__________________________________________________________________

           Title: Scripture and Truth: Dissertations by the Late Benjamin Jowett
                  with Introduction by Lewis Campbell.
      Creator(s): Jowett, Benjamin (1817-1893)
     Print Basis: London: Henry Frowde (1907)
   CCEL Subjects: All;
      LC Call no: BV4501
     LC Subjects:

                  Practical theology

                  Practical religion. The Christian life
     __________________________________________________________________

SCRIPTURE AND TRUTH

DISSERTATIONS BY THE LATE
BENJAMIN JOWETT

WITH INTRODUCTION BY

LEWIS CAMPBELL.

  LONDON

  HENRY FROWDE

  1907

    OXFORD: HORACE HART
    PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
     __________________________________________________________________

Prefatory Material
     __________________________________________________________________

   JOWETT has been of use to me, because he believes in the great
   essentials--the life of the dead and the deity of Christ. What he says
   is very comforting, because he knows on what foundations our faith
   rests. Others have been most kind and sympathizing; but cut-and-dry
   sentiments, in which everything is taken for granted, do me no good at
   all.'--ALEXANDER EWING, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles: 1856.
     __________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION

   THE Dissertations which are here reprinted turn principally on the
   Author's method of interpreting Scripture. They indicate the point of
   view from which he looked upon the sacred writings, both in themselves,
   and in their possible applications to human life in its religious
   aspect. With the exception of the first Essay, which is of general
   significance, they formed part of his edition of St. Paul's Epistles to
   the Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans (1855-1859). The Essay on
   Interpretation, though it appeared afterwards (I860) as a contribution
   to the volume known as Essays and Reviews, consists of a series of
   observations which had occurred to the writer in the course of the same
   long-continued labour. This Essay contains the noble sentences--to
   print them twice within the limits of the same volume can hardly be
   superfluous:--

   When interpreted like any other book, by the same rules of evidence and
   the same canons of criticism, the Bible will still remain unlike any
   other book; its beauty will be freshly seen, as of a picture which is
   restored after many ages to its original state; it will create a new
   interest and make for itself a new kind of authority by the life which
   is in it. . . . No one can form any notion from what we see around us,
   of the power which Christianity might have if it were at one with the
   conscience of man, and not at variance with his intellectual
   convictions. There, a world weary of the heat and dust of
   controversy--of speculations about God and man--weary too of the
   rapidity of its own motion, would return home and find rest.' [1]

   Though separated from their original context, and republished after so
   long an interval, it is believed that these writings will be found to
   have a lasting value. Much has since been thought and written in
   theology, and discoveries have been made, through which Biblical
   Criticism has been placed on more secure foundations. Perhaps, also,
   the errors of Bibliolatry, against which some of these Essays were
   directed, are less current, in the present day, than sacerdotal
   tendencies which equally make for obscurantism. But the spirit of
   Jowett's work, in which the purest love of truth was transfused with
   deep religious feeling, may still give encouragement to inquirers and
   comfort to doubtful minds. Learned treatises abound among us and
   devotional manuals and incitements are not infrequent. But the
   combination of learning with wisdom and of both with piety, of
   fearlessness with sobriety, of enthusiasm with clear judgement, of
   considerateness with openness of mind, has not been common in any age,
   and is rare in our own. Not the matter conveyed so much as the
   personality behind it, and the style which is the man', give permanence
   to compositions, which may in some ways come short of our present
   horizon of knowledge, or be not directly applicable to the mental
   requirements of our time.

   The late Lord Bowen, between whom and Jowett there was a life-long
   attachment, once said of him, The Master taught us not what to think,
   but how to think.' The former method has an immediate fascination for
   many minds, and has often led to the formation of a school. The results
   of the latter mode of instruction are less obvious, but they are more
   far-reaching and permanent, supplying stimulus and guidance for all
   subsequent activities, theoretical and practical.

   In an appreciative notice of the former volume, [2] one critic has
   remarked on the serenity' which is characteristic of Jowett as a writer
   on theology; and has quoted in illustration the concluding paragraph of
   the Essay on the Atonement. The justice of this remark would be still
   more evident, if the atmosphere of theological agitation and
   excitement, in the midst of which Jowett thought and wrote, could be
   realized by the present generation. The passage in question appeared
   for the first time in the second edition of the work on the Epistles,
   published in 1859. And it was the only answer given to numberless
   attacks. Moreover, as readers of the Life of Benjamin Jowett are aware,
   it was written under the stress not only of controversy and
   denunciation, but of ignoble treatment which impartial bystanders
   regarded as a species of persecution. That circumstance greatly
   enhances the impressiveness of a beautiful page:--

   In the heat of the struggle, let us at least pause to imagine polemical
   disputes as they will appear a year, two years, three years hence; it
   may be, dead and gone,--certainly more truly seen than in the hour of
   controversy. For the truths about which we are disputing cannot partake
   of the passing stir; they do not change even with the greater
   revolutions of human things. They are in eternity; and the image of
   them on earth is not the movement on the surface of the waters, but the
   depths of the silent sea. Lastly, as a measure of the value of such
   disputes, which above all other interests seem to have for a time the
   power of absorbing men's minds and rousing their passions, we only
   carry our thoughts onwards to the invisible world, and there behold, as
   in a glass, the great theological teachers of past ages, who have
   anathematized each other in their lives, resting together in the
   communion of the same Lord.'

   The Sermon on Richard Baxter, which is appended to this volume, has
   already appeared amongst the author's Biographical Sermons, [3] and
   thanks are due to the authorities of Balliol College for their
   permission to reprint it here. It was one of the last of those which
   Jowett preached in Westminster Abbey, and I believe it to have been
   actually the last which he specially designed for delivery there. For
   of the other two sermons which he preached there after 1890, that on
   John Wesley was one of a series which he prepared for Balliol College
   Chapel, and the discourse on Bunyan and Spinoza was, at least in
   substance, the same which he had delivered in Grey friars Church,
   Edinburgh, at a time when it was found possible for a clergyman of the
   Church of England occasionally to occupy a Presbyterian pulpit in
   Scotland.

   In the Congregation which from 1866 to 1893 assembled in the Abbey to
   hear Professor Jowett each July, there was always more than a
   sprinkling of personal friends,--former pupils with their wives and
   families,--who heard him gladly. To them it was at once pathetic and
   inspiriting to listen to that silvery familiar voice in the evening of
   life expatiating cheerfully on the solemn experiences of Old Age. That
   impression was not soon to fade. But the preacher's purpose had a
   larger scope. It is observable that in the three sermons just mentioned
   the Englishmen whom he chose to celebrate had all in their lifetime
   been estranged from the Communion of the Church of England. They
   followed not with us.' And he desired to enforce the divine precept,
   Forbid them not.'

   For in his latest years he increasingly lamented the Schism' which so
   long had separated the loyal Churchman from the pious Dissenter, and he
   strove in various ways to soften the asperity of the misunderstanding
   which held them apart.

   In the Autumn of the same year (1891) in which the Baxter' Sermon was
   preached at Westminster,--during a distressing illness which he himself
   expected to have a fatal result,--he wrote or dictated as follows to
   his former pupil, the Rev. J. C. Edwards, who had been appointed to
   succeed his father as Principal of the Nonconformist Theological
   College at Bala in Wales:--

   I dare say that you remember the often quoted .saying of Lessing, that
   "the Christian religion had been tried for eighteen centuries, and that
   the religion of Christ remained to be tried". It seems rather boastful
   and extravagant, but it expresses the spirit in which any new movement
   for the improvement of theology must be carried on. It means that
   Christians should no longer be divided into Churchmen and
   Nonconformists, or even into Christians and non-Christians, but that
   the best men everywhere should know themselves to be partakers of the
   Spirit of God, as He imparts Himself to them in various degrees. It
   means that the old foolish quarrels of science with religion, or of
   criticism with religion, should for ever cease, and that we should
   recognize all truth, based on fact, to be acceptable to the God of
   truth. It means that goodness and knowledge should be inseparably
   united in every Christian word or work, that the school should not be
   divorced from the Church, or the sermon from the lesson, or preaching
   from visiting, or secular duties from religious ones, except so far as
   convenience may require. It means that we should regard all persons as
   Christians, even if they come before us with other names, if they are
   doing the works of Christ.

   These arc the principles by which the founders or restorers of a
   theological College may hope to be guided. They have not been often
   acted upon in the history of the Christian Church. But the best men and
   the best part of men have borne witness to them in the silence of their
   hearts.' [4]

   And in the summer of the following year (1892), little more than a
   twelvemonth before his death, he assisted at the formal inauguration of
   Mansfield College, which had recently been opened in Oxford under
   Principal Fairbairn, for the training of Non conformist Protestant
   Ministers. His speech on that occasion, which has been recorded, bears
   evidence of the same deeply seated desire. He said:--

   This is a great festival of union and reconciliation. I might go back
   into the past and speak of the time when, 230 years ago, a few words
   introduced into a formula divided the whole people of England against
   itself. Every sensible man knows that there were things done in the
   olden time that no good and wise man will now defend; and every
   sensible man knows, too, that it is better to forget them, and not to
   think too much of what happened to one's ancestors 230 years ago.

   Now let me draw your attention to points of agreement amongst us, not
   points of difference. . . . Do we not use the same version of the
   Scriptures? Are not many of the hymns, in which we worship God, of
   Nonconformist origin? Is there any one who is unwilling to join with
   others in any philanthropic work? However different may have been our
   education, are our ideas of truth and right and goodness materially
   different? . . . The great names of English literature, at least a
   great part of them, although they may be strictly claimed by
   Nonconformists, do not really belong to any caste or party. The names
   of Milton, of Bunyan, of Baxter, of Watts, and Wesley, are the property
   of the whole English nation. This again is a tie between us. We may be
   divided into different sects--I would rather say different
   families--but it does not follow that there is anything wrong in our
   division, or that there should be any feeling of enmity entertained by
   different bodies towards one another. These divisions arise from many
   causes--from the accidents of past history, from differences of
   individual character, from the circumstance that one body is more
   suited to deal with one class, and another with another. Nor do I think
   that much is to be hoped or desired from the attempt to fuse these
   different bodies into one. Persons have entertained schemes of
   comprehension that look well on paper, but they are perfectly
   impracticable, and they really mean very little. But what does mean a
   great deal is that there should be a common spirit among us, a spirit
   which recognizes a great common principle of religious truth and
   morality. And as we begin to understand one another better, we also see
   the points of agreement among us grow larger and larger, and the points
   of disagreement grow less and less.' [5]

   Between 1891 and the Essay on Interpretation there had been an interval
   of thirty-one years. But Jowett was the same man still. The love of
   truth and goodness in him overbore the limits of tradition and
   convention. Reality and not appearance was his persistent aim. And he
   sought on every opportunity to impart to others something of the spirit
   which had animated his own long and fruitful career.

   Fifteen years have passed since then. But his words have not lost their
   power. And the need for them is not less to-day.

   When the wave of mediaevalism and reaction that has submerged so many
   of our clergy shall have spent its force, the serene wisdom of this
   Interpreter may yet be audible in quarters where he would have loved to
   find a hearing. Being dead' he yet may speak,' and call his countrymen
   away from barren controversy and idle speculation to the calm
   consideration of Bible truths and to the words of Him who spake as
   never man spake'.

   Since writing the above, I have received from Professor Allan Menzies
   [6] of St. Andrews the following valuable estimate of Jowett's position
   in relation to the present state of Biblical criticism:--

   No doubt things are very much changed since he wrote. The greatest
   change of all is that derived from the new light thrown on the Old
   Testament by the discoveries of Wellhausen, Reuss, &c. In his Essay on
   Prophecy Jowett calls for a more satisfactory account of the
   development of thought in the Old Testament, and shows that he felt the
   difficulties which have caused the new position to be thought out.
   Surely he lived to know that the prophets were found to be anterior to
   the law, and felt his earlier gropings satisfied.

   On the New Testament, the synoptic question has been wrought out
   statistically since Jowett wrote, and there is not much doubt about the
   main lines of the solution. But the solution, as he truly anticipated,
   does not solve every difficulty. In other parts of the field his words
   are remarkably true forecasts of the course of study since his time.
   What he says about the Greek of the New Testament agrees remarkably
   with the position held by Deissmann, Moulton, &c., that it belongs to
   the fusible spoken language of its day, and that to study words and
   grammatical forms too closely often leads to losing the meaning. The
   study of Aramaic as the language spoken by Christ is post-Jowett, and I
   scarcely think Jowett anticipates it. It is true the method remains
   largely a method, but a valid one, though the results are uncertain. On
   Hebraisms and the LXX., Jowett is quite in line with the latest
   writers.

   His great distinction as a Bible scholar is that he cares for the ideas
   and thought of the books. The attempt to build up the truth of
   Scripture by external methods, antiquities, travels, classical
   analogies, &c., has its uses, but is apt to take the place of what is
   vital. On the other hand the Classical revival has penetrated into New
   Testament Studies very powerfully since Jowett in the way of making the
   life and the problems of the New Testament Churches more real to us,
   and throwing on them the light of the religious ideas and practices
   which were general in those times. The History of Religion had hardly
   begun in his day to illustrate the New Testament. But, suppose this
   done, the central work of appreciating the thought of the writers
   remains very much what it was; and here Jowett has very much to teach
   us still. I know no writer who has seized the essential Christian
   spirit in the books so purely and subtly.'

   LEWIS CAMPBELL.

   ALASSIO, ITALY,

   December 1906.
     __________________________________________________________________

   [1] Vide infra, pp. 50, 51.

   [2] Theological Essays. By the late Benjamin Jowett. Oxford, 1906.

   [3] Sermons, Biographical and Miscellaneous. By the late Benjamin
   Jowett. Edited by the Very Rev. the Hon. W. H. Fremantle. Murray, 1899:
   pp. 65-85.

   [4] Life of Benjamin Jowett. Vol. ii. pp. 362-3.

   [5] The Nationalization of the Old English Universities. Chapman &
   Hall, 1901: p. 149.

   [6] Author of National Religion (1888), and of The Earliest Gospel
   (1901): Editor of the Review of Theology and Philosophy.
     __________________________________________________________________
     __________________________________________________________________

ESSAY ON THE
INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE.

§ 1.

   IT is a strange, though familiar fact, that great differences of
   opinion exist respecting the Interpretation of Scripture. All
   Christians receive the Old and New Testament as sacred writings, but
   they are not agreed about the meaning which they attribute to them. The
   book itself remains as at the first; the commentators seem rather to
   reflect the changing atmosphere of the world or of the Church.
   Different individuals or bodies of Christians have a different point of
   view, to which their interpretation is narrowed or made to conform. It
   is assumed, as natural and necessary, that the same words will present
   one idea to the mind of the Protestant, an other to the Roman Catholic;
   one meaning to the German, another to the English interpreter. The
   Ultramontane or Anglican divine is not supposed to be impartial in his
   treatment of passages which afford an apparent foundation for the
   doctrine of purgatory or the primacy of St. Peter on the one hand, or
   the three orders of clergy and the divine origin of episcopacy on the
   other. It is a received view with many, that the meaning of the Bible
   is to be defined by that of the Prayer-book; while there are others who
   interpret the Bible and the Bible only with a silent reference to the
   traditions of the Reformation. Philosophical differences are in the
   background, into which the differences about Scripture also resolve
   themselves. They seem to run up at last into a difference of opinion
   respecting Revelation itself--whether given beside the human faculties
   or through them, whether an interruption of the laws of nature or their
   perfection and fulfilment.

   This effort to pull the authority of Scripture in different directions
   is not peculiar to our own day; the same phenomenon appears in the past
   history of the Church. At the Reformation, in the Nicene or Pelagian
   times, the New Testament was the ground over which men fought; it might
   also be compared to the armoury which furnished them with weapons.
   Opposite aspects of the truth which it contains were appropriated by
   different sides. Justified by faith without works' and justified by
   faith as well as works' are equally Scriptural expressions; the one has
   become the formula of Protestants, the other of Roman Catholics. The
   fifth and ninth chapters of the Romans, single verses such as 1 Cor.
   iii. 15; John iii. 3, still bear traces of many a life-long strife in
   the pages of commentators. The difference of interpretation which
   prevails among ourselves is partly traditional, that is to say,
   inherited from the controversies of former ages. The use made of
   Scripture by Fathers of the Church, as well as by Luther and Calvin,
   affects our idea of its meaning at the present hour.

   Another cause of the multitude of interpretations is the growth or
   progress of the human mind itself. Modes of interpreting vary as time
   goes on; they partake of the general state of literature or knowledge.
   It has not been easily or at once that mankind have learned to realize
   the character of sacred writings--they seem almost necessarily to veil
   themselves from human eyes as circumstances change; it is the old age
   of the world only that has at length understood its childhood. (Or
   rather perhaps is beginning to understand it, and learning to make
   allowance for its own deficiency of knowledge; for the infancy of the
   human race, as of the individual, affords out few indications of the
   workings of the mind within.) More often than we suppose, the great
   sayings and doings upon the earth, thoughts that breathe and words that
   burn,' are lost in a sort of chaos to the apprehension of those that
   come after. Much of past history is dimly seen and receives only a
   conventional interpretation, even when the memorials of it remain.
   There is a time at which the freshness of early literature is lost;
   mankind have turned rhetoricians, and no longer write or feel in the
   spirit which created it. In this unimaginative period in which sacred
   or ancient writings are partially unintelligible, many methods have
   been taken at different times to adapt the ideas of the past to the
   wants of the present. One age has wandered into the flowery paths of
   allegory,

   In pious meditation fancy fed.'

   Another has straitened the liberty of the Gospel by a rigid application
   of logic, the former being a method which was at first more naturally
   applied to the Old Testament, the latter to the New. Both methods of
   interpretation, the mystical and logical, as they may be termed, have
   been practised on the Vedas and the Koran, as well as on the Jewish and
   Christian Scriptures, the true glory and note of divinity in these
   latter being not that they have hidden mysterious or double meanings,
   but a simple and universal one, which is beyond them, and will survive
   them. Since the revival of literature, interpreters have not
   unfrequently fallen into error of another kind from a pedantic and
   misplaced use of classical learning; the minute examination of words
   often withdrawing the mind from more important matters. A tendency may
   be observed within the last century to clothe systems of philosophy in
   the phraseology of Scripture. But new wine cannot thus be put into old
   bottles', Though roughly distinguishable by different ages, these modes
   and tendencies also exist together; the remains of all of them may be
   remarked in some of the popular commentaries of our own day.

   More common than any of these methods, and not peculiar to any age, is
   that which may be called by way of distinction the rhetorical one. The
   tendency to exaggerate or amplify the meaning of simple words for the
   sake of edification may indeed have a practical use in sermons, the
   object of which is to awaken not so much the intellect as the heart and
   conscience. Spiritual food, like natural, may require to be of a
   certain bulk to nourish the human mind. But this tendency to
   edification' has had an unfortunate influence on the interpretation of
   Scripture. For the preacher almost necessarily oversteps the limits of
   actual knowledge, his feelings overflow with the subject; even if he
   have the power, he has seldom the time for accurate thought or inquiry.
   And in the course of years spent in writing, perhaps, without study, he
   is apt to persuade himself, if not others, of the truth of his own
   repetitions. The trivial consideration of making a discourse of
   sufficient length is often a reason why he overlays the words of Christ
   and his Apostles with commonplaces. The meaning of the text is not
   always the object which he has in view, but some moral or religious
   lesson which he has found it necessary to append to it; some cause
   which he is pleading, some error of the day which he has to combat. And
   while in some passages he hardly dares to trust himself with the full
   force of Scripture (Matt. v. 34; ix. 13; xix. 21: Acts v. 29), in
   others he extracts more from words than they really imply (Matt. xxii.
   21; xxviii. 20: Rom. xiii. 1; &c.), being more eager to guard against
   the abuse of some precept than to enforce it, attenuating or adapting
   the utterance of prophecy to the requirements or to the measure of
   modern times. Any one who has ever written sermons is aware how hard it
   is to apply Scripture to the wants of his hearers and at the same time
   to preserve its meaning.

   The phenomenon which has been described in the preceding pages is so
   familiar, and yet so extraordinary, that it requires an effort of
   thought to appreciate its true nature. We do not at once see the
   absurdity of the same words having many senses, or free our minds from
   the illusion that the Apostle or Evangelist must have written with a
   reference to the creeds or controversies or circumstances of other
   times. Let it be considered, then, that this extreme variety of
   interpretation is found to exist in the case of no other book, but of
   the Scriptures only. Other writings are preserved to us in dead
   languages--Greek, Latin, Oriental, some of them in fragments, all of
   them originally in manuscript. It is true that difficulties arise in
   the explanation of these writings, especially in the most ancient, from
   our imperfect acquaintance with the meaning of words, or the
   defectiveness of copies, or the want of some historical or geographical
   information which is required to present an event or character in its
   true bearing. In comparison with the wealth and light of modern
   literature, our knowledge of Greek classical authors, for example, may
   be called imperfect and shadowy. Some of them have another sort of
   difficulty arising from subtlety or abruptness in the use of language;
   in lyric poetry especially, and some of the earlier prose, the
   greatness of the thought struggles with the stammering lips. It may be
   observed that all these difficulties occur also in Scripture; they are
   found equally in sacred and profane literature. But the meaning of
   classical authors is known with comparative certainty; and the
   interpretation of them seems to rest on a scientific basis. It is not,
   therefore, to philological or historical difficulties that the greater
   part of the uncertainty in the interpretation of Scripture is to be
   attributed. No ignorance of Hebrew or Greek is sufficient to account
   for it. Even the Vedas and the Zendavesta, though beset by obscurities
   of language probably greater than are found in any portion of the
   Bible, are interpreted, at least by European scholars, according to
   fixed rules, and beginning to be clearly understood.

   To bring the parallel home, let us imagine the remains of some
   well-known Greek author, as Plato or Sophocles, receiving the same
   treatment at the hands of the world which the Scriptures have
   experienced. The text of such an author, when first printed by Aldus or
   Stephens, would be gathered from the imperfect or miswritten copies
   which fell in the way of the editors; after a while older and better
   manuscripts come to light, and the power of using and estimating the
   value of manuscripts is greatly improved. We may suppose, further, that
   the readings of these older copies do not always conform to some
   received canons of criticism. Up to the year 1550, or 1624,
   alterations, often proceeding on no principle, have been introduced
   into the text; but now a stand is made--an edition which appeared at
   the latter of the two dates just mentioned is invested with authority;
   this authorized text is a pièce de résistance against innovation. Many
   reasons are given why it is better to have bad readings to which the
   world is accustomed than good ones which are novel and strange--why the
   later manuscripts of Plato or Sophocles are often to be preferred to
   earlier ones--why it is useless to remove imperfections where perfect
   accuracy is not to be attained. A fear of disturbing the critical
   canons which have come down from former ages is, however, suspected to
   be one reason for the opposition. And custom and prejudice, and the
   nicety of the subject, and all the arguments which are intelligible to
   the many against the truth, which is intelligible only to the few, are
   thrown into the scale to preserve the works of Plato or Sophocles as
   nearly as possible in the received text.

   Leaving the text we proceed to interpret and translate. The meaning of
   Greek words is known with tolerable certainty; and the grammar of the
   Greek language has been minutely analysed both in ancient and modern
   times. Yet the interpretation of Sophocles is tentative and uncertain;
   it seems to vary from age to age: to some the great tragedian has
   appeared to embody in his choruses certain theological or moral ideas
   of his own age or country; there are others who find there an allegory
   of the Christian religion or of the history of modern Europe. Several
   schools of critics have commented on his works; to the Englishman he
   has presented one meaning, to the Frenchman another, to the German a
   third; the interpretations have also differed with the philosophical
   systems which the interpreters espoused. To one the same words have
   appeared to bear a moral, to another a symbolical meaning; a third is
   determined wholly by the authority of old commentators; while there is
   a disposition to condemn the scholar who seeks to interpret Sophocles
   from himself only, and with reference to the ideas and beliefs of the
   age in which he lived. And the error of such an one is attributed not
   only to some intellectual but even to a moral obliquity which prevents
   his seeing the true meaning.

   It would be tedious to follow into details the absurdity which has been
   supposed. By such methods it would be truly said that Sophocles or
   Plato may be made to mean anything. It would seem as if some Novum
   Organum were needed to lay down rules of interpretation for ancient
   literature. Still one other supposition has to be introduced which will
   appear, perhaps, more extravagant than any which have preceded.
   Conceive then that these modes of interpreting Sophocles had existed
   for ages; that great institutions and interests had become interwoven
   with them, and in some degree even the honour of nations and
   churches--is it too much to say that in such a case they would be
   changed with difficulty, and that they would continue to be maintained
   long after critics and philosophers had seen that they were
   indefensible?

   No one who has a Christian feeling would place classical on a level
   with sacred literature; and there are other particulars in which the
   preceding comparison fails, as, for example, the style and subject.
   But, however different the subject, although the interpretation of
   Scripture requires a vision and faculty divine', or at least a moral
   and religious interest which is not needed in the study of a Greek poet
   or philosopher, yet in what may be termed the externals of
   interpretation, that is to say, the meaning of words, the connexion of
   sentences, the settlement of the text, the evidence of facts, the same
   rules apply to the Old and New Testaments as to other books. And the
   figure is no exaggeration of the erring fancy of men in the use of
   Scripture, or of the tenacity with which they cling to the
   interpretations of other times, or of the arguments by which they
   maintain them. All the resources of knowledge may be turned into a
   means not of discovering the true rendering, but of upholding a
   received one. Grammar appears to start from an independent point of
   view, yet inquiries into the use of the article or the preposition have
   been observed to wind round into a defence of some doctrine. Rhetoric
   often magnifies its own want of taste into the design of inspiration.
   Logic (that other mode of rhetoric) is apt to lend itself to the
   illusion, by stating erroneous explanations with a clearness which is
   mistaken for truth. Metaphysical aid' carries away the common
   understanding into a region where it must blindly follow. Learning
   obscures as well as illustrates; it heaps up chaff when there is no
   more wheat. These are some of the ways in which the sense of Scripture
   has become confused, by the help of tradition, in the course of ages,
   under a load of commentators.

   The book itself remains as at the first, unchanged amid the changing
   interpretations of it. The office of the interpreter is not to add
   another, but to recover the original one; the meaning, that is, of the
   words as they struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those
   who first heard and read them. He has to transfer himself to another
   age; to imagine that he is a disciple of Christ or Paul; to disengage
   himself from all that follows. The history of Christendom is nothing to
   him; but only the scene at Galilee or Jerusalem, the handful of
   believers who gathered themselves together at Ephesus, or Corinth, or
   Rome. His eye is fixed on the form of one like the Son of man, or of
   the Prophet who was girded with a garment of camel's hair, or of the
   Apostle who had a thorn in the flesh. The greatness of the Roman Empire
   is nothing to him; it is an inner not an outer world that he is
   striving to restore. All the after-thoughts of theology are nothing to
   him; they are not the true lights which light him in difficult places.
   His concern is with a book in which, as in other ancient writings, are
   some things of which we are ignorant; which defect of our knowledge
   cannot, however, be supplied by the conjectures of fathers or divines.
   The simple words of that book he tries to preserve absolutely pure from
   the refinements or distinctions of later times. He acknowledges that
   they are fragmentary, and would suspect himself, if out of fragments he
   were able to create a well-rounded system or a continuous history. The
   greater part of his learning is a knowledge of the text itself; he has
   no delight in the voluminous literature which has overgrown it. He has
   no theory of interpretation; a few rules guarding against common errors
   are enough for him. His object is to read Scripture like any other
   book, with a real interest and not merely a conventional one. He wants
   to be able to open his eyes and see or imagine things as they truly
   are.

   Nothing would be more likely to restore a natural feeling on this
   subject than a history of the Interpretation of Scripture. It would
   take us back to the beginning; it would present in one view the causes
   which have darkened the meaning of words in the course of ages; it
   would clear away the remains of dogmas, systems, controversies, which
   are encrusted upon them. It would show us the erring fancy' of
   interpreters assuming sometimes to have the Spirit of God Himself, yet
   unable to pass beyond the limits of their own age, and with a judgement
   often biassed by party. Great names there have been among them, names
   of men who may be reckoned also among the benefactors of the human
   race, yet comparatively few who have understood the thoughts of other
   times, or who have bent their minds to interrogate' the meaning of
   words. Such a work would enable us to separate the elements of doctrine
   and tradition with which the meaning of Scripture is encumbered in our
   own day. It would mark the different epochs of interpretation from the
   time when the living word was in process of becoming a book to Origen
   and Tertullian, from Origen to Jerome and Augustine, from Jerome and
   Augustine to Abelard and Aquinas; again, making a new beginning with
   the revival of literature, from Erasmus, the father of Biblical
   criticism in more recent times, with Calvin and Beza for his immediate
   successors, through Grotius and Hammond, down to De Wette and Meyer,
   our own contemporaries. We should see how the mystical interpretation
   of Scripture originated in the Alexandrian age; how it blended with the
   logical and rhetorical; how both received weight and currency from
   their use in support of the claims and teaching of the Church. We
   should notice how the new learning' of the fifteenth and sixteenth
   centuries gradually awakened the critical faculty in the study of the
   sacred writings; how Biblical criticism has slowly but surely followed
   in the track of philological and historical (not without a remoter
   influence exercised upon it also by natural science); how, too, the
   form of the scholastic literature, and even of notes on the classics,
   insensibly communicated itself to commentaries on Scripture. We should
   see how the word inspiration, from being used in a general way to
   express what may be called the prophetic spirit of Scripture, has
   passed, within the last two centuries, into a sort of technical term;
   how, in other instances, the practice or feeling of earlier ages has
   been hollowed out into the theory or system of later ones. We should
   observe how the popular explanations of prophecy as in heathen (Thucyd.
   ii. 54), so also in Christian times, had adapted themselves to the
   circumstances of mankind. We might remark that in our own country, and
   in the present generation especially, the interpretation of Scripture
   had assumed an apologetic character, as though making an effort to
   defend itself against some supposed inroad of science and criticism;
   while among German commentators there is, for the first time in the
   history of the world, an approach to agreement and certainty. For
   example, the diversity among German writers on prophecy is far less
   than among English ones. That is a new phenomenon which has to be
   acknowledged. More than any other subject of human knowledge, Biblical
   criticism has hung to the past; it has been hitherto found truer to the
   traditions of the Church than to the words of Christ. It has made,
   however, two great steps onward--at the time of the Reformation and in
   our day. The diffusion of a critical spirit in history and literature
   is affecting the criticism of the Bible in our own day in a manner not
   unlike the burst of intellectual life in the fifteenth or sixteenth
   centuries. Educated persons are beginning to ask, not what Scripture
   may be made to mean, but what it does. And it is no exaggeration to say
   that he who in the present state of knowledge will confine himself to
   the plain meaning of words and the study of their context may know more
   of the original spirit and intention of the authors of the New
   Testament than all the controversial writers of former ages put
   together.

   Such a history would be of great value to philosophy as well as to
   theology. It would be the history of the human mind in one of its most
   remarkable manifestations. For ages which are not original show their
   character in the interpretation of ancient writings. Creating nothing,
   and incapable of that effort of imagination which is required in a true
   criticism of the past, they read and explain the thoughts of former
   times by the conventional modes of their own. Such a history would form
   a kind of preface or prolegomena to the study of Scripture. Like the
   history of science, it would save many a useless toil; it would
   indicate the uncertainties on which it is not worth while to speculate
   further; the by-paths or labyrinths in which men lose themselves; the
   mines that are already worked out. He who reflects on the multitude of
   explanations which already exist of the number of the beast,' the two
   witnesses,' the little horn,' the man of sin,' who observes the manner
   in which these explanations have varied with the political movements of
   our own time, will be unwilling to devote himself to a method of
   inquiry in which there is so little appearance of certainty or
   progress. These interpretations would destroy one another if they were
   all placed side by side in a tabular analysis. It is an instructive
   fact, which may be mentioned in passing, that Joseph Mede, the greatest
   authority on this subject, twice fixed the end of the world in the last
   century and once during his own lifetime. In like manner, he who
   notices the circumstance that the explanations of the first chapter of
   Genesis have slowly changed, and, as it were, retreated before the
   advance of geology, will be unwilling to add another to the spurious
   reconcilements of science and revelation. Or, to take an example of
   another kind, the Protestant divine who perceives that the types and
   figures of the Old Testament are employed by Roman Catholics in support
   of the tenets of their church, will be careful not to use weapons which
   it is impossible to guide, and which may with equal force be turned
   against himself. Those who have handled them on the Protestant side
   have before now fallen victims to them, not observing as they fell that
   it was by their own hand.

   Much of the uncertainty which prevails in the interpretation of
   Scripture arises out of party efforts to wrest its meaning to different
   sides. There are, however, deeper reasons which have hindered the
   natural meaning of the text from immediately and universally
   prevailing. One of these is the unsettled state of many questions which
   have an important but indirect bearing on this subject. Some of these
   questions veil themselves in ambiguous terms; and no one likes to draw
   them out of their hiding-place into the light of day. In natural
   science it is felt to be useless to build on assumptions; in history we
   look with suspicion on a priori ideas of what ought to have been; in
   mathematics, when a step is wrong, we pull the house down until we
   reach the point at which the error is discovered. But in theology it is
   otherwise; there the tendency has been to conceal the unsoundness of
   the foundation under the fairness and loftiness of the superstructure.
   It has been thought safer to allow arguments to stand which, although
   fallacious, have been on the right side, than to point out their
   defect. And thus many principles have imperceptibly grown up which have
   overridden facts. No one would interpret Scripture, as many do, but for
   certain previous suppositions with which we come to the perusal of it.
   There can be no error in the Word of God,' therefore the discrepancies
   in the books of Kings and Chronicles are only apparent, or may be
   attributed to differences in the copies:--It is a thousand times more
   likely that the interpreter should err than the inspired writer.' For a
   like reason the failure of a prophecy is never admitted, in spite of
   Scripture and of history (Jer. xxxvi. 30: Isa. xxiii: Amos vii. 10-17);
   the mention of a name later than the sup posed age of the prophet is
   not allowed, as in other writings, to be taken in evidence of the date
   (Isa. xlv. 1). The accuracy of the Old Testament is measured not by the
   standard of primeval history, but of a modern critical one, which,
   contrary to all probability, is supposed to be attained; this arbitrary
   standard once assumed, it becomes a point of honour or of faith to
   defend every name, date, place, which occurs. Or to take another class
   of questions, it is said that the various theories of the origin of the
   three first Gospels are all equally unknown to the Holy Catholic
   Church', or as another writer of a different school expresses himself,
   they tend to sap the inspiration of the New Testament.' Again, the
   language in which our Saviour speaks of His own union with the Father
   is interpreted by the language of the creeds. Those who remonstrate
   against double senses, allegorical interpretations, forced
   reconcilements, find themselves met by a sort of presupposition that
   God speaks not as man speaks'. The limitation of the human faculties is
   confusedly appealed to as a reason for abstaining from investigations
   which are quite within their limits. The suspicion of Deism, or perhaps
   of Atheism, awaits inquiry. By such fears a good man refuses to be
   influenced; a philosophical mind is apt to cast them aside with too
   much bitterness. It is better to close the book than to read it under
   conditions of thought which are imposed from without. Whether those
   conditions of thought are the traditions of the Church, or the opinions
   of the religious world--Catholic or Protestant--makes no difference.
   They are inconsistent with the freedom of the truth and the moral
   character of the Gospel. It becomes necessary, therefore, to examine
   briefly some of these prior questions which lie in the way of a
   reasonable criticism.

§ 2.

   Among these previous questions, that which first presents itself is the
   one already alluded to--the question of inspiration. Almost all
   Christians agree in the word, which use and tradition have consecrated
   to express the reverence which they truly feel for the Old and New
   Testaments. But here the agreement of opinion ends; the meaning of
   inspiration has been variously explained, or more often passed over in
   silence from a fear of stirring the difficulties that would arise about
   it. It is one of those theological terms which may be regarded as great
   peacemakers', but which are also sources of distrust and
   misunderstanding. For while we are ready to shake hands with any one
   who uses the same language as ourselves, a doubt is apt to insinuate
   itself whether he takes language in the same senses--whether a
   particular term conveys all the associations to another which it does
   to ourselves--whether it is not possible that one who disagrees about
   the word may not be more nearly agreed about the thing. The advice has,
   indeed, been given to the theologian that he should take care of words
   and leave things to themselves'; the authority, however, who gives the
   advice is not good--it is placed by Goethe in the mouth of
   Mephistopheles. Pascal seriously charges the Jesuits with acting on a
   similar maxim--excommunicating those who meant the same thing and said
   another, holding communion with those who said the same thing and meant
   another. But this is not the way to heal the wounds of the Church of
   Christ; we cannot thus skin and film' the weak places of theology.
   Errors about words, and the attribution to words themselves of an
   excessive importance, lie at the root of theological as of other
   confusions. In theology they are more dangerous than in other sciences,
   because they cannot so readily be brought to the test of facts.

   The word inspiration has received more numerous gradations and
   distinctions of meaning than perhaps any other in the whole of
   theology. There is an inspiration of superintendence and an inspiration
   of suggestion; an inspiration which would have been consistent with the
   Apostle or Evangelist falling into error, and an inspiration which
   would have prevented him from erring; verbal organic inspiration by
   which the inspired person is the passive utterer of a Divine Word, and
   an inspiration which acts through the character of the sacred writer;
   there is an inspiration which absolutely communicates the fact to be
   revealed or statement to be made, and an inspiration which does not
   supersede the ordinary knowledge of human events; there is an
   inspiration which demands infallibility in matters of doctrine, but
   allows for mistakes in fact. Lastly, there is a view of inspiration
   which recognizes only its supernatural and prophetic character, and a
   view of inspiration which regards the Apostles and Evangelists as
   equally inspired in their writings and in their lives, and in both
   receiving the guidance of the Spirit of truth in a manner not different
   in kind but only in degree from ordinary Christians. Many of these
   explanations lose sight of the original meaning and derivation of the
   word; some of them are framed with the view of meeting difficulties;
   all perhaps err in attempting to define what, though real, is incapable
   of being defined in an exact manner. Nor for any of the higher or
   supernatural views of inspiration is there any foundation in the
   Gospels or Epistles. There is no appearance in their writings that the
   Evangelists or Apostles had any inward gift, or were subject to any
   power external to them different from that of preaching or teaching
   which they daily exercised; nor do they anywhere lead us to suppose
   that they were free from error or infirmity. St. Paul writes like a
   Christian teacher, exhibiting all the emotions and vicissitudes of
   human feeling, speaking, indeed, with authority, but hesitating in
   difficult cases and more than once correcting himself, corrected, too,
   by the course of events in his expectation of the coming of Christ. The
   Evangelist who saw it, bare record, and his record is true: and he
   knoweth that he saith true' (John xix. 35). Another Evangelist does not
   profess to be an original narrator, but only to set forth in order a
   declaration of what eye witnesses had delivered', like many others
   whose writings have not been preserved to us (Luke i. 1, 2). And the
   result is in accordance with the simple profession and style in which
   they describe them selves; there is no appearance, that is to say, of
   insincerity or want of faith; but neither is there perfect accuracy or
   agreement. One supposes the original dwelling-place of our Lord's
   parents to have been Bethlehem (Matt. ii. 1, 22), another Nazareth
   (Luke ii. 4); they trace his genealogy in different ways; one mentions
   the thieves blaspheming, another has preserved to after-ages the record
   of the penitent thief; they appear to differ about the day and hour of
   the Crucifixion; the narrative of the woman who anointed our Lord's
   feet with ointment is told in all four, each narrative having more or
   less considerable variations. These are a few instances of the
   differences which arose in the traditions of the earliest ages
   respecting the history of our Lord. But he who wishes to investigate
   the character of the sacred writings should not be afraid to make a
   catalogue of them all with the view of estimating their cumulative
   weight. (For it is obvious that the answer which would be admitted in
   the case of a single discrepancy, will not be the true answer when
   there are many.) He should further consider that the narratives in
   which these discrepancies occur are short and partly identical--a cycle
   of tradition beyond which the knowledge of the early fathers never
   travels, though if all the things that Jesus said and did had been
   written down, the world itself could not have contained the books that
   would have been written' (John xx. 30; xxi. 25). For the proportion
   which these narratives bear to the whole subject, as well as their
   relation to one another, is an important element in the estimation of
   differences. In the same way, he who would understand the nature of
   prophecy in the Old Testament, should have the courage to examine how
   far its details were minutely fulfilled. The absence of such a
   fulfilment may further lead him to discover that he took the letter for
   the spirit in expecting it.

   The subject will clear of itself if we bear in mind two
   considerations:--First, that the nature of inspiration can only be
   known from the examination of Scripture. There is no other source to
   which we can turn for information; and we have no right to assume some
   imaginary doctrine of inspiration like the infallibility of the Roman
   Catholic Church. To the question, What is inspiration?' the first
   answer therefore is, That idea of Scripture which we gather from the
   knowledge of it.' It is no mere a priori notion, but one to which the
   book is itself a witness. It is a fact which we infer from the study of
   Scripture--not of one portion only, but of the whole. Obviously then it
   embraces writings of very different kinds--the book of Esther, for
   example, or the Song of Solomon, as well as the Gospel of St. John. It
   is reconcileable with the mixed good and evil of the characters of the
   Old Testament, which nevertheless does not exclude them from the favour
   of God, with the attribution to the Divine Being of actions at variance
   with that higher revelation, which He has given of Himself in the
   Gospel; it is not inconsistent with imperfect or opposite aspects of
   the truth as in the Book of Job or Ecclesiastes, with variations of
   fact in the Gospels or the books of Kings and Chronicles, with
   inaccuracies of language in the Epistles of St. Paul. For these are all
   found in Scripture; neither is there any reason why they should not be,
   except a general impression that Scripture ought to have been written
   in a way different from what it has. A principle of progressive
   revelation admits them all; and this is already contained in the words
   of our Saviour, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts'; or even
   in the Old Testament, Henceforth there shall be no more this proverb in
   the house of Israel.' For what is progressive is necessarily imperfect
   in its earlier stages, and even erring to those who come after, whether
   it be the maxims of a half-civilized world which are compared with
   those of a civilized one, or the Law with the Gospel. Scripture itself
   points the way to answer the moral objections to Scripture. Lesser
   difficulties remain, but only such as would be found commonly in
   writings of the same age or country. There is no more reason why
   imperfect narratives should be excluded from Scripture than imperfect
   grammar; no more ground for expecting that the New Testament would be
   logical or Aristotelian in form, than that it would be written in Attic
   Greek.

   The other consideration is one which has been neglected by writers on
   this subject. It is this--that any true doctrine of inspiration must
   conform to all well-ascertained facts of history or of science. The
   same fact cannot be true and untrue, any more than the same words can
   have two opposite meanings. The same fact cannot be true in religion
   when seen by the light of faith, and untrue in science when looked at
   through the medium of evidence or experiment. It is ridiculous to
   suppose that the sun goes round the earth in the same sense in which
   the earth goes round the sun; or that the world appears to have
   existed, but has not existed during the vast epochs of which geology
   speaks to us. But if so, there is no need of elaborate reconcilements
   of revelation and science; they reconcile themselves the moment any
   scientific truth is distinctly ascertained. As the idea of nature
   enlarges, the idea of revelation also enlarges; it was a temporary
   misunderstanding which severed them. And as the knowledge of nature
   which is possessed by the few is communicated in its leading features
   at least to the many, they will receive with it a higher conception of
   the ways of God to man. It may hereafter appear as natural to the
   majority of mankind to see the providence of God in the order of the
   world, as it once was to appeal to interruptions of it.

   It is true that there is a class of scientific facts with which popular
   opinions on theology often conflict which do not seem to conform in all
   respects to the severer conditions of inductive science: such
   especially are the facts relating to the formation of the earth and the
   beginnings of the human race. But it is not worth while to fight on
   this debateable ground a losing battle in the hope that a generation
   will pass away before we sound a last retreat. Almost all intelligent
   persons are agreed that the earth has existed for myriads of ages; the
   best informed are of opinion that the history of nations extends back
   some thousand years before the Mosaic chronology; recent discoveries in
   geology may perhaps open a further vista of existence for the human
   species, while it is possible, and may one day be known, that mankind
   spread not from one but from many centres over the globe; or as others
   say, that the supply of links which are at present wanting in the chain
   of animal life may lead to new conclusions respecting the origin of
   man. Now let it be granted that these facts, being with the past,
   cannot be shown in the same palpable and evident manner as the facts of
   chemistry or physiology; and that the proof of some of them, especially
   of those last mentioned, is wanting; still it is a false policy to set
   up inspiration or revelation in opposition to them, a principle which
   can have no influence on them and should be rather kept out of their
   way. The sciences of geology and comparative philology are steadily
   gaining ground; many of the guesses of twenty years ago have become
   certainties, and the guesses of to-day may hereafter become so. Shall
   we peril religion on the possibility of their untruth? on such a cast
   to stake the life of man implies not only a recklessness of facts, but
   a misunderstanding of the nature of the Gospel. If it is fortunate for
   science, it is perhaps more fortunate for Christian truth, that the
   admission of Galileo's discovery has for ever settled the principle of
   the relations between them.

   A similar train of thought may be extended to the results of historical
   inquiries. These results cannot be barred by the dates or narrative of
   Scripture; neither should they be made to wind round into agreement
   with them. Again, the idea of inspiration must expand and take them in.
   Their importance in a religious point of view is not that they impugn
   or confirm the Jewish history, but that they show more clearly the
   purposes of God towards the whole human race. The recent chronological
   discoveries from Egyptian monuments do not tend to overthrow
   revelation, nor the Ninevite inscriptions to support it. The use of
   them on either side may indeed arouse a popular interest in them; it is
   apt to turn a scientific inquiry into a semi-religious controversy. And
   to religion either use is almost equally injurious, be cause seeming to
   rest truths important to human life on the mere accident of an
   archaeological discovery. Is it to be thought that Christianity gains
   anything from the deciphering of the names of some Assyrian and
   Babylonian kings, contemporaries chiefly with the later Jewish history?
   As little as it ought to lose from the appearance of a contradictory
   narrative of the Exodus in the chamber of an Egyptian temple of the
   year B.C. 1500. This latter supposition may not be very probable. But
   it is worth while to ask ourselves the question, whether we can be
   right in maintaining any view of religion which can be affected by such
   a probability.

   It will be a further assistance in the consideration of this subject,
   to observe that the interpretation of Scripture has nothing to do with
   any opinion respecting its origin. The meaning of Scripture is one
   thing; the inspiration of Scripture is another. It is conceivable that
   those who hold the most different views about the one, may be able to
   agree about the other. Rigid upholders of the verbal inspiration of
   Scripture, and those who deny inspiration altogether, may nevertheless
   meet on the common ground of the meaning of words. If the term
   inspiration were to fall into disuse, no fact of nature, or history, or
   language, no event in the life of man, or dealings of God with him,
   would be in any degree altered. The word itself is but of yesterday,
   not found in the earlier confessions of the reformed faith; the
   difficulties that have arisen about it are only two or three centuries
   old. Therefore the question of inspiration, though in one sense
   important, is to the interpreter as though it were not important; he is
   in no way called upon to determine a matter with which he has nothing
   to do, and which was not determined by fathers of the Church. And he
   had better go on his way and leave the more precise definition of the
   word to the progress of knowledge and the results of the study of
   Scripture, instead of entangling himself with a theory about it.

