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THE
FITNESS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
FOR
UNFOLDING THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF ME-N.
II.
CHRIST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS,
OR, THE
UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM.
BEING
THE HULSEAN LECTURES
FOR MDCCCXLV. AND MDCCCXLVI.
BY RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, M.A.,
VICAR -CFP.ITCHEN-STOKE, HANTS; PROFESSOR OP DIVINITY, KING S COLLEGE, LONDON; EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP
OF LONDON; AND LATE HULSEAN LECTURER.
rom itt Ztvou4 lrtjuh  BbitionW, attibfzt     tis   autbe or.
PHILADELPHIA:
H. HOOKER. —S. W. COR. EIGHTH AND CHESTNUT STS.
18 5 6.








ADVERTISEMENT.
I HAVE not felt myself at liberty to make
more than a few verbal alterations, or here
and there  to recast a sentence, or add a
clause, in these Lectures, on the occasion of
their second  appearance.  I have inserted
indeed a few brief passages, which, originally
belonging to the Discourses, had been omitted
in the delivery, and have to the Second Series
appended a considerable number of Notes, in
confirmation or illustration of statements made
in the text.  These having been asked for
in more quarters than one, I trust may not
be found unacceptable to some readers.
ITCHEN-STOKE, Nov. 19, 1847.








CONTENTS, FOR TiE YEAR 1845.
LECTURE I.
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
PIsalm CXIX. 18.
Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out
of thy law,.. a                                        9
LECTURE II.
THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.
Ephesians I. 9, 10.
Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according
to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in himself;
that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might
gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are
in heaven and which are on earth; even in him,. 24
LECTURE III.
THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.
Matthew XIV. 20.
They did all eat and were filled,...               89
LECTURE IV.
THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.
Hebrews I. 1, 2.
God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in time
past unto the fathers, by the prophets, hath in these last
days spoken unto us by his Son,... 57
(5)




6                       CONTENTS.
LECTURE V.
THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.
John XII. 16.
These things understood not his disciples at the first; but when
Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these
things were written of him,.                        72
LECTURE VI.
THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.
Isaiah XII. 3.
WVith joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation,. 86
LECTURE VII.
THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE.
Ezekiel XLVII. 9.
And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which
moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live,. 101
LECTURE VIII.
THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.
Revelations VI. 2.
Conquering and to conquer,....115




CONTENTS, FOR THE YEAR 1846.
LECTURE I.
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
Haggai II. 7
The Desire of all nations shall come,. 131
LE CTURE II.
THE VANQUISHER OF HADES.
Mark XVI.- 3.
Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the
sepulchre?   -... 148
LECTURE III.
THE SON OF GOD.
Acts XIV. 11.
And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up
their voices, saying, in the speech of Lycaonia, The'gods
are come down to us in the likeness of men,... 163
LECTURE IV.
THE PERFECT SACRIFICE..Iicah VI. 6, 7.
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself
before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt
offerings; with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be
pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of
rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?.. 177
(7)




8                       CONTENTS.
LECTURE V.
THE RESTORER OF PARADISE.
Genesis V. 29
And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort
us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of
the ground which the Lord hath cursed,... 192
LECTURE VI.
THE REDEEMER FROM SIN.
Romans VII. 21-23.
I find then a law, that, when I would -do good, evil is present
with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring
against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity
to the law of sin which is in my members,... 205
LECTURE VII.
THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM.
Hebrews XI. 10.
A city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker ip
God,.                                              222
LECTURE VIII.
CONCLUDING LECTURE.
1 Thess. V. 21.
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good,... 238