   It is one evil of conditions or previous suppositions in the study of
   Scripture, that the assumption of them has led to an apologetic temper
   in the interpreters of Scripture. The tone of apology is always a tone
   of weakness, and does injury to a good cause. It is the reverse of ye
   shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'. It is
   hampered with the necessity of making a defence, and also with previous
   defences of the same side; it accepts, with an excess of reserve and
   caution, the truth itself, when it comes from an opposite quarter.
   Commentators are often more occupied with the proof of miracles than
   with the declaration of life and immortality; with the fulfilment of
   the details of prophecy than with its life and power; with the
   reconcilement of the discrepancies in the narrative of the infancy,
   pointed out by Schleiermacher, than with the importance of the great
   event of the appearance of the Saviour--To this end was I born and for
   this cause came I into the world that I should bear witness unto the
   truth.' The same tendency is observable also in reference to the Acts
   of the Apostles and the Epistles, which are not only brought into
   harmony with each other, but interpreted with a reference to the
   traditions of existing communions. The natural meaning of particular
   expressions, as for example: Why are they then baptized for the dead?'
   (1 Cor. xv. 29), or the words because of the angels' (1 Cor. xi. 10);
   or, this generation shall not pass away until all these things be
   fulfilled' (Matt. xxiv. 34); or, upon this rock will I build my Church'
   (Matt. xvi. 18), is set aside in favour of others, which, however
   improbable, are more in accordance with preconceived opinions, or seem
   to be more worthy of the sacred writers. The language, and also the
   text, are treated on the same defensive and conservative principles.
   The received translations of Phil. ii. 6 (Who, being in the form of
   God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God'), or of Rom. iii. 25
   (Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his
   blood'), or Rom. xv. 6 (God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus
   Christ'), though erroneous, are not given up without a struggle; the 1
   Tim. iii. 16, and 1 John v. 7 (the three witnesses), though the first
   (God manifest in the flesh,' ThS for OS) is not found in the best
   manuscripts, and the second in no Greek manuscript worth speaking of,
   have not yet disappeared from the editions of the Greek Testament
   commonly in use in England, and still less from the English
   translation. An English commentator who, with Lachmann and Tischendorf,
   supported also by the authority of Erasmus, ventures to alter the
   punctuation of the doxology in Rom. ix. 5 (Who is over all God blessed
   for ever') hardly escapes the charge of heresy. That in most of these
   cases the words referred to have a direct bearing on important
   controversies is a reason not for retaining, but for correcting them.

   The temper of accommodation shows itself especially in two ways: first,
   in the attempt to adapt the truths of Scripture to the doctrines of the
   creeds; secondly, in the adaptation of the precepts and maxims of
   Scripture to the language or practice of our own age. Now the creeds
   are acknowledged to be a part of Christianity; they stand in a close
   relation to the words of Christ and His Apostles; nor can it be said
   that any heterodox formula makes a nearer approach to a simple and
   scriptural rule of faith. Neither is anything gained by contrasting
   them with Scripture, in which the germs of the expressions used in them
   are sufficiently apparent. Yet it does not follow that they should be
   pressed into the service of the interpreter. The growth of ideas in the
   interval which separated the first century from the fourth or sixth
   makes it impossible to apply the language of the one to the explanation
   of the other. Between Scripture and the Nicene or Athanasian Creed, a
   world of the understanding comes in--that world of abstractions and
   second notions; and mankind are no longer at the same point as when the
   whole of Christianity was contained in the words, Believe on the Lord
   Jesus Christ and thou mayest be saved,' when the Gospel centred in the
   attachment to a living or recently departed friend and Lord. The
   language of the New Testament is the first utterance and consciousness
   of the mind of Christ; or the immediate vision of the Word of life (1
   John i. 1) as it presented itself before the eyes of His first
   followers, or as the sense of His truth and power grew upon them (Rom.
   i. 3, 4); the other is the result of three or four centuries of
   reflection and controversy. And although this last had a truth suited
   to its age, and its technical expressions have sunk deep into the heart
   of the human race, it is not the less unfitted to be the medium by the
   help of which Scripture is to be explained. If the occurrence of the
   phraseology of the Nicene age in a verse of the Epistles would detect
   the spuriousness of the verse in which it was found, how can the Nicene
   or Athanasian Creed be a suit able instrument for the interpretation of
   Scripture? That advantage which the New Testament has over the teaching
   of the Church, as representing what may be termed the childhood of the
   Gospel, would be lost if its language were required to conform to that
   of the Creeds.

   To attribute to St. Paul or the Twelve the abstract notion of Christian
   truth which afterwards sprang up in the Catholic Church, is the same
   sort of anachronism as to attribute to them a system of philosophy. It
   is the same error as to attribute to Homer the ideas of Thales or
   Heraclitus, or to Thales the more developed principles of Aristotle and
   Plato. Many persons who have no difficulty in tracing the growth of
   institutions, yet seem to fail in recognizing the more subtle progress
   of an idea. It is hard to imagine the absence of conceptions with which
   we are familiar; to go back to the germ of what we know only in
   maturity; to give up what has grown to us, and become a part of our
   minds. In the present case, however, the development is not difficult
   to prove. The statements of Scripture are unaccountable if we deny it;
   the silence of Scripture is equally unaccountable. Absorbed as St. Paul
   was in the person of Christ with an intensity of faith and love of
   which in modern days and at this distance of time we can scarcely form
   a conception--high as he raised the dignity of his Lord above all
   things in heaven and earth--looking to Him as the Creator of all
   things, and the head of quick and dead, he does not speak of Him as
   equal to the Father', or of one substance with the Father'. Much of the
   language of the Epistles (passages for example such as Rom. i. 2: Phil.
   ii. 6) would lose their meaning if distributed in alternate clauses
   between our Lord's humanity and divinity. Still greater difficulties
   would be introduced into the Gospels by the attempt to identify them
   with the Creeds. We should have to suppose that He was and was not
   tempted; that when He prayed to His Father He prayed also to Himself;
   that He knew and did not know of that hour' of which He as well as the
   angels were ignorant. How could He have said, My God, my God, why hast
   thou forsaken me'? or, Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass
   from me'? How could He have doubted whether when the Son cometh he
   shall find faith upon the earth'? These simple and touching words have
   to be taken out of their natural meaning and connexion to be made the
   theme of apologetic discourses if we insist on reconciling them with
   the distinctions of later ages.

   Neither, as has been already remarked, would the substitution of any
   other precise or definite rule of faith, as for example the Unitarian,
   be more favour able to the interpretation of Scripture. How could the
   Evangelist St. John have said the Word was God', or God was the Word'
   (according to either mode of translating), or how would our Lord
   Himself have said, I and the Father are one,' if either had meant that
   Christ was a mere man, a prophet or as one of the prophets'? No one who
   takes words in their natural sense can suppose that in the beginning'
   (John i. 1) means, at the commencement of the ministry of Christ,' or
   that the Word was with God', only relates to the withdrawal of Christ
   to commune with God', or that the Word is said to be God', in the
   ironical sense of John x. 35. But while venturing to turn one eye on
   these (perhaps obsolete) perversions of the meanings of words in old
   opponents, we must not forget also to keep the other open to our own.
   The object of the preceding remark is not to enter into controversy
   with them, or to balance the statements of one side with those of the
   other, but only to point out the error of introducing into the
   interpretation of Scripture the notions of a later age which is common
   alike to us and them.

   The other kind of accommodation which was alluded to above arises out
   of the difference between the social and ecclesiastical state of the
   world, as it exists in actual fact, and the ideal which the Gospel
   presents to us. An ideal is, by its very nature, far removed from
   actual life. It is enshrined not in the material things of the external
   world, but in the heart and conscience. Mankind are dissatisfied at
   this separation; they fancy that they can make the inward kingdom an
   outward one also. But this is not possible. The frame of civilization,
   that is to say, institutions and laws, the usages of business, the
   customs of society, these are for the most part mechanical, capable
   only in a certain degree of a higher and spiritual life. Christian
   motives have never existed in such strength, as to make it safe or
   possible to entrust them with the preservation of social order. Other
   interests are therefore provided and other principles, often
   independent of the teaching of the Gospel, or even apparently at
   variance with it. If a man smite thee on the right cheek turn to him
   the other also,' is not a regulation of police but an ideal rule of
   conduct, not to be explained away, but rarely if ever to be literally
   acted upon in a civilized country; or rather to be acted upon always in
   spirit, yet not without a reference to the interests of the community.
   If a missionary were to endanger the public peace and come like the
   Apostles saying, I ought to obey God rather than man,' it is obvious
   that the most Christian of magistrates could not allow him (say in
   India or New Zealand) to shield himself under the authority of these
   words. For in religion as in philosophy there are two opposite poles;
   of truth and action, of doctrine and practice, of idea and fact. The
   image of God in Christ is over against the necessities of human nature
   and the state of man on earth. Our Lord Himself recognizes this
   distinction, when He says, Of whom do the kings of the earth gather
   tribute?' and then are the children free' (Matt, xvii. 26). And again,
   Notwithstanding lest we should offend them,' &c. Here are contrasted
   what may be termed the two poles of idea and fact.

   All men appeal to Scripture, and desire to draw the authority of
   Scripture to their side; its voice may be heard in the turmoil of
   political strife; a merely verbal similarity, the echo of a word, has
   weight in the determination of a controversy. Such appeals are not to
   be met always by counter-appeals; they rather lead to the consideration
   of deeper questions as to the manner in which Scripture is to be
   applied. In what relation does it stand to actual life? Is it a law, or
   only a spirit? for nations, or for individuals? to be enforced
   generally, or in details also? Are its maxims to be modified by
   experience, or acted upon in defiance of experience? Are the accidental
   circumstances of the first believers to become a rule for us? Is
   everything, in short, done or said by our Saviour and His Apostles,. to
   be regarded as a precept or example which is to be followed on all
   occasions and to last for all time? That can hardly be, consistently
   with the changes of human things. It would be a rigid skeleton of
   Christianity (not the image of Christ), to which society and politics,
   as well as the lives of individuals, would be conformed. It would be
   the oldness of the letter, on which the world would be stretched; not
   the law of the spirit of life' which St. Paul teaches. The attempt to
   force politics and law into the framework of religion is apt to drive
   us up into a corner, in which the great principles of truth and justice
   have no longer room to make themselves felt. It is better, as well as
   safer, to take the liberty with which Christ has made us free. For our
   Lord Himself has left behind Him words, which contain a principle large
   enough to admit all the forms of society or of life; My kingdom is not
   of this world' (John xviii. 36). It does not come into collision with
   politics or knowledge; it has nothing to do with the Roman government
   or the Jewish priesthood, or with corresponding institutions in the
   present day; it is a counsel of perfection, and has its dwelling-place
   in the heart of man. That is the real solution of questions of Church
   and State; all else is relative to the history or circumstances of
   particular nations. That is the answer to a doubt which is also raised
   respecting the obligation of the letter of the Gospel on individual
   Christians. But this inwardness of the words of Christ is what few are
   able to receive; it is easier to apply them superficially to things
   without, than to be a partaker of them from within. And false and
   miserable applications of them are often made, and the kingdom of God
   becomes the tool of the kingdoms of the world.

   The neglect of this necessary contrast between the ideal and the actual
   has had a twofold effect on the Interpretation of Scripture. It has led
   to an unfair appropriation of some portions of Scripture and an undue
   neglect of others. The letter is in many cases really or apparently in
   harmony with existing practices, or opinions, or institutions. In other
   cases it is far removed from them; it often seems as if the world would
   come to an end before the words of Scripture could be realized. The
   twofold effect just now mentioned, corresponds to these two classes.
   Some texts of Scripture have been eagerly appealed to and made (in one
   sense) too much of; they have been taken by force into the service of
   received opinions and beliefs; texts of the other class have been
   either unnoticed or explained away. Consider, for example, the
   extraordinary and unreasonable importance attached to single words,
   sometimes of doubtful meaning, in reference to any of the following
   subjects:--(1) Divorce; (2) Marriage with a Wife's Sister; (3)
   Inspiration; (4) the Personality of the Holy Spirit; (5) Infant
   Baptism; (6) Episcopacy; (7) Divine Right of Kings; (8) Original Sin.
   There is, indeed, a kind of mystery in the way in which the chance
   words of a simple narrative, the occurrence of some accidental event,
   the use even of a figure of speech, or a mistranslation of a word in
   Latin or English, have affected the thoughts of future ages and distant
   countries. Nothing so slight that it has not been caught at; nothing so
   plain that it may not be explained away. What men have brought to the
   text they have also found there; what has received no interpretation or
   witness, either in the customs of the Church or in the thoughts of many
   hearts', is still an unknown tongue' to them. It is with Scripture as
   with oratory, its effect partly depends on the preparation in the mind
   or in circumstances for the reception of it. There is no use of
   Scripture, no quotation or even misquotation of a word which is not a
   power in the world, when it embodies the spirit of a great movement or
   is echoed by the voice of a large party.

   (1) On the first of the subjects referred to above, it is argued from
   Scripture that adulterers should not be allowed to marry again; and the
   point of the argument turns on the question whether the words (ekto`s
   lo'gou pornei'as) saving for the cause of fornication', which occur in
   the first clause of an important text on marriage, were designedly or
   accidentally omitted in the second (Matt. v. 32: Whosoever shall put
   away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to
   commit adultery, and who soever shall marry her that is divorced
   committeth adultery'; compare also Mark x. 11, 12). (2) The Scripture
   argument in the second instance is almost invisible, being drawn from a
   passage the meaning of which is irrelevant (Lev. xviii. 18: Neither
   shalt thou take a wife to her sister to vex her, to uncover her
   nakedness beside the other in her lifetime'): and transferred from the
   Polygamy which prevailed in Eastern countries 3000 years ago to the
   Monogamy of the nineteenth century and the Christian Church, in spite
   of the custom and tradition of the Jews and the analogy of the
   brother's widow. (3) In the third case the word (theo'pneustos) given
   by inspiration of God' is spoken of the Old Testament, and is assumed
   to apply to the New, including that Epistle in which the expression
   occurs (2 Tim. iii. 16). (4) In the fourth example the words used are
   mysterious (John xiv. 26; xvi. 15), and seem to come out of the depths
   of a divine consciousness; they have sometimes, how ever, received a
   more exact meaning than they would truly bear; what is spoken in a
   figure is construed with the severity of a logical statement, while
   passages of an opposite tenour are overlooked or set aside. (5) In the
   fifth instance, the mere mention of a family of a jailer at Philippi
   who was baptized (he and all his,' Acts xvi. 33), has led to the
   inference that in this family there were probably young children, and
   hence that infant baptism is, first, permissive, secondly, obligatory.
   (6) In the sixth case the chief stress of the argument from Scripture
   turns on the occurrence of the word (epi'skopos) bishop, in the
   Epistles to Timothy and Titus, which is assisted by a supposed analogy
   between the position of the Apostles and of their successors; although
   the term bishop is clearly used in the passages referred to as well as
   in other parts of the New Testament indistinguishably from Presbyter,
   and the magisterial authority of bishops in after ages is unlike rather
   than like the personal authority of the Apostles in the beginning of
   the Gospel. The further development of Episcopacy into Apostolical
   succession has often been rested on the promise, Lo, I am with you
   alway, even to the end of the world.' (7) In the seventh case the
   precepts of order which are addressed in the Epistle to the fifth
   monarchy men of those days', are transferred to a duty of obedience to
   hereditary princes; the fact of the house of David, the Lord's
   anointed,' sitting on the throne of Israel is converted into a
   principle for all times and countries. And the higher lesson which our
   Saviour teaches: Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's,' that
   is to say, Render unto all their due, and to God above all,' is spoiled
   by being made into a precept of political subjection. (8) Lastly, the
   justice of God who rewardeth every man according to his works', and the
   Christian scheme of redemption, have been staked on two figurative
   expressions of St. Paul to which there is no parallel in any other part
   of Scripture (1 Cor. xv. 22: For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ
   shall all be made alive,' and the corresponding passage in Rom. v. 12);
   notwithstanding the declaration of the Old Testament as also of the
   New, Every soul shall bear its own iniquity,' and neither this man
   sinned nor his parents'. It is not necessary for our purpose to engage
   further in the matters of dispute which have arisen by the way in
   attempting to illustrate the general argument. Yet to avoid
   misconception it may be remarked, that many of the principles, rules,
   or truths mentioned, as for example, Infant Baptism, or the Episcopal
   Form of Church Government, have sufficient grounds; the weakness is the
   attempt to derive them from Scripture.

   With this minute and rigid enforcement of the words of Scripture in
   passages where the ideas expressed in them either really or apparently
   agree with received opinions or institutions, there remains to be
   contrasted the neglect, or in some instances the misinterpretation of
   other words which are not equally in harmony with the spirit of the
   age. In many of our Lord's discourses He speaks of the blessedness of
   poverty'; of the hardness which they that have riches will experience
   in attaining eternal life'. It is easier for a camel to go through a
   needle's eye,' and Son, thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good
   things', and again One thing thou lackest, go sell all that thou hast'.
   Precepts like these do not appeal to our own experience of life; they
   are unlike anything that we see around us at the present day, even
   among good men; to some among us they will recall the remarkable saying
   of Lessing,--that the Christian religion had been tried for eighteen
   centuries; the religion of Christ remained to be tried.' To take them
   literally would be injurious to ourselves and to society (at least, so
   we think). Religious sects or orders who have seized this aspect of
   Christianity have come to no good, and have often ended in
   extravagance. It will not do to go into the world saying, Woe unto you,
   ye rich men,' or on entering a noble mansion to repeat the
   denunciations of the prophet about cedar and vermilion', or on being
   shown the prospect of a magnificent estate to cry out, Woe unto them
   that lay field to field that they may be placed alone in the midst of
   the earth.' Times have altered, we say, since these denunciations were
   uttered; what appeared to the Prophet or Apostle a violation of the
   appointment of Providence has now become a part of it. It will not do
   to make a great supper, and mingle at the same board the two ends of
   society, as modern phraseology calls them, fetching in the poor, the
   maimed, the lame, the blind,' to fill the vacant places of noble
   guests. That would be eccentric in modern times, and even hurtful.
   Neither is it suitable for us to wash one another's feet, or to perform
   any other menial office, because our Lord set us the example. The
   customs of society do not admit it; no good would be done by it, and
   singularity is of itself an evil. Well, then, are the precepts of
   Christ not to be obeyed? Perhaps in their fullest sense they cannot be
   obeyed. But at any rate they are not to be explained away; the standard
   of Christ is not to be lowered to ordinary Christian life, because
   ordinary Christian life cannot rise, even in good men, to the standard
   of Christ. And there may be standing among us' some one in ten thousand
   whom we know not', in whom there is such a divine union of charity and
   prudence that he is most blest in the entire fulfilment of the
   precept--Go sell all that thou hast,'--which to obey literally in other
   cases would be evil, and not good. Many there have been, doubtless (not
   one or two only), who have given all that they had on earth to their
   family or friends--the poor servant casting her two mites into the
   treasury', denying herself the ordinary comforts of life for the sake
   of an erring parent or brother; that is not probably an uncommon case,
   and as near an approach as in this life we make to heaven. And there
   may be some one or two rare natures in the world in whom there is such
   a divine courtesy, such a gentleness and dignity of soul, that
   differences of rank seem to vanish before them, and they look upon the
   face of others, even of their own servants and dependents, only as they
   are in the sight of God and will be in His kingdom. And there may be
   some tender and delicate woman among us, who feels that she has a
   divine vocation to fulfil the most repulsive offices towards the dying
   inmates of a hospital, or the soldier perishing in a foreign land.
   Whether such examples of self-sacrifice are good or evil, must depend,
   not altogether on social or economical principles, but on the spirit of
   those who offer them, and the power which they have in themselves of
   making all things kin'. And even if the ideal itself were not carried
   out by us in practice, it has nevertheless what may be termed a truth
   of feeling. Let them that have riches be as though they had them not.'
   Let the rich man wear the load lightly; he will one day fold them up as
   a vesture.' Let not the refinement of society make us forget that it is
   not the refined only who are received into the kingdom of God; nor the
   daintiness of life hide from us the bodily evils of which the rich man
   and Lazarus are alike heirs. Thoughts such as these have the power to
   reunite us to our fellow creatures from whom the accidents of birth,
   position, wealth, have separated us; they soften our hearts towards
   them, when divided not only by vice and ignorance, but what is even a
   greater barrier, difference of manners and associations. For if there
   be anything in our own fortune superior to that of others, instead of
   idolizing or cherishing it in the blood, the Gospel would have us cast
   it from us; and if there be anything mean or despised in those with
   whom we have to do, the Gospel would have us regard such as friends and
   brethren, yea, even as having the person of Christ.

   Another instance of apparent, if not real neglect of the precepts of
   Scripture, is furnished by the commandment against swearing. No precept
   about divorce is so plain, so universal, so exclusive as this; Swear
   not at all.' Yet we all know how the custom of Christian countries has
   modified this counsel of perfection' which was uttered by the Saviour.
   This is the more remarkable because in this case the precept is not, as
   in the former, practically impossible of fulfilment or even difficult.
   And yet in this instance again, the body who have endeavoured to follow
   more nearly the letter of our Lord's commandment, seem to have gone
   against the common sense of the Christian world. Or to add one more
   example: Who, that hears of the Sabbatarianism, as it is called, of
   some Protestant countries, would imagine that the Author of our
   religion had cautioned His disciples, not against the violation of the
   Sabbath, but only against its formal and Pharisaical observance; or
   that the chiefest of the Apostles had warned the Colossians to Let no
   man judge them in respect of the new moon, or of the sabbath-days' (ii.
   16).

   The neglect of another class of passages is even more surprising, the
   precepts contained in them being quite practicable and in harmony with
   the existing state of the world. In this instance it seems as if
   religious teachers had failed to gather those principles of which they
   stood most in need. Think ye that those eighteen upon whom the tower of
   Siloam fell?' is the characteristic lesson of the Gospel on the
   occasion of any sudden visitation. Yet it is another reading of such
   calamities that is commonly insisted upon. The observation is seldom
   made respecting the parable of the good Samaritan, that the true
   neighbour is also a person of a different religion. The words, Forbid
   him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that
   can lightly speak evil of me,' are often said to have no application to
   sectarian differences in the present day, when the Church is
   established and miracles have ceased. The conduct of our Lord to the
   woman taken in adultery, though not intended for our imitation always,
   yet affords a painful contrast to the excessive severity with which
   even a Christian society punishes the errors of women. The boldness
   with which St. Paul applies the principle of individual judgement, Let
   every man be fully persuaded in his own mind,' as exhibited also in the
   words quoted above, Let no man judge you in respect of the new moon, or
   of the sabbath-days,' is far greater than would be allowed in the
   present age. Lastly, that the tenet of the damnation of the heathen
   should ever have prevailed in the Christian world, or that the
   damnation of Catholics should have been a received opinion among
   Protestants, implies a strange forgetfulness of such passages as Rom.
   ii. 1-16. Who rewardeth every man according to his work,' and When the
   Gentiles, which know not the law, do by nature the things contained in
   the law', &c. What a difference between the simple statement which the
   Apostle makes of the justice of God and the uncovenanted mercies' or
   invincible ignorance' of theologians half reluctant to give up, yet
   afraid to maintain the advantage of denying salvation to those who are
   extra palum Ecclesiae'!

   The same habit of silence or misinterpretation extends to words or
   statements of Scripture in which doctrines are thought to be
   interested. When maintaining the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity, we
   do not readily recall the verse, of that hour knoweth no man, no not
   the Angels of God, neither the Son, but the Father' (Mark xiii. 32).
   The temper or feeling which led St. Ambrose to doubt the genuineness of
   the words marked in italics, leads Christians in our own day to pass
   them over. We are scarcely just to the Millenarians or to those who
   maintain the continuance of miracles or spiritual gifts in the
   Christian Church, in not admitting the degree of support which is
   afforded to their views by many passages of Scripture. The same remark
   applies to the Predestinarian controversy; the Calvinist is often
   hardly dealt with, in being deprived of his real standing ground in the
   third and ninth chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. And the
   Protestant who thinks himself bound to prove from Scripture the very
   details of doctrine or discipline which are maintained in his Church,
   is often obliged to have recourse to harsh methods, and sometimes to
   deny appearances which seem to favour some particular tenet of Roman
   Catholicism (Matt. xvi. 18, 19; xviii. 18: 1 Cor. iii. 15). The Roman
   Catholic, on the other hand, scarcely observes that nearly all the
   distinctive articles of his creed are wanting in the New Testament; the
   Calvinist in fact ignores almost the whole of the sacred volume for the
   sake of a few verses. The truth is, that in seeking to prove our own
   opinions out of Scripture, we are constantly falling into the common
   fallacy of opening our eyes to one class of facts and closing them to
   another. The favourite verses shine like stars, while the rest of the
   page is thrown into the shade.

   Nor indeed is it easy to say what is the meaning of proving a doctrine
   from Scripture'. For when we demand logical equivalents and similarity
   of circumstances, when we balance adverse statements, St. James and St.
   Paul, the New Testament with the Old, it will be hard to demonstrate
   from Scripture any complex system either of doctrine or practice. The
   Bible is not a book of statutes in which words have been chosen to
   cover the multitude of cases, but in the greater portion of it,
   especially the Gospels and Epistles, like a man talking to his friend.'
   Nay, more, it is a book written in the East, which is in some degree
   liable to be misunderstood, because it speaks the language and has the
   feeling of Eastern lands. Nor can we readily determine in explaining
   the words of our Lord or of St. Paul, how much (even of some of the
   passages just quoted) is to be attributed to Oriental modes of speech.
   Expressions which would be regarded as rhetorical exaggerations in the
   Western world are the natural vehicles of thought to an Eastern people.
   How great then must be the confusion where an attempt is made to draw
   out these Oriental modes with the severity of a philosophical or legal
   argument! Is it not such a use of the words of Christ which He Himself
   rebukes when He says? It is the spirit that quickeneth. the flesh
   profiteth nothing' (John vi. 52, 63).

   There is a further way in which the language of creeds and liturgies as
   well as the ordinary theological use of terms exercises a disturbing
   influence on the interpretation of Scripture. Words which occur in
   Scripture are singled out and incorporated in systems, like stones
   taken out of an old building and put into a new one. They acquire a
   technical meaning more or less divergent from the original one. It is
   obvious that their use in Scripture, and not their later and technical
   sense, must furnish the rule of interpretation. We should not have
   recourse to the meaning of a word in Polybius, for the explanation of
   its use in Plato, or to the turn of a sentence in Lycophron, to
   illustrate a construction of Aeschylus. It is the same kind of
   anachronism which would interpret Scripture by the scholastic or
   theological use of the language of Scripture. It is remarkable that
   this use is indeed partial, that is to say it affects one class of
   words and not another. Love and truth, for example, have never been
   theological terms; grace and faith, on the other hand, always retain an
   association with the Pelagian or Lutheran controversies. Justification
   and inspiration are derived from verbs which occur in Scripture, and
   the later substantive has clearly affected the meaning of the original
   verb or verbal in the places where they occur. The remark might be
   further illustrated by the use of Scriptural language respecting the
   Sacraments, which has also had a reflex influence on its interpretation
   in many passages of Scripture, especially in the Gospel of St. John
   (John iii. 5; vi. 56, &c). Minds which are familiar with the mystical
   doctrine of the Sacraments seem to see a reference to them in almost
   every place in the Old Testament as well as in the New, in which the
   words water', or bread and wine' may happen to occur.

   Other questions meet us on the threshold, of a different kind, which
   also affect the interpretation of Scripture, and therefore demand an
   answer. Is it admitted that the Scripture has one and only one true
   meaning? Or are we to follow the fathers into mystical and allegorical
   explanations? or with the majority of modern interpreters to confine
   ourselves to the double senses of prophecy, and the symbolism of the
   Gospel in the law? In either case, we assume what can never be proved,
   and an instrument is introduced of such subtlety and pliability as to
   make the Scriptures mean anything--Gallus in campanili' as the
   Waldenses described it; the weathercock on the church tower,' which is
   turned hither and thither by every wind of doctrine. That the present
   age has grown out of the mystical methods of the early fathers is a
   part of its intellectual state. No one will now seek to find hidden
   meanings in the scarlet thread of Rahab, or the number of Abraham's
   followers, or in the little circumstance mentioned after the
   resurrection of the Saviour that St. Peter was the first to enter the
   sepulchre. To most educated persons in the nineteenth century, these
   applications of Scripture appear foolish. Yet it is rather the excess
   of the method which provokes a smile than the method itself. For many
   remains of the mystical interpretation exist among ourselves; it is not
   the early fathers only who have read the Bible crosswise, or deciphered
   it as a book of symbols. And the uncertainty is the same in any part of
   Scripture if there is a departure from the plain and obvious meaning.
   If, for example, we alternate the verses in which our Lord speaks of
   the last things between the day of judgement and the destruction of
   Jerusalem; or, in the elder prophecies, which are the counterparts of
   these, make a corresponding division between the temporal and the
   spiritual Israel; or again if we attribute to the details of the
   Mosaical ritual a reference to the New Testament; or, once more,
   supposing the passage of the Red Sea to be regarded not merely as a
   figure of baptism, but as a pre ordained type, the principle is
   conceded; there is no good reason why the scarlet thread of Rahab
   should not receive the explanation given to it by Clement. A little
   more or a little less of the method does not make the difference
   between certainty and uncertainty in the interpretation of Scripture.
   In whatever degree it is practised it is equally incapable of being
   reduced to any rule; it is the interpreter's fancy, and is likely to be
   not less but more dangerous and extravagant when it adds the charm of
   authority from its use in past ages.

   The question which has been suggested runs up into a more general one,
   the relation between the Old and New Testaments.' For the Old Testament
   will receive a different meaning accordingly as it is explained from
   itself or from the New. In the first case a careful and conscientious
   study of each one for itself is all that is required; in the second
   case the types and ceremonies of the law, perhaps the very facts and
   persons of the history, will be assumed to be predestined or made after
   a pattern corresponding to the things that were to be in the latter
   days. And this question of itself stirs another question respecting the
   interpretation of the Old Testament in the New. Is such interpretation
   to be regarded as the meaning of the original text, or an accommodation
   of it to the thoughts of other times?

   Our object is not to attempt here the determination of these questions,
   but to point out that they must be determined before any real progress
   can be made or any agreement arrived at in the interpretation of
   Scripture. With one more example of another kind we may close this part
   of the subject. The origin of the three first Gospels is an inquiry
   which has not been much considered by English theologians since the
   days of Bishop Marsh. The difficulty of the question has been sometimes
   misunderstood; the point being how there can be so much agreement in
   words, and so much disagreement both in words and facts; the double
   phenomenon is the real perplexity--how in short there can be all
   degrees of similarity and dissimilarity, the kind and degree of
   similarity being such as to make it necessary to suppose that large
   portions are copied from each other or from common documents; the
   dissimilarities being of a kind which seem to render impossible any
   knowledge in the authors of one another's writings. The most probable
   solution of this difficulty is, that the tradition on which the three
   first Gospels are based was at first preserved orally, and slowly put
   together and written in the three forms which it assumed at a very
   early period, those forms being in some places, perhaps, modified by
   translation. It is not necessary to develop this hypothesis farther.
   The point to be noticed is, that whether this or some other theory be
   the true account (and some such account is demonstrably necessary), the
   assumption of such a theory, or rather the observation of the facts on
   which it rests, cannot but exercise an influence on interpretation. We
   can no longer speak of three independent witnesses of the Gospel
   narrative. Hence there follow some other consequences. (1) There is no
   longer the same necessity as heretofore to reconcile inconsistent
   narratives; the harmony of the Gospels only means the parallel ism of
   similar words. (2) There is no longer any need to enforce everywhere
   the connexion of successive verses, for the same words will be found to
   occur in different connexions in the different Gospels. (3) Nor can the
   designs attributed to their authors be regarded as the free handling of
   the same subject on different plans; the difference consisting chiefly
   in the occurrence or absence of local or verbal explanations, or the
   addition or omission of certain passages. Lastly, it is evident that no
   weight can be given to traditional statements of facts about the
   authorship, as, for example, that respecting St. Mark being the
   interpreter of St. Peter, because the Fathers who have handed down
   these statements were ignorant or unobservant of the great fact, which
   is proved by internal evidence, that they are for the most part of
   common origin.

   Until these and the like questions are determined by interpreters, it
   is not possible that there should be agreement in the interpretation of
   Scripture. The Protestant and Catholic, the Unitarian and Trinitarian
   will continue to fight their battle on the ground of the New Testament.
   The Preterists and Futurists, those who maintain that the roll of
   prophecies is completed in past history, or in the apostolical age;
   those who look forward to a long series of events which are yet to come
   [es aphane`s to`n muthon anenei'kas ouk e'chei e'lenchon], may alike
   claim the authority of the Book of Daniel, or the Revelation. Apparent
   coincidences will always be discovered by those who want to find them.
   Where there is no critical interpretation of Scripture, there will be a
   mystical or rhetorical one. If words have more than one meaning, they
   may have any meaning. Instead of being a rule of life or faith,
   Scripture becomes the expression of the ever-changing aspect of
   religious opinions. The unchangeable word of God, in the name of which
   we repose, is changed by each age and each generation in accordance
   with its passing fancy. The book in which we believe all religious
   truth to be contained, is the most uncertain of all books, because
   interpreted by arbitrary and uncertain methods.

§ 3.

   It is probable that some of the preceding statements may be censured as
   a wanton exposure of the difficulties of Scripture. It will be said
   that such inquiries are for the few, while the printed page lies open
   to the many, and that the obtrusion of them may offend some weaker
   brother, some half-educated or prejudiced soul, for whom,'
   nevertheless, in the touching language of St. Paul, Christ died.' A
   confusion of the heart and head may lead sensitive minds into a
   desertion of the principles of the Christian life, which are their own
   witness, because they are in doubt about facts which are really
   external to them. Great evil to character may sometimes ensue from such
   causes. No man can serve two' opinions without a sensible harm to his
   nature. The consciousness of this responsibility should be always
   present to writers on theology. But the responsibility is really
   twofold; for there is a duty to speak the truth as well as a duty to
   withhold it. The voice of a majority of the clergy throughout the
   world, the half sceptical, half conservative instincts of many laymen,
   perhaps, also, individual interest, are in favour of the latter course;
   while a higher expediency pleads that honesty is the best policy', and
   that truth alone makes free'. To this it may be replied, that truth is
   not truth to those who are unable to use it; no reasonable man would
   attempt to lay before the illiterate such a question as that concerning
   the origin of the Gospels. And yet it may be rejoined once more, the
   healthy tone of religion among the poor depends upon freedom of thought
   and inquiry among the educated. In this conflict of reasons, individual
   judgement must at last decide. That there has been no rude, or improper
   unveiling of the difficulties of Scripture in the preceding pages, is
   thought to be shown by the following considerations:

   First, that the difficulties referred to are very well known; they
   force themselves on the attention, not only of the student, but of
   every intelligent reader of the New Testament, whether in Greek or
   English. The treatment of such difficulties in theological works is no
   measure of public opinion respecting them. Thoughtful persons, whose
   minds have turned towards theology, are continually discovering that
   the critical observations which they make themselves have been made
   also by others apparently without concert. The truth is that they have
   been led to them by the same causes, and these again lie deep in the
   tendencies of education and literature in the present age. But no one
   is willing to break through the reticence which is observed on these
   subjects; hence a sort of smouldering scepticism. It is probable that
   the distrust is greatest at the time when the greatest efforts are made
   to conceal it. Doubt comes in at the window, when Inquiry is denied at
   the door. The thoughts of able and highly educated young men almost
   always stray towards the first principles of things; it is a great
   injury to them, and tends to raise in their minds a sort of incurable
   suspicion, to find that there is one book of the fruit of the knowledge
   of which they are forbidden freely to taste, that is, the Bible. The
   same spirit renders the Christian Minister almost powerless in the
   hands of his opponents. He can give no true answer to the mechanic or
   artisan who has either discovered by his mother-wit or who retails at
   second-hand the objections of critics; for he is unable to look at
   things as they truly are.

   Secondly, as the time has come when it is no longer possible to ignore
   the results of criticism, it is of importance that Christianity should
   be seen to be in harmony with them. That objections to some received
   views should be valid, and yet that they should be always held up as
   the objections of infidels, is a mischief to the Christian cause. It is
   a mischief that critical observations which any intelligent man can
   make for himself, should be ascribed to atheism or unbelief. It would
   be a strange and almost incredible thing that the Gospel, which at
   first made war only on the vices of mankind, should now be opposed to
   one of the highest and rarest of human virtues--the love of truth. And
   that in the present day the great object of Christianity should be, not
   to change the lives of men, but to prevent them from changing their
   opinion; that would be a singular inversion of the purposes for which
   Christ came into the world. The Christian religion is in a false
   position when all the tendencies of knowledge are opposed to it. Such a
   position cannot be long maintained, or can only end in the withdrawal
   of the educated classes from the influences of religion. It is a grave
   consideration whether we ourselves may not be in an earlier stage of
   the same religious dissolution, which seems to have gone further in
   Italy and France. The reason for thinking so is not to be sought in the
   external circumstances of our own or any other religious communion, but
   in the progress of ideas with which Christian teachers seem to be ill
   at ease. Time was when the Gospel was before the age; when it breathed
   a new life into a decaying world--when the difficulties of Christianity
   were difficulties of the heart only, and the highest minds found in its
   truths not only the rule of their lives, but a well-spring of
   intellectual delight. Is it to be held a thing impossible that the
   Christian religion, instead of shrinking into itself, may again embrace
   the thoughts of men upon the earth? Or is it true that since the
   Reformation all intellect has gone the other way? and that in
   Protestant countries reconciliation is as hopeless as Protestants
   commonly believe to be the case in Catholic?

   Those who hold the possibility of such a reconcilement or restoration
   of belief, are anxious to disengage Christianity from all suspicion of
   disguise or unfairness. They wish to preserve the historical use of
   Scripture as the continuous witness in all ages of the higher things in
   the heart of man, as the inspired source of truth and the way to the
   better life. They are willing to take away some of the external
   supports, because they are not needed and do harm; also, because they
   interfere with the meaning. They have a faith, not that after a period
   of transition all things will remain just as they were before, but that
   they will all come round again to the use of man and to the glory of
   God. When interpreted like any other book, by the same rules of
   evidence and the same canons of criticism, the Bible will still remain
   unlike any other book; its beauty will be freshly seen, as of a picture
   which is restored after many ages to its original state; it will create
   a new interest and make for itself a new kind of authority by the life
   which is in it. It will be a spirit and not a letter; as it was in the
   beginning, having an influence like that of the spoken word, or the
   book newly found. The purer the light in the human heart, the more it
   will have an expression of itself in the mind of Christ; the greater
   the knowledge of the development of man, the truer will be the insight
   gained into the increasing purpose of revelation. In which also the
   individual soul has a practical part, finding a sympathy with its own
   imperfect feelings, in the broken utterance of the Psalmist or the
   Prophet as well as in the fulness of Christ. The harmony between
   Scripture and the life of man, in all its stages, may be far greater
   than appears at present. No one can form any notion from what we see
   around us, of the power which Christianity might have if it were at one
   with the conscience of man, and not at variance with his intellectual
   convictions. There, a world weary of the heat and dust of
   controversy--of speculations about God and man--weary too of the
   rapidity of its own motion, would return home and find rest.

   But for the faith that the Gospel might win again the minds of
   intellectual men, it would be better to leave religion to itself,
   instead of attempting to draw them together. Other walks in literature
   have peace and pleasure and profit; the path of the critical
   Interpreter of Scripture is almost always a thorny one in England. It
   is not worth while for any one to enter upon it who is not supported by
   a sense that he has a Christian and moral object. For although an
   Interpreter of Scripture in modern times will hardly say with the
   emphasis of the Apostle, Woe is me, if I speak not the truth without
   regard to consequences,' yet he too may feel it a matter of duty not to
   conceal the things which he knows. He does not hide the discrepancies
   of Scripture, because the acknowledgement of them is the first step
   towards agreement among interpreters. He would restore the original
   meaning, because seven other' meanings take the place of it; the book
   is made the sport of opinion and the instrument of perversion of life.
   He would take the excuses of the head out of the way of the heart;
   there is hope too that by drawing Christians together on the ground of
   Scripture, he may also draw them nearer to one another. He is not
   afraid that inquiries, which have for their object the truth, can ever
   be displeasing to the God of truth; or that the Word of God is in any
   such sense a word as to be hurt by investigations into its human origin
   and conception.

   It may be thought another ungracious aspect of the preceding remarks,
   that they cast a slight upon the interpreters of Scripture in former
   ages. The early Fathers, the Roman Catholic mystical writers, the Swiss
   and German Reformers, the Nonconformist divines, have qualities for
   which we look in vain among ourselves; they throw an intensity of light
   upon the page of Scripture which we nowhere find in modern
   commentaries. But it is not the light of interpretation. They have a
   faith which seems indeed to have grown dim nowadays, but that faith is
   not drawn from the study of Scripture; it is the element in which their
   own mind moves which over flows on the meaning of the text. The words
   of Scripture suggest to them their own thoughts or feelings. They are
   preachers, or in the New Testament sense of the word, prophets rather
   than interpreters. There is nothing in such a view derogatory to the
   saints and doctors of former ages. That Aquinas or Bernard did not
   shake themselves free from the mystical method of the Patristic times,
   or the Scholastic one which was more peculiarly their own; that Luther
   and Calvin read the Scriptures in connexion with the ideas which were
   kindling in the mind of their age, and the events which were passing
   before their eyes, these and similar remarks are not to be construed as
   depreciatory of the genius or learning of famous men of old; they
   relate only to their interpretation of Scripture, in which it is no
   slight upon them to maintain that they were not before their day.

   What remains may be comprised in a few precepts, or rather is the
   expansion of a single one. Interpret the Scripture like any other book.
   There are many respects in which Scripture is unlike any other book;
   these will appear in the results of such an interpretation. The first
   step is to know the meaning, and this can only be done in the same
   careful and impartial way that we ascertain the meaning of Sophocles or
   of Plato. The subordinate principles which flow out of this general one
   will also be gathered from the observation of Scripture. No other
   science of Hermeneutics is possible but an inductive one, that is to
   say, one based on the language and thoughts and narrations of the
   sacred writers. And it would be well to carry the theory of
   interpretation no further than in the case of other works. Excessive
   system tends to create an impression that the meaning of Scripture is
   out of our reach, or is to be attained in some other way than by the
   exercise of manly sense and industry. Who would write a bulky treatise
   about the method to be pursued in interpreting Plato or Sophocles? Let
   us not set out on our journey so heavily equipped that there is little
   chance of our arriving at the end of it. The method creates itself as
   we go on, beginning only with a few reflections directed against plain
   errors. Such reflections are the rules of common sense, which we
   acknowledge with respect to other works written in dead languages;
   without pretending to novelty they may help us to return to nature' in
   the study of the sacred writings.

   First, it may be laid down that Scripture has one meaning the
   meaning--which it had to the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who
   first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received
   it. Another view may be easier or more familiar to us, seeming to
   receive a light and interest from the circumstances of our own age. But
   such accommodation of the text must be laid aside by the interpreter,
   whose business is to place himself as nearly as possible in the
   position of the sacred writer. That is no easy task--to call up the
   inner and outer life of the contemporaries of our Saviour; to follow
   the abrupt and involved utterance of St. Paul or of one of the old
   Prophets; to trace the meaning of words when language first became
   Christian. He will often have to choose the more difficult
   interpretation (Gal. ii. 20; Rom. iii. 15, &c.), and to refuse one more
   in agreement with received opinions, because the latter is less true to
   the style and time of the author. He may incur the charge of
   singularity, or confusion of ideas, or ignorance of Greek, from a
   misunderstanding of the peculiarity of the subject in the person who
   makes the charge. For if it be said that the translation of some Greek
   words is contrary to the usages of grammar (Gal. iv. 13), that is not
   in every instance to be denied; the point is, whether the usages of
   grammar are always observed. Or if it be objected to some
   interpretation of Scripture that it is difficult and perplexing, the
   answer is--that may very well be--it is the fact,' arising out of
   differences in the modes of thought of other times, or irregularities
   in the use of language which no art of the interpreter can evade. One
   consideration should be borne in mind, that the Bible is the only book
   in the world written in different styles and at many different times,
   which is in the hands of persons of all degrees of knowledge and
   education. The benefit of this outweighs the evil, yet the evil should
   be admitted --namely, that it leads to a hasty and partial
   interpretation of Scripture, which often obscures the true one. A sort
   of conflict arises between scientific criticism and popular opinion.
   The indiscriminate use of Scripture has a further tendency to maintain
   erroneous readings or translations; some which are allowed to be such
   by scholars have been stereotyped in the mind of the English reader;
   and it becomes almost a political question how far we can venture to
   disturb them.

   There are difficulties of another kind in many parts of Scripture, the
   depth and inwardness of which require a measure of the same qualities
   in the interpreter himself. There are notes struck in places, which
   like some discoveries of science have sounded before their time; and
   only after many days have been caught up and found a response on the
   earth. There are germs of truth which after thousands of years have
   never yet taken root in the world. There are lessons in the Prophets
   which, however simple, mankind have not yet learned even in theory; and
   which the complexity of society rather tends to hide; aspects of human
   life in Job and Ecclesiastes which have a truth of desolation about
   them which we faintly realize in ordinary circumstances. It is,
   perhaps, the greatest difficulty of all to enter into the meaning of
   the words of Christ--so gentle, so human, so divine, neither adding to
   them nor marring their simplicity. The attempt to illustrate or draw
   them out in detail, even to guard against their abuse, is apt to
   disturb the balance of truth. The interpreter needs nothing short of
   fashioning' in himself the image of the mind of Christ. He has to be
   born again into a new spiritual or intellectual world, from which the
   thoughts of this world are shut out. It is one of the highest tasks on
   which the labour of a life can be spent, to bring the words of Christ a
   little nearer the heart of man.

   But while acknowledging this inexhaustible or infinite character of the
   sacred writings, it does not, therefore, follow that we are willing to
   admit of hidden or mysterious meanings in them: in the same way we
   recognize the wonders and complexity of the laws of nature to be far
   beyond what eye has seen or knowledge reached, yet it is not therefore
   to be supposed that we acknowledge the existence of some other laws,
   different in kind from those we know, which are incapable of
   philosophical analysis. In like manner we have no reason to attribute
   to the Prophet or Evangelist any second or hidden sense different from
   that which appears on the surface. All that the Prophet meant may not
   have been consciously present to his mind; there were depths which to
   himself also were but half revealed. He beheld the fortunes of Israel
   passing into the heavens; the temporal kingdom was fading into an
   eternal one. It is not to be supposed that what he saw at a distance
   only was clearly defined to him; or that the universal truth which was
   appearing and reappearing in the history of the surrounding world took
   a purely spiritual or abstract form in his mind. There is a sense in
   which we may still say with Lord Bacon, that the words of prophecy are
   to be interpreted as the words of one with whom a thousand years are as
   one day, and one day as a thousand years'. But that is no reason for
   turning days into years, or for interpreting the things that must
   shortly come to pass' in the book of Revelation, as the events of
   modern history, or for separating the day of judgement from the
   destruction of Jerusalem in the Gospels. The double meaning which is
   given to our Saviour's discourse respecting the last things is not that
   form of eternity' of which Lord Bacon speaks; it resembles rather the
   doubling of an object when seen through glasses placed at different
   angles. It is true also that there are types in Scripture which were
   regarded as such by the Jews themselves, as for example, the scapegoat,
   or the paschal lamb. But there is no proof of all outward ceremonies
   being types when Scripture is silent;--if we assume the New Testament
   as a tradition running parallel with the Old, may not the Roman
   Catholic assume with equal reason a tradition running parallel with the
   New? Prophetic symbols, again, have often the same meaning in different
   places (e.g. the four beasts or living creatures, the colours white or
   red); the reason is that this meaning is derived from some natural
   association (as of fruitfulness, purity, or the like); or again, they
   are borrowed in some of the later prophecies from earlier ones; we are
   not, there fore, justified in supposing any hidden connexion in the
   prophecies where they occur. Neither is there any ground for assuming
   design of any other kind in Scripture any more than in Plato or Homer.
   Wherever there is beauty and order, there is design; but there is no
   proof of any artificial design, such as is often traced by the Fathers,
   in the relation of the several parts of a book, or of the several books
   to each other. That is one of those mischievous notions which enables
   us, under the disguise of reverence, to make Scripture mean what we
   please. Nothing that can be said of the greatness or sublimity, or
   truth, or depth, or tenderness, of many passages, is too much. But that
   greatness is of a simple kind; it is not increased by double senses, or
   systems of types, or elaborate structure, or design. If every sentence
   was a mystery, every word a riddle, every letter a symbol, that would
   not make the Scriptures more worthy of a Divine author; it is a
   heathenish or Rabbinical fancy which reads them in this way. Such
   complexity would not place them above but below human compositions in
   general; for it would deprive them of the ordinary intelligibleness of
   human language. It is not for a Christian theologian to say that words
   were given to mankind to conceal their thoughts, neither was revelation
   given them to conceal the Divine.

   The second rule is an application of the general principle; interpret
   Scripture from itself,' as in other respects like any other book
   written in an age and country of which little or no other literature
   survives, and about which we know almost nothing except what is derived
   from its pages. Not that all the parts of Scripture are to be regarded
   as an indistinguishable mass. The Old Testament is not to be identified
   with the New, nor the Law with the Prophets, nor the Gospels with the
   Epistles, nor the Epistles of St. Paul to be violently harmonized with
   the Epistle of St. James. Each writer, each successive age, has
   characteristics of its own, as strongly marked, or more strongly than
   those which are found in the authors or periods of classical
   literature. These differences are not to be lost in the idea of a
   Spirit from whom they proceed or by which they were overruled. And
   therefore, illustration of one part of Scripture by another should be
   confined to writings of the same age and the same authors, except where
   the writings of different ages or persons offer obvious similarities.
   It may be said further that illustration should be chiefly derived, not
   only from the same author, but from the same writing, or from one of
   the same period of his life. For example, the comparison of St. John
   and the synoptic' Gospels, or of the Gospel of St. John with the
   Revelation of St. John, will tend rather to confuse than to elucidate
   the meaning of either; while, on the other hand, the comparison of the
   Prophets with one another, and with the Psalms, offers many valuable
   helps and lights to the interpreter. Again, the connexion between the
   Epistles written by the Apostle St. Paul about the same time (e.g.
   Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians--Colossians, Philippians,
   Ephesians--compared with Romans, Colossians--Ephesians, Galatians, &c.)
   is far closer than of Epistles which are separated by an interval of
   only a few years.

   But supposing all this to be understood, and that by the interpretation
   of Scripture from itself is meant a real interpretation of like by
   like, it may be asked, what is it that we gain from a minute comparison
   of a particular author or writing? The indiscriminate use of parallel
   passages taken from one end of Scripture and applied to the other
   (except so far as earlier compositions may have afforded the material
   or the form of later ones) is useless and uncritical. The uneducated or
   imperfectly educated person who looks out the marginal references of
   the English Bible, imagining himself in this way to gain a clearer
   insight into the Divine meaning, is really following the religious
   associations of his own mind. Even the critical use of parallel
   passages is not without danger. For are we to conclude that an author
   meant in one place what he says in another? Shall we venture to mend a
   corrupt phrase on the model of some other phrase, which memory,
   prevailing over judgement, calls up and thrusts into the text? It is
   this fallacy which has filled the pages of classical writers with
   useless and unfounded emendations.

   The meaning of the Canon Non nisi ex Scripturâ Scripturam potes
   interpretari', is only this, That we cannot understand Scripture
   without becoming familiar with it.' Scripture is a world by itself,
   from which we must exclude foreign influences, whether theological or
   classical. To get inside that world is an effort of thought and
   imagination, requiring the sense of a poet as well as a
   critic--demanding much more than learning a degree of original power
   and intensity of mind. Any one who, instead of burying himself in the
   pages of the commentators, would learn the sacred writings by heart,
   and paraphrase them in English, will probably make a nearer approach to
   their true meaning than he would gather from any commentary. The
   intelligent mind will ask its own questions, and find for the most part
   its own answers. The true use of interpretation is to get rid of
   interpretation, and leave us alone in company with the author. When the
   meaning of Greek words is once known, the young student has almost all
   the real materials which are possessed by the greatest Biblical
   scholar, in the book itself. For almost our whole knowledge of the
   history of the Jews is derived from the Old Testament and the
   Apocryphal books, and almost our whole knowledge of the life of Christ
   and of the Apostolical age is derived from the New; whatever is added
   to them is either conjecture, or very slight topographical or
   chronological illustration. For this reason the rule given above, which
   is applicable to all books, is applicable to the New Testament more
   than any other.

   Yet in this consideration of the separate books of Scripture it is not
   to be forgotten that they have also a sort of continuity. We make a
   separate study of the subject, of the mode of thought, in some degree
   also of the language of each book. And at length the idea arises in our
   minds of a common literature, a pervading life, an overruling law. It
   may be compared to the effect of some natural scene in which we
   suddenly perceive a harmony or picture, or to the imperfect appearance
   of design which suggests itself in looking at the surface of the globe.
   That is to say, there is nothing miraculous or artificial in the
   arrangement of the books of Scripture; it k the result, not the design,
   which appears in them when bound in the same volume. Or if we like so
   to say, there is design, but a natural design which is revealed to
   after ages. Such continuity or design is best expressed under some
   notion of progress or growth, not regular, however, but with broken and
   imperfect stages, which the want of knowledge prevents our minutely
   defining. The great truth of the unity of God was there from the first;
   slowly as the morning broke in the heavens, like some central light, it
   filled and afterwards dispersed the mists of human passion in which it
   was itself enveloped. A change passes over the Jewish religion from
   fear to love, from power to wisdom, from the justice of God to the
   mercy of God, from the nation to the individual, from this world to
   another; from the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the
   children, to every soul shall bear its own iniquity'; from the fire,
   the earthquake, and the storm, to the still small voice. There never
   was a time after the deliverance from Egypt, in which the Jewish people
   did not bear a kind of witness against the cruelty and licentiousness
   of the surrounding tribes. In the decline of the monarchy, as the
   kingdom itself was sinking under foreign conquerors, whether springing
   from contact with the outer world, or from some reaction within, the
   under growth of morality gathers strength; first, in the anticipation
   of prophecy, secondly, like a green plant in the hollow rind of
   Pharisaism,--and individuals pray and commune with God each one for
   himself. At length the tree of life blossoms; the faith in immortality
   which had hitherto slumbered in the heart of man, intimated only in
   doubtful words (2 Sam. xii. 23; Psalm xvii. 15), or beaming for an
   instant in dark places (Job xix. 25), has become the prevailing belief.

   There is an interval in the Jewish annals which we often exclude from
   our thoughts, because it has no record in the canonical
   writings--extending over about four hundred years, from the last of the
   prophets of the Old Testament to the forerunner of Christ in the New.
   This interval, about which we know so little, which is regarded by many
   as a portion of secular rather than of sacred history, was nevertheless
   as fruitful in religious changes as any similar period which preceded.
   The establishment of the Jewish sects, and the wars of the Maccabees,
   probably exercised as great an influence on Judaism as the captivity
   itself. A third influence was that of the Alexandrian literature, which
   was attracting the Jewish intellect, at the same time that the Galilean
   zealot was tearing the nation in pieces with the doctrine that it was
   lawful to call no man master but God'. In contrast with that wild
   fanaticism as well as with the proud Pharisee, came One most unlike all
   that had been before, as the kings or rulers of mankind. In an age
   which was the victim of its own passions, the creature of its own
   circumstances, the slave of its own degenerate religion, our Saviour
   taught a lesson absolutely free from all the influences of a
   surrounding world. He made the last perfect revelation of God to man; a
   revelation not indeed immediately applicable to the state of society or
   the world, but in its truth and purity inexhaustible by the after
   generations of men. And of the first application of the truth which He
   taught as a counsel of perfection to the actual circumstances of
   mankind, we have the example in the Epistles.

   Such a general conception of growth or development in Scripture,
   beginning with the truth of the Unity of God in the earliest books and
   ending with the perfection of Christ, naturally springs up in our minds
   in the perusal of sacred writings. It is a notion of value to the
   interpreter, for it enables him at the same time to grasp the whole and
   distinguish the parts. It saves him from the necessity of maintaining
   that the Old Testament is one and the same every where; that the books
   of Moses contain truths or precepts, such as the duty of prayer or the
   faith in immortality, or the spiritual interpretation of sacrifice,
   which no one has ever seen there. It leaves him room enough to admit
   all the facts of the case. No longer is he required to defend or to
   explain away David's imprecations against his enemies, or his
   injunctions to Solomon, any more than his sin in the matter of Uriah.
   Nor is he hampered with a theory of accommodation. Still, the sense of
   the increasing purpose which through the ages ran' is present to him,
   nowhere else continuously discernible or ending in a divine perfection.
   Nowhere else is there found the same interpenetration of the political
   and religious element--a whole nation, though never good for much at
   any time,' possessed with the conviction that it was living in the face
   of God--in whom the Sun of righteousness shone upon the corruption of
   an Eastern nature--the fewest of all people', yet bearing the greatest
   part in the education of the world. Nowhere else among the teachers and
   benefactors of mankind is there any form like His, in whom the desire
   of the nation is fulfilled, and not of that nation only', but of all
   mankind, whom He restores to His Father and their Father, to His God
   and their God.

   Such a growth or development may be regarded as a kind of progress from
   childhood to manhood. In the child there is an anticipation of truth;
   his reason is latent in the form of feeling; many words are used by him
   which he imperfectly understands; he is led by temporal promises,
   believing that to be good is to be happy always; he is pleased by
   marvels and has vague terrors. He is confined to a spot of earth, and
   lives in a sort of prison of sense, yet is bursting also with a fulness
   of childish life: he imagines God to be like a human father, only
   greater and more awful; he is easily impressed with solemn thoughts,
   but soon rises up to play' with other children. It is observable that
   his ideas of right and wrong are very simple, hardly extending to
   another life; they consist chiefly in obedience to his parents, whose
   word is his law. As he grows older he mixes more and more with others;
   first with one or two who have a great influence in the direction of
   his mind. At length the world opens upon him; another work of education
   begins; and he learns to discern more truly the meaning of things and
   his relation to men in general. You may complete the image, by
   supposing that there was a time in his early days when he was a
   helpless outcast in the land of Egypt and the house of bondage'. And as
   he arrives at manhood he reflects on his former years, the progress of
   his education, the hardships of his infancy, the home of his youth (the
   thought of which is ineffaceable in after life), and he now understands
   that all this was but a preparation for another state of being, in
   which he is to play a part for himself. And once more in age you may
   imagine him like the patriarch looking back on the entire past, which
   he reads anew, perceiving that the events of life had a purpose or
   result which was not seen at the time; they seem to him bound each to
   each by natural piety'.

   Which things are an allegory,' the particulars of which any one may
   interpret for himself. For the child born after the flesh is the symbol
   of the child born after the Spirit. The law was a schoolmaster to bring
   men to Christ,' and now we are under a schoolmaster' no longer. The
   anticipation of truth which came from without to the childhood or youth
   of the human race is witnessed to within; the revelation of God is not
   lost but renewed in the heart and understanding of the man. Experience
   has taught us the application of the lesson in a wider sphere. And many
   influences have combined to form the after life' of the world. When at
   the close (shall we say) of a great period in the history of man, we
   cast our eyes back on the course of events, from the angel of his
   presence in the wilderness' to the multitude of peoples, nations,
   languages, who are being drawn together by His Providence--from the
   simplicity of the pastoral state in the dawn of the world's day, to all
   the elements of civilization and knowledge which are beginning to meet
   and mingle in a common life, we also understand that we are no longer
   in our early home, to which, nevertheless, we fondly look; and that the
   end is yet unseen, and the purposes of God towards the human race only
   half revealed. And to turn once more to the Interpreter of Scripture,
   he too feels that the continuous growth of revelation which he traces
   in the Old and New Testament, is a part of a larger whole extending
   over the earth and reaching to another world.

§ 4.

   Scripture has an inner life or soul; it has also an outward body or
   form. That form is language, which imperfectly expresses our common
   notions, much more those higher truths which religion teaches. At the
   time when our Saviour came into the world the Greek language was itself
   in a state of degeneracy and decay. It had lost its poetic force, and
   was ceasing to have the sway over the mind which classical Greek once
   held. That is a more important revolution in the mental history of
   mankind than we easily conceive in modern times, when all languages sit
   loosely on thought, and the peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of one are
   corrected by our knowledge of another. It may be numbered among the
   causes which favoured the growth of Christianity. That degeneracy was a
   preparation for the Gospel--the decaying soil in which the new elements
   of life were to come forth--the beginning of another state of man, in
   which language and mythology and philosophy were no longer to exert the
   same constraining power as in the ancient world. The civilized portion
   of mankind were becoming of one speech, the diffusion of which along
   the shores of the Mediterranean sea made a way for the entrance of
   Christianity into the human understanding, just as the Roman empire
   prepared the framework of its outward history. The first of all
   languages, for glory and for beauty,' had become the common dialect' of
   the Macedonian kingdoms; it had been moulded in the schools of
   Alexandria to the ideas of the East and the religious wants of Jews.
   Neither was it any violence to its nature to be made the vehicle of the
   new truths which were springing up in the heart of man. The
   definiteness and absence of reflectiveness in the earlier forms of
   human speech, would have imposed a sort of limit on the freedom and
   spirituality of the Gospel; even the Greek of Plato would have coldly
   furnished forth' the words of eternal life'. A religion which was to be
   universal required the divisions of languages, as of nations, to be in
   some degree broken down. [Poena linguarum dispersit homines, donum
   linguarum in unum collegit.'] But this community or freedom of language
   was accompanied by corresponding defects; it had lost its logical
   precision; it was less coherent, and more under the influence of
   association. It might be compared to a garment which allowed and yet
   impeded the exercise of the mind by being too large and loose for it.

   From the inner life of Scripture it is time to pass on to the
   consideration of this outward form, including that other framework of
   modes of thought and figures of speech which is between the two. A
   knowledge of the original language is a necessary qualification of the
   Interpreter of Scripture. It takes away at least one chance of error in
   the explanation of a passage; it removes one of the films which have
   gathered over the page; it brings the meaning home in a more intimate
   and subtle way than a translation could do. To this, however, another
   qualification should be added, which is, the logical power to perceive
   the meaning of words in reference to their context. And there is a
   worse fault than ignorance of Greek in the interpretation of the New
   Testament, that is, ignorance of any language. The Greek fathers, for
   example, are far from being the best verbal commentators, because their
   knowledge of Greek often leads them away from the drift of the passage.
   The minuteness of the study in our own day has also a tendency to
   introduce into the text associations which are not really found there.
   There is a danger of making words mean too much; refinements of
   signification are drawn out of them, perhaps contained in their
   etymology, which are lost in common use and parlance. There is the
   error of interpreting every particle, as though it were a link in the
   argument, instead of being, as is often the case, an excrescence of
   style. The verbal critic magnifies his art, which is really great in
   Aeschylus or Pindar, but not of equal importance in the interpretation
   of the simpler language of the New Testament. His love of scholarship
   will sometimes lead him to impress a false system on words and
   constructions. A great critic [7] who has commented on the three first
   chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians, has certainly afforded a
   proof that it is possible to read the New Testament under a distorting
   influence from classical Greek. The tendency gains support from the
   undefined feeling that Scripture does not come behind in excellence of
   language any more than of thought. And if not, as in former days, the
   classic purity of the Greek of the New Testament, yet its certainty and
   accuracy, the assumption of which, as any other assumption, is only the
   parent of inaccuracy, is still maintained.

   The study of the language of the New Testament has suffered in another
   way by following too much in the track of classical scholarship. All
   dead languages which have passed into the hands of grammarians, have
   given rise to questions which have either no result or in which the
   certainty, or if certain, the importance of the result, is out of
   proportion to the labour spent in attaining it. The field is exhausted
   by great critics, and then subdivided among lesser ones. The subject,
   unlike that of physical science, has a limit, and unless new ground is
   broken up, as for example in mythology, or comparative philology, is
   apt to grow barren. Though it is not true to say that we know as much
   about the Greeks and Romans as we ever shall', it is certain that we
   run a danger from a deficiency of material, of wasting time in
   questions which do not add any thing to real knowledge, or in
   conjectures which must always remain uncertain, and may in turn give
   way to other conjectures in the next generation. Little points may be
   of great importance when rightly determined, because the observation of
   them tends to quicken the instinct of language; but conjectures about
   little things or rules respecting them which were not in the mind of
   Greek authors them selves, are not of equal value. There is the
   scholasticism of philology, not only in the Alexandrian, but in our own
   times; as in the middle ages, there was the scholasticism of
   philosophy. Questions of mere orthography, about which there cannot be
   said to have been a right or wrong, have been pursued almost with a
   Rabbinical minuteness. The story of the scholar who regretted that he
   had not concentrated his life on the dative case', is hardly a
   caricature of the spirit of such inquiries. The form of notes to the
   classics often seems to arise out of a necessity for observing a
   certain proportion between the commentary and the text. And the same
   tendency is noticeable in many of the critical and philological
   observations which are made on the New Testament. The field of Biblical
   criticism is narrower, and its materials more fragmentary; so too the
   minuteness and uncertainty of the questions raised has been greater.
   For example, the discussions respecting the chronology of St. Paul's
   life and his second imprisonment: or about the identity of James, the
   brother of the Lord, or in another department, respecting the use of
   the Greek article, have gone far beyond the line of utility.

   There seem to be reasons for doubting whether any considerable light
   can be thrown on the New Testament from inquiry into the language. Such
   inquiries are popular, because they are safe; but their popularity is
   not the measure of their use. It has not been sufficiently considered
   that the difficulties of the New Testament are for the most part common
   to the Greek and the English. The noblest translation in the world has
   a few great errors, more than half of them in the text; but we do it
   violence' to haggle over the words. Minute corrections of tenses or
   particles are no good; they spoil the English without being nearer the
   Greek. Apparent mistranslations are often due to a better knowledge of
   English rather than a worse knowledge of Greek. It is true that the
   signification of a few uncommon expressions, e. g. exousi'a, epibalo'n,
   sunapago'menoi, k.t.l.), is yet uncertain. But no result of consequence
   would follow from the attainment of absolute certainty respecting the
   meaning of any of these. A more promising field opens to the
   interpreter in the examination of theological terms, such as faith
   (pi'stis), grace (cha'ris), righteousness (dikaiosu'ne), sanctification
   (agiasmo's), the law (no'mos), the spirit (pneuma), the comforter
   (para'kletos), &c., provided always that the use of such terms in the
   New Testament is clearly separated (1) from their derivation or
   previous use in Classical or Alexandrian Greek, (2) from their after
   use in the Fathers and in systems of theology. To which may be added
   another select class of words descriptive of the offices or customs of
   the Apostolic Church, such as Apostle (apo'stolos), Bishop
   (epi'skopos), Elder (presbu'teros), Deacon and Deaconess (o kai` e
   dia'konos), love-feast (aga'pai), the Lord's day (e kuriake` eme'ra),
   &c. It is a lexilogus of these and similar terms, rather than a lexicon
   of the entire Greek Testament that is required. Interesting subjects of
   real inquiry are also the comparison of the Greek of the New Testament
   with modern Greek on the one hand, and the Greek of the LXX on the
   other. It is not likely, however, that they will afford much more help
   than they have already done in the elucidation of the Greek of the New
   Testament.

   It is for others to investigate the language of the Old Testament, to
   which the preceding remarks are only in part applicable. It may be
   observed in passing of this, as of any other old language, that not the
   later form of the language, but the cognate dialects, must ever be the
   chief source of its illustration. For in every ancient language,
   antecedent or contemporary forms, not the subsequent ones, afford the
   real insight into its nature and structure. It must also be admitted,
   that very great and real obscurities exist in the English translation
   of the Old Testament, which even a superficial acquaintance with the
   original has a tendency to remove. Leaving, however, to others the
   consideration of the Semitic languages, which raise questions of a
   different kind from the Hellenistic Greek, we will offer a few remarks
   on the latter. Much has been said of the increasing accuracy of our
   knowledge of the language of the New Testament: the old Hebraistic
   method of explaining difficulties of language or construction has
   retired within very narrow limits; it might probably with advantage be
   confined to still narrower ones--[if it have any place at all except in
   the Apocalypse or the Gospel of St. Matthew]. There is, perhaps, some
   confusion between accuracy of our knowledge of language, and the
   accuracy of language itself; which is also strongly maintained. It is
   observed that the usages of barbarous as well as civilized nations
   conform perfectly to grammatical rules; that the uneducated in all
   countries have certain laws of speech as much as Shakespeare or Bacon;
   the usages of Lucian, it may be said, are as regular as those of Plato,
   even when they are different. The decay of language seems rather to
   witness to the permanence than to the changeableness of its structure;
   it is the flesh, not the bones, that begins to drop off. But such
   general remarks, although just, afford but little help in determining
   the character of the Greek of the New Testament, which has of course a
   certain system, failing in which it would cease to be a language, Some
   further illustration is needed of the change which has passed upon it.
   All languages do not decay in the same manner; and the influence of
   decay in the same language may be different in different countries;
   when used in writing and in speaking--when applied to the matters of
   ordinary life and to the higher truths of philosophy or religion. And
   the degeneracy of language itself is not a mere principle of
   dissolution, but creative also; while dead and rigid in some of its
   uses, it is elastic and expansive in others. The decay of an ancient
   language is the beginning of the construction of a modern one. The loss
   of some usages gives a greater precision or freedom to others. The
   logical element, as for example in the Mediaeval Latin, will probably
   be strongest when the poetical has vanished. A great movement, like the
   Reformation in Germany, passing over a nation, may give a new birth
   also to its language.

   These remarks may be applied to the Greek of the New Testament, which
   although classed vaguely under the common dialect', has, nevertheless,
   many features which are altogether peculiar to itself, and such as are
   found in no other remains of ancient literature. (1) It is more unequal
   in style even in the same books, that is to say, more original and
   plastic in one part, more rigid and unpliable in another. There is a
   want of the continuous power to frame a paragraph or to arrange clauses
   in subordination to each other, even to the extent in which it was
   possessed by a Greek scholiast or rhetorician. On the other hand there
   is a fulness of life, a new birth,' in the use of abstract terms, which
   is not found elsewhere after the golden age of Greek philosophy. Almost
   the only passage in the New Testament which reads like a Greek period
   of the time, is the first paragraph of the Gospel according to St.
   Luke, and the corresponding words of the Acts. But the power and
   meaning of the characteristic words of the New Testament is in
   remarkable contrast with the vapid and general use of the same words in
   Philo about the same time. There is also a sort of lyrical passion in
   some passages (1 Cor. xiii; 2 Cor. vi. 6-10; xi. 21-33) which is a new
   thing in the literature of the world; to which, at any rate, no Greek
   author of a later age furnishes any parallel. (2) Though written, the
   Greek of the New Testament partakes of the character of a spoken
   language; it is more lively and simple, and less structural than
   ordinary writing--a peculiarity of style which further agrees with the
   circumstance that the Epistles of St. Paul were not written with his
   own hand, but probably dictated to an amanuensis, and that the Gospels
   also probably originate in an oral narrative. (3) The ground colours of
   the language may be said to be two; first, the LXX; which is modified,
   secondly, by the spoken Greek of eastern countries, and by the
   differences which might be expected to arise between a translation and
   an original; many Hebraisms would occur in the Greek of a translator,
   which would never have come to his pen but for the influence of the
   work which he was translating. (4) To which may be added a few Latin
   and Chaldee words, and a few Rabbinical formulae. The influence of
   Hebrew or Chaldee in the New Testament is for the most part at a
   distance, in the background, acting not directly, but mediately,
   through the LXX. It has much to do with the clausular structure and
   general form, but hardly anything with the grammatical usage. Philo,
   too, did not know Hebrew, or at least the Hebrew Scriptures, yet there
   is also a mediate' influence of Hebrew trace able in his writings. (5)
   There is an element of constraint in the style of the New Testament,
   arising from the circumstance of its authors writing in a language
   which was not their own. This constraint shows itself in the repetition
   of words and phrases; in the verbal oppositions and anacolutha of St.
   Paul; in the short sentences of St. John. This is further increased by
   the fact that the writers of the New Testament were unlearned men', who
   had not the same power of writing as of speech. Moreover, as has been
   often remarked, the difficulty of composition increases in proportion
   to the greatness of the subject: e. g., the narrative of Thucydides is
   easy and intelligible, while his reflections and speeches are full of
   confusion; the effort to concentrate seems to interfere with the
   consecutiveness and fluency of ideas. Something of this kind is
   discernible in those passages of the Epistles in which the Apostle St.
   Paul is seeking to set forth the opposite sides of God's dealing with
   man, e. g., Rom. iii. 1-9; ix, x; or in which the sequence of the
   thought is interrupted by the conflict of emotions, 1 Cor. ix. 20; Gal.
   iv. 11-20. (6) The power of the Gospel over language must be
   recognized, showing itself, first of all, in the original and
   consequently variable signification of words (pi'stis, cha'ris,
   soteri'a), which is also more comprehensive and human than the
   heretical usage of many of the same terms, e. g., gnosis (knowledge),
   sophi'a (wisdom), kti'sis (creature, creation); secondly, in a peculiar
   use of some constructions, such as dikaiosu'ne Theou (righteousness of
   God), pi'stis Iesou Christou (faith of Jesus Christ), en Christo (in
   Christ), en Theo (in God), upe`r emon (for us), in which the meaning of
   the genitive case or of the preposition almost escapes our notice, from
   familiarity with the sound of it. Lastly, the degeneracy of the Greek
   language is traceable in the failure of syntactical power; in the
   insertion of prepositions to denote relations of thought, which
   classical Greek would have expressed by the case only; in the omission
   of them when classical Greek would have required them; in the incipient
   use of i'na with the subjunctive for the infinitive; in the confusion
   of ideas of cause and effect; in the absence of the article in the case
   of an increasing number of words which are passing into proper names;
   in the loss of the finer shades of difference in the negative
   particles; in the occasional confusion of the aorist and perfect; in
   excessive fondness for particles of reasoning or inference; in various
   forms of apposition, especially that of the word to the sentence; in
   the use, some times emphatic, sometimes only pleonastic, of the
   personal and demonstrative pronouns. These are some of the signs that
   the language is breaking up and losing its structure.

   Our knowledge of the New Testament is derived almost exclusively from
   itself. Of the language, as well as of the subject, it may be truly
   said, that what other writers contribute is nothing in comparison of
   that which is gained from observation of the text. Some inferences
   which may be gathered from this general fact are the following:--First,
   that less weight should be given to lexicons, that is, to the authority
   of other Greek writers, and more to the context. The use of a word in a
   new sense, the attribution of a neuter meaning to a verb elsewhere
   passive (Rom. iii. 9 proecho'metha the resolution of the compound into
   two simple notions (Gal. iii. 1 proegra'phe), these, when the context
   requires it, are not to be set aside by the scholar because sanctioned
   by no known examples. The same remark applies to grammars as well as
   lexicons. We cannot be certain that dia' with the accusative never has
   the same meaning as dia' with the genitive (Gal. iv. 13; Phil. i. 15),
   or that the article always retains its defining power (2 Cor. i. 17;
   Acts xvii. 1), or that the perfect is never used in place of the aorist
   (1 Cor. xv. 4; Rev. v. 7, &c.); still less can we affirm that the
   latter end of a sentence never forgets the beginning (Rom. ii. 17-21;
   v. 12-18; ix. 22; xvi. 25-7; &c. &c.). Foreign influences tend to
   derange the strong natural perception or remembrance of the analogy of
   our own language. That is very likely to have occurred in the case of
   some of the writers of the New Testament; that there is such a
   derangement is a fact. There is no probability in favour of St. Paul
   writing in broken sentences, but there is no improbability which should
   lead us to assume, in such sentences, continuous grammar and thought,
   as appears to have been the feeling of the copyists who have corrected
   the anacolutha. The occurrence of them further justifies the
   interpreter in using some freedom with other passages in which the
   syntax does not absolutely break down. When confusion of two
   constructions', meaning to say one thing and finishing with another,'
   saying two things in one instead of disposing them in their logical
   sequence,' are attributed to the Apostle; the use of these and similar
   expressions is defended by the fact that more numerous anacolutha occur
   in St. Paul's writings than in any equal portion of the New Testament,
   and far more than in the writings of any other Greek author of equal
   length.

   Passing from the grammatical structure, we may briefly consider the
   logical character of the language of the New Testament. Two things
   should be here distinguished, the logical form and the logical sequence
   of thought. Some ages have been remarkable for the former of these two
   characteristics; they have dealt in opposition, contradiction, climax,
   pleonasm, reason within reason, and the like; mere statements taking
   the form of arguments--each sentence seeming to be a link in a chain.
   In such periods of literature, the appearance of logic is rhetorical,
   and is to be set down to the style. That is the case with many passages
   in the New Testament which are studded with logical or rhetorical
   formulae, especially in the Epistles of St. Paul. Nothing can be more
   simple or natural than the object of the writer. Yet forms of the
   schools' appear (whether learnt at the feet of Gamaliel, that reputed
   master of Greek learning, or not) which imply a degree of logical or
   rhetorical training.

   The observation of this rhetorical or logical element has a bearing on
   the Interpretation of Scripture. For it leads us to distinguish between
   the superficial connexion of words and the real connexion of thoughts.
   Otherwise, injustice is done to the argument of the sacred writer, who
   may be supposed to violate logical rules, of which he is unconscious.
   For example, the argument of Rom. iii. 19 may be classed by the
   logicians under some head of fallacy (Ex aliquo non sequitur omnis');
   the series of inferences which follow one another in Rom. i. 16-18 are
   for the most part different aspects or statements of the same truth. So
   in Rom. i. 32 the climax rather appears to be an anticlimax. But to
   dwell on these things interferes with the true perception of the
   Apostle's meaning, which is not contained in the repetitions of ga`r by
   which it is hooked together; nor are we accurately to weigh the
   proportions expressed by his ou mo'non--alla` kai', or pollo mallon:
   neither need we suppose that where me'n is found alone, there was a
   reason for the omission of de' (Rom. i. 8; iii. 2); or that the
   opposition of words and sentences is always the opposition of ideas
   (Rom. v. 7; x. 10). It is true that these and similar forms or
   distinctions of language admit of translation into English; and in
   every case the interpreter may find some point of view in which the
   simplest truth of feeling may be drawn out in an antithetical or
   argumentative form. But whether these points of view were in the
   Apostle's mind at the time of writing may be doubted; the real meaning,
   or kernel, seems to lie deeper and to be more within. When we pass from
   the study of each verse to survey the whole at a greater distance, the
   form of thought is again seen to be unimportant in comparison of the
   truth which is contained in it. The same remark may be extended to the
   opposition, not only of words, but of ideas, which is found in the
   Scriptures generally, and almost seems to be inherent in human language
   itself. The law is opposed to faith, good to evil, the spirit to the
   flesh, light to darkness, the world to the believer; the sheep are set
   on his right hand, but the goats on the left . The influence of this
   logical opposition has been great and not always without abuse in
   practice. For the opposition is one of ideas only which is not realized
   in fact. Experience shows us not that there are two classes of men
   animated by two opposing principles, but an infinite number of classes
   or individuals from the lowest depth of misery and sin to the highest
   perfection of which human nature is capable, the best not wholly good,
   the worst not entirely evil. But the figure or mode of representation
   changes these differences of degree into differences of kind. And we
   often think and speak and act in reference both to ourselves and
   others, as though the figure were altogether a reality.

   Other questions arise out of the analysis of the modes of thought of
   Scripture. Unless we are willing to use words without inquiring into
   their meaning, it is necessary for us to arrange them in some relation
   to our own minds. The modes of thought of the Old Testament are not the
   same with those of the New, and those of the New are only partially the
   same with those in use among ourselves at the present day. The
   education of the human mind may be traced as clearly from the Book of
   Genesis to the Epistles of St. Paul, as from Homer to Plato and
   Aristotle. When we hear St. Paul speaking of body and soul and spirit',
   we know that such language as this would not occur in the Books of
   Moses or in the Prophet Isaiah. It has the colour of a later age, in
   which abstract terms have taken the place of expressions derived from
   material objects. When we proceed further to compare these or other
   words or expressions of St. Paul with the body and mind', or mind' and
   matter', which is a distinction, not only of philosophy, but of common
   language among ourselves, it is not easy at once to determine the
   relation between them. Familiar as is the sound of both expressions,
   many questions arise when we begin to compare them.

   This is the metaphysical difficulty in the Interpretation of Scripture,
   which it is better not to ignore, because the consideration of it is
   necessary to the understanding of many passages, and also because it
   may return upon us in the form of materialism or scepticism. To some
   who are not aware how little words affect the nature of things it may
   seem to raise speculations of a very serious kind. Their doubts would,
   perhaps, find expression in some such exclamations as the
   following:--How is religion possible when modes of thought are
   shifting? and words changing their meaning, and statements of doctrine,
   though "starched" with philosophy, are in perpetual danger of
   dissolution from metaphysical analysis?'

   The answer seems to be, that Christian truth is not dependent on the
   fixedness of modes of thought. The metaphysician may analyse the ideas
   of the mind just as the physiologist may analyse the powers or parts of
   the bodily frame, yet morality and social life still go on, as in the
   body digestion is uninterrupted. That is not an illustration only; it
   represents the fact. Though we had no words for mind, matter, soul,
   body, and the like, Christianity would remain the same. This is
   obvious, whether we think of the case of the poor, who understand such
   distinctions very imperfectly, or of those nations of the earth, who
   have no precisely corresponding division of ideas. It is not of that
   subtle or evanescent character which is liable to be lost in shifting
   the use of terms. Indeed, it is an advantage at times to discard these
   terms with the view of getting rid of the oppositions to which they
   give rise. No metaphysical analysis can prevent our taking up the cross
   and following Christ', or receiving the kingdom of heaven as little
   children. To analyse the trichotomy' of St. Paul is interesting as a
   chapter in the history of the human mind and necessary as a part of
   Biblical exegesis, but it has nothing to do with the religion of
   Christ. Christian duties may be enforced, and the life of Christ may be
   the centre of our thoughts, whether we speak of reason and faith, of
   soul and body, or of mind and matter, or adopt a mode of speech which
   dispenses with any of these divisions.

   Connected with the modes of thought or representation in Scripture are
   the figures of speech of Scripture, about which the same question may
   be asked: What division can we make between the figure and reality?'
   And the answer seems to be of the same kind, that We cannot precisely
   draw the line between them'. Language, and especially the language of
   Scripture, does not admit of any sharp distinction. The simple
   expressions of one age become the allegories or figures of another;
   many of those in the New Testament are taken from the Old. But neither
   is there any thing really essential in the form of these figures; nay,
   the literal application of many of them has been a great stumblingblock
   to the reception of Christianity. A recent commentator on Scripture
   appears willing to peril religion on the literal truth of such an
   expression as We shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air'. Would
   he be equally ready to stake Christianity on the literal meaning of the
   words, Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched'?

   Of what has been said this is the sum:--That Scripture, like other
   books, has one meaning, which is to be gathered from itself without
   reference to the adaptations of Fathers or Divines; and without regard
   to a priori notions about its nature and origin. It is to be
   interpreted like other books, with attention to the character of its
   authors, and the prevailing state of civilization and knowledge, with
   allowance for peculiarities of style and language, and modes of thought
   and figures of speech. Yet not without a sense that as we read, there
   grows upon us the witness of God in the world, anticipating in a rude
   and primitive age the truth that was to be, shining more and more unto
   the perfect day in the life of Christ, which again is reflected from
   different points of view in the teaching of His Apostles.

§ 5.

   It has been a principal aim of the preceding pages to distinguish the
   interpretation from the application of Scripture. Many of the errors
   alluded to arise out of a confusion of the two. The present is nearer
   to us than the past; the circumstances which surround us pre-occupy our
   thoughts; it is only by an effort that we reproduce the ideas, or
   events, or persons of other ages. And thus, quite naturally, almost by
   a law of the human mind, the application of Scripture takes the place
   of its original meaning. And the question is, not how to get rid of
   this natural tendency, but how we may have the true use of it. For it
   cannot be got rid of, or rather is one of the chief instruments of
   religious usefulness, in the world. Ideas must be given through
   something; those of religion find their natural expression in the words
   of Scripture, in the adaptation of which to another state of life it is
   hardly possible that the first intention of the writers should be
   always preserved. Interpretation is the province of few; it requires a
   finer perception of language, and a higher degree of cultivation than
   is attained by the majority of mankind. But applications are made by
   all, from the philosopher reading God in History', to the poor woman
   who finds in them a response to her prayers, and the solace of her
   daily life. In the hour of death we do not want critical explanations;
   in most cases, those to whom they would be offered are incapable of
   understanding them. A few words, breathing the sense of the whole
   Christian world, such as I know that my Redeemer liveth' (though the
   exact meaning of them may be doubtful to the Hebrew scholar); I shall
   go to him, but he shall not return to me'; touch a chord which would
   never be reached by the most skilful exposition of the argument of one
   of St. Paul's Epistles.

   There is also a use of Scripture in education and literature. This
   literary use, though secondary to the religious one, is not
   unimportant. It supplies a common language to the educated and
   uneducated, in which the best and highest thoughts of both are
   expressed; it is a medium between the abstract notions of the one and
   the simple feelings of the other. To the poor, especially, it conveys
   in the form which they are most capable of receiving, the lesson of
   history and life. The beauty and power of speech and writing would be
   greatly impaired, if the Scriptures ceased to be known or used among
   us. The orator seems to catch from them a sort of inspiration; in the
   simple words of Scripture which he stamps anew, the philosopher often
   finds his most pregnant expressions. If modern times have been richer
   in the wealth of abstract thought, the contribution of earlier ages to
   the mind of the world has not been less, but perhaps greater, in
   supplying the poetry of language. There is no such treasury of
   instruments and materials as Scripture. The loss of Homer, or the loss
   of Shakespeare, would have affected the whole series of Greek or
   English authors who follow. But the disappearance of the Bible from the
   books which the world contains, would produce results far greater; we
   can scarcely conceive the degree in which it would alter literature and
   language--the ideas of the educated and philosophical, as well as the
   feelings and habits of mind of the poor. If it has been said, with an
   allowable hyperbole, that Homer is Greece', with much more truth may it
   be said, that the Bible is Christendom'.

   Many by whom considerations of this sort will be little understood,
   may, nevertheless, recognize the use made of the Old Testament in the
   New. The religion of Christ was first taught by an application of the
   words of the Psalms and the Prophets. Our Lord Himself sanctions this
   application. Can there be a better use of Scripture than that which is
   made by Scripture?' Or any more likely method of teaching the truths of
   Christianity than that by which they were first taught?' For it may be
   argued that the critical interpretation of Scripture is a device almost
   of yesterday; it is the vocation of the scholar or philosopher, not of
   the Apostle or Prophet. The new truth which was introduced into the Old
   Testament, rather than the old truth which was found there, was the
   salvation and the conversion of the world. There are many quotations
   from the Psalms and the Prophets in the Epistles, in which the meaning
   is quickened or spiritualized, but hardly any, probably none, which is
   based on the original sense or context. That is not so singular a
   phenomenon as may at first sight be imagined. It may appear strange to
   us that Scripture should be interpreted in Scripture, in a manner not
   altogether in agreement with modern criticism; but would it not be more
   strange that it should be interpreted otherwise than in agreement with
   the ideas of the age or country in which it was written? The
   observation that there is such an agreement, leads to two conclusions
   which have a bearing on our present subject. First, it is a reason for
   not insisting on the applications which the New Testament makes of
   passages in the Old, as their original meaning. Secondly, it gives
   authority and precedent for the use of similar applications in our own
   day.

   But, on the other hand, though interwoven with literature, though
   common to all ages of the Church, though sanctioned by our Lord and his
   Apostles, it is easy to see that such an employment of Scripture is
   liable to error and perversion. For it may not only receive a new
   meaning; it may be applied in a spirit alien to itself. It may become
   the symbol of fanaticism, the cloak of malice, the disguise of policy.
   Cromwell at Drogheda, quoting Scripture to his soldiers; the well-known
   attack on the Puritans in the State Service for the Restoration, Not
   every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord'; the reply of the Venetian
   Ambassador to the suggestion of Wolsey, that Venice should take a lead
   in Italy, which was only the Earth is the Lord's and the fulness
   thereof,' are examples of such uses. In former times, it was a real and
   not an imaginary fear, that the wars of the Lord in the Old Testament
   might arouse a fire in the bosom of Franks and Huns. In our own day
   such dangers have passed away; it is only a figure of speech when the
   preacher says, Gird on thy sword, O thou most mighty.' The warlike
   passions of men are not roused by quotations from Scripture, nor can
   states of life such as slavery or polygamy, which belong to a past age,
   be defended, at least in England, by the example of the Old Testament.
   The danger or error is of another kind; more subtle, but hardly less
   real. For if we are permitted to apply Scripture under the pretence of
   interpreting it, the language of Scripture becomes only a mode of
   expressing the public feeling or opinion of our own day. Any passing
   phase of politics or art, or spurious philanthropy, may have a kind of
   Scriptural authority. The words that are used are the words of the
   Prophet or Evangelist, but we stand behind and adapt them to our
   purpose. Hence it is necessary to consider the limits and manner of a
   just adaptation; how much may be allowed for the sake of ornament; how
   far the Scripture, in all its details, may be regarded as an allegory
   of human life--where the true analogy begins--how far the
   interpretation of Scripture will serve as a corrective to its practical
   abuse.

   Truth seems to require that we should separate mere adaptations from
   the original meaning of Scripture. It is not honest or reasonable to
   confound illustration with argument, in theology, any more than in
   other subjects. For example, if a preacher chooses to represent the
   condition of a Church or of an individual in the present day, under the
   figure of Elijah left alone among the idolatrous tribes of Israel, such
   an allusion is natural enough; but if he goes on to argue that
   individuals are therefore justified in remaining in what they believe
   to be an erroneous communion--that is a mere appearance of argument
   which ought not to have the slightest weight with a man of sense. Such
   a course may indeed be perfectly justifiable, but not on the ground
   that a prophet of the Lord once did so, two thousand five hundred years
   ago. Not in this sense were the lives of the Prophets written for our
   instruction. There are many important morals conveyed by them, but only
   so far as they themselves represent universal principles of justice and
   love. These universal principles they clothe with flesh and blood; they
   show them to us written on the hearts of men of like passions with
   ourselves. The prophecies, again, admit of many applications to the
   Christian Church or to the Christian life. There is no harm in speaking
   of the Church as the Spiritual Israel, or in using the imagery of
   Isaiah respecting Messiah's kingdom, as the type of good things to
   come. But when it is gravely urged, that from such passages as Kings
   shall be thy nursing fathers', we are to collect the relations of
   Church and State, or from the pictorial description of Isaiah, that it
   is to be inferred there will be a reign of Christ on earth--that is a
   mere assumption of the forms of reasoning by the imagination. Nor is it
   a healthful or manly tone of feeling which depicts the political
   opposition to the Church in our own day, under imagery which is
   borrowed from the desolate Sion of the captivity. Scripture is apt to
   come too readily to the lips, when we are pouring out our own
   weaknesses, or enlarging on some favourite theme--perhaps idealizing in
   the language of prophecy the feebleness of preaching or missions in the
   present day, or from the want of something else to say. In many
   discussions on these and similar subjects, the position of the Jewish
   King, Church, Priest, has led to a confusion, partly caused by the use
   of similar words in modern senses among ourselves. The King or Queen of
   England may be called the Anointed of the Lord, but we should not
   therefore imply that the attributes of sovereignty are the same as
   those which belonged to King David. All these are figures of speech,
   the employment of which is too common, and has been injurious to
   religion, because it prevents our looking at the facts of history or
   life as they truly are.

   This is the first step towards a more truthful use of Scripture in
   practice--the separation of adaptation from interpretation. No one who
   is engaged in preaching or in religious instruction can be required to
   give up Scripture language; it is the common element in which his
   thoughts and those of his hearers move. But he may be asked to
   distinguish the words of Scripture from the truths of Scripture--the
   means from the end. The least expression of Scripture is weighty; it
   affects the minds of the hearers in a way that no other language can.
   Whatever responsibility attaches to idle words, attaches in still
   greater degree to the idle or fallacious use of Scripture terms. And
   there is surely a want of proper reverence for Scripture, when we
   confound the weakest and feeblest applications of its words with their
   true meaning--when we avail ourselves of their natural power to point
   them against some enemy--when we divert the eternal words of charity
   and truth into a defence of some passing opinion. For not only in the
   days of the Pharisees, but in our own, the letter has been taking the
   place of the spirit; the least matters, of the greatest, and the
   primary meaning has been lost in the secondary use.

   Other simple cautions may also be added. The applications of Scripture
   should be harmonized and, as it were, interpenetrated with the spirit
   of the Gospel, the whole of which should be in every part; though the
   words may receive a new sense, the new sense ought to be in agreement
   with the general truth. They should be used to bring home practical
   precepts, not to send the imagination on a voyage of discovery; they
   are not the real foundation of our faith in another world, nor can
   they, by pleasant pictures, add to our knowledge of it. They should not
   confound the accidents with the essence of religion--the restrictions
   and burdens of the Jewish law with the freedom of the Gospel--the
   things which Moses allowed for the hardness of the heart, with the
   perfection of the teaching of Christ. They should avoid the form of
   arguments, or they will insensibly be used, or under stood, to mean
   more than they really do. They should be subjected to an overruling
   principle, which is the heart and conscience of the Christian teacher,
   who indeed stands behind them', not to make them the vehicles of his
   own opinions, but as the expressions of justice, and truth, and love.

   And here the critical interpretation of Scripture comes in and
   exercises a corrective influence on its popular use. We have already
   admitted that criticism is not for the multitude; it is not what the
   Scripture terms the Gospel preached to the poor. Yet, indirectly
   passing from the few to the many, it has borne a great part in the
   Reformation of religion. It has cleared the eye of the mind to
   understand the original meaning. It was a sort of criticism which
   supported the struggle of the sixteenth century against the Roman
   Catholic Church; it is criticism that is leading Protestants to doubt
   whether the doctrine that the Pope is Antichrist, which has descended
   from the same period, is really discoverable in Scripture. Even the
   isolated thinker, against whom the religious world is taking up arms,
   has an influence on his opponents. The force of observations, which are
   based on reason and fact, remains when the tide of religious or party
   feeling is gone down. Criticism has also a healing influence in
   clearing away what may be termed the Sectarianism of knowledge. Without
   criticism it would be impossible to reconcile History and Science with
   Revealed Religion; they must remain for ever in a hostile and defiant
   attitude. Instead of being like other records, subject to the
   conditions of knowledge which existed in an early stage of the world,
   Scripture would be regarded on the one side as the work of organic
   Inspiration, and as a lying imposition on the other.

   The real unity of Scripture, as of man, has also a relation to our
   present subject. Amid all the differences of modes of thought and
   speech which have existed in different ages, of which much is said in
   our own day, there is a common element in human nature which bursts
   through these differences and remains unchanged, because akin to the
   first instincts of our being. The simple feeling of truth and right is
   the same to the Greek or Hindoo as to ourselves. However great may be
   the diversities of human character, there is a point at which these
   diversities end, and unity begins to appear. Now this admits of an
   application to the books of Scripture, as well as to the world
   generally. Written at many different times, in more than one language,
   some of them in fragments, they, too, have a common element of which
   the preacher may avail himself. This element is twofold, partly divine
   and partly human; the revelation of the truth and righteousness of God,
   and the cry of the human heart towards Him. Every part of Scripture
   tends to raise us above ourselves--to give us a deeper sense of the
   feebleness of man, and of the wisdom and power of God. It has a sort of
   kindred, as Plato would say, with religious truth everywhere in the
   world. It agrees also with the imperfect stages of knowledge and faith
   in human nature, and answers to its inarticulate cries. The universal
   truth easily breaks through the accidents of time and place in which it
   is involved. Although we cannot apply Jewish institutions to the
   Christian world, or venture in reliance on some text to resist the tide
   of civilization on which we are borne, yet it remains, nevertheless, to
   us, as well as to the Jews and first Christians, that Righteousness
   exalteth a nation', and that love is the fulfilling not of the Jewish
   law only, but of all law'.

   In some cases, we have only to enlarge the meaning of Scripture to
   apply it even to the novelties and peculiarities of our own times. The
   world changes, but the human heart remains the same; events and details
   are different, but the principle by which they are governed, or the
   rule by which we are to act, is not different. When, for example, our
   Saviour says, Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you
   free,' it is not likely that these words would have conveyed to the
   minds of the Jews who heard Him any notion of the perplexities of doubt
   or inquiry. Yet we cannot suppose that our Saviour, were He to come
   again upon the earth, would refuse thus to extend them. The Apostle St.
   Paul, when describing the Gospel, which is to the Greek foolishness,
   speaks also of a higher wisdom which is known to those who are perfect.
   Neither is it unfair for us to apply this passage to that reconcilement
   of faith and knowledge, which may be termed Christian philosophy, as
   the nearest equivalent to its language in our own day. Such words,
   again, as Why seek ye the living among the dead?' admit of a great
   variety of adaptations to the circumstances of our own time. Many of
   these adaptations have a real germ in the meaning of the words. The
   precept, Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the
   things that are God's,' may be taken generally as expressing the
   necessity of distinguishing the divine and human--the things that
   belong to faith and the things that belong to experience. It is worth
   remarking in the application made of these words by Lord Bacon, Da
   fidei quae fidei sunt;' that, although the terms are altered, yet the
   circumstance that the form of the sentence is borrowed from Scripture
   gives them point and weight.

   The portion of Scripture which more than any other is immediately and
   universally applicable to our own times is, doubtless, that which is
   contained in the words of Christ Himself. The reason is that they are
   words of the most universal import. They do not relate to the
   circumstances of the time, but to the common life of all mankind. You
   cannot extract from them a political creed; only, Render unto Cæsar the
   things that are Cæsar's,' and, The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses'
   seat; whatsoever, therefore, they say unto you do, but after their
   works do not.' They present to us a standard of truth and duty, such as
   no one can at once and immediately practise--such as, in its
   perfection, no one has fulfilled in this world. But this idealism does
   not interfere with their influence as a religious lesson. Ideals, even
   though unrealized, have effect on our daily life. The preacher of the
   Gospel is, or ought to be, aware that his calls to repentance, his
   standard of obligations, his lamentations over his own shortcomings or
   those of others, do not at once convert hundreds or thousands, as on
   the day of Pentecost. Yet it does not follow that they are thrown away,
   or that it would be well to substitute for them mere prudential or
   economical lessons, lectures on health or sanitary improvement. For
   they tend to raise men above themselves, providing them with Sabbaths
   as well as working days, giving them a taste of the good word of God'
   and of the powers of the world to come'. Human nature needs to be
   idealized; it seems as if it took a dislike to itself when presented
   always in its ordinary attire; it lives on in the hope of becoming
   better. And the image or hope of a better life--the vision of Christ
   crucified--which is held up to it, doubtless has an influence; not like
   the rushing mighty wind of the day of Pentecost; it may rather be
   compared to the leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of
   meal, till the whole was leavened.'

   The Parables of our Lord are a portion of the New Testament, which we
   may apply in the most easy and literal manner. The persons in them are
   the persons among whom we live and move; there are times and occasions
   at which the truths symbolized by them come home to the hearts of all
   who have ever been impressed by religion. We have been prodigal sons
   returning to our Father; servants to whom talents have been entrusted;
   labourers in the vineyard inclined to murmur at our lot, when compared
   with that of others, yet receiving every man his due; well-satisfied
   Pharisees; repentant Publicans:--we have received the seed, and the
   cares of the world have choked it--we hope also at times that we have
   found the pearl of great price after sweeping the house--we are ready
   like the Good Samaritan to show kindness to all mankind. Of these
   circumstances of life or phases of mind, which are typified by the
   parables, most Christians have experience. We may go on to apply many
   of them further to the condition of nations and Churches. Such a
   treasury has Christ provided us of things new and old, which refer to
   all time and all mankind may we not say in His own words--because He is
   the Son of Man'?

   There is no language of Scripture which penetrates the individual soul,
   and embraces all the world in the arms of its love, in the same manner
   as that of Christ Himself. Yet the Epistles contain lessons which are
   not found in the Gospels, or, at least, not expressed with the same
   degree of clearness. For the Epistles are nearer to actual life--they
   relate to the circumstances of the first believers, to their struggles
   with the world without, to their temptations and divisions from
   within--their subject is not only the doctrine of the Christian
   religion, but the business of the early Church. And although their
   circumstances are not our circumstances--we are not afflicted or
   persecuted, or driven out of the world, but in possession of the
   blessings, and security, and property of an established religion--yet
   there is a Christian spirit which infuses itself into all
   circumstances, of which they are a pure and living source. It is
   impossible to gather from a few fragmentary and apparently not always
   consistent expressions, how the Communion was celebrated, or the Church
   ordered, what was the relative position of Presbyters and Deacons, or
   the nature of the gift of tongues, as a rule for the Church in after
   ages:--such inquiries have no certain answer, and, at the best, are
   only the subject of honest curiosity. But the words, Charity never
   faileth,' and Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and
   have not charity, I am nothing',--these have a voice which reaches to
   the end of time. There are no questions of meats and drinks nowadays,
   yet the noble words of the Apostle remain: If meat make my brother to
   offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my
   brother to offend.' Moderation in controversy, toleration towards
   opponents or erring members, is a virtue which has been thought by many
   to belong to the development and not to the origin of Christianity, and
   which is rarely found in the commencement of a religion. But lessons of
   toleration may be gathered from the Apostle, which have not yet been
   learned either by theologians or by mankind in general. The
   persecutions and troubles which awaited the Apostle no longer await us;
   we can not, therefore, without unreality, except, perhaps, in a very
   few cases, appropriate his words, I have fought the good fight, I nave
   finished my course, I have kept the faith. But that other text still
   sounds gently in our ears: My strength is perfected in weakness,' and
   when I am weak, then am I strong'. We cannot apply to ourselves the
   language of authority in which the Apostle speaks of himself as an
   ambassador for Christ, without something like bad taste. But it is not
   altogether an imaginary hope that those of us who are ministers of
   Christ may attain to a real imitation of his great diligence, of his
   sympathy with others, and consideration for them--of his willingness to
   spend and be spent in his Master's service.

   Such are a few instances of the manner in which the analogy of faith
   enables us to apply the words of Christ and His Apostles, with a strict
   regard to their original meaning. But the Old Testament has also its
   peculiar lessons which are not conveyed with equal point or force in
   the New. The beginnings of human history are themselves a lesson having
   a freshness as of the early dawn. There are forms of evil against which
   the Prophets and the prophetical spirit of the Law carry on a warfare,
   in terms almost too bold for the way of life of modern times. There,
   more plainly than in any other portion of Scripture, is expressed the
   antagonism of outward and inward, of ceremonial and moral, of mercy and
   sacrifice. There all the masks of hypocrisy are rudely torn asunder, in
   which an unthinking world allows itself to be disguised. There the
   relations of rich and poor in the sight of God, and their duties
   towards one another, are most clearly enunciated. There the religion of
   suffering first appears--adversity, the blessing' of the Old Testament,
   as well as of the New. There the sorrows and aspirations of the soul
   find their deepest expression, and also their consolation. The feeble
   person has an image of himself in the bruised reed'; the suffering
   servant of God passes into the beloved one, in whom my soul
   delighteth'. Even the latest and most desolate phases of the human mind
   are reflected in Job and Ecclesiastes; yet not without the solemn
   assertion that to fear God and keep his commandments' is the beginning
   and end of all things.

   It is true that there are examples in the Old Testament which were not
   written for our instruction, and that, in some instances, precepts or
   commands are attributed to God Himself, which must be regarded as
   relative to the state of knowledge which then existed of the Divine
   nature, or given for the hardness of men's hearts'. It cannot be denied
   that such passages of Scripture are liable to misunderstanding; the
   spirit of the Old Covenanters, although no longer appealing to the
   action of Samuel, hewing Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal,' is
   not altogether extinguished. And a community of recent origin in
   America found their doctrine of polygamy on the Old Testament. But the
   poor generally read the Bible unconsciously; they take the good, and
   catch the prevailing spirit, without stopping to reason whether this or
   that practice is sanctioned by the custom or example of Scripture. The
   child is only struck by the impiety of the children who mocked the
   prophet; he does not think of the severity of the punishment which is
   inflicted upon them. And the poor, in this respect, are much like
   children; their reflection on the morality or immorality of characters
   or events is suppressed by reverence for Scripture. The Christian
   teacher has a sort of tact by which he guides them to perceive only the
   spirit of the Gospel everywhere; they read in the Psalms, of David's
   sin and repentance; of the never-failing goodness of God to him, and
   his never-failing trust in Him, not of his imprecations against his
   enemies. Such difficulties are greater in theory and on paper, than in
   the management of a school or parish. They are found to affect the
   half-educated, rather than either the poor, or those who are educated
   in a higher sense. To be above such difficulties is the happiest
   condition of human life and knowledge, or to be below them; to see, or
   think we see, how they may be reconciled with Divine power and wisdom,
   or not to see how they are apparently at variance with them.

§ 6.

   Some application of the preceding subject may be further made to
   theology and life.

   Let us introduce this concluding inquiry with two remarks.

   First, it may be observed, that a change in some of the prevailing
   modes of interpretation is not so much a matter of expediency as of
   necessity. The original meaning of Scripture is beginning to be clearly
   under stood. But the apprehension of the original meaning is
   inconsistent with the reception of a typical or conventional one. The
   time will come when educated men will be no more able to believe that
   the words, Out of Egypt have I called my son' (Matt. ii. 15; Hos. xi.
   1), were intended by the prophet to refer to the return of Joseph and
   Mary from Egypt, than they are now able to believe the Roman Catholic
   explanation of Gen. iii. 15, Ipsa conteret caput tuum.' They will no
   more think that the first chapters of Genesis relate the same tale
   which Geology and Ethnology unfold than they now think the meaning of
   Joshua x. 12, 13, to be in accordance with Galileo's discovery.

   From the circumstance that in former ages there has been a fourfold or
   a sevenfold Interpretation of Scripture, we cannot argue to the
   possibility of up holding any other than the original one in our own.
   The mystical explanations of Origen or Philo were not seen to be
   mystical; the reasonings of Aquinas and Calvin were not supposed to go
   beyond the letter of the text. They have now become the subject of
   apology; it is justly said that we should not judge the greatness of
   the Fathers or Reformers by their suitableness to our own day. But this
   defence of them shows that their explanations of Scripture are no
   longer tenable; they belong to a way of thinking and speaking which was
   once diffused over the world, but has now passed away. And what we give
   up as a general principle we shall find it impossible to maintain
   partially, e. g., in the types of the Mosaic Law and the double
   meanings of prophecy--at least, in any sense in which it is not equally
   applicable to all deep and suggestive writings.

   The same observation may be applied to the historical criticism of
   Scripture. From the fact that Paley or Butler were regarded in their
   generation as supplying a triumphant answer to the enemies of
   Scripture, we cannot argue that their answer will be satisfactory to
   those who inquire into such subjects in our own. Criticism has far more
   power than it formerly had; it has spread itself over ancient, and even
   modern, history; it extends to the thoughts and ideas of men as well as
   to words and facts; it has also a great place in education. Whether the
   habit of mind which has been formed in classical studies will not go on
   to Scripture; whether Scripture can be made an exception to other
   ancient writings, now that the nature of both is more understood;
   whether in the fuller light of history and science the views of the
   last century will hold out--these are questions respecting which the
   course of religious opinion in the past does not afford the means of
   truly judging.

   Secondly, it has to be considered whether the intellectual forms under
   which Christianity has been described may not also be in a state of
   transition and resolution, in this respect contrasting with the
   never-changing truth of the Christian life (1 Cor. xiii. 8). Looking
   backwards at past ages, we experience a kind of amazement at the
   minuteness of theological distinctions, and also at their permanence.
   They seem to have borne a part in the education of the Christian world,
   in an age when language itself had also a greater influence than
   nowadays. It is admitted that these distinctions are not observed in
   the New Testament, and are for the most part of a later growth. But
   little is gained by setting up theology against Scripture, or Scripture
   against theology; the Bible against the Church, or the Church against
   the Bible. At different periods either has been a bulwark against some
   form of error: either has tended to correct the abuse of the other. A
   true inspiration guarded the writers of the New Testament from Gnostic
   or Manichean tenets; at a later stage, a sound instinct pre vented the
   Church from dividing the humanity and Divinity of Christ. It may be
   said that the spirit of Christ forbids us to determine beyond what is
   written; and the decision of the council of Nicaea has been described
   by an eminent English prelate [8] as the greatest misfortune that ever
   befel the Christian world'. That is, perhaps, true; yet a different
   decision would have been a greater misfortune. Nor does there seem any
   reason to suppose that the human mind could have been arrested in its
   theological course. It is a mistake to imagine that the dividing and
   splitting of words is owing to the depravity of the human heart; was it
   not rather an intellectual movement (the only phenomenon of progress
   then going on among men) which led, by a sort of necessity, some to go
   forward to the completion of the system, while it left others to stand
   aside? A veil was on the human understanding in the great controversies
   which absorbed the Church in earlier ages; the cloud which the
   combatants themselves raised intercepted the view. They did not
   see--they could not have imagined--that there was a world which lay
   beyond the range of the controversy.

   And now, as the Interpretation of Scripture is receiving another
   character, it seems that distinctions of theology, which were in great
   measure based on old interpretations, are beginning to fade away. A
   change is observable in the manner in which doctrines are stated and
   defended; it is no longer held sufficient to rest them on texts of
   Scripture, one, two, or more, which contain, or appear to contain,
   similar words or ideas. They are connected more closely with our moral
   nature; extreme consequences are shunned; large allowances are made for
   the ignorance of mankind. It is held that there is truth on both sides;
   about many questions there is a kind of union of opposites; others are
   admitted to have been verbal only; all are regarded in the light which
   is thrown upon them by church history and religious experience. A
   theory has lately been put forward, apparently as a defence of the
   Christian faith, which denies the objective character of any of them.
   And there are other signs that times are changing, and we are changing
   too. It would be scarcely possible at present to revive the interest
   which was felt less than twenty years ago [9] in the doctrine of
   Baptismal Regeneration; nor would the arguments by which it was
   supported or impugned have the meaning which they once had. The
   communion of the Lord's Supper is also ceasing, at least in the Church
   of England, to be a focus or centre of disunion--

   Our greatest love turned to our greatest hate.'

   A silence is observable on some other points of doctrine around which
   controversies swarmed a generation ago. Persons begin to ask what was
   the real difference which divided the two parties. They are no longer
   within the magic circle, but are taking up a position external to it.
   They have arrived at an age of reflection, and begin to speculate on
   the action and reaction, the irritation and counter-irritation, of
   religious forces; it is a common observation that revivals are not
   permanent'; the movement is criticized even by those who are subject to
   its influence. In the present state of the human mind, any
   consideration of these subjects, whether from the highest or lowest or
   most moderate point of view, is unfavourable to the stability of
   dogmatical systems, because it rouses inquiry into the meaning of
   words. To the sense of this is probably to be attributed the reserve on
   matters of doctrine and controversy which characterizes the present
   day, compared with the theological activity of twenty years ago. [10]

   These reflections bring us back to the question with which we
   began--What effect will the critical interpretation of Scripture have
   on theology and on life?' Their tendency is to show that the result is
   beyond our control, and that the world is not unprepared for it. More
   things than at first sight appear are moving towards the same end.
   Religion often bids us think of ourselves, especially in later life,
   as, each one in his appointed place, carrying on a work which is
   fashioned within by unseen hands. The theologian, too, may have peace
   in the thought, that he is subject to the conditions of his age rather
   than one of its moving powers. When he hears theological inquiry
   censured as tending to create doubt and confusion, he knows very well
   that the cause of this is not to be sought in the writings of so-called
   rationalists or critics who are disliked partly because they unveil the
   age to itself; but in the opposition of reason and feeling, of the past
   and the present, in the conflict between the Calvinistic tendencies of
   an elder generation, and the influences which even in the same family
   naturally affect the young.

   This distraction of the human mind between ad verse influences and
   associations, is a fact which we should have to accept and make the
   best of, whatever consequences might seem to follow to individuals or
   Churches. It is not to be regarded as a merely heathen notion that
   truth is to be desired for its own sake even though no "good" result
   from it', As a Christian paradox it may be said, What hast thou to do
   with "good"? follow thou Me.' But the Christian revelation does not
   require of us this Stoicism in most cases; it rather shows how good and
   truth are generally coincident. Even in this life, there are numberless
   links which unite moral good with intellectual truth. It is hardly too
   much to say that the one is but a narrower form of the other. Truth is
   to the world what holiness of life is to the individual--to man
   collectively the source of justice and peace and good.

   There are many ways in which the connexion between truth and good may
   be traced in the interpretation of Scripture. Is it a mere chimera that
   the different sections of Christendom may meet on the common ground of
   the New Testament? Or that the individual may be urged by the vacancy
   and unprofitableness of old traditions to make the Gospel his own--a
   life of Christ in the soul, instead of a theory of Christ which is in a
   book or written down? Or that in missions to the heathen Scripture may
   become the expression of universal truths rather than of the tenets of
   particular men or churches? That would remove many obstacles to the
   reception of Christianity. Or that the study of Scripture may have a
   more important place in a liberal education than hitherto? Or that the
   rational service' of interpreting Scripture may dry up the crude and
   dreamy vapours of religious excitement? Or, that in preaching, new
   sources of spiritual health may flow from a more natural use of
   Scripture? Or that the lessons of Scripture may have a nearer way to
   the hearts of the poor when disengaged from theological formulas? Let
   us consider more at length some of these topics.

   I. No one casting his eye over the map of the Christian world can
   desire that the present lines of demarcation should always remain, any
   more than he will be inclined to regard the division of Christians to
   which he belongs himself, as in a pre-eminent or exclusive sense the
   Church of Christ. Those lines of demarcation seem to be political
   rather than religious; they are differences of nations, or governments,
   or ranks of society, more than of creeds or forms of faith. The feeling
   which gave rise to them has, in a great measure, passed away; no
   intelligent man seriously inclines to believe that salvation is to be
   found only in his own denomination. Examples of this sturdy orthodoxy',
   in our own generation, rather provoke a smile than arouse serious
   disapproval. Yet many experiments show that these differences cannot be
   made up by any formal concordat or scheme of union; the parties cannot
   be brought to terms, and if they could, would cease to take an interest
   in the question at issue. The friction is too great when persons are
   invited to meet for a discussion of differences; such a process is like
   opening the doors and windows to put out a slumbering flame. But that
   is no reason for doubting that the divisions of the Christian world are
   beginning to pass away. The progress of politics, acquaintance with
   other countries, the growth of knowledge and of material greatness,
   changes of opinion in the Church of England, the present position of
   the Roman Communion--all these phenomena show that the ecclesiastical
   state of the world is not destined to be perpetual. Within the envious
   barriers which divide human nature into very little pieces' (Plato,
   Rep. iii. 395), a common sentiment is springing up of religious truth;
   the essentials of Christianity are contrasted with the details and
   definitions of it; good men of all religions find that they are more
   nearly agreed than heretofore. Neither is it impossible that this
   common feeling may so prevail over the accidental circumstances of
   Christian communities, that their political or ecclesiastical
   separation may be little felt. The walls which no adversary has scaled
   may fall down of themselves. We may perhaps figure to ourselves the
   battle against error and moral evil taking the place of one of sects
   and parties.

   In this movement, which we should see more clearly but for the
   divisions of the Christian world which partly conceal it, the critical
   interpretation of Scripture will have a great influence. The Bible will
   be no longer appealed to as the witness of the opinions of particular
   sects, or of our own age; it will cease to be the battle-field of
   controversies. But as its true meaning is more clearly seen, its moral
   power will also be greater. If the outward and inward witness, instead
   of parting into two, as they once did, seem rather to blend and
   coincide in the Christian consciousness, that is not a source of
   weakness, but of strength. The Book itself, which links together the
   beginning and end of the human race, will not have a less inestimable
   value because the spirit has taken the place of the letter. Its
   discrepancies of fact, when we become familiar with them, will seem of
   little consequence in comparison with the truths which it unfolds. That
   these truths, instead of floating down the stream of tradition, or
   being lost in ritual observances, have been preserved for ever in a
   book, is one of the many blessings which the Jewish and Christian
   revelations have conferred on the world--a blessing not the less real,
   because it is not necessary to attribute it to miraculous causes.

   Again, the Scriptures are a bond of union to the whole Christian world.
   No one denies their authority, and could all be brought to an
   intelligence of their true meaning, all might come to agree in matters
   of religion. That may seem to be a hope deferred, yet not altogether
   chimerical. If it is not held to be a thing impossible that there
   should be agreement in the meaning of Plato or Sophocles, neither is it
   to be regarded as absurd that there should be a like agreement in the
   interpretation of Scripture. The disappearance of artificial notions
   and systems will pave the way to such an agreement. The recognition of
   the fact, that many aspects and stages of religion are found in
   Scripture; that different, or even opposite parties existed in the
   Apostolic Church; that the first teachers of Christianity had a
   separate and individual mode of regarding the Gospel of Christ; that
   any existing communion is necessarily much more unlike the brotherhood
   of love in the New Testament than we are willing to
   suppose--Protestants in some respects, as much so as Catholics--that
   rival sects in our own day--Calvinists and Arminians--those who
   maintain and those who deny the final restoration of man--may equally
   find texts which seem to favour their respective tenets (Mark ix.
   44-48; Romans xi. 32)--the recognition of these and similar facts will
   make us unwilling to impose any narrow rule of religious opinion on the
   ever-varying conditions of the human mind and Christian society.

   II. Christian missions suggest another sphere in which a more
   enlightened use of Scripture might offer a great advantage to the
   teacher. The more he is himself penetrated with the universal spirit of
   Scripture, the more he will be able to resist the literal and servile
   habits of mind of Oriental nations. You cannot transfer English ways of
   belief, and almost the history of the Church of England itself, as the
   attempt is sometimes made--not to an uncivilized people, ready like
   children to receive new impressions, but to an ancient and decaying
   one, furrowed with the lines of thought, incapable of the principle of
   growth. But you may take the purer light or element of religion, of
   which Christianity is the expression, and make it shine on some
   principle in human nature which is the fallen image of it. You cannot
   give a people who have no history of their own, a sense of the
   importance of Christianity, as an historical fact: but, perhaps, that
   very peculiarity of their character may make them more impressible by
   the truths or ideas of Christianity. Neither is it easy to make them
   understand the growth of Revelation in successive ages--that there are
   precepts of the Old Testament which are reversed in the New--or that
   Moses allowed many things for the hardness of men's hearts. They are in
   one state of the world, and the missionary who teaches them is in
   another, and the Book through which they are taught does not altogether
   coincide with either. Many difficulties thus arise which we are most
   likely to be successful in meeting when we look them in the face. To
   one inference they clearly point, which is this: that it is not the
   Book of Scripture which we should seek to give them, to be reverenced
   like the Vedas or the Koran, and consecrated in its words and letters,
   but the truth of the Book, the mind of Christ and His Apostles, in
   which all lesser details and differences should be lost and absorbed.
   We want to awaken in them the sense that God is their Father, and they
   His children;--that is of more importance than any theory about the
   inspiration of Scripture. But to teach in this spirit, the missionary
   should himself be able to separate the accidents from the essence of
   religion; he should be conscious that the power of the Gospel resides
   not in the particulars of theology, but in the Christian life.

   III. It may be doubted whether Scripture has ever been sufficiently
   regarded as an element of liberal education. Few deem it worth while to
   spend in the study of it the same honest thought or pains which are
   bestowed on a classical author. Nor, as at present studied, can it be
   said always to have an elevating effect. It is not a useful lesson for
   the young student to apply to Scripture principles which he would
   hesitate to apply to other books; to make formal reconcilements of
   discrepancies which he would not think of reconciling in ordinary
   history; to divide simple words into double meanings; to adopt the
   fancies or conjectures of Fathers and Commentators as real knowledge.
   This laxity of knowledge is apt to infect the judgement when
   transferred to other subjects. It is not easy to say how much of the
   unsettlement of mind which prevails among intellectual young men is
   attributable to these causes; the mixture of truth and falsehood in
   religious education certainly tends to impair, at the age when it is
   most needed, the early influence of a religious home.

   Yet Scripture studied in a more liberal spirit might supply a part of
   education which classical literature fails to provide. The best book
   for the heart might also be made the best book for the intellect.' The
   noblest study of history and antiquity is contained in it; a poetry
   which is also the highest form of moral teaching; there, too, are lives
   of heroes and prophets, and especially of One whom we do not name with
   them, because He is above them. This history, or poetry, or biography,
   is distinguished from all classical or secular writings by the
   contemplation of man as he appears in the sight of God. That is a sense
   of things into which we must grow as well as reason ourselves, without
   which human nature is but a truncated, half-educated sort of being. But
   this sense or consciousness of a Divine presence in the world, which
   seems to be natural to the beginnings of the human race, but fades away
   and requires to be renewed in its after history, is not to be gathered
   from Greek or Roman literature, but from the Old and New Testament. And
   before we can make the Old and New Testament a real part of education,
   we must read them not by the help of custom or tradition, in the spirit
   of apology or controversy, but in accordance with the ordinary laws of
   human knowledge.

   IV. Another use of Scripture is that in sermons, which seems to be
   among the tritest, and yet is far from being exhausted. If we could
   only be natural and speak of things as they truly are, with a real
   interest and not merely a conventional one! The words of Scripture come
   readily to hand, and the repetition of them requires no effort of
   thought in the writer or speaker. But, neither does it produce any
   effect on the hearer, which will always be in proportion to the degree
   of feeling or consciousness in ourselves. It may be said that
   originality is the gift of few; no Church can expect to have, not a
   hundred, but ten such preachers as Robertson or Newman. But, without
   originality, it seems possible to make use of Scripture in sermons in a
   much more living way than at present. Let the preacher make it a sort
   of religion, and proof of his reverence for Scripture, that he never
   uses its words without a distinct meaning; let him avoid the form of
   argument from Scripture, and catch the feeling and spirit. Scripture is
   itself a kind of poetry, when not overlaid with rhetoric. The scene and
   country has a freshness which may always be renewed; there is the
   interest of antiquity and the interest of home or common life as well.
   The facts and characters of Scripture might receive a new reading by
   being described simply as they are. The truths of Scripture again would
   have greater reality if divested of the scholastic form in which
   theology has cast them. The universal and spiritual aspects of
   Scripture might be more brought forward to the exclusion of questions
   of the Jewish law, or controversies about the sacraments, or
   exaggerated statements of doctrines which seem to be at variance with
   morality. The life of Christ, regarded quite naturally as of one who
   was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin', is also the
   life and centre of Christian teaching. There is no higher aim which the
   preacher can propose to him self than to awaken what may be termed the
   feeling of the presence of God and the mind of Christ in Scripture; not
   to collect evidences about dates and books, or to familiarize
   metaphysical distinctions; but to make the heart and conscience of his
   hearers bear him witness that the lessons which are contained in
   Scripture--lessons of justice and truth--lessons of mercy and peace--of
   the need of man and the goodness of God to him, are indeed not human
   but divine.

   V. It is time to make an end of this long disquisition--let the end be
   a few more words of application to the circumstances of a particular
   class in the present age. If any one who is about to become a clergyman
   feels, or thinks that he feels, that some of the preceding statements
   cast a shade of trouble or suspicion on his future walk of life; who,
   either from the influence of a stronger mind than his own, or from some
   natural tendency in himself, has been led to examine those great
   questions which lie on the thresh old of the higher study of theology,
   and experiences a sort of shrinking or dizziness at the prospect which
   is opening upon him; let him lay to heart the following
   considerations:--First, that he may possibly not be the person who is
   called upon to pursue such inquiries. No man should busy himself with
   them who has not clearness of mind enough to see things as they are,
   and a faith strong enough to rest in that degree of knowledge which God
   has really given; or who is unable to separate the truth from his own
   religious wants and experiences. For the theologian as well as the
   philosopher has need of dry light', unmingled with any tincture of the
   affections'--the more so as his conclusions are oftener liable to be
   disordered by them. He who is of another temperament may find another
   work to do, which is in some respects a higher one. Unlike philosophy,
   the Gospel has an ideal life to offer, not to a few only, but to all.
   There is one word of caution, however, to be given to those who
   renounce inquiry; it is, that they cannot retain the right to condemn
   inquirers. Their duty is to say with Nicodemus, Doth the Gospel condemn
   any man before it hear him?' although the answer may be only Art thou
   also of Galilee?' They have chosen the path of practical usefulness,
   and they should acknowledge that it is a narrow path. For any but a
   strong swimmer' will be insensibly drawn out of it by the tide of
   public opinion or the current of party.

   Secondly, let him consider that the difficulty is not so great as
   imagination sometimes paints it. It is a difficulty which arises
   chiefly out of differences of education in different classes of
   society. It is a difficulty which tact, and prudence, and, much more,
   the power of a Christian life may hope to surmount. Much depends on the
   manner in which things are said; on the evidence in the writer or
   preacher of a real good will to his opponents, and a desire for the
   moral improvement of men. There is an aspect of truth which may always
   be put forward so as to find a way to the hearts of men. If there is
   danger and shrinking from one point of view, from another there is
   freedom and sense of relief. The wider contemplation of the religious
   world may enable us to adjust our own place in it. The acknowledgement
   of churches as political and national institutions is the basis of a
   sound government of them. Criticism itself is not only negative; if it
   creates some difficulties, it does away others. It may put us at
   variance with a party or section of Christians in our own
   neighbourhood. But, on the other hand, it enables us to look at all men
   as they are in the sight of God, not as they appear to human eye,
   separated and often interdicted from each other by lines of religious
   demarcation; it divides us from the parts to unite us to the whole.
   That is a great help to religious communion. It does away with the
   supposed opposition of reason and faith. It throws us back on the
   conviction that religion is a personal thing, in which certainty is to
   be slowly won and not assumed as the result of evidence or testimony.
   It places us, in some respects (though it be deemed a paradox to say
   so), more nearly in the position of the first Christians to whom the
   New Testament was not given, in whom the Gospel was a living word, not
   yet embodied in forms or supported by ancient institutions.

   Thirdly, the suspicion or difficulty which attends critical inquiries
   is no reason for doubting their value. The Scripture nowhere leads us
   to suppose that the circumstance of all men speaking well of us is any
   ground for supposing that we are acceptable in the sight of God. And
   there is no reason why the condemnation of others should be witnessed
   to by our own conscience. Perhaps it may be true that, owing to the
   jealousy or fear of some, the reticence of others, the terrorism of a
   few, we may not always find it easy to regard these subjects with
   calmness and judgement. But, on the other hand, these accidental
   circumstances have nothing to do with the question at issue; they
   cannot have the slightest influence on the meaning of words, or on the
   truth of facts. No one can carry out the principle that public opinion
   or church authority is the guide to truth, when he goes beyond the
   limits of his own church or country. That is a consideration which may
   well make him pause before he accepts of such a guide in the journey to
   another world. All the arguments for repressing inquiries into
   Scripture in Protestant countries hold equally in Italy and Spain for
   repressing inquiries into matters of fact or doctrine, and so for
   denying the Scriptures to the common people.

   Lastly, let him be assured that there is some nobler idea of truth than
   is supplied by the opinion of man kind in general, or the voice of
   parties in a church. Every one, whether a student of theology or not,
   has need to make war against his prejudices no less than against his
   passions; and, in the religious teacher, the first is even more
   necessary than the last. For, while the vices of mankind are in a great
   degree isolated, and are, at any rate, reprobated by public opinion,
   their prejudices have a sort of communion or kindred with the world
   without. They are a collective evil, and have their being in the
   interest, classes, states of society, and other influences amid which
   we live. He who takes the prevailing opinions of Christians and decks
   them out in their gayest colours--who reflects the better mind of the
   world to itself--is likely to be its favourite teacher. In that
   ministry of the Gospel, even when assuming forms repulsive to persons
   of education, no doubt the good is far greater than the error or harm.
   But there is also a deeper work which is not dependent on the opinions
   of men, in which many elements combine, some alien to religion, or
   accidentally at variance with it. That work can hardly expect to win
   much popular favour, so far as it runs counter to the feelings of
   religious parties. But he who bears a part in it may feel a confidence,
   which no popular caresses or religious sympathy could inspire, that he
   has by a Divine help been enabled to plant his foot somewhere beyond
   the waves of time. He may depart hence be fore the natural term, worn
   out with intellectual toil; regarded with suspicion by many of his
   contemporaries; yet not without a sure hope that the love of truth,
   which men of saintly lives often seem to slight, is, nevertheless,
   accepted before God.
     __________________________________________________________________

   [7] [G.] Hermann.

   [8] [Kaye, Bishop of Lincoln, d. 1853.]

   [9] [Written in 1860.]

   [10] [Written in 1860.]
     __________________________________________________________________

ESSAY ON THE ABSTRACT IDEAS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

   RELIGION and philosophy have often been contrasted as moving in
   different planes, in which they can never come into contact with each
   other. Yet there are many meeting-points at which either passes into
   the circle of the other. One of these meeting-points is language, which
   loses nothing of its original imperfection by being employed in the
   service of religion. Its plastic nature is an element of uncertainty in
   the interpretation of Scripture; its logical structure is a necessary
   limit on human faculties in the conception of truths above them;
   whatever growth it is capable of, must affect also the growth of our
   religious ideas; the analysis we are able to make of it, we must be
   able also to extend to the theological use of it. Religion cannot place
   itself above the instrument through which alone it speaks to man; our
   true wisdom is, therefore, to be aware of their interdependence.

   One of the points in which theology and philosophy are brought into
   connexion by language, is their common usage of abstract words, and of
   what in the phraseology of some philosophers are termed mixed modes',
   or ideas not yet freed from associations of time or sense. Logicians
   speak of the abstract and concrete, and of the formation of our
   abstract ideas: Are the abstractions of Scripture the same in kind with
   those of philosophy? May we venture to analyse their growth, to ask
   after their origin, to compare their meaning in one age of the world
   and in another? The same words in different languages have not
   precisely the same meaning. May not this be the case also with abstract
   terms which have passed from the Old Testament into the New, which have
   come down to us from the times of the Apostles, hardened by
   controversy, worn by the use of two thousand years? These questions do
   not admit of a short and easy answer. Even to make them intelligible,
   we have to begin some way off, to enter on our inquiry as a speculation
   rather of logic than of theology, and hereafter to return to its
   bearing on the interpretation of Scripture.

   It is remarked by a great metaphysician, that abstract ideas are, in
   one point of view, the highest and most philosophical of all our ideas,
   while in another they are the shallowest and most meagre. They have the
   advantage of clearness and definiteness; they enable us to conceive
   and, in a manner, to span the infinity of things; they arrange, as it
   were, in the frames of a window the many-coloured world of phenomena.
   And yet they are mere' abstractions removed from sense, removed from
   experience, and detached from the mind in which they arose. Their
   perfection consists, as their very name implies, in their idealism:
   that is, in their negative nature.

   For example: the idea of happiness' has come down from the Greek
   philosophy. To us it is more entirely freed from etymological
   associations than it was to Aristotle, and further removed from any
   particular state of life, or, in other words, it is more of an
   abstraction. It is what everybody knows, but what nobody can tell. It
   is not pleasure, nor wealth, nor power, nor virtue, nor contemplation.
   Could we define it, we seem at first as if we should have found out the
   secret of the world. But our next thought is that we should only be
   defining a word, that it consists rather in a thousand undefinable
   things which, partly because mankind are not agreed about them, partly
   because they are too numerous to conceive under any single idea, are
   dropt by the instinct of language. It means what each person's fancy or
   experience may lead him to connect with it; it is a vague conception to
   his own mind, which nevertheless may be used without vagueness as a
   middle term in conversing with others.

   It is the uniformity in the use of such words that constitutes their
   true value. Like all other words, they represent in their origin things
   of sense, facts of experience. But they are no longer pictured by the
   sense, or tinged by the affections; they are beyond the circle of
   associations in which they arose. When we use the word happiness, no
   thought of chance now intrudes itself; when we use the word
   righteousness, no thought of law or courts; when the word virtue is
   used, the image no longer presents itself of manly strength or beauty.

   The growth of abstract ideas is an after-growth of language itself,
   which may be compared to the growth of the mind when the body is
   already at its full stature. All language has been originally the
   reflection of a world of sense; the words which describe the faculties
   have once referred to the parts of the body; the name of God himself
   has been derived in most languages from the sun or the powers of
   nature. It is indeed impossible for us to say how far, under these
   earthly and sensual images, there lurked among the primitive peoples of
   mankind a latent consciousness of the spiritual and invisible; whether
   the thought or only the word was of the earth earthy. >From this
   garment of the truth it is impossible for us to separate the truth
   itself. In this form awhile it appears to grow; even the writers of the
   Old Testament, in its earlier portion, finding in the winds or the
   light of heaven the natural expression of the power or holiness of
   Jehovah. But in process of time another world of thought and expression
   seems to create itself. The words for courage, strength, beauty, and
   the like, begin to denote mental and moral qualities; things which were
   only spoken of as actions, become abstract ideas, the name of God loses
   all sensual and outward associations; until at the end of the first
   period of Greek philosophy, the world of abstractions, and the words by
   which they are expressed, have almost as much definiteness and
   preciseness of meaning as among ourselves.

   This process of forming abstractions is ever going on--the mixed modes
   of one language are the pure ideas of another; indeed, the adoption of
   words from dead languages into English has, above all other causes,
   tended to increase the number of our simple ideas, because the
   associations of such words, being lost in the transfer, they are at
   once refined from all alloy of sense and experience. Different
   languages, or the same at different periods of their history, are at
   different stages of the process. We can imagine a language, such as
   language was, as far as the vestiges of it allow us to go back, in its
   first beginnings, in which every operation of the mind, every idea,
   every relation, was expressed by a sensible image; a language which we
   may describe as purely sensual and material, the words of which, like
   the first written characters, were mental pictures: we can imagine a
   language in a state which none has ever yet reached, in which the
   worlds of mind and matter are perfectly separated from each other, and
   no clog or taint of the one is allowed to enter into the other. But all
   languages which exist are in reality between these two extremes, and
   are passing from one to the other. The Greek of Homer is at a different
   stage from that of the Greek tragedians; the Greek of the early Ionic
   philosophers, at a different stage from that of Plato; so, though in a
   different way (for here there was no advancement), the Greek of Plato
   as compared with the Neo-Platonist philosophy. The same remark is
   applicable to the Old Testament, the earlier and later books of which
   may be, in a similar way, contrasted with each other; almost the whole
   of which (though here a new language also comes in) exhibits a marked
   difference from the Apocrypha. The structure of thought insensibly
   changes. This is the case with all languages which have a
   literature--they are ever becoming more and more abstract--modern
   languages, more than ancient; the later stages of either, more than the
   earlier. It by no means follows that as Greek, Latin, and English have
   words that correspond in a dictionary, they are real equivalents in
   meaning, because words, the same, perhaps, etymologically, may be used
   with different degrees of abstraction, which no accuracy or periphrasis
   of translation will suffice to express, belonging, as they do
   generally, to the great underlying differences of a whole language.

   Another illustration of degrees of abstraction may be found in the
   language of poetry, or of common life, and the language of philosophy.
   Poetry, we know, will scarcely endure abstract terms, while they form
   the stock and staple of morals and metaphysics. They are the language
   of books, rather than of conversation. Theology, on the other hand,
   though its problems may seem akin to those of the moralist and
   metaphysician, yet tends to reject them in the same way that English
   tends to reject French words, or poetry to reject prose. He who in
   paraphrasing Scripture spoke of essence, matter, vice, crime, would be
   thought guilty of a want of taste; the reason of which is, that these
   abstract terms are not within the circle of our Scripture associations.
   They carry us into another age or country or school of thought--to the
   ear of the uneducated they have an unusual sound, while to the educated
   they appear to involve an anachronism or to be out of place. Vice, they
   say, is the moral, sin the theological term; nature and law are the
   proper words in a treatise on physiology, while the actions of which
   they are the imaginary causes would in a prayer or sermon be suitably
   ascribed to the Divine Being.

   Our subject admits of another illustration from the language of the
   Fathers as compared with that of Scripture. Those who have observed the
   circumstance naturally ask why it is that Scriptural expressions when
   they reappear in the early patristic literature slightly change their
   signification? that a greater degree of personality is given to one
   word, more definiteness to another, while a third has been singled out
   to be the centre of a scheme of doctrine? The reason is, that use, and
   reflection, and controversy do not allow language to remain where it
   was. Time itself is the great innovator in the sense of words. No one
   supposes that the meaning of conscience or imagination exactly
   corresponds to the Latin conscientia' or imaginatio', Even within the
   limits of our own language the terms of the scholastic philosophy have
   acquired and lost a technical signification. And several changes have
   taken place in the language of creeds and articles, which, by their
   very attempt to define and systematize, have slightly though
   imperceptibly departed from the use of words in Scripture.

   The principle of which all these instances are illustrations leads to
   important results in the interpretation of Scripture. It tends to show,
   that in using the same words with St. Paul we may not be using them in
   precisely the same sense. Nay, that the very exactness with which we
   apply them, the result of the definitions, oppositions, associations,
   of ages of controversy, is of itself a difference of meaning. The mere
   lapse of time tends to make the similarity deceitful. For if the
   language of Scripture (to use an expression which will have been made
   intelligible by the preceding remarks) be really at a different stage
   of abstraction, great differences in the use of language will occur,
   such as in each particular word escape and perplex us, and yet, on a
   survey of the whole, are palpable and evident.

   A well-known difficulty in the interpretation of the Epistles is the
   seemingly uncertain use of dikaiosu'ne, ale'theia, aga'pe, pi'stis,
   do'xa, &c., words apparently the most simple, and yet taking sometimes
   in the same passage different shades and colours of meaning. Sometimes
   they are attributes of God, in other passages qualities in man; here
   realities, there mere ideas, sometimes active, sometimes passive. Some
   of them, as amarti'a, pi'stis, have a sort of personality assigned to
   them, while others, as pneuma, with which we associate the idea of a
   person, seem to lose their personality. They are used with genitive
   cases after them, which we are compelled to explain in various senses.
   In the technical language of German philosophy, they are objective and
   subjective at once. For example: in the first chapter of the Romans,
   ver. 17, it is asked by commentators, Whether the righteousness of God,
   which is revealed in the Gospel,' is the original righteousness of God
   from the beginning, or the righteousness which He imparts to man, the
   righteousness of God in Himself or in man. So again, in chap. v, ver.
   5, it is doubted whether the words hoti he agape tou theou ekkechutai
   en tais kardiais, refer to the love of God in man, or the love of God
   to man. So pneuma theou wavers in meaning between a separate existence,
   or the spirit of God, as we should say the mind of man', and the
   manifestation of that spirit in the soul of the believer. Similar
   apparent ambiguities occur in such expressions as pi'stis Iesou
   Christou, upomoue` Christou, ale'theia theou, do'xa theou, sophi'a
   theou, and several others.

   A difficulty akin to this arises from the apparently numerous senses in
   which another class of words, such as no'mos, zoe', tha'natos, are used
   in the Epistles of St. Paul. That no'mos should sometimes signify the
   law of Moses, at other times the law of the conscience, and that it
   should be often uncertain whether zoe' referred to a life spiritual or
   natural, is inconceivable, if these words had had the same precise and
   defined sense that the corresponding English words have amongst
   ourselves. The class of expressions before mentioned seems to widen and
   extend in meaning as they are brought into contact with God and the
   human soul, or transferred from things earthly and temporal to things
   heavenly and spiritual. The subtle transformation which these latter
   words undergo, may be best described as a metaphorical or analogous use
   of them: not, to take a single instance, that the meaning of the word
   law' is so widened as to include all law', but that the law of Moses
   becomes the figure or type of the law written on the heart, or of the
   law of sin and death, and zoe', the natural life, the figure of the
   spiritual. Each word is a reflector of many thoughts, and we pass, from
   one reflection of it to another in successive verses.

   That such verbal difficulties occur much more often in Scripture than
   in any other book, will be generally admitted. In Plato and Aristotle,
   for example, they can be hardly said to exist at all. What they meant
   by eidos or ousi'a is hard to conceive, but their use of the words does
   not waver in successive sentences. The language of the Greek philosophy
   is, on the whole, precise and definite. A much nearer parallel to what
   may be termed the infinity of Scripture is to be found in the Jewish
   Alexandrian writings. There is the same transition from the personal to
   the impersonal, the same figurative use of language, the same tendency
   to realize and speak of all things in reference to God and the human
   soul. The mind existed prior to the ideas, which are therefore
   conceived of as its qualities or attributes, and naturally coalesced
   with it in the Alexandrian phraseology.

   The difficulty of which we have been speaking, when considered in its
   whole extent, is its own solution. It does but force upon us the fact,
   that the use of language and the mode of thought are different in the
   writings of the Apostle from what they are amongst ourselves. It is the
   difficulty of a person who should set himself to explain the structure
   of a language which he did not know, by one which he did, and at last,
   in despair, begin to learn the new idiom. Or the difficulty that a
   person would have in under standing poetry, who imagined it to be
   prose. It is the difficulty that Aristotle or Cicero found in under
   standing the philosophers that were before them. They were familiar
   with the meaning of the words used by them, but not with the mode of
   thought. Logic itself had increased the difficulty to them of
   understanding the times before logic.

   This is our own difficulty in the interpretation of Scripture. Our use
   of language is more definite, our abstractions more abstract, our
   structure more regular and logical. But the moment we perceive and
   allow for this difference in the use of language in Scripture and among
   ourselves, the difficulty vanishes. We conceive ideas in a process of
   formation, falling from inspired lips, growing in the minds of men. We
   throw ourselves into the world of mixed modes', and seek to recall the
   associations which the technical terms of theology no longer suggest.
   We observe what may be termed the difference of level in our own ideas
   and those of the first Christians, without disturbing the meaning of
   one word in relation to another.

   The difficulty while it is increased, is also explained by the
   personifying character of the age. Ideas in the New Testament are
   relative to the mind of God or man, in which they seem naturally to
   inhere so as scarcely, in the usage of language, to have an independent
   existence. There is ever the tendency to speak of good and virtue and
   righteousness as in separable from the Divine nature, while in evil of
   every sort a reflection of conscience seems to be included. The words
   dikaiosu'ne, ale'theia, aga'pe, are not merely equivalent to
   righteousness, truth, love, but connect imperceptibly with the Author
   and Father of lights'. There is no other righteousness or truth but
   that of God, just as there is no sin without the consciousness of sin
   in man. Consequently, the two thoughts coalesce in one, and what are to
   us ideas, which we can imagine existing even without God, are to the
   Israelite attributes of God Himself. Still, in our mixed modes' we must
   make a further step; for as these ideas cannot be separated from God,
   so neither can they be conceived of, except as revealed in the Gospel,
   and working in the heart of man. Man who is righteous has no
   righteousness of his own, his righteousness is the righteousness of God
   in him. Hence, when considering the righteousness of God, we must go on
   to conceive of it as the revelation of His righteousness, without which
   it would be unknown and unmeaning to us. The abstract must become
   concrete, and must involve at once the attribute of God and the quality
   in man. This concrete' notion of the word righteousness is different
   from the abstract one with which we are familiar. Righteousness is the
   righteousness of God; it is also the communion of that righteousness
   with man. It is used almost with the same double meaning as we
   attribute to the will of God, which we speak of actively, as intending,
   doing, and passively, as done, fulfilled by ourselves.

   A part of this embarrassment in the interpretation of Scripture arises
   out of the unconscious influence of English words and ideas on our
   minds, in translating from Hellenistic Greek. The difficulty is still
   more apparent, when the attempt is made to render the Scriptures into a
   language which has not been framed or moulded on Christianity. It is a
   curious question, the consideration of which is not without practical
   use, how far the nicer shades either of Scriptural expression or of
   later theology are capable of being made intelligible in the languages
   of India or China.

   Yet, on the other hand, it must be remembered, that neither this nor
   any of the other peculiarities here spoken of, is a mere form of
   speech, but enters deeply into the nature of the Gospel. For the Gospel
   has necessarily its mixed modes, not merely because it is preached to
   the poor, and therefore adopts the expressions of ordinary life; nor
   because its language is incrusted with the phraseology of the
   Alexandrian writers; but because its subject is mixed, and, as it were,
   intermediate between God and man. Natural theology speaks clearly, but
   it is of God only; moral philosophy speaks clearly, but it is of man
   only: but the Gospel is, as it were, the communion of God and man, and
   its ideas are in a state of transition or oscillation, having two
   aspects towards God and towards man, which it is hard to keep in view
   at once. Thus, to quote once more the example just given, the
   righteousness of God is an idea not difficult to us to comprehend,
   human justice and goodness are also intelligible; but to conceive
   justice or righteousness as passing from heaven to earth, from God to
   man, actu et potentiâ at once, as a sort of life, or stream, or motion,
   is perplexing. And yet this notion of the communion of the
   righteousness of God being what constitutes righteousness, is of the
   very essence of the Gospel. It was what the Apostle and the first
   believers meant and felt, and what, if we could get the simple
   unlettered Christian, receiving the Gospel as a little child, to
   describe to us his feelings, he would describe.

   Scripture language may thus be truly said to belong to an intermediate
   world, different at once both from the visible and invisible world, yet
   partaking of the nature of both. It does not represent the things that
   the eye sees merely, nor the things that are within the veil of which
   those are the images, but rather the world that is in our hearts; the
   things that we feel, but nobody can express in words. His body is the
   communion of His body; His spirit is the communion of His spirit; the
   love of God is loving as we are loved'; the knowledge of God is knowing
   as we are known'; the righteousness of faith is Divine as well as
   human. Hence language seems to burst its bounds in the attempt to
   express the different aspects of these truths, and from its very
   inadequacy wavers and becomes uncertain in its meaning. The more
   intensely we feel and believe, and the less we are able to define our
   feelings, the more shall we appear to use words at random; employing
   some times one mode of expression, sometimes another; passing from one
   thought to another, by slender threads of association; going off upon a
   word,' as it has been called; because in our own minds all is
   connected, and, as it were, fulfilled with itself, and from the
   abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. To understand the language of
   St. Paul it is necessary, not only to compare the uses of words with
   one another, or to be versed in Alexandrian modes of thought, but to
   lead the life of St. Paul, to have the mind of St. Paul, to be one with
   Christ, to be dead to sin. Otherwise the world within becomes unmeaning
   to us. The inversion of all human things of which he speaks, is
   attributed to the manner of his time, or the peculiarity of his
   individual character; and at the very moment when we seem to have
   attained most accurately the Apostle's meaning, it vanishes away like a
   shadow.

   No human eye can pierce the cloud which overhangs another life; no
   faculty of man can by understanding find out' or express in words the
   Divine nature. Yet it does not follow that our ideas of spiritual
   things are wholly indefinite. There are many symbols and images of them
   in the world without and below. There is a communion of thoughts,
   feelings, and affections, even on earth, quite sufficient to be an
   image of the communion with God and Christ, of which the Epistles speak
   to us. There are emotions, and transitions, and passings out of
   ourselves, and states of undefined consciousness, which language is
   equally unable to express as it is to describe justification, or the
   work of grace, or the relation of the believer to his Lord. All these
   are rather intimated than described or defined by words. The sigh of
   sorrow, the cry of joy or despair, are but inarticulate sounds, yet
   expressive, beyond the power of writing, or speech. There are many such
   still small voices' of warning or of consolation in Scripture, beyond
   the power of philosophy to analyse, yet full of meaning to him who
   catches them aright. The life and force of such expressions do not
   depend on the clearness with which they state a logical proposition, or
   the vividness with which they picture to the imagination a spiritual
   world. They gain for themselves a truth in the individual soul. Even
   logic itself affords negative helps to the feebleness of man in the
   conception of things above him. It limits us by our own faculties; it
   guards us against identifying the images of things unseen with the very
   things themselves'; it bars remote inferences about terms which are
   really metaphorical. Lastly, it helps us to define by op position.
   Though we do not know what spirit is, we know what body is, and we
   conceive of spirit as what body is not. There is a spiritual body, and
   there is a natural body.' We imagine it at once both like and unlike.
   We do not know what heaven, or the glory of God, or His wisdom, is; but
   we imagine them unlike this world, or the wisdom of this world, or the
   glory of the princes of this world, and yet, in a certain way, like
   them, imaged and symbolized by what we see around us. We do not know
   what eternity is, except as the negative of time; but believing in its
   real existence, in a way beyond our faculties to comprehend, we do not
   confine it within the limits of past, present, or future. We are unable
   to reconcile the power of God and the freedom of man, or the contrast
   of this world and another, or even the opposite feelings of our own
   minds about the truths of religion. But we can describe them as the
   Apostle has done, in a paradox (2 Cor. iv. 12; vi. 8-10).

   There is yet a further way in which the ideas of Scripture may be
   defined, that is, by use. It has been already observed that the
   progress of language is from the concrete to the abstract. Not the
   least striking instance of this is the language of theology. Embodied
   in creeds, it gradually becomes developed and precise. The words are no
   longer living creatures with hands and feet', as it were, feeling after
   the hearts of men; but they have one distinct, unchanging meaning. When
   we speak of justification or truth, no question arises whether by this
   is meant the attribute of God, or the quality in man. Time and usage
   have sufficiently circumscribed the diversities of their signification.
   This is not to be regarded as a misfortune to Scriptural truth, but as
   natural and necessary. Part of what is lost in power and life is
   regained in certainty and definiteness. The usage of language itself
   would forbid us, in a discourse or sermon, to give as many senses to
   the word law' as are attributed to it by St. Paul. Only in the
   interpretation of Scripture, if we would feel as St. Paul felt, or
   think as he thought, it is necessary to go back to that age before
   creeds, in which the water of life was still a running stream.

   The course of speculation which has been adopted in this essay, may
   seem to introduce into Scripture an element of uncertainty. It may seem
   to cloud truth with metaphysics, and rob the poor and uneducated of the
   simplicity of the Gospel. But perhaps this is not so. Whether it be the
   case that such speculations introduce an element of uncertainty or
   difficulty into Scripture or not, they introduce a new element of
   truth. For without the consideration of such questions as that of which
   a brief sketch has been here attempted, there is no basis for
   Scriptural interpretation. We are ever liable to draw the meaning of
   words this way or that, according to the theological system of which we
   are the advocates; to fall under the slavery of an illogical logic,
   which first narrows the mind by definitions, and then wearies it with
   far-fetched inferences. Metaphysics must enter into the interpretation
   of Scripture, not for the sake of intruding upon it a new set of words
   or ideas, but with the view of getting rid of meta physics and
   restoring to Scripture its natural sense.

   But the Gospel is still preached to the poor as before, in the same
   sacred yet familiar language. They could not understand questions of
   grammar before; they do not understand modes of thought now. It is the
   peculiar nature of our religious ideas that we are able to apply them,
   and to receive comfort from them, without being able to analyse or
   explain them. All the metaphysical and logical speculations in the
   world will not rob the poor, the sick, or the dying of the truths of
   the Gospel. Yet the subject which we have been considering is not
   without a practical result. It warns us to restore the Gospel to its
   simplicity, to turn from the letter to the spirit, to withdraw from the
   number of the essentials of Christianity points almost too subtle for
   the naked eye, which depend on modes of thought or Alexandrian usages,
   to require no more of preciseness or definition than is necessary to
   give form and substance to our teaching. Not only the feebleness of
   human faculties, but the imperfection of language itself, will often
   make silence our truest wisdom. The saying of Scaliger, taken not
   seriously but in irony, is full of meaning: Many a man has missed of
   his salvation from ignorance of grammar.'

   To the poor and uneducated, at times to all, no better advice can be
   given for the understanding of Scripture than to read the Bible humbly
   with prayer. The critical and metaphysical student requires an other
   sort of rule for which this can never be made a substitute. His duty is
   to throw himself back into the times, the modes of thought, the
   language of the Apostolic age. He must pass from the abstract to the
   concrete, from the ideal and intellectual to the spiritual, from later
   statements of faith or doctrine to the words of inspiration which fell
   from the lips of the first believers. He must seek to conceive the
   religion of Christ in its relation to the religions of other ages and
   distant countries, to the philosophy of our own or other times; and if
   in this effort his mind seems to fail or waver, he must win back in
   life and practice the hold on the truths of the Gospel which he is
   beginning to lose in the mazes of speculation.
     __________________________________________________________________

ESSAY ON THE OLD TESTAMENT

  ROMANS IV.

   Henika d' a`n epistrepse pros kurion, periaireitai to kalumma.
   2 Cor. iii. 16.

   THUS we have reached another stage in the development of the great
   theme. The new commandment has become old; faith is taught in the Book
   of the Law. Abraham had faith in God, and it was counted to him for
   righteousness.' David spoke of the forgiveness of sins in the very
   spirit of the Gospel. The Old Testament is not dead, but alive again.
   It refers not to the past, but to the present. The truths which we
   daily feel, are written in its pages. There are the consciousness of
   sin and the sense of acceptance. There is the veiled remembrance of a
   former world, which is also the veiled image of a future one.

   To us the Old and New Testaments are two books, or two parts of the
   same book, which fit into one another, and can never be separated or
   torn asunder. They are double one against the other, and the New
   Testament is the revelation of the Old. To the first believers it was
   otherwise: as yet there was no New Testament; nor is there any trace
   that the authors of the New Testament ever expected their own writings
   to be placed on a level with the Old. We can scarcely imagine what
   would have been the feeling of St. Paul, could he have foreseen that
   later ages would look not to the faith of Abraham in the law, but to
   the Epistle to the Romans, as the highest authority on the doctrine of
   justification by faith; or that they would have regarded the allegory
   of Hagar and Sarah, in the Epistle to the Galatians, as a difficulty to
   be resolved by the inspiration of the Apostle. Neither he who wrote,
   nor those to whom he wrote, could ever have thought that words which
   were meant for a particular Church were to give life also to all
   mankind; and that the Epistles in which they occurred were one day to
   be placed on a level with the Books of Moses themselves.

   But if the writings of the New Testament were regarded by the
   contemporaries of the Apostle in a manner different from that of later
   ages, there was a difference, which it is far more difficult for us to
   appreciate, in their manner of reading the Old Testament. To them it
   was not half, but the whole, needing no thing to be added to it or to
   counteract it, but containing everything in itself. It seemed to come
   home to them; to be meant specially for their age; to be understood by
   them, as its words had never been understood before. Did not their
   hearts burn within them?' as the Apostles expounded to them the Psalms
   and Prophets. The manner of this exposition was that of the age in
   which they lived. They brought to the understanding of it, not a
   knowledge of the volume of the New Testament, but the mind of Christ.
   Sometimes they found the lesson which they sought in the plain language
   of Scripture; at other times, coming round to the same lesson by the
   paths of allegory, or seeming even in the sound of a word to catch an
   echo of the Redeemer's name. Various as are the writings of the Old
   Testament, composed by such numerous authors, at so many different
   times, so diverse in style and subject, in them all they read only--the
   truth of Christ. They read without distinctions of moral and
   ceremonial, type and antitype, history and prophecy, without inquiries
   into the original meaning or connexion of passages, without theories of
   the relation of the Old and New Testaments. Whatever contrast existed
   was of another kind, not of the parts of a book, but of the law and
   faith; of the earlier and later dispensations. The words of the book
   were all equally for their instruction; the whole volume lighted up
   with new meaning.

   What was then joined cannot now be divided or put asunder. The New
   Testament will never be unclothed of the Old. No one in later ages can
   place himself in the position of the heathen convert who learnt the
   name of Christ first, afterwards the Law and the Prophets. Such
   instances were probably rare even in the first days of the Christian
   Church. No one can easily imagine the manner in which St. Paul himself
   sets the Law over against the Gospel, and at the same time translates
   one into the language of the other. Time has closed up the rent which
   the law made in the heart of man; and the superficial resemblances on
   which the Apostle sometimes dwells, have not the same force to us which
   they had to his contemporaries. But a real unity remains to ourselves
   as well as to the Apostle, the unity not of the letter, but of the
   spirit, like the unity of life or of a human soul, which lasts on amid
   the changes of our being. The Old Testament and the New do not dovetail
   into one another like the parts of an indenture; it is a higher figure
   than this, which is needed to describe the continuity of the Divine
   work. Or rather, the simple fact is above all figures, and can receive
   no addition from philosophical notions of design, or the observation of
   minute coincidences. What we term the Old and New dispensation is the
   increasing revelation of God, amid the accidents of human history:
   first, in Himself; secondly, in His Son, gathering not one nation only,
   but all mankind into His family. It is the vision of God Himself, true
   and just, and remembering mercy in one age of the world; not ceasing to
   be true and just, but softening also into human gentleness, and love,
   and forgiveness, and making His dwelling in the human heart in another.
   The wind, and the earth quake, and the fire pass by first, and after
   that the still small voice'. This is the great fulfilment of the Law
   and the Prophets in the Gospel. No other religion has anything like it.
   And the use of language, and systems of theology, and the necessity of
   giving ideas through something', and the prayers and thoughts of
   eighteen hundred years, have formed another connexion between the Old
   and New Testament, more accidental and outward, and also more intricate
   and complex, which is incapable of being accurately drawn out, and
   ought not to be imposed as an article of faith; which yet seems to many
   to supply a want in human nature, and gives expression to feelings
   which would otherwise be unuttered.

   It is not natural, nor perhaps possible, to us to cease to use the
   figures in which holy men of old' spoke of that which belonged to their
   peace. But it is well that we should sometimes remind ourselves, that
   all these things are a shadow, but the body is of Christ'. Framed as
   our minds are, we are ever tending to confuse that which is accidental
   with that which is essential, to substitute the language of imagery for
   the severity of our moral ideas, to en tangle Divine truths in the
   state of society in which they came into the world or in the ways of
   thought of a particular age. All these things are a shadow'; that is to
   say, not only the temple and tabernacle, and the victim laid on the
   altar, and the atonement offered once a year for the sins of the
   nation; but the conceptions which later ages express by these words, so
   far as anything human or outward or figurative mingles with them, so
   far as they cloud the Divine nature with human passions, so far as they
   imply, or seem to imply, anything at variance with our notions of truth
   and right, are as much, or even more a shadow than that outward image
   which belonged to the elder dispensation. The same Lord who compared
   the scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven to a householder who
   brought forth out of his treasure things new and old, said also in a
   figure, that new cloth must not be put on an old garment' or new wine
   into old bottles'.
     __________________________________________________________________

ESSAY ON CONTRASTS OF PROPHECY

  ROMANS XI.

   EVERY reader of the Epistles must have remarked the opposite and
   apparently inconsistent uses, which the Apostle St. Paul makes of the
   Old Testament. This appearance of inconsistency arises out of the
   different and almost conflicting statements, which may be read in the
   Old Testament itself. The law and the prophets are their own witnesses,
   but they are witnesses also to a truth which is beyond them. Two
   spirits are found in them, and the Apostle sets aside the one, that he
   may establish the other. When he says that the man that doeth these
   things shall live in them', x. 5, and again two verses after wards, the
   word is very nigh unto thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart,' he is
   using the authority of the law, first, that out of its own mouth he may
   condemn the law; secondly, that he may confirm the Gospel by the
   authority of that which he condemns. Still more striking are the
   contrasts of prophecy in which he reads, not only the rejection of
   Israel, but its restoration; the over-ruling providence of God, as well
   as the free agency of man; not only as it is written, God gave unto
   them a spirit of heaviness,' but, who hath believed our report'; nor
   only, all day long I have stretched forth my hand to a disobedient and
   gainsaying people,' but there shall come out of Sion a deliverer and He
   shall turn away iniquities from Jacob'. Experience and faith seem to
   contend together in the Apostle's own mind, and alike to find an echo
   in the two voices of prophecy.

   It were much to be wished that we could agree upon a chronological
   arrangement of the Old Testament, which would approach more nearly to
   the true order in which the books were written, than that in which they
   have been handed down to us. Such an arrangement would throw great
   light on the interpretation of prophecy. At present, we scarcely resist
   the illusion exercised upon our minds by four prophets the greater,
   followed by twelve prophets the less'; some of the latter being of a
   prior date to any of the former. Even the distinction of the law and
   the prophets as well as of the Psalms and the prophets leads indirectly
   to a similar error. For many elements of the prophetical spirit enter
   into the law, and legal precepts are repeated by the prophets. The
   continuity of Jewish history is further broken by the Apocrypha. The
   four centuries before Christ were as fruitful of hopes and struggles
   and changes of thought and feeling in the Jewish people as any
   preceding period of their existence as a nation, perhaps more so. And
   yet we piece together the Old and New Testament as if the interval were
   blank leaves only. Few, if any, English writers have ever attempted to
   form a conception of the growth of the spirit of prophecy, from its
   first beginnings in the law itself, as it may be traced in the lives
   and characters of Samuel and David, and above all, of Elijah and his
   immediate successor; as it reappears a few years later, in the written
   prophecies respecting the house of Israel, and the surrounding nations
   (not even in the oldest of the prophets, without reference to Messiah's
   kingdom); or again after the carrying away of the ten tribes, as it
   concentrates itself in Judah, uttering a sadder and more mournful cry
   in the hour of captivity, yet in the multitude of sorrows increasing
   the comfort; the very dispersion of the people widening the prospect of
   Christ's kingdom, as the nation is cut short in righteousness', God
   being so much the nearer to those who draw near to Him.

   The fulfilment of prophecy has been sought for in a series of events
   which have been sometimes bent to make them fit, and one series of
   events has frequently taken the place of another. Even the passing
   circumstances of to-day or yesterday, at the distance of about two
   thousand years, and as many miles, which are but shadows flitting on
   the mountains compared with the deeper foundations of human history,
   are thought to be within the range of the prophet's eye. And it may be
   feared that, in attempting to establish a claim which, if it could be
   proved, might be made also for heathen oracles and prophecies,
   commentators have sometimes lost sight of those great characteristics
   which distinguish Hebrew prophecy from all other professing revelations
   of other religions: (1) the sense of the truthfulness, and holiness,
   and loving-kindness of the Divine Being, with which the prophet is as
   one possessed, which he can no more forget or doubt than he can cease
   to be himself; (2) their growth, that is, their growing perception of
   the moral nature of the revelation of God to man, apart from the
   commandments of the law or the privileges of the house of Israel.

   There are some prophecies more national, of which the fortunes of the
   Jewish people are the only subject; others more individual, seeming to
   enter more into the recesses of the human soul, and which are, at the
   same time, more universal, rising above earthly things, and passing
   into the distant heaven. At one time the prophet embodies these
   thoughts of many hearts' as present, at another as future; in some
   cases as following out of the irrevocable decree of God, in others as
   dependent on the sin or repentance of man. At one moment he is looking
   for the destruction of Israel, at another for its consolation; going
   from one of these aspects of the heavenly vision to another, like St.
   Paul himself in successive verses. And some times he sees the Lord's
   house exalted in the top of the mountains, and the image of the
   Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty Prince, the Everlasting God'. At
   other times, his vision is of the Servant whom it pleased the Lord to
   bruise', whose form was marred more than that of the sons of men', who
   was led as a lamb to the slaughter'.

   National, individual,--spiritual, temporal,--present,
   future,--rejection, restoration,--faith, the law,--Providence,
   freewill,--mercy, sacrifice,--Messiah suffering and triumphant,--are so
   many pairs of opposites with reference to which the structure of
   prophecy admits of being examined. It is true that such an examination
   is nothing more than a translation or decomposition of prophecy into
   the modes of thought of our own time, and is far from reproducing the
   living image which presented itself to the eyes of the prophet. But,
   like all criticism, it makes us think; it enables us to observe fresh
   points of connexion between the Old Testament and the New; it keeps us
   from losing our way in the region of allegory or of modern history.
   Many things are unlearnt as well as learnt by the aid of criticism; it
   clears the mind of conventional interpretations, teaching us to look
   amid the symbols of time and place for the higher and universal
   meaning.

   Prophecy has a human as well as a Divine element: that is to say, it
   partakes of the ordinary workings of the mind. There is also something
   beyond which the analogy of human knowledge fails to explain. Could the
   prophet himself have been asked what was the nature of that impulse by
   which he was carried away, he would have replied that the God of Israel
   was a living God' who had ordained him a prophet before he came forth
   from the womb'. Of the Divine element no other account can be given--it
   pleased God to raise up individuals in a particular age and country,
   who had a purer and loftier sense of truth than their fellow men.'
   Prophecy would be no longer prophecy if we could untwist its soul. But
   the human part admits of being analysed like poetry or history, of
   which it is a kind of union; it is written with a man's pen in a known
   language; it is cast in the imaginative form of early language itself.
   The truth of God comes into contact with the world, clothing itself in
   human feelings, revealing the lesson of historical events. But human
   feelings and the lesson of events vary, and in this sense the prophetic
   lesson varies too. Even in the workings of our own minds we may
   perceive this; those who think much about themselves and God cannot but
   be conscious of great changes and transitions of feeling at different
   periods of life. We are the creatures of impressions and associations;
   and although Providence has not made our knowledge of Himself dependent
   on these impressions, He has allowed it to be coloured by them. We
   cannot say that in the hours of prosperity and adversity, in health and
   sickness, in poverty and wealth, our sense of God's dealings with us is
   absolutely the same; still less, that all our prayers and aspirations
   have received the answer that we wished or expected. And sometimes the
   thoughts of our own hearts go before to God; at other times, the power
   of God seems to anticipate the thoughts of our hearts. And sometimes,
   in looking back at our past lives, it seems as if God had done
   everything; at other times, we are conscious of the movement of our own
   will. The wide world itself also, and the political fortunes of our
   country, have been enveloped in the light or darkness which rested on
   our individual soul.

   Especially are we liable to look at religious truth under many aspects,
   if we live amid changes of religious opinions, or are witnesses of some
   revival or reaction in religion, or supposing our lot to be cast in
   critical periods of history, such as extend the range and powers of
   human nature, or certainly enlarge our experience of it. Then the germs
   of new truths will subsist side by side with the remains of old ones;
   and thoughts, that are really inconsistent, will have a place together
   in our minds, without our being able to perceive their inconsistency.
   The inconsistency will be traced by posterity; they will remark that up
   to a particular point we saw clearly; but that no man is beyond his
   age--there was a circle which we could not pass. And some one living in
   our own day may look into the future with eagle eye'; he may weigh and
   balance with a sort of omniscience the moral forces of the world,
   perhaps with something too much of confidence that the right will
   ultimately prevail even on earth; and after ages may observe that his
   predictions were not always fulfilled or not fulfilled at the time he
   said.

   Such general reflections may serve as an introduction to what at first
   appears an anomaly in prophecy,--that it has not one, but many lessons;
   and that the manner in which it teaches those lessons is through the
   alternations of the human soul itself. There are failings of prophecy,
   just as there are failings in our own anticipations of the future. And
   sometimes when we had hoped to be delivered it has seemed good to God
   to afflict us still. But it does not follow that religion is therefore
   a cunningly devised fable, either now or then. Neither the faith of the
   people, nor of the prophet, in the God of their fathers is shaken
   because the prophecies are not realized before their eyes; because the
   vision', as they said, is delayed'; because in many cases events seem
   to occur which make it impossible that it should be accomplished. A
   true instinct still enables them to separate the prophets of Jehovah
   from the numberless false prophets with whom the land swarmed; they are
   gifted with the same discernment of spirits' which distinguished
   Micaiah from the four hundred whom Ahab called. The internal evidence
   of the true prophet we are able to recognize in the written prophecies
   also. In the earliest as well as the latest of them there is the same
   spirit one and continuous, the same witness of the invisible God, the
   same character of the Jewish people, the same law of justice and mercy
   in the dealings of Providence with respect to them, the same walking
   with God' in the daily life of the prophet himself.

   Novum Testamentum in vetere latet,' has come to be a favourite word
   among theologians, who have thought they saw in the truths of the
   Gospel the original design as well as the evangelical application of
   the Mosaical law. With a deeper meaning, it may be said that prophecy
   grows out of itself into the Gospel. Not, as some extreme critics have
   conceived, that the facts of the Gospel history are but the
   crystallization of the imagery of prophecy. Say, rather, that the river
   of the water of life is beginning again to flow. The Son of God himself
   is that prophet'--the prophet, not of one nation only, but of all
   mankind, in whom the particularity of the old prophets is finally done
   away, and the ever-changing form of the servant in whom my soul
   delighteth' at last finds rest. St. Paul, too, is a prophet who has
   laid aside the poetical and authoritative garb of old times, and is
   wrapped in the rhetorical or dialectical one of his own age. The
   language of the old prophets comes unbidden into his mind; it seems to
   be the natural expression of his own thoughts. Separated from Joel,
   Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah by an interval of about eight hundred
   years, he finds their words very near to him even in his mouth and his
   heart'; that is the word which he preached. When they spoke of
   forgiveness of sins, of non-imputation of sins, of a sudden turning to
   God, what did this mean but righteousness by faith? when they said I
   will have mercy, and not sacrifice', here also was imaged the great
   truth, that salvation was not of the law. If St. Paul would have no man
   judged for a new moon or sabbath', the prophets of old time had again
   and again said in the name of Jehovah Your new moons and sabbaths I
   cannot away with'. Like the elder prophets, he came not to build up a
   temple made with hands', but to teach a moral truth; like them he went
   forth alone, and not in connexion with the Church at Jerusalem. His
   calling is to be Apostle of the Gentiles; they also sometimes pass
   beyond the borders of Israel, to receive Egypt and Assyria into
   covenant with God.

   It is not, however, this deeper unity between St. Paul and the prophets
   of the old dispensation that we are about to consider further, but a
   more superficial parallelism, which is afforded by the alternation or
   successive representation of the purposes of God towards Israel, which
   we meet with in the Old Testament, and which recurs in the Epistle to
   the Romans. Like the elder prophets, St. Paul also prophesies in part',
   feeling after events rather than seeing them, and divided between
   opposite aspects of the dealings of Providence with mankind. This
   changing feeling often finds an expression in the words of Isaiah or
   the Psalmist, or the author of the book of Deuteronomy. Hence a kind of
   contrast springs up in the writings of the Apostle, which admits of
   being traced to its source in the words of the prophets. Portions of
   his Epistles are the disjecta membra of prophecy. Oppositions are
   brought into view by him, and may be said to give occasion to a
   struggle in his own mind, which were unobserved by the prophets
   themselves. For so far from prophecy setting forth one unchanging
   purpose of God, it seems rather to represent a succession of purposes
   conditional on men's actions; speaking as distinctly of the rejection
   as of the restoration of Israel; and of the restoration almost as the
   correlative of the rejection; often too making a transition from the
   temporal to the spiritual. Some of these contrasts it is proposed to
   consider in detail as having an important bearing on St. Paul's
   Epistles, especially on the Epistles to the Thessalonians, and on
   chapters x-xii of the Epistles to the Romans.

   (1) All the prophets are looking for and hastening to the day of the
   Lord', the great day', which there is none like,' the day of the Lord's
   sacrifice,' the day of visitation', of the great slaughter', in which
   the Lord shall judge in the valley of Jehoshaphat', in which they shall
   go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks,
   for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth
   to shake terribly the earth'. That day is the fulfilment and
   realization of prophecy, without which it would cease to have any
   meaning, just as religion itself would cease to have any meaning to
   ourselves, were there no future life, or retribution of good and evil.
   All the prophets are in spirit present at it; living alone with God,
   and hardly mingling with men on earth, they are fulfilled with its
   terrors and its glories. For the earth is not to go on for ever as it
   is, the wickednesses of the house of Israel are not to last for ever.
   First, the prophet sees the pouring out of the vials of wrath upon
   them; then, more at a distance, follows the vision of mercy, in which
   they are to be comforted, and their enemies, the ministers of God's
   vengeance on them, in turn punished. And evil and oppression
   everywhere, so far as it comes within the range of the prophet's eye,
   is to be punished in that day, and good is to prevail.

   In these terrors of the day of the Lord', of which the prophets speak,
   the fortunes of the Jewish people mingle with another vision of a more
   universal judgement, and it has been usual to have recourse to the
   double senses of prophecy to separate the one from the other, an
   instrument of interpretation which has also been applied to the New
   Testament for the same purpose. Not in this way could the prophet or
   apostle themselves have conceived them. To them they were not two, but
   one; not double one against the other', or separable into the figure
   and the thing signified. For the figure is in early ages the mode of
   conception also. More true would it be to say that the judgements of
   God on the Jewish people were an anticipation or illustration of His
   dealings with the world generally. If a separation is made at all, let
   us rather separate the accidents of time and place from that burning
   sense of the righteousness of God, which somewhere we cannot tell
   where, at some time we cannot tell when, must and will have retribution
   on evil; which has this other note of its Divine character, that in
   judgement it remembers mercy, pronouncing no endless penalty or
   irreversible doom, even upon the house of Israel. This twofold lesson
   of goodness and severity speaks to us as well as to the Jews. Better
   still to receive the words of prophecy as we have them, and to allow
   the feeling which it utters to find its way to our hearts, without
   stopping to mark out what was not separated in the prophet's own mind
   and cannot therefore be divided by us.

   Other contrasts are traceable in the teaching of the prophets
   respecting the day of the Lord. In that day the Lord is to judge
   Israel, and He is to punish Egypt and Assyria; and yet it is said also,
   the Lord shall heal Egypt, and Israel shall be the third with Egypt and
   Assyria whom the Lord shall bless (Is. xix. 25). In many of the
   prophecies also the judgement is of two kinds; it is a judgement on
   Israel, which is executed by the heathen; it is a judgement against the
   heathen, and in favour of Israel, in which God himself is sometimes
   said to be their advocate as well as their judge in that day'. A
   singular parallel with the New Testament is presented by another
   contrast which occurs in a single passage. That the day of the Lord is
   near, it cometh, it cometh,' is the language of all the prophets; and
   yet there were those who said also in Ezekiel's time, The days are
   prolonged, and every vision faileth. Tell them therefore, Thus saith
   the Lord God; I will make this proverb to cease, and they shall no more
   use it as a proverb in Israel; but say unto them, The days are at hand,
   and the effect of every vision' (xii. 22, 23). (Compare 2 Pet. iii. 4,
   Where is the promise of his coming?') On the other hand, in the later
   chapters of Isaiah (xl. seq.) we seem to trace the same feeling as in
   the New Testament itself: the anticipation of prophecy has ceased; the
   hour of its fulfilment has arrived; men seem to be conscious that they
   are living during the restoration of Israel as the disciples at the day
   of Pentecost felt that they were living amid the things spoken of by
   the prophet Joel.

   (2) A closer connexion with the Epistle to the Romans is furnished by
   the double and, on the surface, inconsistent language of prophecy
   respecting the rejection and restoration of Israel. These seem to
   follow one another often in successive verses. It is true that the
   appearance of inconsistency is greater than the reality, owing to the
   lyrical and concentrated style of prophecy (some of its greatest works
   being not much longer than this cobweb [11] ' of an essay); and this
   leads to opposite feelings and trains of thought being presented to us
   together, without the preparations and joinings which would be required
   in the construction of a modern poem. Yet, after making allowance for
   this peculiarity of the ancient Hebrew style, it seems as if there were
   two thoughts ever together in the prophet's mind: captivity,
   restoration,--judgement, mercy,--sin, repentance,--the people sitting
   in darkness, and the great light'.

   There are portions of prophecy in which the darkness is deep and
   enduring, darkness that may be felt,' in which the prophet is living
   amid the sins and sufferings of the people; and hope is a long way off
   from them--when they need to be awakened rather than comforted; and
   things must be worse, as men say, before they can become better. Such
   is the spirit of the greater part of the book of Jeremiah. But the tone
   of prophecy is on the whole that of alternation; God deals with the
   Israelites as with children; he cannot bear to punish them for long;
   his heart comes back to them when they are in captivity; their very
   helplessness gives them a claim on him. Vengeance may endure for a
   time, but soon the full tide of His mercy returns upon them. Another
   voice is heard, saying, Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.' Speak ye
   comfortably to Jerusalem, and say unto her that she hath received of
   the Lord's hand double for all her sins.' So from the vision of God on
   Mount Sinai, at the giving of the Law amid storms and earthquakes,
   arises that tender human relation in which the Gospel teaches that He
   stands, not merely to His Church as a body, but to each one of us.

   Naturally this human feeling is called forth most in the hour of
   adversity. As the affliction deepens, the hope also enlarges, seeming
   often to pass beyond the boundaries of this life into a spiritual
   world. Though their sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow;
   when Jerusalem is desolate, there shall be a tabernacle on Mount Sion.
   The formula in which this enlargement of the purposes of God is
   introduced is itself worthy of notice. It shall be no more said, The
   Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of
   Egypt; but, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel
   from the land of the North, and from all the lands whither he had
   driven them.' Their old servitude in Egypt came back to their minds now
   that they were captives in a strange land, and the remembrance that
   they had already been delivered from it was an earnest that they were
   yet to return. Deeply rooted in the national mind, it had almost become
   an attribute of God himself that He was their deliverer from the house
   of bondage.

   With this narrower view of the return of the children of Israel from
   captivity, not without a remembrance of that great empire which had
   once extended from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates, there blended
   also the hope of another kingdom in which dwelt righteousness--the
   kingdom of Solomon become the kingdom of Christ and God'. The children
   of Israel had been in their origin the fewest of all people', and the
   most alien to the nations round about. The Lord their God was a jealous
   God, who would not suffer them to mingle with the idolatries of the
   heathen. And in that early age of the world, when national life was so
   strong and individuals so feeble, we cannot conceive how the worship of
   the true God could have been otherwise preserved. But the day had
   passed away when the nation could be trusted with the preservation of
   the faith of Jehovah; it had never been good for much at any time.' The
   prophets, too, seem to withdraw from the scenes of political events;
   they are no longer the judges and leaders of Israel; it is a part of
   their mission to commit to writing for the use of after ages the
   predictions which they utter. We pass into another country, to another
   kingdom in which the prospect is no more that which Moses saw from
   Mount Pisgah, but in which the Lord's horn is exalted in the top of the
   mountains, and all nations flock to it'.

   In this kingdom the Gentiles have a place, still on the outskirts, but
   not wholly excluded from the circle of God's providence. Sometimes they
   are placed on a level with Israel, the circumcised with the
   uncircumcised', as if only to teach the Apostle's lesson, that there is
   no respect of persons with God' (Jer. ix. 25, 26; compare Rom. ii.
   12-28). At other times they are themselves the subjects of promises and
   threatenings (Jer. xii. 14-17). It is to them that God will turn when
   His patience is exhausted with the rebellions of Israel; for whom it
   shall be more tolerable' than for Israel and Judah in the day of the
   Lord. They are those upon whom, though at a distance, the brightness of
   Jehovah must over flow; who, in the extremities of the earth, are
   bathed with the light of His presence. Helpers of the joy of Israel,
   they pour with gifts and offerings through the open gates of the city
   of God. They have a part in Messiah's kingdom, not of right, but
   because without them it would be imperfect and incomplete. In one
   passage only, which is an exception to the general spirit of prophecy,
   Israel makes the third' with Egypt and Assyria, whom the Lord of Hosts
   shall bless' (Is. xix. 18-25).

   It was not possible that such should be the relation of the Gentiles to
   the people of God in the Epistles of St. Paul. Experience seemed to
   invert the natural order of Providence--the Jew first and afterwards
   the Gentile. Accordingly, what is subordinate in the prophets, becomes
   of principal importance in the application of the Apostle. The dark
   sayings about the Gentiles had more meaning than the utterers of them
   were aware of. Events connected them with the rejection of the Jews, of
   which the same prophets spoke. Not only had the Gentiles a place on the
   outskirts of the people of God, gathering up the fragments of promises
   under the table'; they them selves were the spiritual Israel. When the
   prophets spoke of the Mount Sion, and all nations flowing to it, they
   were not expecting literally the restoration of the kingdom to Israel.
   They spoke of they knew not what--of something that had as yet no
   existence upon the earth. What that was, the vision on the way to
   Damascus, no less than the history of the Church and the world,
   revealed to the Apostle of the Gentiles.

   (3) Another characteristic of Hebrew prophecy is the transition from
   the nation to the individual. That is to say, first the nation becomes
   an individual; it is spoken of, thought of, dealt with, as a person, it
   makes the third' with God and the prophet. Almost a sort of drama is
   enacted between them, the argument of which is the mercy and justice of
   God; and the Jewish nation itself has many parts assigned to it.
   Sometimes she is the adulterous sister', the wife of whoredoms', who
   has gone astray with Chaldean and Egyptian lovers. In other passages,
   still retaining the same personal relation to God, the daughter of my
   people' is soothed and comforted; then a new vision rises before the
   prophet's mind--not the same with that of the Jewish people, but not
   wholly distinct from it, in which the suffering prophet himself, or
   Cyrus the prophet king, have a part--the vision of the servant of God',
   the Saviour with dyed garments' from Bosra--he shall grow up before him
   as a tender plant;' he is led as a lamb to the slaughter' (Is. liii. 2,
   7; compare Jer. xi. 19). Yet there is a kind of glory even on earth in
   this image of gentleness and suffering: A bruised reed shall he not
   break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, until he hath brought
   forth judgement unto victory.' We feel it to be strange, and yet it is
   true. So we have sometimes seen the image of the kingdom of God among
   ourselves, not in noble churches or scenes of ecclesiastical power or
   splendour, but in the face of some child or feeble person, who, after
   overcoming agony, is about to depart and be with Christ.

   Analogies from Greek philosophy may seem far fetched in reference to
   Hebrew prophecy, yet there are particular points in which subjects the
   most dissimilar receive a new light from one another. In the writings
   of Plato and Aristotle, and the philosophers who were their successors,
   moral truths gradually separate from politics, and the man is
   acknowledged to be different from the mere citizen: and there arises a
   sort of ideal of the individual, who has a responsibility to himself
   only. The growth of Hebrew prophecy is so different; its figures and
   modes of conception are so utterly unlike; there seems such a wide gulf
   between morality which almost excludes God, and religion which exists
   only in God, that at first sight we are unwilling to allow any
   similarity to exist between them. Yet an important point in both of
   them is really the same. For the transition from the nation to the
   individual is also the more perfect revelation of God Himself, the
   change from the temporal to the spiritual, from the outward glories of
   Messiah's reign to the kingdom of God which is within. Prophets as well
   as apostles teach the near intimate personal relation of man to God.
   The prophet and psalmist, who is at one moment inspired with the
   feelings of a whole people, returns again to God to express the
   lowliest sorrows of the individual Christian. The thought of the Israel
   of God is latent in prophecy itself, not requiring a great nation or
   company of believers; but where one is there is God present with him.

   There is another way also in which the individual takes the place of
   the nation in the purposes of God; a remnant shall be saved'. In the
   earlier books of the Old Testament, the whole people is bound up
   together for good or for evil. In the law especially, there is no trace
   that particular tribes or individuals are to be singled out for the
   favour of God. Even their great men are not so much individuals as
   representatives of the whole people. They serve God as a nation; as a
   nation they go astray. If, in the earlier times of Jewish history, we
   suppose an individual good man living amid an adulterous and crooked
   generation', we can scarcely imagine the relation in which he would
   stand to the blessings and cursings of the law. Would the righteous
   perish with the wicked? That be far from thee, O Lord'. Yet prosperity,
   the blessing of the Old Testament', was bound up with the existence of
   the nation. Gradually the germ of the new dispensation begins to unfold
   itself; the bands which held the nation together are broken in pieces;
   a fragment only is preserved, a branch, in the Apostle's language, cut
   off from the patriarchal stem, to be the beginning of another Israel.

   The passage quoted by St. Paul in the eleventh chapter of the Romans is
   the first indication of this change in God's mode of dealing with His
   people. The prophet Elijah wanders forth into the wilderness to lay
   before the Lord the iniquities of the people: The children of Israel
   have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy
   prophets with the sword.' But what,' we may ask with the Apostle, saith
   the answer of God to him?' Not They are corrupt, they are altogether
   become abominable', but Yet I have seven thousand men who have not
   bowed the knee to Baal'. The whole people were not to be regarded as
   one; there were a few who still preserved, amid the general corruption,
   the worship of the true God.

   The marked manner in which the answer of God is introduced, the
   contrast of the still small voice' with the thunder, the storm, and the
   earthquake, the natural symbols of the presence of God in the law--the
   contradiction of the words spoken to the natural bent of the prophet's
   mind, and the greatness of Elijah's own character--all tend to stamp
   this passage as marking one of the epochs of prophecy. The solitude of
   the prophet and his separation in the mount of God', from the places in
   which men ought to worship', are not without meaning. There had not
   always been this proverb in the house of Israel'; but from this time
   onwards it is repeated again and again. We trace the thought of a
   remnant to be saved in captivity, or to return from captivity, through
   a long succession of prophecies--Hosea, Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
   Ezekiel;--it is the text of almost all the prophets, passing, as a
   familiar word, from the Old Testament to the New. The voice uttered to
   Elijah was the beginning of this new Revelation.

   (4) Coincident with the promise of a remnant is the precept, I will
   have mercy and not sacrifice,' which, in modern language, opposes the
   moral to the ceremonial law. It is another and the greatest step onward
   towards the spiritual dispensation. Moral and religious truths hang
   together; no one can admit one of them in the highest sense, without
   admitting a principle which involves the rest. He who acknowledged that
   God was a God of mercy and not of sacrifice, could not long have
   supposed that He dealt with nations only, or that He raised men up for
   no other end but to be vessels of His wrath or monuments of His
   vengeance. For a time there might be things too hard for him', clouds
   resting on his earthly tabernacle, when he saw the ungodly in such
   prosperity'; yet had he knowledge enough, as he went into the sanctuary
   of God', and confessed him self to be a stranger and pilgrim upon the
   earth'.

   It is in the later prophets that the darkness begins to be dispelled
   and the ways of God justified to man. Ezekiel is above all others the
   teacher of this new commandment'. The familiar words, when the wicked
   man turneth away from his wickedness, and doeth that which is lawful
   and right, he shall save his soul alive,' are the theme of a great part
   of this wonderful book. Other prophets have more of poetical beauty, a
   deeper sense of Divine things, a tenderer feeling of the mercies of God
   to His people; none teach so simply this great moral lesson, to us the
   first of all lessons. On the eve of the captivity, and in the midst of
   it, when the hour of mercy is past, and no image is too loathsome to
   describe the iniquities of Israel, still the prophet does not forget
   that the Lord will not destroy the righteous with the wicked: Though
   Noah, Daniel, and Job were in the land, as I live, saith the Lord, they
   shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall deliver but their
   own souls by their righteousness' (xiv. 20). Yet, behold, therein shall
   be left a remnant; and they shall know that I have not done without
   cause all that I have done, saith the Lord' (ver. 22, 23).

   It is observable that, in the Book of Ezekiel as well as of Jeremiah,
   this new principle on which God deals with mankind is recognized as a
   contradiction to the rule by which he had formerly dealt with them. At
   the commencement of chap, xviii, as if with the intention of revoking
   the words of the second commandment, visiting the sins of the fathers
   upon the children,' it is said:--

   The word of the Lord came unto me again, saying,

   What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel,
   saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth
   are set on edge?

   As I live, saith the Lord GOD, ye shall not have occasion any more to
   use this proverb in Israel.

   Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul
   of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.'

   Similar language occurs also in Jer. xxxi. 29, in a connexion which
   makes it still more remarkable, as the new truth is described as a part
   of that fuller revelation which God will give of himself, when He makes
   a new covenant with the house of Israel. And yet the same prophet, as
   if not at all times conscious of his own lesson, says also in his
   prayer to God (Lam. v. 7.), Our fathers have sinned and are not, and we
   have borne their iniquities.' The truth which he felt was not one and
   the same always, but rather two opposite truths, like the Law and the
   Gospel, which for a while seemed to struggle with one another in the
   teaching of the prophet and the heart of man.

   And yet this opposition was not necessarily conscious to the prophet
   himself. Isaiah, who saw the whole nation going before to judgement,
   did not refrain from preaching the lessons, If ye be willing and
   obedient,' and Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man
   his thoughts'. Ezekiel, the first thought and spirit of whose
   prophecies might be described in modern language as the responsibility
   of man, like Micaiah in the Book of Kings, seemed to see the false
   prophets inspired by Jehovah Himself to their own destruction. As in
   the prophet, so in the Apostle, there was no sense that the two lessons
   were in any degree inconsistent with each other. It is an age of
   criticism and philosophy, which, in making the attempt to conceive the
   relation of God to the world in a more abstract way, has invented for
   itself the perplexity, or, may we venture to say, by the very fact of
   acknowledging it, has also found its solution. The intensity with which
   the prophet felt the truths that he revealed, the force with which he
   uttered them, the desire with which he yearned after their fulfilment,
   have passed from the earth; but the truths them selves remain an
   everlasting possession. We seem to look upon them more calmly, and
   adjust them more truly. They no longer break through the world of sight
   with unequal power; they can never again be confused with the accidents
   of time and place. The history of the Jewish people has ceased to be
   the only tabernacle in which they are enshrined; they have an
   independent existence, and a light and order of their own.
     __________________________________________________________________

   [11] Carlyle.
     __________________________________________________________________

ON THE PROBABILITY THAT MANY OF ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES HAVE BEEN LOST

   En pa'se epistole--In every Epistle.'--2 Thess. iii. 17.

   THESE three words, dropping out by the way, open a field for reflection
   to those who maintain the genuineness of the Epistle in which they
   occur, because they imply, or at least make it probable, that St. Paul
   wrote other Epistles, which were never reckoned among the Canonical
   books, and of which all trace must therefore have disappeared in
   ecclesiastical history, even in that early age in which the Canon was
   beginning to be fixed.

   Other expressions in the writings of the Apostle lead to the same
   inference. In the second chapter of the Epistle from which they are
   taken, which it is important to observe is almost the earliest of those
   extant, and the words of which cannot therefore refer to the Epistles
   which are familiar to us, he twice speaks of a letter as from us', as a
   common and possible occurrence (ver. 2, 15). In the Second Epistle to
   the Corinthians, x. 10, the Apostle supposes his adversaries to say
   that his letters are weighty and powerful'; to which he replies in the
   next verse, Such as we are in word by letters when absent, such will we
   also be in deed when we are present'. Is it likely that the Apostle is
   here referring to the First Epistle only? The words of 1 Cor. v. 9, I
   wrote unto you in the epistle,' probably allude, notwithstanding the
   tense, to the letter which he was writing at the time, and have,
   therefore, nothing to do with our present inquiry. But the general
   character of both Epistles to the Corinthians leads to the conviction
   that he was in habits of correspondence with the teachers of the Church
   of Corinth. It appears also from 1 Cor. xvi. 3 that he was intending
   (although the intention in this instance was not fulfilled) to send
   messengers with letters of introduction, as we term them, to the Church
   at Jerusalem;--letters of Christian courtesy, of which one only--the
   short Epistle to Philemon--has been preserved to after-ages. Similar
   occasions must often have occurred in the course of a long life and
   ministry; St. Paul did not cease to be St. Paul in his feelings towards
   others, because what he wrote in the privacy of the closet was not
   destined to be read afterwards by the whole Christian world. Once more,
   in the Epistle to the Colossians, iv. 16, the Apostle enjoins the
   Churches of Colossae and Laodicea to interchange the letters which they
   had received from him. It is only a conjecture, and one which is not
   favoured by the similarity of the Epistles to the Colossians and
   Ephesians, that the Epistle here referred to as the Epistle to the
   Laodiceans is the extant Epistle to the Ephesians. Here then are signs
   of another lost Epistle. The allusion in the Second Epistle of St.
   Peter, iii. 15, 16, Even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to
   the wisdom given unto him, hath written unto you; as also in all his
   epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things
   hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable
   wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own
   destruction,' may be mentioned also, though it has only a general
   bearing on our present subject.

   (ii) The character of the Apostle is a further presumption on the same
   side of the question. He who lives in himself the life of all the
   Churches, who is praying for his converts night and day, and who allows
   no other concerns to occupy his mind,--of such an one is it reasonable
   to suppose that, during his whole ministry, to all his followers in
   many lands, he would write no other Epistles but those which have come
   down to us? One might have thought that every year, almost every month,
   he would have found some exhortation to give to them; that he would
   have received news of them from some quarter or other touching
   divisions which required healing, or persecution under which his
   children needed comfort, or advances of the truth which called for his
   counsel and sympathy. One might have thought that his affection for
   them, and his extreme (may we call it?) sensitiveness to their feelings
   towards himself, would have led him to make use of every opportunity
   for writing to them or hearing from them. He who had no rest in his
   soul until he had sent Timothy to know their state, could not have
   borne to have passed a great portion of his life without knowledge of
   them or intercourse with them. But if so, the Canonical Epistles or
   Letters cannot be the only ones of which the Apostle was the author.
   For, including the Pastoral Epistles, their number is but thirteen, not
   one in two years for the entire active portion of the Apostle's life,
   and these very unequally spread over different periods. Of the first
   ten or fifteen years no Epistle is extant; then two short ones begin
   the series; after an interval of some years succeeded by another short
   one: then in a single year follow the three larger Epistles together,
   more than half the whole: lastly, in the years of his imprisonment, we
   have not much more than a short Epistle for every year. Is it likely
   that there were no others?--or are we suffering ourselves to be imposed
   upon by the fear of disturbing a natural but superficial impression?

   (iii) The Epistles which are extant, with the exception of the Epistle
   to the Romans, are unlike the compositions of one who in his whole life
   wrote only ten letters. They are too lively and draw too near to the
   hearts of men. Those especially to the Thessalonians, Corinthians,
   Galatians, and Colossians (compare Philemon) imply habits of familiar
   intercourse between the Apostle and the distant Churches. Messengers
   are passing from him to them, and he is minutely informed of their
   circumstances. There is no trace of ignorance on the Apostle's part of
   what is going on among them. There is none of that natural formality
   which grows up in letters between unknown persons. Would the Apostle
   have written to a Church which he only addressed once in his life in a
   style which is more like talking than writing?--and without the least
   allusion anywhere to the singularity of the circumstance of his writing
   to them?

   But if, as the allusions which have been mentioned and the reason of
   the thing, and the style of the extant Epistles themselves, lead us to
   suppose, St. Paul wrote other Epistles, which have not been handed down
   to us, then many reflections arise in our minds, some of which have an
   important bearing on the interpretation of Scripture.

   1. It has been observed that within a single year of his life the
   Apostle wrote the Epistle to the Romans and the two Epistles to the
   Corinthians, which are in quantity equal to more than half the whole of
   his Epistles, and not much short of a seventh portion of the entire New
   Testament. Nor is it certain that these were the only Epistles written
   by him in the same year: the reverse is more likely. Now suppose we
   take this as the criterion of the probable amount of his lost writings,
   and that during each year of his ministry, which extended over a period
   of at least twenty-five years, he wrote an equal quantity,--though it
   would not be true to say that the world itself would not contain the
   books that would have been written,' yet the result would have been a
   volume three times the size of the New Testament. There is nothing
   extravagant in this speculation, although there is no proof of it; the
   allusions to lost Epistles make the idea extremely probable. Nor would
   any one think it extravagant if the Apostle had not been one of the
   Canonical writers, whose writings we are accustomed to regard as
   supernaturally preserved to us.

   2. Suppose, further, that in a distant part of the world, in some
   Syriac, or Armenian, or Aethiopic transcript, or even in its original
   language, buried in the unexcavated portions of Herculaneum or Pompeii,
   one of these lost Epistles were suddenly brought to light: with what
   feelings would it be received by the astonished world! The return of
   the Apostle himself to earth would hardly be a more surprising event.
   There are minds to whom such a discovery would seem to involve more
   danger than the loss of an Epistle which we already have. It is not
   impossible that it might be suppressed or ever it found its way to the
   Christian public. Suppose it to escape this fate; it is printed and
   translated: with what anxiety do men turn over its pages, to find in
   them something which has a bearing on this or that controverted point!
   If touching upon disputed matters, is it too much to conceive that it
   would not find equal acceptance with disputants on both
   sides--supposing that it favoured one of them rather than the other?
   Time would elapse before the new Epistle would find its way into the
   language of theology. There would be no Fathers or Commentators to
   overlay it with traditional interpretations. It is strange but also
   true that it could never receive the deference and respect which has
   attached to those more legitimate Epistles in the possession of which
   the Christian Church has gloried for above eighteen centuries. And some
   one standing aloof might ask whether any article of faith which such an
   accident might disturb could be necessary to salvation.

   3. Another supposition may be raised of the discovery not of one but of
   many lost Epistles of St. Paul, which suggests a new question. Would
   the balance of Christian truth be thereby altered? Not so. A moment's
   reflection will remind us that the servant is not above his Lord, nor
   the disciple above his Master. If we have failed to gather from the
   words of Christ the spirit of the Gospel, a new Epistle of St. Paul
   would hardly enlighten us; if we are partakers of that spirit we have
   more religious knowledge than it is possible to exhaust on earth. The
   alarm is no sooner raised than dispelled. The chief use of bringing the
   supposition before our minds is to remind us of the simplicity of the
   faith of Christ. It may help to indicate also to the theological
   student the nature of the problem which he has to consider in the
   interpretation of Scripture, at once harder and easier than he at first
   supposed,--easier because simpler, harder because beset with artificial
   difficulties. Were the Epistles bearing the name of St. Paul not ten
   but thirty in number, a great change would take place in our mode of
   studying them. Is it not their shortness which provokes microscopic
   criticism?--the scantiness of materials giving rise to conjectures, the
   fragmentary thought itself provoking system? Words and phrases such as
   justification by faith without the works of the law' could not have had
   such a powerful and exclusive influence on the theology of after times
   had they been found in two only out of thirty Epistles. Theories and
   constructions soon come to an end when materials are abundant;
   ingenuity ceases to make an attempt to fill up the blanks of knowledge
   when the mind is distinctly conscious that it is dealing not with the
   whole but with a part only.

   4. No difference is made by the supposition which has been raised
   respecting the extant Epistles considered as a rule of life and
   practice. Almost any one of them is a complete witness to the Author
   and Finisher of our faith; a complete text-book of the truths of the
   Gospel. But it is obvious that the supposition, or rather the simple
   fact, that Epistles have been lost which were written by St. Paul, is
   inconsistent with the theory of a plan which is some times attributed
   to the extant ones, which are regarded as a temple having many parts,
   even as there are many members in one body, and all members have not
   the same office. A mistaken idea of design is one of the most
   attractive errors in the interpretation of Scripture no less than of
   nature. No such plan or unity can be really conceived as existing in
   the Apostle's own mind; for he could never have distinguished between
   the Epistles destined to be lost and those which have been allowed to
   survive. And to attribute such a plan to an overruling Providence would
   be an arbitrary fancy, involving not inspiration, but the supernatural
   selection and preservation of particular Epistles, and destructive to
   all natural ideas of the Gospel. It is a striking illustration of what
   may be termed the incidental character of Christianity, that (not
   without a Providence in this as in all other earthly things) some of
   the Epistles of St. Paul, in the course of nature, as if by chance, are
   for ever lost to us; while others, as if by chance, are handed down to
   be the treasures of the Christian world throughout all ages.

   5. There is no reason to suppose that those Epistles of St. Paul which
   have been preserved were more sacred or inspired than those which were
   lost, or either more so than his discourses in the synagogue at
   Thessalonica during three Sabbath days', at Athens, at Corinth, at
   Rome, or the other places in which he preached the Gospel. The
   supposition of the lost Epistles indefinitely extends itself when we
   think of lost words. Of these it might be truly said, that if they were
   written every one, even the world itself would not contain the books
   that should be written.' The writings of the Apostle, like the words of
   our Saviour, are but a fragment of his life. And they must be restored
   to their context before they can be truly understood. They do not
   acquire any real sacredness by isolation from the rest. It would be a
   loss, not a gain, to deprive the New Testament of its natural human
   character,--instead of receiving a higher and diviner meaning, it would
   only be reduced to a level with the sacred writings of the Asiatic
   religions. So Christ and his Apostles went about speaking day after
   day,' is a truer and more instructive thought than these things were
   formally set down for our instruction'. Nor does it really diminish the
   power of Scripture to describe it, as it appears to the eye of the
   critical student, as a collection of fragmentary and occasional pieces.
   For these fragments are living plants; the germ of eternal life is in
   them all; the least of all seeds, when compared in bulk with human
   literature, they have grown up into a tree, the shade of which covers
   the earth.
     __________________________________________________________________

FROM THE ESSAY ON THE LAW AS THE STRENGTH OF SIN

   The strength of sin is the law.'--1 Cor. xv. 56.

   IN another sense than that in which the Apostle employs the words, the
   law is dead to us, and we to the law.' The lapse of ages has but
   deepened the chasm which separates Judaism from Christianity. Between
   us and them there is a gulf fixed, so that few are they who pass from
   them to us, nor do any go from us to them. The question remains, What
   application is it possible for us to make of that which has preceded?
   Is there anything in the world around standing in the same relation to
   us that the law did to the contemporaries of St. Paul?

   One answer that might be given is, the Roman Catholic Church.' The
   experience of Luther seems indeed not unlike that struggle which St.
   Paul describes. But whatever resemblance may be found between Romanism
   and the ancient Jewish religion,--whether in their ceremonial or
   sacrificial character, or in the circumstance of their both resting on
   outward and visible institutions, and so limiting the worship of Spirit
   and truth,--it cannot be said that Romanism stands in the same relation
   to us individually that the law did to the Apostle St. Paul. The real
   parallels are more general, though less obvious. The law St. Paul
   describes as without us, but not in that sense in which an object of
   sense is without us: though without us it exercises an inward power; it
   drives men to despair; it paralyses human nature; it causes evil by its
   very justice and holiness. It is like a barrier which we cannot pass; a
   chain where with a nation is bound together; a rule which is not
   adapted to human feelings, but which guides them into subjection to
   itself.

   It has been already remarked that a general parallel to the law as the
   strength of sin' is to be found in that strange blending of good and
   evil, of truth and error, which is the condition of our earthly
   existence. But there seem also to be cases in which the parallel is yet
   closer; in which good is not only the accidental cause of evil, but the
   limiting principle which prevents man from working out to the utter
   most his individual and spiritual nature. In some degree, for example,
   society may exercise the same tyranny over us, and its conventions be
   stumblingblocks to us of the same kind as the law to the contemporaries
   of St. Paul; or, in another way, the thought of self and the
   remembrance of our past life may deceive and slay us.' As in the
   description of the seventh chapter of the Romans:--It was I, and it was
   not I; and who can deliver me from the influence of education and the
   power of my former self?' Or faith and reason, reason and faith may
   seem mutually to limit each other, and to make the same opposition in
   speculation that the law and the flesh did to the Apostle in practice.
   Or, to seek the difficulty on a lower level, while fully assured of the
   truths of the Gospel, we may seem to be excluded from them by our
   mental or bodily constitution, which no influences of the Spirit or
   power of habit may be capable of changing.

   I. The society even of a Christian country--and the same remark applies
   equally to a Church--is only to a certain extent based upon Christian
   principle. It rests neither on the view that all mankind are evil, nor
   that they are all good, but on certain motives, supposed to be strong
   enough to bind mankind together; on institutions handed down from
   former generations; on tacit compacts between op posing parties and
   opinions. Every government must tolerate, and therefore must to a
   certain degree sanction, contending forms of faith. Even in reference
   to those more general principles of truth and justice which, in theory
   at least, equally belong to all religions, the government is limited by
   expediency, and seeks only to enforce them so far as is required for
   the preservation of society. Hence arises a necessary opposition
   between the moral principles of the individual and the political
   principles of a state. A good man may be sensitive for his faith,
   zealous for the honour of God, and for every moral and spiritual good;
   the statesman has to begin by considering the conditions of human
   society. Aristotle raises a famous question, whether the good citizen
   is the good man? We have rather to raise the question, whether the good
   man is the good citizen? If matters of state are to be determined by
   abstract principles of morality and religion,--if, for the want of such
   principles, whole nations are to be consigned to the vengeance of
   heaven,--if the rule is to be not my kingdom is not of this world',
   but, we ought to obey God rather than man'--there is nothing left but
   to supersede civil society, and found a religious one in its stead.

   It is no imaginary spectre that we are raising, but one that acts
   powerfully on the minds of religious men. Is it not commonly said by
   many, that the government is unchristian, that the legislature is
   unchristian, that all governments and all legislatures are the enemies
   of Christ and His Church? Herein to them is the fixed evil of the
   world; not in vice, or in war, or in injustice, or in falsehood; but
   simply in the fact that the constitution of their country conforms to
   the laws of human society. It is not necessary to suppose that they
   will succeed in carrying out their principles, or that a civilized
   nation will place its liberties in the keeping of a religious party.
   But, without succeeding, they do a great deal of harm to themselves and
   to the world. For they draw the mind away from the simple truths of the
   Gospel to manifestations of opinion and party spirit; they waste their
   own power to do good; some passing topic of theological controversy
   drains their life. We may not do evil that good may come', they say;
   and what is morally wrong cannot be politically right'; and with this
   misapplied syllogism of the conscience' they would make it impossible,
   in the mixed state of human affairs, to act at all, either for good or
   evil. He who seriously believes that not for our actual sins, but for
   some legislative measure of doubtful expediency, the wrath of God is
   hanging over his country, is in so unreal a state of mind as to be
   scarcely capable of discerning the real evils by which we are
   surrounded. The remedies of practical ills sink into insignificance
   compared with some point in which the interests of religion appear to
   be, but are not, concerned.

   But it is not only in the political world that imaginary forms of evil
   present themselves, and we are haunted by ideas which can never be
   carried out in practice; the difficulty comes nearer home to most of us
   in our social life. If governments and nations appear unchristian, the
   appearance of society itself is in a certain point of view still more
   unchristian. Suppose a person acquainted with the real state of the
   world in which we live and move, and neither morosely depreciating nor
   unduly exalting human nature, to turn to the image of the Christian
   Church in the New Testament, how great would the difference appear! How
   would the blessing of poverty contrast with the real, even the moral
   advantages of wealth! the family of love, with distinctions of ranks!
   the spiritual, almost supernatural, society of the first Christians,
   with our world of fashion, of business, of pleasure! the community of
   goods, with our meagre charity to others! the prohibition of going to
   law before the heathen, with our endless litigation before judges of
   all religions! the cross of Christ, with our ordinary life! How little
   does the world in which we live seem to be designed for the tabernacle
   of immortal souls! How large a portion of mankind, even in a civilized
   country, appears to be sacrificed to the rest, and to be without the
   means of moral and religious improvement! How fixed, and steadfast, and
   regular do dealings of money and business appear! how transient and
   passing are religious objects! Then, again, consider how society,
   sometimes in self-defence, sets a false stamp on good and evil; as in
   the excessive punishment of the errors of women, compared with Christ's
   conduct to the woman who was a sinner. Or when men are acknowledged to
   be in the sight of God equal, how strange it seems that one should heap
   up money for another, and be dependent on him for his daily life.
   Susceptible minds, attaching themselves, some to one point, some to
   another, may carry such reflections very far, until society itself
   appears evil, and they desire some primitive patriarchal mode of life.
   They are tired of conventionalities; they want, as they say, to make
   the Gospel a reality; to place all men on a religious, social, and
   political equality. In this, as in the last case, they are kicking
   against the pricks'; what they want is a society which has not the very
   elements of a social state; they do not perceive that the cause of the
   evil is human nature itself, which will not cohere without mixed
   motives and received forms and distinctions, and that Providence has
   been pleased to rest the world on a firmer basis than is supplied by
   the fleeting emotions of philanthropy, viz. self-interest. We are not,
   indeed, to sit with our arms folded, and acquiesce in human evil. But
   we must separate the accidents from the essence of this evil: questions
   of taste, things indifferent, or customary, or necessary, from the
   weightier matters of oppression, falsehood, vice. The ills of society
   are to be struggled against in such a manner as not to violate the
   conditions of society; the precepts of Scripture are to be applied, but
   not without distinctions of times and countries; Christian duties are
   to be enforced, but not identified with political principles. To see
   the world,--not as it ought to be, but as it is,--to be on a level with
   the circumstances in which God has placed them, to renounce the remote
   and impossible for what is possible and in their reach; above all, to
   begin within,--these are the limits which enthusiasts should set to
   their aspirations after social good. It is a weary thing to be all our
   life long warring against the elements, or, like the slaves of some
   eastern lord, using our hands in a work which can only be accomplished
   by levers and machines. The physician of society should aid nature
   instead of fighting against it; he must let the world alone as much as
   he can; to a certain degree, he will even accept things as they are, in
   the hope of bettering them.

   II. Mere weakness of character will sometimes afford an illustration of
   the Apostle's words. If there are some whose days are bound each to
   each by natural piety', there are others on whom the same continuous
   power is exercised for evil as well as good; they are unable to throw
   off their former self; the sins of their youth lie heavy on them; the
   influence of opinions which they have ceased to hold discolours their
   minds. Or it may be that their weakness takes a different form, viz.
   that of clinging to some favourite resolve, or of yielding to some
   fixed idea which gets dominion over them, and becomes the limit of all
   their ideas. A common instance of this may be found in the use made by
   many persons of conscience. Whatever they wish or fancy, whatever
   course of action they are led to by some influence obvious to others,
   though unobserved by themselves, immediately assumes the necessary and
   stereotyped form of the conscientious fulfilment of a duty. To every
   suggestion of what is right and reasonable, they reply only with the
   words--their consciences will not allow it.' They do what they think
   right; they do not observe that they never seem to themselves to do
   otherwise. No voice of authority, no opinion of others, weighs with
   them when put in the scale against the dictates of what they term
   conscience. As they get older, their narrow ideas of right acquire a
   greater tenacity; the world is going on, and they are as they were. A
   deadening influence lies on their moral nature, the peculiarity of
   which is, that, like the law, it assumes the appearance of good,
   differing from the law only in being unconscious. Conscience, one may
   say, putting their own character into the form of a truth or
   commandment, has deceived and slain them.'

   Another form of conscience yet more closely resembles the principle
   described in the seventh chapter of the Romans. There is a state in
   which man is powerless to act, and is, nevertheless, clairvoyant of all
   the good and evil of his own nature. He places the good and evil
   principle before him, and is ever oscillating between them. He traces
   the labyrinth of conflicting principles in the world, and is yet
   farther perplexed and entangled. He is sensitive to every breath of
   feeling, and incapable of the performance of any duty. Or take another
   example: it sometimes happens that the remembrance of past suffering,
   or the consciousness of sin, may so weigh a man down as fairly to
   paralyse his moral power. He is distracted between what he is and what
   he was; old habits and vices, and the new character which is being
   fashioned in him. Sometimes the balance seems to hang equal; he feels
   the earnest wish and desire to do rightly, but cannot hope to find
   pleasure and satisfaction in a good life; he desires heartily to
   repent, but can never think it possible that God should forgive. It is
   I, and it is not I, but sin that dwelleth in me.' I have, and have
   never ceased to have, the wish for better things, even amid haunts of
   infamy and vice.' In such language, even now, though with less fervour
   than in the first spiritual chaos of the affections', does the soul cry
   out to God--O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the
   body of this death?'

   III. There is some danger of speculative difficulties presenting the
   same hindrance and stumbling-block to our own generation, that the law
   is described as doing to the contemporaries of St. Paul. As the law was
   holy, just, and good, so many of these difficulties are true, and have
   real grounds: all of them, except in cases where they spring from
   hatred and opposition to the Gospel, are at least innocent. And yet, by
   undermining received opinions, by increasing vanity and egotism,
   instead of strengthening the will and fixing the principles, their
   promulgation may become a temporary source of evil; so that, in the
   words of the Apostle, it may be said of them that, taking occasion by
   the truth, they deceive and slay men. What then? is the law sin? is
   honest inquiry wrong? God forbid! it is we ourselves who are incapable
   of receiving the results of inquiry; who will not believe unless we
   see; who demand a proof that we cannot have; who begin with appeals to
   authority, and tradition, and consequences, and, when dissatisfied with
   these, imagine that there is no other foundation on which life can
   repose but the loose and sandy structure of our individual opinions.
   Persons often load their belief in the hope of strengthening it; they
   escape doubt by assuming certainty. Or they believe under an
   hypothesis'; their worldly interests lead them to acquiesce; their
   higher intellectual convictions rebel. Opinions, hardly won from study
   and experience, are found to be at variance with early education, or
   natural temperament. Opposite tendencies grow together in the mind;
   appearing and reappearing at intervals. Life becomes a patchwork of new
   and old cloth, or like a garment which changes colour in the sun.

   It is true that the generation to which we belong has difficulties to
   contend with, perhaps greater than those of any former age; and
   certainly different from them. Some of those difficulties arise out of
   the opposition of reason and faith; the critical inquiries of which the
   Old and New Testament have been the subject are a trouble to many; the
   circumstance that, while the Bible is the word of life for all men,
   such inquiries are open only to the few, increases the irritation. The
   habit of mind which has been formed in the study of Greek or Roman
   history may be warned off the sacred territory, but cannot really be
   prevented from trespassing: still more impossible is it to keep the
   level of knowledge at one point in Germany, at another in England.
   Geology, ethnology, historical and metaphysical criticism, assail in
   succession not the Scriptures themselves, but notions and beliefs which
   in the minds of many good men are bound up with them. The eternal
   strain to keep theology where it is while the world is going on,
   specious reconcilements, political or ecclesiastical exigencies, recent
   attempts to revive the past, and the reaction to which they have given
   birth, the contrast that everywhere arises of old and new, all add to
   the confusion. Probably no other age has been to the same extent the
   subject of cross and contradictory influences. What can be more unlike
   than the tone of sermons and of newspapers? or the ideas of men on art,
   politics, and religion, now, and half a generation ago? The thoughts of
   a few original minds, like wedges, pierce into all received and
   conventional opinions and are almost equally removed from either. The
   destruction of shams,' that is, the realization of things as they are
   amid all the conventions of thought and speech and action, is also an
   element of unsettlement. The excess of self-reflection, again, is not
   favourable to strength or simplicity of character. Every one seems to
   be employed in decomposing the world, human nature, and himself. The
   discovery is made that good and evil are mixed in a far more subtle way
   than at first sight would have appeared possible; and that even
   extremes of both meet in the same person. The mere analysis of moral
   and religious truth, the fact that we know the origin of many things
   which the last generation received on authority, is held by some to
   destroy their sacredness. Lastly, there are those who feel that all the
   doubts of sceptics put together fall short of that great doubt which
   has insinuated itself into their minds, from the contemplation of
   mankind--saying one thing and doing another.

   It is foolish to lament over these things; it would be still more
   foolish to denounce them. They are the mental trials of the age and
   country in which God has placed us. If they seem at times to exercise a
   weakening or unsettling influence, may we not hope that increasing love
   of truth, deeper knowledge of ourselves and other men, will, in the
   end, simplify and not perplex the path of life? We may leave off in
   mature years where we began in youth, and receive not only the kingdom
   of God, but the world also, as little children'. The analysis of moral
   and religious truth may correct its errors without destroying its
   obligations. Experience of the illusions of religious feeling at a
   particular time should lead us to place religion on a foundation which
   is independent of feeling. Because the Scripture is no longer held to
   be a book of geology or ethnology, or a supernatural revelation of
   historical facts, it will not cease to be the law of our lives,
   exercising an influence over us, different in kind from the ideas of
   philosophical systems, or the aspirations of poetry or romance. Because
   the world (of which we are a part) is hypocritical and deceitful, and
   individuals go about dissecting their neighbours 1 motives and lives,
   that is a reason for cherishing a simple and manly temper of mind,
   which does not love men the less because it knows human nature more;
   which pierces the secrets of the heart, not by any process of anatomy,
   but by the light of an eye from which the mists of selfishness are
   dispersed.

   IV. The relation in which science stands to us may seem to bear but a
   remote resemblance to that in which the law stood to the Apostle St.
   Paul. Yet the analogy is not fanciful, but real. Traces of physical
   laws are discernible everywhere in the world around us; in ourselves
   also, whose souls are knit together with our bodies, whose bodies are a
   part of the material creation. It seems as if nature came so close to
   us as to leave no room for the motion of our will: instead of the
   inexhaustible grace of God enabling us to say, in the language of the
   Apostle, I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me,' we
   become more and more the slaves of our own physical constitution. Our
   state is growing like that of a person whose mind is over-sensitive to
   the nervous emotions of his own bodily frame. And as the
   self-consciousness becomes stronger and the contrast between faith and
   experience more vivid, there arises a conflict between the spirit and
   the flesh, nature and grace, not unlike that of which the Apostle
   speaks. No one who, instead of hanging to the past, will look forward
   to the future, can expect that natural science should stand in the same
   attitude towards revelation fifty years hence as at present. The faith
   of mankind varies from age to age; it is weaker, or it may be stronger,
   at one time than at another. But that which never varies or turns
   aside, which is always going on and cannot be driven back, is knowledge
   based on the sure ground of observation and experiment, the regular
   progress of which is itself matter of observation. The stage at which
   the few have arrived is already far in advance of the many, and if
   there were nothing remaining to be discovered, still the diffusion of
   the knowledge that we have, without new addition, would exert a great
   influence on religious and social life. Still greater is the indirect
   influence which science exercises through the medium of the arts. In
   one century a single invention has changed the face of Europe: three or
   four such inventions might produce a gulf between us and the future far
   greater than the interval which separates ancient from modern
   civilization. Doubtless God has provided a way that the thought of Him
   should not be banished from the hearts of men. And habit, and opinion,
   and prescription may last our time,' and many motives may conspire to
   keep our minds off the coming change. But if ever our present knowledge
   of geology, of languages, of the races and religions of mankind, of the
   human frame itself, shall be regarded as the starting-point of a goal
   which has been almost reached, supposing too the progress of science to
   be accompanied by a corresponding development of the mechanical arts,
   we can hardly anticipate, from what we already see, the new relation
   that will then arise between reason and faith. Perhaps the very
   opposition between them may have died away. At any rate experience
   shows that religion is not stationary when all other things are moving
   onward.

   Changes of this kind pass gradually over the world; the mind of man is
   not suddenly thrown into a state for which it is unprepared. No one has
   more doubts than he can carry; the way of life is not found to stop and
   come to an end in the midst of a volcano, or on the edge of a
   precipice. Dangers occur, not from the disclosure of any new, or
   hitherto unobserved, facts, for which, as for all other blessings, we
   have reason to be thankful to God; but from our concealment or denial
   of them, from the belief that we can make them other than they are;
   from the fancy that some a priori notion, some undefined word, some
   intensity of personal conviction, is the weapon with which they are to
   be met. New facts, whether bearing on Scripture, or on religion
   generally, or on morality, are sure to win their way; the tide refuses
   to recede at any man's bidding. And there are not wanting signs that
   the increase of secular knowledge is beginning to be met by a
   corresponding progress in religious ideas. Controversies are dying out;
   the lines of party are fading into one another; niceties of doctrine
   are laid aside. The opinions respecting the inspiration of Scripture,
   which are held in the present day by good and able men, are not those
   of fifty years ago; a change may be observed on many points, a reserve
   on still more. Formulas of reconciliation have sprung up: the Bible is
   not a book of science,' the inspired writers were not taught
   supernaturally what they could have learned from ordinary sources,'
   resting-places in the argument at which travellers are the more ready
   to halt, because they do not perceive that they are only temporary. For
   there is no real resting-place but in the entire faith, that all true
   knowledge is a revelation of the will of God. In the case of the poor
   and suffering, we often teach resignation to the accidents of life; it
   is not less plainly a duty of religious men, to submit to the progress
   of knowledge. That is a new kind of resignation, in which many
   Christians have to school themselves. When the difficulty may seem, in
   anticipation, to be greatest, they will find, with the Apostle, that
   there is a way out: The truth has made them free.'
     __________________________________________________________________

ESSAY ON PREDESTINATION AND FREE WILL.

   THE difficulty of necessity and free will is not peculiar to
   Christianity. It enters into all religions at a certain stage of their
   progress; it reappears in philosophy and is a question not only of
   speculation but of life. Wherever man touches nature, wherever the
   stream of thought which flows within meets and comes into conflict with
   scientific laws, reflecting on the actions of an individual in relation
   to his antecedents, considering the balance of human actions in many
   individuals; when we pass into the wider field of history, and trace
   the influence of circumstances on the course of events, the sequence of
   nations and states of society, the physical causes that lie behind all;
   in the region of philosophy, as we follow the order of human thoughts,
   and observe the seeming freedom and real limitation of ideas and
   systems; lastly in that higher world of which religion speaks to us,
   when we conceive man as a finite being, who has the witness in himself
   of his own dependence on God, whom theology too has made the subject of
   many theories of grace, new forms appear of that famous controversy
   which the last century discussed under the name of necessity and free
   will.

   I shall at present pursue no further the train of reflections which are
   thus suggested. My first object is to clear the way for the
   consideration of the subject within the limits of Scripture. Some
   preliminary obstacles offer themselves, arising out of the opposition
   which the human mind everywhere admits in the statement of this
   question. These will be first examined. We may afterwards return to the
   modern aspects of the contradiction and of the reconcilement.

§ 1.

   In the relations of God and man, good and evil, finite and infinite,
   there is much that must ever be mysterious. Nor can any one exaggerate
   the weakness and feebleness of the human mind in the attempt to seek
   for such knowledge. But although we acknowledge the feebleness of man's
   brain and the vastness of the subject, we should also draw a
   distinction between the original difficulty of our own ignorance, and
   the puzzles and embarrassments which false philosophy or false theology
   have introduced. The impotence of our faculties is not a reason for
   acquiescing in a metaphysical fiction. Philosophy has no right to veil
   herself in mystery at the point where she is lost in a confusion of
   words. That we know little is the real mystery; not that we are caught
   in dilemmas or surrounded by contradictions. These contradictions are
   involved in the slightest as well as in the most serious of our
   actions, which is a proof of their really trifling nature. They confuse
   the mind but not things. To trace the steps by which mere abstractions
   have acquired this perplexing and constraining power, though it cannot
   meet the original defect, yet may perhaps assist us to under stand the
   misunderstanding, and to regard the question of predestination and free
   will in a simpler and more natural light.

   A subject which claims to be raised above the rules and requirements of
   logic must give a reason for the exemption, and must itself furnish
   some other test of truth to which it is ready to conform. The reason is
   that logic is inapplicable to the discussion of a question which begins
   with a contradiction in terms: it can only work out the opposite
   aspects or principles of such a question on one side or the other, but
   is inadequate to that more comprehensive conception of the subject
   which embraces both. We often speak of language as an imperfect
   instrument for the expression of thought. Logic is even more imperfect;
   it is wanting in the plastic and multiform character of language, yet
   deceives us by the appearance of a straight rule and necessary
   principle. Questions respecting the relation of God and man, necessity
   and free will, the finite and the infinite--perhaps every question
   which has two opposite poles of fact and idea--are beyond the sphere of
   its art. But if not logic, some other test must be found of our
   theories or reasonings, on these and the like metaphysical subjects.
   This can only be their agreement with facts, which we shall the more
   readily admit if the new form of expression or statement of them be a
   real assistance to our powers of thought and action.

   The difficulties raised respecting necessity and free will partake, for
   the most part, of the same nature as the old fallacies respecting
   motion and space of Zeno and the Eleatics, and have their solvitur
   ambulando' as well. This is the answer of Bishop Butler, who aims only
   at a practical solution. But as it is no use to say to the lame man,
   rise up and walk,' without a crutch or helping hand, so it is no use to
   offer these practical solutions to a mind already entangled in
   speculative perplexities. It retorts upon you--I cannot walk: if my
   outward actions seem like other men's; if I do not throw myself from a
   precipice, or take away the life of another under the fatal influence
   of the doctrine of necessity, yet the course of thought within me is
   different. I look upon the world with other eyes, and, slowly and
   gradually, differences in thought must beget differences also in
   action.' But if the mind, which is bound by this chain, could be shown
   that it was a slave only to its own abstract ideas,--that it was below
   where it ought to be above them,--that, considering all the many minds
   of men as one mind, it could trace the fiction,--this world of
   abstractions would gradually disappear, and not merely in a Christian,
   but in a philosophical sense, it would receive the kingdom of Heaven as
   a little child, seeking rather for some new figure under which
   conflicting notions might be represented, than remaining in suspense
   between them. It may be as surprising to a future generation that the
   nineteenth century should have been under the influence of the illusion
   of necessity and free will, or that it should have proposed the law of
   contradiction as an ultimate test of truth, as it is to ourselves that
   former ages have been subjected to the fictions of essence, substance,
   and the like.

   The notion that no idea can be composed of two contradictory
   conceptions seems to arise out of the analogy of the sensible world. It
   would be an absurdity to suppose that an object should be white and
   black at the same time; that a captive should be in chains and not in
   chains at the same time, and so on. But there is no absurdity in
   supposing that the mental analysis even of a matter of fact or an
   outward object should involve us in contradictions. Objects, considered
   in their most abstract point of view, may be said to contain a positive
   and a negative element: everything is and is not; is in itself, and is
   not, in relation to other things. Our conceptions of motion, of
   becoming, or of beginning, in like manner involve a contradiction. The
   old puzzles of the Eleatics are merely an exemplification of the same
   difficulty. There are objections, it has been said, against a vacuum,
   objections against a plenum, though we need not add, with the writer
   who makes the remark, Yet one of these must be true.' How a new
   substance can be formed by chemical combination out of two other
   substances may seem also to involve a contradiction, e.g. water is and
   is not oxygen and hydrogen. Life, in like manner, has been defined as a
   state in which every end is a means, and every means an end. And if we
   turn to any moral or political subject we are perpetually coming across
   different and opposing lines of argument, and constantly in danger of
   passing from one sphere to another; of applying, for example, moral or
   theological principles to politics, and political priniciples to
   theology. Men form to themselves first one system, then many, as they
   term them different, but in reality opposite to each other. Just as
   that nebulous mass, out of which the heavens have been imagined to be
   formed, at last, with its circling motion, subsides into rings, and
   embodies the stars moving in their courses', so also in the world of
   mind there are so many different orbits which never cross or touch each
   other, and yet which must be conceived of as the colours of the
   rainbow, the result of a single natural phenomenon.

   It is at first sight strange that some of these contradictions should
   seem so trivial to us, while others assume the appearance of a high
   mystery. In physics or mathematics we scarcely think of them, though
   speculative minds may sometimes be led by them to seek for higher
   expressions, or to embrace both sides of the contradiction in some
   conception of flux or transition, reciprocal action, process by
   antagonism, the Hegelian vibration of moments, or the like. In common
   life we acquiesce in the contradiction almost unconsciously, merely
   remarking on the difference of men's views, or the possibility of
   saying something on either side of a question. But in religion the
   difficulty appears of greater importance, partly from our being much
   more under the influence of language in theology than in subjects which
   we can at once bring to the test of fact and experiment, and partly
   also from our being more subject to our own natural constitution, which
   leads us to one or the other horn of the dilemma, instead of placing us
   between or above both. As in heathen times it was natural to think of
   extraordinary phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, as the work of
   gods rather than as arising from physical causes, so it is still to the
   religious mind to consider the bewilderments and entanglements which it
   has itself made as a proof of the unsearchableness of the Divine
   nature.

   The immovableness of these abstractions from within will further
   incline us to consider the meta physical contradiction of necessity and
   free will in the only rational way; that is, historically.' To say that
   we have ideas of fate or freedom which are innate, is to assume what is
   at once disproved by a reference to history. In the East and West, in
   India and in Greece, in Christian as well as heathen times, whenever
   men have been sufficiently enlightened to form a distinct conception of
   a single Divine power or overruling law, the question arises, How is
   the individual related to this law? The first answer to this question
   is Pantheism; in which the individual, dropping his proper qualities,
   abstracts himself into an invisible being, indistinguishable from the
   Divine. God overpowers man; the inner life absorbs the outer; the ideal
   world is too much for this. The second answer, which the East has also
   given to this question, is Fatalism; in which, without abstraction, the
   individual identifies himself, soul and body, in deed as well as
   thought, with the Divine will. The first is the religion of
   contemplation; the second, of action. Only in the last, as the world
   itself alters, the sense of the overruling power weakens; and faith in
   the Divine will, as in Mahometan countries at the present day, shows
   itself, not in a fanatical energy, but in passive compliance and
   resignation.

   The gradual emergence of the opposition is more clearly traceable in
   the Old Testament Scriptures or in Greek poetry or philosophy. The
   Israelites are distinguished from all other Eastern nations--certainly
   from all contemporary with their early history--by their distinct
   recognition of the unity and personality of God. God, who is the
   Creator and Lord of the whole earth, is also in a peculiar sense the
   God of the Jewish people whom He deals with according to His own good
   pleasure, which is also a law of truth and right. He is not so much the
   Author of good as the Author of all things, without whom nothing either
   good or evil can happen; not only the permitter of evil, but in a few
   instances, in the excess of His power, the cause of it also. With this
   universal attribute He combines another, the Lord our God, who brought
   us out of the land of bondage.' The people have one heart and one soul
   with which they worship God and have dealings with Him. Only a few
   individuals among them, as Moses or Joshua, draw near separately to
   Him. In the earliest ages they do not pray each one for himself. There
   is a great difference in this respect between the relation of man to
   God which is expressed in the Psalms and in the Pentateuch. In the
   later Psalms, certainly, and even in some of those ascribed to David,
   there is an immediate personal intercourse between God and His
   servants. At length in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, the human
   spirit begins to strive with God, and to ask not only, how can man be
   just before God? but also, how can God be justified to man? There was a
   time when the thought of this could never have entered into their
   minds; in which they were only, as children with a father, doing evil,
   and punished, and returning once more to the arms of His wisdom and
   goodness. The childhood of their nation passed away, and the
   remembrance of what God had done for their fathers was forgotten;
   religion became the religion of individuals, of Simeon and Anna, of
   Joseph and Mary. On the one hand, there was the proud claim of those
   who said, We have Abraham to our Father'; on the other hand, the
   regretful feeling that God was casting oft Israel,' which St. Paul in
   the manner of the Old Testament rebukes with the words, Who art thou, O
   man?' and We are the clay, and He the potter.'

   We may briefly trace the progress of a parallel struggle in Grecian
   mythology. It presents itself, however, in another form, beginning with
   the Fates weaving the web of life, or the Furies pursuing the guilty,
   and ending in the pure abstraction of necessity or nature. Many changes
   of feeling may be observed between the earlier and later of these two
   extremes. The Fate of poetry is not like that of philosophy, the chain
   by which the world is held together; but an ever-living power or
   curse--sometimes just, some times arbitrary,--specially punishing
   impiety towards the Gods or violations of nature. In Homer it
   represents also a determination already fixed, or an ill irremediable
   by man; in one aspect it is the folly which leaves no place for
   repentance'. In Pindar it receives a nobler form, Law the king of all.'
   In the tragedians it has a peculiar interest, giving a kind of measured
   and regular movement to the whole action of the play. The consciousness
   that man is not his own master had deepened in the course of ages;
   there had grown up in the mind a sentiment of overruling law. It was
   this half-religious, half-philosophical feeling, which Greek tragedy
   embodied; whence it derived not only dramatic irony or contrast of the
   real and seeming, but also its characteristic feature--repose. The same
   reflective tone is observable in the Epic' historian of the Persian
   war; who delights to tell, not (like a modern narrator) of the
   necessary connexion of causes and effects, but of effects without
   causes, due only to the will of Heaven. A sadder note is heard at
   intervals of the feebleness and nothingness of man; pan estin
   a'nthropos sumphore'. In Thucydides (who was separated from Herodotus
   by an interval of about twenty years) the sadness remains, but the
   religious element has vanished. Man is no longer in the toils of
   destiny, but he is still feeble and helpless. Fortune and human
   enterprise divide the empire of life.

   Such conceptions of fate belong to Paganism, and have little in common
   with that higher idea of Divine predestination of which the New
   Testament speaks. The Fate of Greek philosophy is different from
   either. The earlier schools expressed their sense of an all-pervading
   law in rude, mythological figures. In time this passed away, and the
   conceptions of chance, of nature, and necessity became matters of
   philosophical inquiry. By the Sophists first the question was
   discussed, whether man is the cause of his own actions; the mode in
   which they treated of the subject being to identify the good with the
   voluntary, and the evil with the involuntary. It is this phase of the
   question which is alone considered by Aristotle. In the chain of the
   Stoics the doctrine has arrived at a further stage, in which human
   action has become a part of the course of the world. How the free will
   of man was to be reconciled either with Divine power, or Divine
   foreknowledge, was a difficulty which pressed upon the Stoical
   philosopher equally as upon the metaphysicians of the last century; and
   was met by various devices, such as that of the confatalism of
   Chrysippus, which may be described as a sort of identity of fate and
   freedom, or of an action and its conditions.

   Our inquiry has been thus far confined to an attempt to show, first,
   that the question of pre destination cannot be considered according to
   the common rules of logic; secondly, that the contradictions which are
   involved in this question are of the same kind as many other contrasts
   of ideas; and, thirdly, that the modern conception of necessity was the
   growth of ages, whether its true origin is to be sought in the
   Scriptures, or in the Greek philosophy, or both. If only we could throw
   ourselves back to a prior state of the world, and know no other modes
   of thought than those which existed in the infancy of the human mind,
   the opposition would cease to have any meaning for us; and thus the
   further reflection is suggested, that if ever we become fully conscious
   that the words which we use respecting it are words only, it will again
   become unmeaning. Historically we know when it arose, and whence it
   came. Already we are able to consider the subject in a simpler way,
   whether presented to us (1) in connexion with the statements of
   Scripture, or (2) as a subject of theology and philosophy.

§ 2.

   Two kinds of predestination may be distinguished in the writings of St.
   Paul, as well as in some parts of the Old Testament. First, the
   predestination of nations; secondly, of individuals. The former of
   these may be said to flow out of the latter, God choosing at once the
   patriarchs and their descendants. As the author of the Epistle to the
   Hebrews expresses it, By faith Abraham offered up Isaac; and there fore
   sprang there of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of
   heaven in multitude.' The life of the patriarchs was the type or shadow
   of the history of their posterity, for evil as well as good. Simeon and
   Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations;
   Joseph is a goodly bough': Moab and Ammon are children of whoredom;
   Ishmael is a wild man, and so on. There is also the feeling that
   whatever extraordinary thing happens in Jewish history is God's doing,
   not of works nor even of faith, but of grace and choice; He took David
   from the sheep-folds, and set him over His people Israel.' So that a
   double principle is discernible: first, absolute election; and,
   secondly, the fulfilment of the promises made to the fathers, or the
   visitation of their sins upon the children.

   The notion of freedom is essentially connected with that of
   individuality. No one is truly free who has not that inner circle of
   thoughts and actions in which he is wholly himself and independent of
   the will of others. A slave, for example, may be in this sense free,
   even while in the service of his lord; constraint can apply only to his
   outward acts, not to his inward nature. But if, in the language of
   Aristotle, he were a natural slave, whose life seemed to himself
   defective and imperfect, who had no thoughts or feelings of his own,
   but only instincts and impulses, we could no more call him free than a
   domestic animal which attaches itself to a master. So, in that stage of
   society in which the State is all in all, the idea of the individual
   has a feeble existence. In the language of philosophy the whole is
   free, and the parts are determined by the whole. So the theocracy of
   the Old Testament seems to swallow up its members. The Jewish
   commonwealth is governed by God himself; this of itself interferes with
   the personal relation in which He stands to the individuals who compose
   it. Through the law only, in the congregation, at the great feasts,
   through their common ancestors, the people draw near to God; they do
   not venture to think severally of their separate and independent
   connexion with Him. They stand or fall together; they go astray or
   return to Him as one man. It is this which makes so much of their
   history directly applicable to the struggle of Christian life.
   Religion, which to the believer in Christ is an individual principle,
   is with them a national one.

   The idea of a chosen people passes from the Old Testament into the New.
   As the Jews had been predestined in the one, so it appeared to the
   Apostle St. Paul that the Gentiles were predestined in the other. In
   the Old Testament he observed two sorts of predestination; first, that
   more general one, in which all who were circumcised were partakers of
   the privilege--which was applicable to all Israelites as the children
   of Abraham; secondly, the more particular one, in reference to which he
   says, All are not Israel who are of Israel.' To the eye of faith all
   Israel were saved'; and yet within Israel there was another Israel
   chosen in a more special sense. The analogy of this double
   predestination the Apostle transfers to the Christian society. All
   alike were holy, even those of whom he speaks in the strongest terms of
   reprobation. The Church, like Israel of old, presents to the Apostle's
   mind the conception of a definite body, consisting of those who are
   sealed by baptism and have received the first fruits of the Spirit'.
   They are elect according to the fore knowledge or predisposition of
   God; sealed by God unto the day of redemption; a peculiar people, a
   royal priesthood, taken alike from Jews and Gentiles. The Apostle
   speaks of their election as of some external fact. The elect of God
   have an offence among them not even named among the Gentiles, they
   abuse the gifts of the Spirit, they partake in the idol's temple, they
   profane the body and blood of Christ. And yet, as the Israelites of
   old, they bear on their foreheads the mark that they are God's people,
   and are described as chosen saints', sanctified in Christ Jesus.'

   Again, the Apostle argues respecting Israel itself, Hath God cast off
   his people whom he foreknew?' or rather, whom He before appointed. They
   are in the position of their fathers when they sinned against Him. If
   we read their history we shall see, that what happened to them in old
   times is happening to them now; and yet in the Old Testament as well as
   the New the overruling design was not their condemnation but their
   salvation--God concluded all under sin that he might have mercy upon
   all.' They stumbled and rose again then; they will stumble and rise
   again now. Their predestination from the beginning is a proof that they
   cannot be finally cast off; beloved as they have been for their
   fathers' sakes, and the children of so many promises. There is a
   providence which, in spite of all contrary appearance, in spite of the
   acceptance of the Gentiles, or rather so much the more in consequence
   of it, makes all things work together for good to the chosen people.

   In this alternation of hopes and fears, in which hope finally prevails
   over fear, the Apostle speaks in the strongest language of the right of
   God to do what He will with His own; if any doctrine could be
   established by particular passages of Scripture, Calvinism would rest
   immovable on the ninth chapter of the Romans. It seemed to him no more
   unjust that God should reject than that He should accept the
   Israelites; if, at that present time He cut them short in
   righteousness, and narrowed the circle of election, He had done the
   same with the patriarchs. He had said of old, Jacob have I loved, and
   Esau have I hated:' and this preference, as the Apostle observes, was
   shown before either could have committed actual sin. In the same spirit
   He says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I
   will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.' And to Pharaoh,
   For this cause have I raised thee up.' Human nature, it is true, rebels
   at this, and says, Why does he yet find fault?' To which the Apostle
   only replies, Shall the thing formed say unto him that formed it, Why
   hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay?' Some
   of the expressions which have become the most objectionable watchwords
   of predestinarian theology, such as vessels of wrath and vessels of
   mercy', are in fact taken from the same passage in the Epistle to the
   Romans.

   It is answered by the opponents of Calvinism, that the Apostle is here
   speaking not of individual but of national predestination. From the
   teaching of the Old Testament respecting the election of the Jewish
   people we can infer nothing respecting the Divine economy about
   persons. To which in turn it may be replied, that if we admit the
   principle that the free choice of nations is not inconsistent with
   Divine justice, we cannot refuse to admit the free choice of persons
   also. A little more or a little less of the doctrine cannot make it
   more or less reconcilable with the perfect justice of God. Nor can we
   argue that the election of nations is a part of the Old Testament
   dispensation, which has no place in the New; because the Apostle speaks
   of election according to the purpose of God as a principle which was at
   that time being manifested in the acceptance of the Gentiles.

   Yet the distinction is a sound one if stated a little differently, that
   is to say, if we consider that the predestination of Christians is only
   the continuance of the Old Testament in the New. It is the feeling of a
   religious Israelite respecting his race; this the Apostle enlarges to
   comprehend the Gentiles. As the temporal Israel becomes the spiritual
   Israel, the chosen people are transfigured into the elect. Why this is
   so is only a part of the more general question, why the New Testament
   was given through the Old?' It was natural it should be so given;
   humanly speaking, it could not have been otherwise. The Gospel would
   have been unmeaning, if it had been tossed into the world' separated
   from all human antecedents; if the heaven of its clearness had been
   beyond the breath of every human feeling. Neither is there any more
   untruthfulness in St. Paul's requiring us to recognize the goodness of
   God in the election of some and the rejection of others, than in
   humility or any act of devotion. The untruth lies not in the devout
   feeling, but in the logical statement. When we humble ourselves before
   God, we may know, as a matter of common sense, that we are not worse
   than others; but this, however true (Father, I thank thee I am not as
   other men'), is not the temper in which we kneel before Him. So in
   these passages, St. Paul is speaking, not from a general consideration
   of the Divine nature, but with the heart and feelings of an Israelite.
   Could the question have been brought before him in another form,--could
   he have been asked whether God, according to His own pleasure, chose
   out individual souls, so that some could not fail of being saved while
   others were necessarily lost,--could he have been asked whether Christ
   died for all or for the chosen few,--whether, in short, God was sincere
   in His offer of salvation,--can we doubt that to such suggestions he
   would have replied in his own words, God forbid! for how shall God
   judge the world?'

   It has been said that the great error in the treatment of this subject
   consists in taking chap. ix. separated from chaps, x. xi. We may say
   more generally, in taking parts of Scripture without the whole, or in
   interpreting either apart from history and experience. In considering
   the question of pre destination, we must not forget that at least
   one-half of Scripture tells not of what God does, but of what man ought
   to do; not of grace and pardon only, but of holiness. If, in speaking
   of election, St. Paul seems at times to use language which implies the
   irrespective election of the Jews as a nation; yet, on the other hand,
   what immediately follows shows us that conditions were understood
   throughout, and that, although we may not challenge the right of God to
   do what He would with His own, yet that in all His dealings with them
   the dispensation was but the effect of their conduct. And although the
   Apostle is speaking chiefly of national predestination, with respect to
   which the election of God is asserted by him in the most unconditional
   terms; yet, as if he were already anticipating the application of his
   doctrine to the individual, he speaks of human causes for the rejection
   of Israel; because they sought not righteousness by the way of faith';
   because they stumble at the rock of offence.' God accepted and rejected
   Israel of His own good pleasure; and yet it was by their own fault. How
   are we to reconcile these conflicting statements? They do not need
   reconciliation; they are but the two opposite expressions of a
   religious mind, which says at one moment, Let me try to do right', and
   at another, God alone can make me do right'. The two feelings may
   involve a logical contradiction, and yet exist together in fact and in
   the religious experience of mankind.

   In the Old Testament the only election of individuals is that of the
   great leaders or chiefs, who are identified with the nation. But in the
   New Testament, where religion has become a personal and individual
   matter, it follows that election must also be of persons. The Jewish
   nation knew, or seemed to know, one fact, that they were the chosen
   people. They saw, also, eminent men raised up by the hand of God to be
   the deliverers of His servants. It is not in this historical' way that
   the Christian becomes conscious of his individual election. From
   within, not from without, he is made aware of the purpose of God
   respecting himself. Living in close and intimate union with God, having
   the mind of the Spirit and knowing the things of the Spirit, he begins
   to consider with St. Paul, When it pleased God, who separated me from
   my mother's womb, to reveal his Son in me.' His whole life seems a sort
   of miracle to him; supernatural, and beyond other men's in the gifts of
   grace which he has received. If he asks himself, Whence was this to
   me?' he finds no other answer but that God gave them because he had a
   favour unto him.' He recalls the hour of his conversion, when, in a
   moment, he was changed from darkness to light, and from the power of
   Satan unto God. Or, perhaps, the dealings of God with him have been
   insensible, yet not the less real; like a child, he cannot remember the
   time when he first began to trust the love of his parent. How can he
   separate himself from that love or refuse to believe that He who began
   the good work will also accomplish it unto the end? At which step in
   the ladder of God's mercy will he stop? Whom he did foreknow, them he
   did predestinate; whom he did predestinate, them he also called; whom
   he called, them he justified; whom he justified, them he also
   glorified.'

   A religious mind feels the difference between saying, God chose me; I
   cannot tell why; not for any good that I have done; and I am persuaded
   that He will keep me unto the end'; and saying, God chooses men quite
   irrespective of their actions, and predestines them to eternal
   salvation'; and yet more, if we add the other half of the doctrine, God
   refuses men quite irrespective of their actions, and they become
   reprobates, predestined to everlasting damnation.' Could we be willing
   to return to that stage of the doctrine which St. Paul taught, without
   comparing contradictory statements or drawing out logical
   conclusions,--could we be content to rest our belief, as some of the
   greatest, even of Calvinistic divines have done, on fact and
   experience, theology would be no longer at variance with morality.

   Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God that
   worketh in you both to do and to will of His good pleasure', is the
   language of Scripture, adjusting the opposite aspects of this question.
   The Arminian would say, Work out your own salvation'; the Calvinist,
   God worketh in you both to do and to will of His good pleasure.'
   However contradictory it may sound, the Scripture unites both; work out
   your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God that worketh
   in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.

§ 3.

   I. We have been considering the question thus far within the limits of
   Scripture. But it has also a wider range. The primary relations of the
   will of man to the will of God are independent of the Christian
   revelation. Natural religion, that is to say, the Greek seeking after
   wisdom, the Indian wandering in the expanse of his own dreamlike
   consciousness, the Jew repeating to himself that he is Abraham's seed;
   each in their several ways at different stages of the world's history
   have asked the question, How is the freedom of the human will
   consistent with the infinity and omni potence of God?' These attributes
   admit of a further analysis into the power of God and the knowledge of
   God. And hence arises a second form of the inquiry, How is the freedom
   of the human will reconcilable with Divine omniscience or
   foreknowledge?' To which the Christian system adds a third question,
   How is the freedom of the human will reconcilable with that more
   immediate presence of God in the soul which is termed by theologians
   Divine grace?'

   (1) God is everywhere; man is nowhere. Infinity exists continuously in
   every point of time; it fills every particle of space. Or rather, these
   very ideas of time and space are figures of speech, for they have a
   here' and a there', a future and a past--which no effort of human
   imagination can transcend. But in God there is no future and no past,
   neither here nor there'; He is all and in all. Where, then, is room for
   man? in what open place is he permitted to live and move and have his
   being?

   God is the cause of all things; without Him nothing is made that is
   made. He is in history, in nature, in the heart of man. The world
   itself is the work of His power; the least particulars of human life
   are ordained by Him. Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and
   yet your heavenly Father feedeth them'; and the hairs of your head are
   all numbered'. Is there any point at which this Divine causality can
   stop? at which the empire of law ceases? at which the human will is set
   free?

   The answer is the fact; not the fact of consciousness as it is
   sometimes termed, that we are free agents, which it is impossible to
   see or verify; but the visible tangible fact that we have a place in
   the order of nature, and walk about on the earth, and are ourselves
   causes drawing effects after them. Does any advocate of freedom mean
   more than this? Or any believer in necessity less? No one can deny of
   himself the restrictions which he observes to be true of others; nor
   can any one doubt that there exists in others the same consciousness of
   freedom and responsibility which he has himself. But if so, all these
   things are as they were before; we need not differ about the unseen
   foundation whether of necessity or free will, spirit or body, mind or
   matter, upon which the edifice of human life is to be reared. Just as
   the theory of the ideality of matter leaves the world where it
   was--they do not build houses in the air who imagine Bishop Berkeley to
   have dissolved the solid elements into sensations of the mind--so the
   doctrine of necessity or predestination leaves morality and religion
   unassailed, unless it intrude itself as a motive on the sphere of human
   action.

   It is remarkable that the belief in predestination, both in modern and
   in ancient times, among Mahometans as well as Christians, has been the
   animating principle of nations and bodies of men, equally, perhaps more
   than of individuals. It is characteristic of certain countries, and has
   often arisen from sympathy in a common cause. Yet it cannot be said to
   have been without a personal influence also. It has led to a view of
   religion in which man has been too much depressed to form a true
   conception of God Himself. For it is not to be supposed that the lower
   we sink human nature in the scale of being, the higher we raise the
   Author of being; worthy notions of God imply worthy notions of man
   also.

   God is infinite.' But in what sense? Am I to conceive a space without
   limit, such as I behold in the immeasurable ether, and apply this
   viewless form to the thought of the Almighty? Any one will admit that
   here would be a figure of speech. Yet few of us free our notions of
   infinity from the imagery of place. It is this association which gives
   them their positive, exclusive character. But conceive of infinity as
   mere negation, denying of God the limits which are imposed upon finite
   beings, meaning only that God is not a man or comprehensible by man,
   without any suggestion of universal space, and the exclusiveness
   disappears; there is room for the creature side by side with the
   Creator. Or again, press the idea of the infinite to its utmost extent,
   till it is alone in the universe, or rather is the universe itself, in
   this heaven of abstraction, nevertheless, a cloud begins to appear; a
   limitation casts its shadow over the formless void. Infinite is finite
   because it is infinite. That is to say, because infinity includes all
   things, it is incapable of creating what is external to itself. Deny
   infinity in this sense, and the being to whom it is attributed receives
   a new power; God is greater by being finite than by being infinite.
   Proceeding in the same train of thought, we may observe that the word
   finite is the symbol, to our own minds as to the Greek, of strength and
   reality and truth. It cannot be these which we intend to deny of the
   Divine Being. Lastly, when we have freed our minds from associations of
   place and from those other solemn associations which naturally occur to
   us from its application to the Almighty, are we sure that we intend
   anything more by the Infinite' than mere vacancy, the indefinite', the
   word not'?

   It is useful to point out the ambiguities and perplexities of such
   terms. Logic is not to puzzle us with inferences about words which she
   clothes in mystery; at any rate, before moving a step she should
   explain their meaning. She must admit that the infinite overreaches
   itself in denying the existence of the finite, and that there are some
   limitations', such as the impossibility of evil or falsehood, which are
   of the essence of the Divine nature. She must inquire whether it be
   conceivable to reach a further infinite, in which the opposition to the
   finite is denied, which may be a worthier image of the Divine Being.
   She must acknowledge that negative ideas, while they have often a kind
   of solemnity and mystery, are the shallowest and most trifling of all
   our ideas.

   So far the will may be free unless we persist in an idea of the Divine
   which logic and not reason erroneously requires, and which is the
   negative not only of freedom but of all other existence but its own.
   More serious consequences may seem to flow from the attribute of
   omnipotence. For if God is the Author of all things, must it not be as
   a mode of Divine operation that man acts? We can get no further than a
   doctrine of emanation or derivation. Again, we are caught unwittingly
   in the toils of an illogical' logic. For why should we assume that
   because God is omnipotent He cannot make beings independent of Himself?
   A figure of speech is not generally a good argument; but in this
   instance it is a sufficient one, what is needed being not an answer but
   only an image or mode of conception. (For in theology and philosophy it
   constantly happens that while logic is working out antinomies, language
   fails to supply an expression of the intermediate truth.) The carpenter
   makes a chair, which exists detached from its maker; the mechanician
   constructs a watch, which is wound up and goes by the action of a
   spring or lever; he can frame yet more complex instruments, in which
   power is treasured up for other men to use. The greater the skill of
   the artificer the more perfect and independent the work. Shall we say
   of God only that He is unable to separate His creations from Himself?
   That man can produce works of imagination which live for ages after he
   is committed to the dust; nay, that in the way of nature he can bring
   into existence another being endowed with life and consciousness to
   perpetuate his name? But that God cannot remove a little space to
   contemplate His works? He must needs be present in all their movements,
   according to the antiquated error of natural philosophers, that no body
   can act where it is not.'

   (2) Yet although the freedom of the will may be consistent with the
   infinity and omnipotence of God, when rightly understood and separated
   from logical consequences, it may be thought to be really interfered
   with by the Divine omniscience. God knows all things; our thoughts are
   His before they are our own; what I am doing at this moment was
   certainly foreseen by Him; what He certainly foresaw yester day, or a
   thousand years ago, or from everlasting, how can I avoid doing at this
   time? To-day He sees the future course of my life. Can I make or unmake
   what is already within the circle of His knowledge? The imperfect
   judgement of my fellow-creatures gives me no disquietude--they may
   condemn me, and I may reverse their opinion. But the fact that the
   unerring judgement of God has foreseen my doom renders me alike
   indifferent to good and evil. 1

   What shall we say to this? First, that the distinction between Divine
   and human judgements is only partially true. For as God sees with
   absolute unerringness, so a wise man who is acquainted with the
   character and circumstances of others may foretell and assure their
   future life with a great degree of certainty. He may perceive
   intuitively their strength and weakness, and prophesy their success or
   failure. Now, here it is observable, that the fact of our knowing the
   probable course of action which another will pursue has nothing to do
   with the action itself. It does not exercise the smallest constraint on
   him; it does not produce the slightest feeling of constraint. Imagine
   ourselves acquainted with the habits of some animal; as we open the
   door of the enclosure in which it is kept, we know that it will run up
   to or away from us; it will show signs of pleasure or irritation. No
   one supposes that its actions, what ever they are, depend on our
   knowledge of them. Let us take another example, which is at the other
   end of the scale of freedom and intelligence. Conceive a veteran
   statesman casting his eye over the map of Europe, and foretelling the
   parts which nations or individuals would take in some coming struggle,
   who thinks the events when they come to pass are the consequences of
   the prediction? Every one is able to distinguish the causes of the
   events from the knowledge which foretells them.

   There are degrees in human knowledge or fore knowledge proceeding from
   the lowest probability, through increasing certainty, up to absolute
   demonstration. But as faint presumptions do not affect the future, nor
   great probability, so neither does scientific demonstration. Many
   natural laws cannot be known more certainly than they are; but we do
   not there fore confuse the fact with our knowledge of the fact. The
   time of the rising of the sun, or of the ebb and flow of the tide, are
   foretold and acted upon without the least hesitation. Yet no one has
   imagined that these or any other natural phenomena are affected by our
   previous calculations about them.

   Why, then, should we impose on ourselves the illusion that the unerring
   certainty of Divine knowledge is a limit or shackle on human actions?
   The foreknowledge which we possess ourselves in no way produces the
   facts which we foresee; the circumstance that we foresee them in
   distant time has no more to do with them than if we saw them in distant
   space. So, once more, we return from the dominion of ideas and trains
   of speculative consequences to rest in experience. God sits upon the
   circle of the heavens, present, past, and future in a figure open
   before Him, and sees the inhabitants of the earth like grass hoppers,
   coming and going, to and fro, doing or not doing their appointed work:
   His knowledge of them is not the cause of their actions. So might we
   ourselves look down upon some wide prospect without disturbing the
   peaceful toils of the villagers who are beneath. They do not slacken or
   hasten their business because we are looking at them. In like manner
   God may look upon mankind without thereby interfering with the human
   will or influencing in any degree the actions of men.

   (3) But the difficulty with which Christianity surrounds, or rather
   seems to surround us, winds yet closer; it rests also on the Christian
   consciousness. The doctrine of grace may be expressed in the language
   of St. Paul: I can do nothing as of myself, but my sufficiency is of
   God'; that which is truly self, which is peculiarly self, is yet in
   another point of view not self but God. He who has sought most
   earnestly to fulfil the will of God refers his efforts to something
   beyond himself; he is humble and simple, seeming to fear that he will
   lose the good that he has, when he makes it his own.

   This is the mind of Christ which is formally expressed in theology by
   theories of grace. Theories of grace have commonly started from the
   transgression of Adam and the corruption of human nature in his
   posterity. Into the origin of sin it is not necessary for us to
   inquire; we may limit ourselves to the fact. All men are very far gone
   from original righteousness, they can only return to God by His grace
   preventing them; that is to say, anticipating and co-operating with the
   motions of their will. (1) God wills that some should be saved, whom He
   elects without reference to their deserts; (2) God wills that some
   should be saved, and implants in them the mind of salvation; (3) God
   calls all men, but chooses some out of those whom He calls; (4) God
   chooses all alike, and shows no preference to any; (5) God calls all
   men, even in the heathen world, and some hear His voice, not knowing
   whom they obey. Such are the possible gradations of the question of
   election. In the first of them grace is a specific quality distinct
   from holiness or moral virtue; in the second it is identical with
   holiness and moral virtue, according to a narrow conception of them
   which denies their existence in those who have not received a Divine
   call; in the third an attempt is made to reconcile justice to all men
   with favour to some; in the fourth the justice of God extends equally
   to all Christian men; in the fifth we pass the boundaries of the
   Christian world and expression is given to the thought of the Apostle,
   Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but that in
   every nation he that feareth God is accepted of him.'

   All these theories of grace affect at various points the freedom of the
   will, the first seeming wholly to deny it, while all the others attempt
   some real or apparent reconcilement of morality and religion. The
   fourth and fifth meet the difficulties arising out of our ideas of the
   justice of God, but fall into others derived from experience and fact.
   Can we say that all Christians, nominal and real, nay, that the most
   degraded persons among the heathen, are equally the subjects of Divine
   grace? Then grace is some thing unintelligible; it is a word only, to
   which there is no corresponding idea. Again, how upon any of these
   theories is grace distinguishable from the better consciousness of the
   individual himself? Can any one pretend to say where grace ends and the
   movement of the will begins? Did any one ever recognize in himself
   those lines of demarcation of which theology sometimes speaks?

   These are difficulties in which we are involved by oppositions of
   knowledge falsely so called'. The answer to them is simple--a return to
   fact and nature. When, instead of reading our own hearts, we seek, in
   accordance with a preconceived theory, to determine the proportions of
   the divine and human--to distinguish grace and virtue, the word of God
   and man--we know not where we are, the difficulty becomes insuperable,
   we have involved ourselves in artificial meshes, and are bound hand and
   foot. But when we look by the light of conscience and Scripture on the
   facts of human nature, the difficulty of itself disappears. No one
   doubts that he is capable of choosing between good and evil, and that
   in making this choice he may be supported, if he will, by a power more
   than earthly. The movement of that Divine power is not independent of
   the movement of his own will, but coincident and identical with it.
   Grace and virtue, conscience and the Spirit of God, are not different
   from each other, but in harmony. If no man can do what is right without
   the aid of the Spirit, then every one who does what is right has the
   aid of the Spirit.

   Part of the difficulty originates in the fact that the Scripture
   regards Christian truth from a Divine aspect, God working in you,'
   while ordinary language, even among religious men in modern times,
   deals rather with human states or feelings. Philosophy has a third way
   of speaking which is different from either. Two or more sets of words
   and ideas are used which gradually acquire a seemingly distinct
   meaning; at last comes the question--in what relation they stand to one
   another? The Epistles speak of grace and faith at the same time that
   heathen moralists told of virtue and wisdom, and the two streams of
   language have flowed on without uniting even at our own day. The
   question arises, first, whether grace is anything more than the
   objective name of faith and love; and again, whether these two latter
   are capable of being distinguished from virtue and truth? Is that which
   St. Paul called faith absolutely different from that which Seneca
   termed virtue or morality? Is not virtue, pro`s theo'n, faith? Is faith
   anything without virtue? But if so, they are not opposed at all, or
   opposed only as part and whole. Christianity is not the negative of the
   religions of nature or the heathen; it includes and purifies them.

   Instead, then, of arranging in a sort of theological diagram the
   relations of the human will to Divine grace, we deny the possibility of
   separating them. In various degrees, in many ways, more or less
   consciously in different cases, the Spirit of God is working in the
   soul of man. It is an erroneous mode of speaking, according to which
   the free agency of man is represented as in conflict with the Divine
   will. For the freedom of man in the higher sense is the grace of God;
   and in the lower sense (of mere choice) is not inconsistent with it.
   The real opposition is not between freedom and predestination, which
   are imperfect and in some degree misleading expressions of the same
   truth, but between good and evil.

   II. Passing out of the sphere of religion, we have now to examine the
   question of free agency within the narrower limits of the mind itself.
   It will confirm the line of argument hitherto taken, if it be found
   that here too we are subject to the illusions of language and the
   oppositions of logic.

   (1) Every effect has a cause; every cause an effect. The drop of rain,
   the ray of light does not descend at random on the earth. In the
   natural world though we are far from understanding all the causes of
   phenomena, we are certain from that part which we know, of their
   existence in that part which we do not know. In the human mind we
   perceive the action of many physical causes; we are therefore led to
   infer, that only our ignorance of physiology prevents our perceiving
   the absolute interdependence of body and soul. So indissolubly are
   cause and effect bound together, that there is a mental impossibility
   in conceiving them apart. Where, then in the endless chain of causes
   and effect can the human will be inserted, or how is the insertion of
   the will, as one cause out of many, consistent with the absolute
   freedom which we ascribe to it?

   The author of the Critic of pure Reason is willing to accept such a
   statement as has been just made, and yet believes himself to have found
   out of time and space, independent of the laws of cause and effect, a
   transcendental freedom. Our separate acts are determined by previous
   causes; our whole life is a continuous effect', yet in spite of this
   mechanical sequence, freedom is the overruling law which gives the form
   to human action. It is not necessary to analyse the steps by which Kant
   arrived at this paradoxical conclusion. Only by adjusting the glass so
   as to exclude from the sight everything but the perplexities of
   previous philosophers, can we conceive how a great intellect could have
   been led to imagine the idea of a freedom from which the notion of time
   is abstracted, of which nevertheless we are conscious in time. For what
   is that freedom which does not apply to our individual acts, hardly
   even to our lives as a whole, like a point which has neither length nor
   breadth, wanting both continuity and succession?

   Scepticism proceeds by a different path in reference to our ideas of
   cause and effect; it challenges their validity, it denies the necessity
   of the connexion, or even doubts the ideas themselves. There was a time
   when the world was startled out of its propriety at this verbal puzzle,
   and half believed itself a sceptic. Now we know that no innovation in
   the use of words or in forms of thought can make any impression on
   solid facts. Nature and religion, and human life remain the same, even
   to one who entirely renounces the common conceptions of cause and
   effect.

   The sceptic of the last century, instead of at tempting to invalidate
   the connexion of fact which we express by the terms cause and effect,
   should rather have attacked language as unequal to the subtlety of
   nature'. Facts must be described in some way, and therefore words must
   be used, but always in philosophy with a latent consciousness of their
   inadequacy and imperfection. The very phrase, cause and effect,' has a
   direct influence in disguising from us the complexity of causes and
   effects. It is too abstract to answer to anything in the concrete. It
   tends to isolate in idea some one antecedent or condition from all the
   rest. And the relation which we deem invariable is really a most
   various one. Its apparent necessity is only the necessity of relative
   terms. Every cause has an effect, in the same sense that every father
   has a son. But while in the latter case the relation is always the
   same, the manifold application of the terms, cause and effect, to the
   most different phenomena has led to an ambiguity in their use. Our
   first impression is, that a cause is one thing and an effect another,
   but soon we find them doubling up, or melting into one. The circulation
   of the blood is not the cause of life, in the same sense that a blow
   with the hammer may be the cause of death; nor is virtue the cause of
   happiness, in precisely the same sense that the circulation of the
   blood is the cause of life. Everywhere, as we ascend in the scale of
   creation, from mechanics to chemistry, from chemistry to physiology and
   human action, the relative notion is more difficult and subtle, the
   cause becoming inextricably involved with the effect, and the effect
   with the cause, every means being an end, and every end a means.'

   Hence, no one who examines our ideas of cause and effect will believe
   that they impose any limit on the will; they are an imperfect mode in
   which the mind imagines the sequence of nature or moral actions; being
   no generalization from experience, but a play of words only. The chain
   which we are wearing is loose, and when shaken will drop off. External
   circumstances are not the cause of which the will is the effect;
   neither is the will the cause of which circumstances are the effect.
   But the phenomenon intended to be described by the words cause and
   effect' is itself the will, whose motions are analysed in language
   borrowed from physical nature.

   The same explanation applies to another formula: the strongest motive.'
   The will of every man is said to be only determined by the strongest
   motive: what is this but another imaginary analysis of the will itself?
   For the motive is a part of the will, and the strongest motive is
   nothing more than the motive which I choose. Nor is it true as a fact
   that we are always thus determined. For the greater proportion of human
   actions have no distinct motives; the mind does not stand like the
   schoolmen's ass, pondering between opposite alternatives. Mind and
   will, and the sequence of cause and effect, and the force of motives,
   are different ways of speaking of the same mental phenomena.

   So readily are we deceived by language, so easily do we fall under the
   power of imaginary reasonings. The author of the Novum Organum has put
   men upon their guard against the illusions of words in the study of the
   natural sciences. It is true that many distinctions may be drawn
   between the knowledge of nature, the facts of which are for the most
   part visible and tangible, and morality and religion, which run up into
   the unseen. But is it therefore to be supposed that language, which is
   the source of half the exploded fallacies of chemistry and physiology,
   is an adequate or exact expression of moral and spiritual truths? It is
   probable that its analysis of human nature is really as erring and
   inaccurate as its description of physical phenomena, though the error
   may be more difficult of detection. Those inexact natures' or
   substances of which Bacon speaks exist in moral philosophy as in
   physics; their names are not heat, moisture, form, matter and the like,
   but necessity, free will, predestination, grace, motive, cause, which
   rest upon nothing and yet become the foundation-stones of many systems.
   Logic, too, has its parallels, and conjugates, and differences of kind,
   which in life and reality are only differences of degree, and remote
   inferences lending an apparent weight to the principle on which they
   really drag, which spread themselves over every field of thought and
   are hardly corrected by their inconsistency with the commonest facts.

   III. Difficulties of this class belong to the last generation rather
   than to the present; they are seldom discussed now by philosophical
   writers. Philosophy in our own age is occupied in another way. Her
   foundation is experience, which alone she interrogates respecting the
   limits of human action. How far is man a free agent? is the question
   still before us. But it is to be considered from without rather than
   from within, as it appears to others or ourselves in the case of
   others, and not with reference to our internal consciousness of our own
   actions.

   The conclusions of philosophers would have met with more favour at the
   hands of preachers and moralists, had they confined themselves to the
   fact. Indeed, they would have been irresistible, like the conclusions
   of natural science, for who can resist evidence that any one may verify
   for himself? But the taint of language has clung to them; the imperfect
   expression of manifest truths has greatly hindered the general
   acceptance of them even among the most educated. It was not understood
   that those who spoke of necessity meant nothing which was really
   inconsistent with free will; when they assumed a power of calculating
   human actions, it was not perceived that all of us are every day guilty
   of this imaginary impiety. The words, character, habit, force of
   circumstances, temperament and constitution imply all that is really
   involved in the idea that human action is subject to uniform laws.
   Neither is it to be denied that expressions have been used equally
   repugnant to fact and morality; instead of regularity, and order, and
   law, which convey a beneficent idea, necessity has been set up as a
   constraining power tending to destroy, if not really destroying, the
   accountability of man. History, too, has received an impress of
   fatalism, which has doubtless affected our estimate of the good and
   evil of the agents who have been regarded as not really responsible for
   actions which the march of events forced upon them.

   According to a common way of considering this subject, the domain of
   necessity is extending every day, and liberty is already confined to a
   small territory not yet reclaimed by scientific inquiry. Mind and body
   are in closer contact; there is increasing evidence of the
   interdependence of the mental and nervous powers. It is probable, or
   rather certain, that every act of the mind has a cause and effect in
   the body, that every act of the body has a cause and effect in the
   mind. Given the circumstances, parent age, education, temperament of
   each individual; we may calculate, with an approximation to accuracy,
   his probable course of life. Persons are engaged every day in making
   such observations; and whatever uncertainty there may be in the
   determination of the future of any single individual, this uncertainty
   is eliminated when the inquiry is extended to many individuals or to a
   whole class. We have as good data for supposing that a fixed proportion
   of a million persons in a country will commit murder or theft as that a
   fixed proportion will die without reaching a particular age and of this
   or that disease under given circumstances. And it so happens that we
   have the power of testing this order or uniformity in the most trifling
   of human actions. Nor can we doubt that were it worth while to make an
   abstract of human life, arranging under heads the least minutiae of
   action, all that we say and do would be found to conform to numerical
   laws.

   So, again, history is passing into the domain of philosophy. Nations,
   like individuals, are moulded by circumstances; in their first rise,
   and ever after in their course, they are dependent on country and
   climate, like plants or animals, embodying the qualities which have
   dropped upon them from sur rounding influences in national temperament;
   in their later stages seeming to react upon these causes, and coming
   under a new kind of law, as the earth discloses its hidden treasures,
   or the genius of man calls forth into life and action the powers which
   are dormant in matter. Nature, which is, in other words, the aggregate
   of all these causes, stamps nations and societies, and creates in them
   a mind, that is to say, ideas of order, of religion, of conquest, which
   they maintain, often unimpaired by the changes in their physical
   condition. She infuses among the mass a few great intellects, according
   to some law unknown to us, to instrument this lower world'. Here is a
   new power which is partially separated from the former, and yet
   combines with it in national existence, like body and soul in the
   existence of man. Partly isolated from their age and nation, partly
   also identified with them, it is a curious observation respecting great
   men that while they seem to have more play and freedom than others, in
   themselves they are often more enthralled, being haunted with the sense
   of a destiny which controls them. The heirs of all the ages' who have
   subjected nature to the dominion of science are also nature's subjects;
   the conquerors who have poured over the earth have only continued some
   wave or tendency in the history of the times which preceded them. From
   the thin vapour which first floated, as some believe, in the azure
   vault, up to that miracle of complexity which we call man, and again
   from man the individual to the whole human race, with its languages and
   religions, and other national characteristics, and back wards to the
   beginning of human history, in the works of mind too as well as in the
   material universe, there is not always development, but order, and
   uniformity, and law.

   It is a matter of some importance in what way this connexion or order
   of nature is to be expressed. For although words cannot alter facts,
   the right use of them greatly affects the readiness with which facts
   are admitted or received. Now the world may be variously imagined as a
   vast machine, as an animal or living being, as a body endowed with a
   rational or divine soul. All these figures of speech, and the
   associations to which they give rise, have an insensible influence on
   our ideas. The representation of the world as a machine is a more
   favourite one, in modern times, than the representation of it as a
   living being; and with mechanism is associated the notion of necessity.
   Yet the machine is, after all, a mere barren unity, which gives no
   conception of the endless fertility of natural or of moral life. So,
   again, when we speak of a soul of the world', there is no real
   resemblance to a human soul; there is no centre in which this mundane
   life or soul has its seat, no individuality such as characterizes the
   soul of man. But the use of the word invariably recalls thoughts of
   Pantheism:

     deum namque ire per omnes
     terrasque tractusque maris, coelumque profundum.'

   So the term law' carries with it an association, partly of compulsion,
   partly of that narrower and more circumscribed notion of law, in which
   it is applied to chemistry or mechanics. So again the word necessity'
   itself always has a suggestion of external force.

   All such language has a degree of error, because it introduces some
   analogy which belongs to another sphere of thought. But when, laying
   aside language, we consider facts only, no appearance of external
   compulsion arises, whether in nature, or in history, or in life. The
   lowest, and therefore the simplest idea, that we are capable of forming
   of physical necessity, is of the stone falling to the ground. No one
   imagines human action to be necessary in any such sense as this. If
   this be our idea of necessity, the meaning of the term must be enlarged
   when it is applied to man. If any one speaks of human action as the
   result of necessary laws, to avoid misunderstanding, we may ask at the
   outset of the controversy, In what degree necessary?' And this brings
   us to an idea which is perhaps the readiest solution of the apparent
   perplexity--that of degrees of necessity. For, although it is true,
   that to the eye of a superior or divine being the actions of men would
   seem to be the subject of laws quite as much as the falling stone, yet
   these laws are of a far higher or more delicate sort; we may figure
   them to ourselves truly, as allowing human nature play and room within
   certain limits, as regulating only and not constraining the freedom of
   its movements.

   How degrees of necessity are possible may be illustrated as follows:
   The strongest or narrowest necessity which we ever see in experience is
   that of some very simple mechanical fact, such as is furnished by the
   law of attraction. A greater necessity than this is only an
   abstraction; as, for example, the necessity by which two and two make
   four, or the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles But any
   relation between objects which are seen is of a much feebler and less
   absolute kind; the strongest which we have ever observed is that of a
   smaller body to a larger. The physiology even of plants opens to our
   minds freer and nobler ideas of law. The tree with its fibres and sap,
   drawing its nourishment from many sources, light, air, moisture, earth,
   is a complex structure: rooted to one particular spot, no one would
   think of ascribing to it free agency, yet as little should we think of
   binding it fast in the chains of a merely mechanical necessity. Animal
   life partaking with man of locomotion is often termed free; its sphere
   is narrowed only by instinct; indeed the highest grade of irrational
   being can hardly be said, in point of freedom, to differ from the
   lowest type of the human species. And in man himself are many degrees
   of necessity or freedom, from the child who is subject to its
   instincts, or the drunkard who is the slave of his passions, up to the
   philosopher comprehending at a glance the wonders of heaven and earth,
   the freeman whom the truth makes free', or the Christian devoting
   himself to God, whose freedom is obedience to a law'; that law being
   the law of the Spirit of life', as the Apostle expresses it; respecting
   which, nevertheless, according to another mode of speaking (so various
   is language on this subject), necessity is laid upon him.' And between
   these two extremes are many half freedoms, or imperfect necessities:
   one man is under the influence of habit, another of prejudice, a third
   is the creature of some superior will; of a fourth it is said, that it
   was impossible for him to act otherwise'; a fifth does by effort what
   to another is spontaneous; while in the case of all, allowance is made
   for education, temperament, and the like.

   The idea of necessity has already begun to expand; it is no longer the
   negative of freedom, they almost touch. For freedom, too, is subject to
   limitation; the freedom of the human will is not the freedom of the
   infinite, but of the finite. It does not pretend to escape from the
   conditions of human life. No man in his senses imagines that he can fly
   into the air, or walk through the earth; he does not fancy that his
   limbs will move with the expedition of thought. He is aware that he has
   a less, or it may be a greater, power than others. He learns from
   experience to take his own measure. But this limited or measured
   freedom is another form of enlarged necessity. Beginning with an
   imaginary freedom, we may reduce it within the bounds of experience;
   beginning with an abstract necessity, we may accommodate it to the
   facts of human life.

   Attention has been lately called to the phenomena (already noticed) of
   the uniformity of human actions. The observation of this uniformity has
   caused a sort of momentary disturbance in the moral ideas of some
   persons, who seem unable to get rid of the illusion, that nature
   compels a certain number of individuals to act in a particular way, for
   the sake of keeping up the average. Their error is, that they confuse
   the law, which is only the expression of the fact, with the cause; it
   is as though they affirmed the universal to necessitate the particular.
   The same uniformity appears equally in matters of chance. Ten thousand
   throws of the dice, ceteris paribus, will give about the same number of
   twos, threes, sixes: what compulsion was there here? So ten thousand
   human lives will give a nearly equal number of forgeries, thefts, or
   other extraordinary actions. Neither is there compulsion here; it is
   the simple fact. It may be said, Why is the number uniform? In the
   first place, it is not uniform, that is to say, it is in our power to
   alter the proportions of crime by altering its circumstances. And this
   change of circumstances is not separable from the act of the legislator
   or private individual by which it may be accomplished, which is in turn
   suggested by other circumstances. The will or the intellect of man
   still holds its place as the centre of a moving world. But, secondly,
   the imaginary power of this uniform number affects no one in
   particular; it is not required that A, B, C, should commit a crime, or
   transmit an undirected letter, to enable us to fill up a tabular
   statement. The fact exhibited in the tabular statement is the result of
   all the movements of all the wills of the ten thousand persons who are
   made the subject of analysis.

   It is possible to conceive great variations in such tables; it is
   possible, that is, to imagine, without any change of circumstances, a
   thousand persons executed in France during one year for political
   offences, and none the next. But the world in which this phenomenon was
   observed would be a very different sort of world from that in which we
   live. It would be a world in which nations, like individuals, went
   mad'; in which there was no habit, no custom; almost, we may say, no
   social or political life. Men must be no longer different, and so
   compensating one another by their excellencies and deficiencies, but
   all in the same extreme; as if the waves of the sea in a storm instead
   of returning to their level were to remain on high. The mere statement
   of such a speculation is enough to prove its absurdity. And, perhaps,
   no better way could be found of disabusing the mind of the objections
   which appear to be entertained to the fact of the uniformity of human
   actions, than a distinct effort to imagine the disorder of the world
   which would arise out of the opposite principle.

   But the advocate of free will may again return to the charge, with an
   appeal to consciousness. Your freedom,' he will say, is but half
   freedom, but I have that within which assures me of an absolute
   freedom, without which I should be deprived of what I call
   responsibility.' No man has seen facts of consciousness, and therefore
   it is at any rate fair that before they are received they shall be
   subjected to analysis. We may look at an outward object which is called
   a table; no one would in this case demand an examination into the human
   faculties before he admitted the existence of the table. But inward
   facts are of another sort; that they really exist, may admit of doubt;
   that they exist in the particular form attributed to them, or in any
   particular form, is a matter very difficult to prove. Nothing is easier
   than to insinuate a mere opinion, under the disguise of a fact of
   consciousness.

   Consciousness tells, or seems to tell, of an absolute freedom; and this
   is supposed to be a sufficient witness of the existence of such a
   freedom. But does consciousness tell also of the conditions under which
   this freedom can be exercised? Does it remind us that we are finite
   beings? Does it present to one his bodily, to another his mental
   constitution? Is it identical with self-knowledge? No one imagines
   this. To what then is it the witness? To a dim and unreal notion of
   freedom, which is as different from the actual fact as dreaming is from
   acting. No doubt the human mind has or seems to have a boundless power,
   as of thinking so also of willing. But this imaginary power, going as
   it does far beyond experience, varying too in youth and age, greatest
   often in idea when it is really least, cannot be adduced as a witness
   for what is inconsistent with experience.

   The question, How is it possible for us to be finite beings, and yet to
   possess this consciousness of freedom which has no limit? may be partly
   answered by another question: How is it possible for us to acquire any
   ideas which transcend experience? The answer is, only, that the mind
   has the power of forming such ideas; it can conceive a beauty,
   goodness, truth, which has no existence on earth. The conception,
   however, is subject to this law, that the greater the idealization the
   less the individuality. In like manner that imperfect freedom which we
   enjoy as finite beings is magnified by us into an absolute idea of
   freedom, which seems to be infinite because it drops out of sight the
   limits with which nature in fact everywhere surrounds us; and also
   because it is the abstraction of self, of which we can never be
   deprived, and which we conceive to be acting still when all the
   conditions of action are removed.

   Freedom is absolute in another sense, as the correlative of obligation.
   Men entertain some one, some another, idea of right, but all are bound
   to act according to that idea. The standard may be relative to their
   own circumstances, but the duty is absolute; and the power is also
   absolute of refusing the evil and choosing the good, under any possible
   contingency. It is a matter (not only of consciousness but) of fact,
   that we have such a power, quite as much as the facts of statistics, to
   which it is some times opposed, or rather, to speak more correctly, is
   one of them. And when we make abstraction of this power, that is, when
   we think of it by itself, there arises also the conception of an
   absolute freedom.

   So singularly is human nature constituted, looking from without on the
   actions of men as they are, witnessing inwardly to a higher law. You
   ought to do so; you have the power to do so,' is consistent with the
   fact, that in practice you fail to do so. It may be possible for us to
   unite both these aspects of human nature, yet experience seems to show
   that we commonly look first at one and then at the other. The inward
   vision tells us the law of duty and the will of God; the outward
   contemplation of ourselves and others shows the trials to which we are
   most subject. Any transposition of these two points of view is fatal to
   morality. For the proud man to say, I inherited pride from my
   ancestors'; or for the licentious man to say, It is in the blood'; for
   the weak man to say, I am weak, and will not strive'; for any to find
   the excuses of their vices in their physical temperament or external
   circumstances, is the corruption of their nature.

   Yet this external aspect of human affairs has a moral use. It is a duty
   to look at the consequences of actions, as well as at actions
   themselves; the knowledge of our own temperament, or strength, or
   health, is a part also of the knowledge of self. We have need of the
   wise man's warning, about age which will not be defied' in our moral
   any more than in our physical constitution. In youth, also, there are
   many things outward and indifferent, which cannot but exercise a moral
   influence on after life. Often opportunities of virtue have to be made,
   as well as virtuous efforts; there are forms of evil, too, against
   which we struggle in vain by mere exertions of the will. He who trusts
   only to a moral or religious impulse, is apt to have aspirations, which
   never realize themselves in action. His moral nature may be compared to
   a spirit without a body, fluttering about in the world, but unable to
   comprehend or grasp any good.

   Yet more, in dealing with classes of men, we seem to find that we have
   greater power to shape their circumstances than immediately to affect
   their wills. The voice of the preacher passes into the air; the members
   of his congregation are like persons beholding their natural face in a
   glass'; they go their way, forgetting their own likeness. And often the
   result of a long life of ministerial work has been the conversion of
   two or three individuals. The power which is exerted in such a case may
   be compared to the unaided use of the hand, while mechanical appliances
   are neglected. Or to turn to another field of labour, in which the
   direct influence of Christianity has been hitherto small, may not the
   reason why the result of missions is often disappointing be found in
   the circumstance, that we have done little to improve the political or
   industrial state of those among whom our missionaries are sent? We have
   thought of the souls of men, and of the Spirit of God influencing them,
   in too naked a way; instead of attending to the complexity of human
   nature, and the manner in which God has ever revealed Himself in the
   history of mankind.

   The great lesson, which Christians have to learn in the present day, is
   to know the world as it is; that is to say, to know themselves as they
   are; human life as it is; nature as it is; history as it is. Such
   knowledge is also a power, to fulfil the will of God and to contribute
   to the happiness of man. It is a resting-place in speculation, and a
   new beginning in practice. Such knowledge is the true reconcilement of
   the opposition of necessity and free will. Not that spurious
   reconcilement which places necessity in one sphere of thought, freedom
   in another; nor that pride of freedom which is ready to take up arms
   against plain facts; nor yet that demonstration of necessity in which
   logic, equally careless of facts, has bound fast the intellect of man.
   The whole question, when freed from the illusions of language, is
   resolvable into experience. Imagination cannot conquer for us more than
   that degree of freedom which we truly have; the tyranny of science
   cannot impose upon us any law or limit to which we are not really
   subject; theology cannot alter the real relations of God and man. The
   facts of human nature and of Christianity remain the same, whether we
   describe them by the word necessity' or freedom', in the phraseology of
   Lord Bacon and Locke, or in that of Calvin and Augustine.
     __________________________________________________________________

RICHARD BAXTER [12]

   I have been young and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous
   forsaken.--Ps. xxxvii. 25.

   A GREAT man, Richard Baxter, who died about two hundred years ago,
   towards the close of his life drew up a narrative of the errors into
   which upon reflection he seemed to himself to have fallen in the course
   of it. This is not the exact anniversary of his death, which took place
   on Dec. 8, 1691. But I may, perhaps, without impropriety, speak to you
   of him on this day. The lives of great and good men are the best
   sermons which we ever read or hear; and the preacher may do well
   sometimes to shield himself behind them, and so to speak with greater
   authority than his own words could fairly claim. It is probable that
   the name of Baxter has never been celebrated before within these walls;
   for he was the leader of the Nonconformists of his day; and it is not
   to be supposed that perfect justice was done him in a later generation
   any more than in his own by his opponents. But now that both he and
   they are gone to their account, we can think of them only as the
   servants of God who by some strange accident were parted from one
   another here, but have now entered into common rest and dwell together
   in His presence.

   I propose in this sermon to do three things--First, I shall give a
   brief account of the life of this remarkable man; one of the greatest
   of Englishmen, not only of his own, but of any time. Secondly, I shall
   enumerate a few particulars remarked by him about himself in that
   singular review of his own errors and misconceptions to which I have
   already referred, and which may with truth be said to be unique in
   English literature. Thirdly, I shall ask you to consider how you or I
   or any of us may, in a humble way, either towards the end of life or in
   the middle of it, examine our own lives in a similar spirit and see
   ourselves as we truly are, not gilded by self-love or self-conceit, but
   as we appear in the sight of other men and women of sense and in the
   sight of God.

   The life of Richard Baxter coincides with a long period of political
   trouble. He was born in the year 1615, and died about three years after
   the Revolution of 1688. Both he and his father, who was an excellent
   man, seem to have passed through the awakening of Puritanism. In 1641
   we find him settled at Kidderminster, in which town he continued to
   minister, with some interruptions, for seventeen years. Wonderful
   stories are told of the effects of his preaching. It might be said of
   him that as the people of Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah,
   so did the people of Kidderminster at the preaching of Richard Baxter.
   Nor was he more occupied in preaching the Gospel to his own flock than
   in opposing the Anabaptists and other sectaries, including the soldiers
   of Cromwell's army, with in exhaustible energy and irresistible logic.
   He was on the side of the Parliament, but believed for a time that both
   he and they were loyal subjects of the king. Under the Commonwealth he
   was appointed chaplain to Cromwell, and seems to have spoken his mind
   to him with astonishing freedom about King Charles the First. Neither
   of them liked or trusted the other.

   After the Restoration, during the short period when it was the policy
   of the Court to conciliate the Nonconformists, he was offered the
   Bishopric of Hereford. The offer was declined. Baxter continued to
   struggle for peace and toleration until, on Aug. 22, 1662, the
   Nonconformist ministers were finally expelled by the Act of Uniformity.
   That was the greatest misfortune that has ever befallen this country, a
   misfortune which has never been retrieved. For it has made two nations
   of us instead of one, in politics, in religion, almost in our notion of
   right and wrong: it has arrayed one class of society permanently
   against another. And many of the political difficulties of our own time
   have their origin in the enmities caused by the rout of Aug. 22, 1662,
   called Black Bartholomew's Day, which Baxter vainly strove to avert.

   When the policy of the Church and the Court could no longer be
   resisted, Baxter, who might have been Bishop of Hereford, thought only
   of retiring to his beloved Kidderminster. He was not permitted to do
   so. For the next twenty-six years his life was that of an exile in his
   own land and a prisoner for conscience sake. Often there must have come
   into his mind those words of St. Paul, which in a measure represented
   his own sufferings: In labours more abundant, . . . in prisons more
   frequent, in deaths oft. . . . In perils by mine own countrymen, . . .
   in perils in the city, . . . in perils among false brethren. . . .
   Besides that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches.'
   He was also afflicted during nearly the whole of his life with painful
   and terrible disorders of the body, which had often to be endured in
   prison and without the necessary means of support. Yet was this the
   time when the activity of his mind was greatest. He is said to have
   been the most voluminous of English divines. He published 168 volumes;
   and among them one book which, with the single exception of the
   Pilgrim's Progress, has had a wider diffusion and found a nearer way to
   the hearts of religious men in England than any other devotional
   writing, and may still be read for its style as well as for its high
   merits with a deep interest, The Saints Everlasting Rest.

   When we hear of such men and their labours, who combined the
   persevering industry of the great scholar with the moral force of a
   hero and a leader of man kind, we are apt to say, There were giants on
   the earth in those days.' It would be better to say, that they were the
   sons of God who fought not in their own strength--one man more than a
   thousand, for they endured as seeing Him who is invisible.

   Yet in this life of suffering, in the prison, in the court of the
   oppressed, in the poor and mean abode, amid disease and all the ills
   which flesh is heir to, there was one star or bright spot which shed a
   ray upon his darkness. This was a lady of gentle birth and breeding
   who, when he was near fifty years of age and she little more than
   twenty, gave herself to God and to him. He had once thought that it was
   better for a minister to be unmarried; he might have added the reason
   given by St. Paul--because of the troubles of the times. But now he
   came to see that a lot might be possible for two joined in sweet
   society, which to a single person might have been death and despair
   only. We may be confident that to her no other life would have been
   acceptable. She lived after her marriage nineteen years. Her name was
   Margaret Charlton. Her husband wrote what he called the breviate of her
   life, from which and from other sources an eloquent writer of the
   present day has drawn a portrait of her. She was one of those
   remarkable women who have effaced themselves that they might help and
   save others, who have found their lives in losing them. After
   mentioning that her strangely vivid wit' was celebrated by John Howe,
   the great Nonconformist divine, the writer to whom I have referred
   continues as follows: Timid, gentle, and reserved, and nursed amid all
   the luxuries of her age, her heart was the abode of affection so
   intense and of fortitude so enduring that her meek spirit, impatient of
   one selfish wish, progressively acquired all the heroism of
   benevolence, and seemed at length incapable of one selfish fear. In
   prison, in sickness, in every form of danger and fatigue, she was still
   with unabated cheerfulness at the side of her husband, prompting him to
   the discharge of every duty, calming the asperities of his temper, his
   associate in unnumbered acts of philanthropy, embellishing his humble
   home by the little arts with which a cultivated mind imparts its own
   gracefulness to the meanest dwelling-place; and during the nineteen
   years of their union joining with him in one unbroken strain of filial
   affiance to the divine mercy. Her tastes and habits had been moulded
   with a perfect conformity to his. He celebrates her catholic charity to
   the opponents of their religious opinions and her in flexible adherence
   to her own; her high esteem of the active and passive virtues of the
   Christian life, as contrasted with a barren orthodoxy; her noble
   disinterestedness, her skill in casuistry, her love of music and her
   medicinal arts.'

   There is still one more fact in Richard Baxter's life which, even in
   the shortest account of him, ought not to be passed over in silence:
   his refusal to join with the Roman Catholics against the Church of
   England, who had been his persecutors during the twenty years previous.
   When the crisis which pre ceded the Revolution of 1688 was approaching,
   the government of James the Second sought to enlist the Nonconformists
   in their interest by a promise of toleration in their struggle against
   the Church of England. Baxter, who had been recently imprisoned,
   refused to join this new league and covenant, and by his great
   influence with his brethren succeeded in detaching them from it. He had
   no thought of revenging himself on the clerical party for their
   persecution of him. And certainly no one ever conferred a greater
   benefit on the Church of England or on the country. For it is easy to
   see that, if James the Second could have carried with him the
   Dissenters, he could have settled things as he pleased. This was what
   Baxter by his statesmanlike insight foresaw, and was not disposed to
   gain advantages for Non conformists at the cost of the destruction of
   the Church of England or the establishment of Popery. He was the same
   man who, when he was committed twenty years before to Clerkenwell gaol
   for some slight infringement of ecclesiastical law, at the same time
   obtained from King Charles the Second, through the influence of one of
   his disciples, the charter of the original Society for the Propagation
   of the Gospel.

   And so this eminent servant of God passed to his rest. Considering his
   character and popularity, the extent of his writings, his genius and
   learning, he may be said to be the greatest of English theologians (or
   one of the greatest), as he has certainly been one of the most lasting
   influences on popular theology. He was not without faults, of which, we
   gather from his writings and also from the narrative to which I
   referred at first, too great pugnacity and contentiousness were the
   most serious. In the days of his youth he was too fervid and vehement
   and inconsiderate. But we are now to hear of him from his own just
   judgment of himself. He left no descendants. The scholar may be
   interested to know that William Baxter, the contemporary of Bentley and
   the editor of Anacreon and Horace, was the son of Richard Baxter's
   brother.

   Baxter wrote a voluminous autobiography, in which at the end of the
   first part is found the review of his own life which I am going to
   describe to you. Why is this passage so remarkable? Because it is one
   of the few theological writings in which the love of holiness and the
   love of truth seem altogether to take the place of ecclesiastical and
   party interests; because it gets rid of conventionalities into which we
   all of us so readily fall when writing of things which are beyond us;
   because it admits us behind the veil into the holy place of a good
   man's soul. Many persons have written about themselves, but no one has
   done so with the same calm judgment or the same breadth of charity
   towards all other men.

   He looks back into the vista of the past and judges his own motives and
   actions with the impartiality of history. He sees more clearly his own
   errors and prejudices when he is at a distance from them, as we
   sometimes have a wider and truer view of the landscape when the sun is
   going down and the heat of the day is past. He tells us that in his
   youth he was very apt to start upon controversies in ignorance of the
   antipathies and enmities which were engendered by them; now he is
   disposed to ignore differences, and to think with Lord Bacon that it is
   a great benefit of Church peace and concord, when writing controversies
   is turned into books of practical devotion'. He has learned to doubt
   whether men can be reasoned into their opinions. He does not venture to
   say anything of his opponents, because his testimony respecting them is
   hardly to be believed. His observation of the world has led him to
   doubt the value of professions of religion; he had once thought that
   all who could pray movingly were saints, but now he has more charity
   for many who are wanting in such gifts. He is not for narrowing the
   Church more than Christ himself alloweth; nor for robbing Him of any of
   His flock. He is not so much inclined to pass a peremptory sentence of
   damnation upon all who never heard of Christ, having much more reason,
   he says, than I knew of before to think that God's dealings with such
   are much unknown to us. His censures of Papists too differ much from
   what they were at first. For he is now assured that their
   misexpressions and misunderstandings of us, and our mistakings of them
   and inconvenient expression of our own opinions, has made the
   differences between Protestant and Catholic on many points, such as
   Justification, to seem much greater than they are, and that in some
   points there is no difference at all. The great and irreconcileable
   differences lie in their church tyranny and usurpations, in their
   corruptions and abasement of God's worship, and their befriending of
   ignorance and vice. Yet he doubts not that God hath many sanctified
   ones among them; and he cannot believe that God will ever cast a soul
   into hell that truly loveth Him. He is farther than ever from expecting
   unity and prosperity to the Church on earth; or that saints should
   dream of a kingdom of this world, or flatter themselves with hopes of a
   Golden Age, or reigning over the ungodly. The observation of God's
   dealing with the Church in every age, and His befooling of them who
   have dreamed of glorious times, as the Anabaptists, the Fifth Monarchy
   Men, and others, confirms him in this. If he were among the Greeks, the
   Lutherans, the Independents, yea, even the Anabaptists, he would
   sometimes hold communion with them. I cannot be of their mind that
   think God will not accept him that prayeth by the Common Prayer, nor
   yet can I be of their mind that say the like of extempore prayers.'

   One more example of his toleration shall be added which, considering
   the country and age in which he lived, is really wonderful: it goes
   back far into the history of the past. After speaking of the prodigious
   lies which had been told in his own age in the interests of religion,
   and the tendency to believe everything on the one side and nothing on
   the other, he continues: Therefore I confess that I give but halting
   credit to most histories that are written, not only against the
   Albigenses and Waldenses, but against most of the ancient heretics who
   have left us none of their own writings in which they speak for
   themselves; and I heartily lament that the historical writings of the
   ancient schismatics and heretics (as they were called) perished, and
   that partiality suffered them not to survive, that we might have had
   more light on the Church affairs of those times and been better able to
   judge between the Fathers and them. And as I am prone to think that few
   of them were so bad as their adversaries made them, so I am apt to
   think that such as the Novatians, whom their adversaries commend, were
   very good men and more godly than most Catholics, however mistaken in
   some one point.'

   Two characteristics he notes of advancing years. First, he feels a
   decline of the zeal of his youth, for which he is half inclined to
   blame himself; he thinks that he is like a person travelling a way
   which he hath often gone, or casting up an account which he hath often
   cast up, or playing upon an instrument which he hath often played upon.
   And no doubt there have been many whose religions, like their other
   affections, have in a manner withered when life was beginning to decay,
   and who by frequent repetitions have grown tired of religious
   exercises. But he also finds better reasons for this decline of
   devotional fervour. For he has learned to value things more truly as he
   grows older and to see them in a juster proportion. In his youth he was
   quickly past fundamentals, and was running up into a multitude of
   controversies, and greatly delighted with metaphysical and scholastic
   writings, but in later life he laid less stress upon those
   controversies and curiosities, and found less and less certainty in
   them. The subjective certainty of an opinion cannot go beyond the
   objective evidence for it; and he will not pretend to be more certain
   than he is. He strongly urges that religion should rest on the broadest
   foundations; on the Being of God rather than on a future state of
   rewards and punishments, on that state itself rather than on the
   endless duration of it; on the essentials of the Christian faith rather
   than on the meaning of particular texts or the canonicalness of some
   certain books. They must allow him to use to Christians the arguments
   by which alone a heathen can be touched, such as the being of a God and
   the necessity of holiness.

   There are some things for which he believes that God may have forgiven
   him, but he cannot forgive himself, especially for very rash words or
   deeds by which he may have seemed injurious or less tender and kind
   than he should have been to near and dear relations, whose love,' he
   says, abundantly obliged me. When such are dead, though we never
   differed in point of interest or any grave matter, every provoking word
   which I gave them maketh me almost irreconcileable to myself, and tells
   me how repentance brought some of old to pray to the dead whom they had
   wronged to forgive them in the passion of their soul. 1

   There is another confession which he makes true to the experience, not
   only of himself, but probably of most religious men. He says that as he
   grew old he is troubled not so much by the consciousness (of past sins,
   but by the sensible want of the love of God shed abroad in the heart.
   This he conceives to be the top of all religion which gives value to
   all the rest because it alters and elevates the mind. He used to think
   such meditations tiresome, and that everybody knew God to be good and
   great, and heaven to be a blessed place, but now he would sooner read,
   hear, or meditate on such truths than on anything else.

   One more extract which speaks to our own and to every other age of the
   Christian Church: I apprehend it,' he says, to be a matter of great
   necessity to imprint true Catholicism in the minds of Christians, it
   being a most lamentable thing to observe how few Christians in the
   world there be that fall not into one sect or the other, and wrong not
   the common interest of Christianity for the promotion of the interest
   of their sect. And how lamentably love is thereby destroyed, so that
   most men think they are not bound to love men as the members of Christ
   which are against their party. And if they can but get to be of a sect
   which they think to be the holiest or which is the largest, they think
   that they are sufficiently warranted to deny others to be God's Church,
   or at least to deny them Christian love and communion.'

   So I have endeavoured to place before you, very imperfectly, a fragment
   or two of a great mind. He was one who lived as well as preached, and
   whose life was his most powerful sermon to posterity, as well as to his
   own age. Some of his words speak to us heart to heart, and have a
   far-reaching meaning to the wants of our days; there are others which
   are not equally appropriate because the relations of the Church and of
   the world have become different, and the thoughts of men have widened
   with the process of the suns'. There have been controversies in our own
   day, not so virulent, but as widely diffused as in the days of the
   Commonwealth and of the Restoration; and must we not all of us admit
   that we have changed many of our religious opinions during the last
   fifty years? There are a few here present who can remember how forty
   years ago, or again rather more than sixty years, the panic about
   Popery spread through the country. There may have been some indirect
   benefit which arose from such a movement, but it can hardly be said to
   have conduced to Christian charity. Reflecting on the past, and
   remembering all the evils which for a century and more have been the
   result of this anti-Catholic bigotry, must we not apply to ourselves
   the censure which Christ passed on His disciples, Ye know not what
   manner of spirit ye are of,' or perhaps on this as on some other great
   historical occasion ask the question Whether nations like individuals,
   may not go mad'? Or, once more, we may note a remarkable change of
   opinion in which many of us no longer agree with our former selves,
   when the results of historical criticism in their bearing on the Old
   and New Testament began to be made known in this country; and now that
   we are becoming familiar with them, will any one say that we ought not
   in some degree to alter our attitude towards such inquiries as light
   and knowledge increase, and not embark the religion of Christ in such a
   hopeless and unmeaning controversy? While we wrangle here in the dark,'
   I am once more quoting Baxter--while we wrangle here in the dark, we
   are dying and passing to the world which will decide all our
   controversies, and the safest passage is by peaceable holiness. It is a
   great source of calm and repose in our religious life always to turn
   from small things to great, from things far away to things near at
   hand, from the foolishness of controversy to the truths which are
   simple and eternal, from man to God.'

   And now, leaving history and controversy and subjects which most of us
   only hear about at a distance, I will suppose a similar vein of
   reflection to be entertained by an elder person living not two hundred
   years ago, but a contemporary of our own, present in this Abbey here
   to-night. He too has something to say to us which is of interest to
   himself and to others. Now on the threshold of old age, he may be
   supposed to take a look backward over the sixty or seventy years which
   have passed, not in the great world, but within the limits of his own
   home. His religion is not derived from books, but comes to him from his
   experience of life.

   First he has a deep sense of thankfulness to God for all His mercies.
   He may have had troubles and disappointments in life, but he
   acknowledges that all things have been ordered for the best. The days
   pass more quickly with him now than formerly and make less impression
   on him. He will soon be crossing the bar and going forth upon the
   ocean. He is not afraid of death, it seems natural to him; he is soon
   about to pass into the hands of God. He has many thoughts about the
   past which he does not communicate to others--about some persons in
   whom he has had a peculiar interest, about places in which he has
   lived, about words spoken to him in his youth which have strangely
   imprinted themselves on his mind, about many things which no one living
   but himself can remember. He wonders how he ever escaped from the
   temptations of youth, and is some times inclined to think that the
   Providence which watches over children and drunken people must have had
   a special care of him. He may have been guilty too of some meannesses
   or sins which are concealed from his fellow-men; he is thankful that
   they are known to God only. He is not greatly troubled at the
   remembrance of them, if he have been delivered from them, but much more
   at the unprofitableness of his whole life.

   Before he departs he has some things to say to his children or to his
   friends. He will tell them that he now sees this world in different
   proportions, and that what was once greatly valued by him now seems no
   longer of importance. The dreams of love and of ambition have fled
   away; he is no longer under the dominion of the hour. The
   disappointments which he has undergone no more affect him; he is
   inclined to think that they may have been for his good. He sees many
   things in his life which might have been better; opportunities lost
   which could never afterwards be by him recovered. He might have been
   wiser about health, or the education of his children, or his choice of
   friends, or the management of his business. He would like to warn
   younger persons against some of the mistakes which he had himself made.
   He would tell them that no man in later life rejoiced in the
   remembrance of a quarrel; and that the trifles of life, good temper, a
   gracious manner, trifles as they are thought, are among the most
   important elements of success. Above all he would exhort them to get
   rid of selfishness and self-conceit, which are the two greatest sources
   of human evil.

   There are some reflections which would often occur to his own mind
   though he might not speak of them to others. A sharp thrill of pain
   might sometimes pierce his heart when he remembered any irremediable
   wrong of which he had been the author, or when he recalled any unkind
   word to a parent which he had hastily uttered, or any dishonourable
   conduct of which he had been guilty. He need not disclose his fault to
   men, but neither will he disguise it from himself; least of all, if he
   have repented of the sin and is no longer the servant of it, should his
   conscience be overpowered by the remembrance of it. For sin too, like
   sorrow, is healed by time; and he who is really delivered from its
   bondage need not fear lest God should create it anew in him that He may
   inflict punishment upon him. For in the sight of God we are what we
   are, not what we have been at some particular moment; nor yet what we
   are in some detail or in reference to some particular act, but what we
   are on the whole.

   Once more, when a man is drawing towards the end, he will be apt to
   think of the blessings of friendship and of family life. He has done so
   little for others and received so much from them. The old days of his
   childhood come back to him: the memory of his father and mother and
   brothers and sisters, all in the house together, and the lessons and
   the games and the birthday feasts and rejoicings as in a picture crowd
   upon his thoughts. When we have grown old they are most of them taken
   before us; no one else can ever fill their place in our lives. Also
   there have been friends who have been like brothers and sisters to us;
   many of these too are gone and cannot be replaced. They have
   sympathized with our trials; they have inspired us with higher
   thoughts; they have spoken words which have been for ever imprinted on
   our mind. They have taken trouble to do us good--sometimes a remark of
   one of them thrown out as if by accident, or a letter written at a
   critical time, may have saved us from a fatal mistake. They have cared
   for our interests more than for their own, they would have died for us.
   Such experiences of disinterested friendship many men have had; and we
   reflect upon them more as we are left more alone, and the world is
   withdrawing from us. Living or dead the true friend can never be
   forgotten by faithful and loyal hearts. And as the days become fewer,
   we think more of them as they once were in life--as they are now with
   God where we too soon shall be.

   Yet once more, we may suppose the statesman, who is within a measurable
   distance of the end,


   When the hurlyburly's done,

   When the battle's lost and won,'

   to make similar reflections on his own political life. Perhaps he will
   say in the words of one who ten years ago was so familiar a figure
   among us: In the past there are many things I condemn, many things that
   I deplore, but a man's life must be taken as a whole.' He will not look
   back to party triumphs or great displays of oratory with the
   satisfaction which he once felt in them. He will acknowledge that he
   has made endless mistakes, and will sometimes wish that he had been
   more independent of popular opinion. He has done little compared with
   what he once hoped to do. He will value most that part of his work
   which tended to promote justice, or to save life or to increase health,
   or to diffuse education, or to establish the foundation of peace
   between nations and classes. And in the words of one of the greatest of
   English statesmen, he will be glad to be remembered with expressions of
   goodwill in the abode of those whose lot it is to labour and to earn
   their daily bread by the sweat of their brow.

   Lastly, we may extend the spirit of the reflections of Richard Baxter
   to the religious difficulties of our own day. We may imagine an aged
   man who has lived through the last fifty or sixty years, and has been
   watching the movements which have agitated the Church from extreme to
   extreme and back again, each tendency seeming to have as great or even
   a greater reaction. He would see, as Baxter saw in his old age, that
   all other things come to an end, but that of the love of God and man
   there is no end. He would not raise questions about the rites of the
   Church, or the canonicity of the books of Scripture: these belong to
   criticism and ecclesiastical history, not to the spiritual life. He
   would seek for the permanent and essential only in the books of
   Scripture, in the lives of good men, in the religion of the world. To
   follow Christ, to speak the truth in love, to do to others as you would
   they should do to you, these are the eternal elements of religion which
   can never pass away, and he who lives in these lives in God.

    Oxford: HORACE HART, Printer to the University
     __________________________________________________________________

   [12] A sermon, preached in Westminster Abbey, July 4, 1891.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Genesis

   [1]3:15

   Leviticus

   [2]18:18

   Joshua

   [3]10:12   [4]10:13

   2 Samuel

   [5]12:23

   Job

   [6]19:25

   Psalms

   [7]17:15

   Isaiah

   [8]19:18-25   [9]19:25   [10]23:1-18   [11]45:1   [12]53:2   [13]53:7

   Jeremiah

   [14]9:25   [15]9:26   [16]11:19   [17]12:14-17   [18]31:29   [19]36:30

   Lamentations

   [20]5:7

   Ezekiel

   [21]12:22-23   [22]14:20   [23]14:22-23

   Hosea

   [24]11:1

   Amos

   [25]7:10-17

   Matthew

   [26]2:1   [27]2:15   [28]2:22   [29]5:32   [30]5:34   [31]9:13
   [32]16:18   [33]16:18-19   [34]18:18   [35]19:21   [36]22:21
   [37]24:34   [38]28:20

   Mark

   [39]9:44-48   [40]10:11   [41]10:12   [42]13:32

   Luke

   [43]1:1   [44]1:2   [45]2:4

   John

   [46]1:1   [47]3:3   [48]3:5   [49]6:52   [50]6:56   [51]6:63
   [52]10:35   [53]14:26   [54]16:15   [55]18:36   [56]19:35   [57]20:30
   [58]21:25

   Acts

   [59]5:29   [60]16:33   [61]17:1

   Romans

   [62]1:2   [63]1:3   [64]1:4   [65]1:8   [66]1:16-18   [67]1:17
   [68]1:32   [69]2:1-16   [70]2:12-28   [71]2:17-21   [72]3:1-9
   [73]3:2   [74]3:9   [75]3:15   [76]3:19   [77]3:25   [78]5:5
   [79]5:7   [80]5:12   [81]5:12-18   [82]9:1-33   [83]9:5   [84]9:22
   [85]10:1-21   [86]10:5   [87]10:10   [88]11:32   [89]13:1   [90]15:6
   [91]16:25-27

   1 Corinthians

   [92]3:15   [93]3:15   [94]5:9   [95]9:20   [96]11:10   [97]13:8
   [98]15:4   [99]15:22   [100]15:29   [101]15:56   [102]16:3

   2 Corinthians

   [103]1:17   [104]3:16   [105]4:12   [106]6:6-10   [107]6:8-10
   [108]10:10   [109]11:21-33

   Galatians

   [110]2:20   [111]3:1   [112]4:11-20   [113]4:13   [114]4:13

   Philippians

   [115]1:15   [116]2:6   [117]2:6

   Colossians

   [118]2:16   [119]4:16

   2 Thessalonians

   [120]2:2   [121]2:15   [122]3:16

   1 Timothy

   [123]3:16

   2 Timothy

   [124]3:16

   2 Peter

   [125]3:15-16

   1 John

   [126]1:1   [127]5:7

   Revelation

   [128]5:7
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Greek Words and Phrases

     * En pa'se epistole: [129]1
     * Henika d' a`n epistrepse pros kurion, periaireitai to kalumma:
       [130]1
     * hoti he agape tou theou ekkechutai en tais kardiais: [131]1
     * ThS: [132]1
     * OS: [133]1
     * aga'pai: [134]1
     * alla` kai': [135]1
     * apo'stolos: [136]1
     * agiasmo's: [137]1
     * amarti'a, pi'stis: [138]1
     * ga`r: [139]1
     * gnosis: [140]1
     * de': [141]1
     * dia': [142]1 [143]2
     * dikaiosu'ne: [144]1
     * dikaiosu'ne Theou: [145]1
     * dikaiosu'ne, ale'theia, aga'pe: [146]1
     * dikaiosu'ne, ale'theia, aga'pe, pi'stis, do'xa: [147]1
     * ekto`s lo'gou pornei'as: [148]1
     * en Theo: [149]1
     * en Christo: [150]1
     * exousi'a, epibalo'n, sunapago'menoi, k.t.l.: [151]1
     * epi'skopos: [152]1 [153]2
     * es aphane`s to`n muthon anenei'kas ouk e'chei e'lenchon: [154]1
     * eidos: [155]1
     * zoe': [156]1 [157]2
     * e kuriake` eme'ra: [158]1
     * theo'pneustos: [159]1
     * i'na: [160]1
     * kti'sis: [161]1
     * me'n: [162]1
     * no'mos: [163]1 [164]2
     * no'mos, zoe', tha'natos: [165]1
     * o kai` e dia'konos: [166]1
     * ou mo'non: [167]1
     * ousi'a: [168]1
     * pan estin a'nthropos sumphore': [169]1
     * para'kletos: [170]1
     * pi'stis: [171]1
     * pi'stis Iesou Christou: [172]1
     * pi'stis Iesou Christou, upomoue` Christou, ale'theia theou, do'xa
       theou, sophi'a theou: [173]1
     * pi'stis, cha'ris, soteri'a: [174]1
     * pneuma: [175]1 [176]2
     * pneuma theou: [177]1
     * pollo mallon: [178]1
     * presbu'teros: [179]1
     * pro`s theo'n: [180]1
     * proegra'phe: [181]1
     * proecho'metha: [182]1
     * sophi'a: [183]1
     * upe`r emon: [184]1
     * cha'ris: [185]1
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Latin Words and Phrases

     * Da fidei quae fidei sunt: [186]1
     * Ex aliquo non sequitur omnis: [187]1
     * Gallus in campanili: [188]1
     * Ipsa conteret caput tuum.: [189]1
     * Non nisi ex Scripturâ Scripturam potes interpretari: [190]1
     * Novum Testamentum in vetere latet: [191]1
     * Poena linguarum dispersit homines, donum linguarum in unum
       collegit.: [192]1
     * a priori: [193]1 [194]2 [195]3 [196]4
     * actu et potentiâ: [197]1
     * ceteris paribus: [198]1
     * conscientia: [199]1
     * deum namque ire per omnes terrasque tractusque maris, coelumque
       profundum.: [200]1
     * disjecta membra: [201]1
     * extra palum Ecclesiae: [202]1
     * imaginatio: [203]1
     * solvitur ambulando: [204]1
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Pages of the Print Edition

   [205]i  [206]ii  [207]iii  [208]iv  [209]vi  [210]vii  [211]viii
   [212]ix  [213]x  [214]xi  [215]xii  [216]xiii  [217]xiv  [218]xv
   [219]xvi  [220]1  [221]2  [222]3  [223]4  [224]5  [225]6  [226]7
   [227]8  [228]9  [229]10  [230]11  [231]13  [232]14  [233]15  [234]16
   [235]17  [236]18  [237]19  [238]20  [239]21  [240]22  [241]23  [242]24
   [243]25  [244]26  [245]27  [246]28  [247]29  [248]30  [249]31  [250]32
   [251]33  [252]34  [253]35  [254]36  [255]37  [256]38  [257]39  [258]40
   [259]41  [260]42  [261]43  [262]49  [263]45  [264]46  [265]47  [266]48
   [267]49  [268]50  [269]51  [270]52  [271]53  [272]54  [273]55  [274]56
   [275]57  [276]58  [277]59  [278]60  [279]61  [280]62  [281]63  [282]64
   [283]65  [284]66  [285]67  [286]68  [287]69  [288]70  [289]71  [290]72
   [291]73  [292]74  [293]75  [294]76  [295]77  [296]78  [297]79  [298]80
   [299]81  [300]82  [301]83  [302]84  [303]85  [304]86  [305]87  [306]88
   [307]89  [308]90  [309]91  [310]92  [311]93  [312]94  [313]95  [314]96
   [315]97  [316]98  [317]99  [318]100  [319]101  [320]102  [321]103
   [322]104  [323]105  [324]106  [325]107  [326]108  [327]109  [328]110
   [329]111  [330]112  [331]113  [332]114  [333]115  [334]116  [335]117
   [336]118  [337]119  [338]120  [339]121  [340]122  [341]123  [342]124
   [343]125  [344]126  [345]127  [346]128  [347]129  [348]130  [349]131
   [350]132  [351]133  [352]134  [353]135  [354]136  [355]137  [356]138
   [357]139  [358]140  [359]141  [360]142  [361]143  [362]144  [363]145
   [364]146  [365]147  [366]148  [367]149  [368]150  [369]151  [370]152
   [371]153  [372]154  [373]155  [374]156  [375]157  [376]158  [377]159
   [378]160  [379]161  [380]162  [381]163  [382]164  [383]165  [384]166
   [385]167  [386]168  [387]169  [388]170  [389]171  [390]172  [391]173
   [392]174  [393]175  [394]176  [395]177  [396]178  [397]179  [398]180
   [399]181  [400]182  [401]183  [402]184  [403]185  [404]186  [405]187
   [406]188  [407]189  [408]190  [409]191  [410]192  [411]193  [412]199
   [413]195  [414]196  [415]197  [416]198  [417]199  [418]200  [419]201
   [420]202  [421]203  [422]204  [423]205  [424]206  [425]207  [426]208
   [427]209  [428]210  [429]211  [430]212  [431]213  [432]214  [433]215
   [434]216  [435]217  [436]218  [437]219  [438]220  [439]221  [440]222
   [441]223  [442]224  [443]225  [444]226  [445]227  [446]228  [447]229
   [448]230  [449]231  [450]232  [451]233  [452]234  [453]235  [454]236
   [455]237  [456]238  [457]239  [458]240  [459]241  [460]242
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

References

   1. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Gen&scrCh=3&scrV=15#iii-p90.3
   2. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Lev&scrCh=18&scrV=18#iii-p30.5
   3. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Josh&scrCh=10&scrV=12#iii-p90.5
   4. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Josh&scrCh=10&scrV=13#iii-p90.6
   5. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Sam&scrCh=12&scrV=23#iii-p54.1
   6. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Job&scrCh=19&scrV=25#iii-p54.3
   7. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Ps&scrCh=17&scrV=15#iii-p54.2
   8. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Isa&scrCh=19&scrV=18#vi-p18.5
   9. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Isa&scrCh=19&scrV=25#vi-p13.1
  10. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Isa&scrCh=23&scrV=1#iii-p15.3
  11. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Isa&scrCh=45&scrV=1#iii-p15.5
  12. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Isa&scrCh=53&scrV=2#vi-p20.1
  13. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Isa&scrCh=53&scrV=7#vi-p20.2
  14. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Jer&scrCh=9&scrV=25#vi-p18.1
  15. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Jer&scrCh=9&scrV=26#vi-p18.2
  16. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Jer&scrCh=11&scrV=19#vi-p20.3
  17. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Jer&scrCh=12&scrV=14#vi-p18.4
  18. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Jer&scrCh=31&scrV=29#vi-p32.1
  19. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Jer&scrCh=36&scrV=30#iii-p15.2
  20. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Lam&scrCh=5&scrV=7#vi-p32.2
  21. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Ezek&scrCh=12&scrV=22#vi-p13.2
  22. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Ezek&scrCh=14&scrV=20#vi-p26.1
  23. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Ezek&scrCh=14&scrV=22#vi-p26.2
  24. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Hos&scrCh=11&scrV=1#iii-p90.2
  25. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Amos&scrCh=7&scrV=10#iii-p15.4
  26. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=2&scrV=1#iii-p17.4
  27. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=2&scrV=15#iii-p90.1
  28. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=2&scrV=22#iii-p17.5
  29. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=5&scrV=32#iii-p30.2
  30. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=5&scrV=34#iii-p6.1
  31. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=9&scrV=13#iii-p6.1
  32. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=16&scrV=18#iii-p23.4
  33. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=16&scrV=18#iii-p34.2
  34. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=18&scrV=18#iii-p34.2
  35. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=19&scrV=21#iii-p6.1
  36. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=22&scrV=21#iii-p6.3
  37. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=24&scrV=34#iii-p23.3
  38. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Matt&scrCh=28&scrV=20#iii-p6.3
  39. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Mark&scrCh=9&scrV=44#iii-p102.1
  40. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Mark&scrCh=10&scrV=11#iii-p30.3
  41. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Mark&scrCh=10&scrV=12#iii-p30.4
  42. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Mark&scrCh=13&scrV=32#iii-p34.1
  43. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Luke&scrCh=1&scrV=1#iii-p17.2
  44. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Luke&scrCh=1&scrV=2#iii-p17.3
  45. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Luke&scrCh=2&scrV=4#iii-p17.6
  46. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=1&scrV=1#iii-p26.1
  47. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=3&scrV=3#iii-p2.2
  48. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=3&scrV=5#iii-p36.1
  49. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=6&scrV=52#iii-p35.1
  50. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=6&scrV=56#iii-p36.1
  51. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=6&scrV=63#iii-p35.2
  52. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=10&scrV=35#iii-p26.2
  53. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=14&scrV=26#iii-p30.8
  54. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=16&scrV=15#iii-p30.8
  55. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=18&scrV=36#iii-p28.1
  56. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=19&scrV=35#iii-p17.1
  57. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=20&scrV=30#iii-p17.7
  58. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=John&scrCh=21&scrV=25#iii-p17.7
  59. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Acts&scrCh=5&scrV=29#iii-p6.2
  60. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Acts&scrCh=16&scrV=33#iii-p30.9
  61. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Acts&scrCh=17&scrV=1#iii-p65.10
  62. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=2#iii-p25.1
  63. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=3#iii-p24.2
  64. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=4#iii-p24.3
  65. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=8#iii-p67.11
  66. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=16#iii-p67.3
  67. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=17#iv-p11.4
  68. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=1&scrV=32#iii-p67.4
  69. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=2&scrV=1#iii-p33.1
  70. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=2&scrV=12#vi-p18.3
  71. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=2&scrV=17#iii-p65.13
  72. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=3&scrV=1#iii-p64.2
  73. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=3&scrV=2#iii-p67.12
  74. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=3&scrV=9#iii-p65.1
  75. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=3&scrV=15#iii-p48.2
  76. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=3&scrV=19#iii-p67.1
  77. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=3&scrV=25#iii-p23.6
  78. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=5&scrV=5#iv-p11.5
  79. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=5&scrV=7#iii-p67.13
  80. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=5&scrV=12#iii-p30.12
  81. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=5&scrV=12#iii-p65.13
  82. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=9&scrV=1#iii-p64.2
  83. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=9&scrV=5#iii-p23.12
  84. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=9&scrV=22#iii-p65.13
  85. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=10&scrV=1#iii-p64.2
  86. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=10&scrV=5#vi-p1.1
  87. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=10&scrV=10#iii-p67.14
  88. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=11&scrV=32#iii-p102.2
  89. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=13&scrV=1#iii-p6.4
  90. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=15&scrV=6#iii-p23.7
  91. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rom&scrCh=16&scrV=25#iii-p65.13
  92. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=3&scrV=15#iii-p2.1
  93. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=3&scrV=15#iii-p34.3
  94. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=5&scrV=9#vii-p3.3
  95. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=9&scrV=20#iii-p64.3
  96. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=11&scrV=10#iii-p23.2
  97. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=13&scrV=8#iii-p93.1
  98. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=15&scrV=4#iii-p65.11
  99. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=15&scrV=22#iii-p30.11
 100. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=15&scrV=29#iii-p23.1
 101. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=15&scrV=56#viii-p1.1
 102. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Cor&scrCh=16&scrV=3#vii-p3.4
 103. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Cor&scrCh=1&scrV=17#iii-p65.9
 104. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Cor&scrCh=3&scrV=16#v-p1.3
 105. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Cor&scrCh=4&scrV=12#iv-p20.1
 106. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Cor&scrCh=6&scrV=6#iii-p64.1
 107. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Cor&scrCh=6&scrV=8#iv-p20.2
 108. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Cor&scrCh=10&scrV=10#vii-p3.2
 109. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Cor&scrCh=11&scrV=21#iii-p64.1
 110. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Gal&scrCh=2&scrV=20#iii-p48.1
 111. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Gal&scrCh=3&scrV=1#iii-p65.3
 112. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Gal&scrCh=4&scrV=11#iii-p64.4
 113. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Gal&scrCh=4&scrV=13#iii-p48.3
 114. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Gal&scrCh=4&scrV=13#iii-p65.7
 115. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Phil&scrCh=1&scrV=15#iii-p65.8
 116. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Phil&scrCh=2&scrV=6#iii-p23.5
 117. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Phil&scrCh=2&scrV=6#iii-p25.2
 118. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Col&scrCh=2&scrV=16#iii-p32.1
 119. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Col&scrCh=4&scrV=16#vii-p3.5
 120. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Thess&scrCh=2&scrV=2#vii-p3.1
 121. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Thess&scrCh=2&scrV=15#vii-p3.1
 122. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Thess&scrCh=3&scrV=16#vii-p1.2
 123. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1Tim&scrCh=3&scrV=16#iii-p23.8
 124. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Tim&scrCh=3&scrV=16#iii-p30.7
 125. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=2Pet&scrCh=3&scrV=15#vii-p3.6
 126. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1John&scrCh=1&scrV=1#iii-p24.1
 127. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=1John&scrCh=5&scrV=7#iii-p23.9
 128. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3?scrBook=Rev&scrCh=5&scrV=7#iii-p65.12
 129. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-p1.1
 130. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#v-p1.1
 131. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p11.6
 132. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p23.10
 133. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p23.11
 134. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.13
 135. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p67.7
 136. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.9
 137. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.5
 138. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p11.2
 139. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p67.5
 140. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.6
 141. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p67.10
 142. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p65.5
 143. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p65.6
 144. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.4
 145. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.9
 146. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p16.1
 147. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p11.1
 148. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p30.1
 149. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.12
 150. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.11
 151. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.1
 152. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p30.10
 153. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.10
 154. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p40.1
 155. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p13.1
 156. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p12.3
 157. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p12.4
 158. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.14
 159. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p30.6
 160. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.14
 161. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.8
 162. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p67.9
 163. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.6
 164. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p12.2
 165. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p12.1
 166. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.12
 167. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p67.6
 168. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p13.2
 169. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-p10.1
 170. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.8
 171. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.2
 172. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.10
 173. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p11.8
 174. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.5
 175. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.7
 176. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p11.3
 177. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p11.7
 178. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p67.8
 179. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.11
 180. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-p40.1
 181. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p65.4
 182. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p65.2
 183. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.7
 184. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p64.13
 185. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p62.3
 186. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p82.1
 187. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p67.2
 188. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p37.1
 189. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p90.4
 190. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p53.1
 191. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-p9.1
 192. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p59.1
 193. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p15.1
 194. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p18.1
 195. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p72.1
 196. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-p14.1
 197. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p18.1
 198. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-p60.1
 199. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p9.1
 200. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-p55.1
 201. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-p10.1
 202. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-p33.2
 203. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-p9.2
 204. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-p5.1
 205. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#i-Page_i
 206. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#i-Page_ii
 207. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#i-Page_iii
 208. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.i-Page_iv
 209. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_vi
 210. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_vii
 211. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_viii
 212. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_ix
 213. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_x
 214. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_xi
 215. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_xii
 216. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_xiii
 217. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_xiv
 218. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_xv
 219. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_xvi
 220. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ii.iii-Page_1
 221. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_2
 222. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_3
 223. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_4
 224. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_5
 225. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_6
 226. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_7
 227. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_8
 228. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_9
 229. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_10
 230. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_11
 231. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_13
 232. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_14
 233. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_15
 234. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_16
 235. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_17
 236. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_18
 237. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_19
 238. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_20
 239. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_21
 240. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_22
 241. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_23
 242. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_24
 243. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_25
 244. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_26
 245. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_27
 246. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_28
 247. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_29
 248. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_30
 249. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_31
 250. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_32
 251. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_33
 252. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_34
 253. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_35
 254. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_36
 255. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_37
 256. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_38
 257. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_39
 258. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_40
 259. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_41
 260. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_42
 261. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_43
 262. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_49
 263. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_45
 264. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_46
 265. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_47
 266. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_48
 267. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_49_1
 268. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_50
 269. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_51
 270. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_52
 271. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_53
 272. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_54
 273. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_55
 274. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_56
 275. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_57
 276. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_58
 277. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_59
 278. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_60
 279. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_61
 280. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_62
 281. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_63
 282. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_64
 283. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_65
 284. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_66
 285. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_67
 286. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_68
 287. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_69
 288. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_70
 289. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_71
 290. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_72
 291. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_73
 292. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_74
 293. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_75
 294. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_76
 295. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_77
 296. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_78
 297. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_79
 298. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_80
 299. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_81
 300. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_82
 301. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_83
 302. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_84
 303. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_85
 304. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_86
 305. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_87
 306. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_88
 307. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_89
 308. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_90
 309. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_91
 310. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_92
 311. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_93
 312. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_94
 313. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_95
 314. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_96
 315. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_97
 316. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_98
 317. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_99
 318. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_100
 319. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_101
 320. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_102
 321. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_103
 322. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_104
 323. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_105
 324. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_106
 325. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_107
 326. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_108
 327. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_109
 328. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_110
 329. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_111
 330. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_112
 331. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_113
 332. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_114
 333. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iii-Page_115
 334. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_116
 335. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_117
 336. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_118
 337. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_119
 338. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_120
 339. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_121
 340. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_122
 341. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_123
 342. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_124
 343. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_125
 344. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_126
 345. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_127
 346. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_128
 347. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_129
 348. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_130
 349. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_131
 350. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#iv-Page_132
 351. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#v-Page_133
 352. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#v-Page_134
 353. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#v-Page_135
 354. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#v-Page_136
 355. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#v-Page_137
 356. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_138
 357. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_139
 358. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_140
 359. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_141
 360. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_142
 361. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_143
 362. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_144
 363. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_145
 364. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_146
 365. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_147
 366. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_148
 367. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_149
 368. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_150
 369. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_151
 370. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_152
 371. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_153
 372. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_154
 373. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_155
 374. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_156
 375. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_157
 376. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_158
 377. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vi-Page_159
 378. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_160
 379. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_161
 380. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_162
 381. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_163
 382. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_164
 383. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_165
 384. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_166
 385. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#vii-Page_167
 386. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_168
 387. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_169
 388. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_170
 389. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_171
 390. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_172
 391. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_173
 392. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_174
 393. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_175
 394. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_176
 395. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_177
 396. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_178
 397. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_179
 398. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_180
 399. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#viii-Page_181
 400. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_182
 401. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_183
 402. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_184
 403. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_185
 404. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_186
 405. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_187
 406. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_188
 407. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_189
 408. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_190
 409. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_191
 410. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_192
 411. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_193
 412. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_199
 413. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_195
 414. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_196
 415. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_197
 416. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_198
 417. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_199_1
 418. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_200
 419. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_201
 420. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_202
 421. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_203
 422. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_204
 423. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_205
 424. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_206
 425. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_207
 426. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_208
 427. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_209
 428. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_210
 429. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_211
 430. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_212
 431. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_213
 432. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_214
 433. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_215
 434. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_216
 435. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_217
 436. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_218
 437. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_219
 438. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_220
 439. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_221
 440. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_222
 441. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_223
 442. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_224
 443. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_225
 444. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#ix-Page_226
 445. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_227
 446. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_228
 447. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_229
 448. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_230
 449. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_231
 450. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_232
 451. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_233
 452. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_234
 453. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_235
 454. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_236
 455. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_237
 456. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_238
 457. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_239
 458. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_240
 459. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_241
 460. file:///ccel/j/jowett_b/scripture/cache/scripture.html3#x-Page_242