THE-FITNESS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
FOR
UNFOLDING THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MEN.
PSAIM  CXIX. 18.
Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.
IT was with a true insight into the sad yet needful conditions of the Truth militant in a world of error, that he
who has of such just title given his name to these Lectures,
which I am now permitted to deliver in this place, devoted
so largelyof his temporal means to the securing among us
a succession of discourses, having more or less nearly to do
with the establishing and vindicating of that Truth against
all gainsayers and opposers.  For such apologies of our
holy Faith as he desired by this and other kindred foundations of which he was the author, to promote and set for,
ward, are deeply grounded in the very nature of the Faith
itself-and this, whether they be defensive or aggressive,
whether they be of the Truth' clearing itself from unjust.aspersions, or carrying the war, as it must often do, into the
quarters of error, and proving itself not merely to be true,
but to be Truth absolute, to the exclusion of all rival claims.
We know, as a matter of history, that Christian literature
did begin, as far back as we can trace it, with works of this
character; they are among the earliest which have reached
us; probably among the earliest which existed.  Nor do
(9)




10                    LECTURE I.
they belong merely to the first ages of the Chtirch's being,
however in them they may naturally have had a special importance. The Truth, like Him who gave it, will always
be a sign which shall be spoken against. The forms of the
enmity may change; the coarser and more brutal accusations of one age may give place to subtler charges of another;
but so long as an ungodly world exists, the enmity itself
will remain, and will find utterance. The Truth, therefore,
must ever be succinct, and prompt to give an answer for
itself; and this it does the more readily, as knowing that
not man's glory, but God's glory is at hazard, when it is
assailed; as being infinitely removed from that pride which
might tempt to the keeping silence, because it knows that
the accusations made against it are unjust; being rather full
of that humility and love, which make it willingly condescend to the most wayward, if haply it may win them to
the service of its King.
And this is not all: the Truth cannot pause when it
has thus refuted and thrown back the things that it knew
not, which yet were laid to its charge. In its very nature
it is aggressive also. How should it not be so?, how should
it not make war on the strongholds of falsehood and error,
when its very task in the world is to deliver them that were
prisoners there? how should it not seek to gather men
under its banner, —being moved, as it ever is, with an inward bleeding compassion for all them  that are aliens from
the faith of Christ, as knowing that every man, till he has
found himself in Him, is estranged from the true home of
his spirit, the right centre of his being? How should it
not press its treasures upon each, commend its medicines to
all, when they are medicines for every man's hurt, treasures
which would make every man rich? when it knows that it
has the reality, of which every lie is the counterfeit; that
when men are the fiercest set against it, then are they the
most madly at strife with their own blessedness?




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                11
But this, it might be said, would sufficiently explain the
uses of Christian apology before a world which resists, or
puts by, the Faith; it would explain why the Truth should
count itself happy to stand, as it did once in the person of
Paul, before Festus and Agrippa, and in presence of Gentile
and Jew, to make answer for itself. But allowing this,
what means it when before a congregation of faithful men,
when at one of the great centres ~of Christian light and
knowledge in our own land, a preacher undertakes, and
that at large and from year to year, the handling some
point of the evidences of our Religion?  Might not this
seem at first as superfluous a form, as when, upon a day of
coronation, a champion rides forth, and with none but loyal
hearts beating in unison with the multitudinous voices
which have hailed his king and theirs, flings down his
glove, and challenges any that will gainsay the monarch's
right to the crown which has just been set upon his brows?
Our task might indeed be superfluous as this, were its only
purpose to convince opposers. There is blessed be God, a
foregone, conclusion in the minds of the faithful, drawn from
all which they have known themselves of the life and
power of the Truth, which suffers them not for an instant to
regard it as something yet in debate, and still to be proved;
since it has already approved itself in power and blessing
unto them.
And yet even for them  a work of Christian apology may
be so constructed as to have its worth and meaning. If it
widen the basis on which their Faith reposes, if it help
them to take count of and use treasures, which before they
had, but Which they knew not before save in part; if it
cause them to pass from belief to insight; if it bring out
for them the perfect proportions of the Truth, its singular
adaptations to the pre-established harmonies of the world,
as they had not perceived these before; if it furnish them
with a clue for guiding some perplexed and wandering




12                   LECTURE I.
brother from his dreary labyrinth of doubt and error-if in
any of these ways it effectually serve, surely it has not been
in vain.  Such uses we acknowledge in Evidences of our
Faith, when we constitute them a part of our discipline in
this University.; which assuredly we do, not as presuming
that we have to deal with any who are yet aliens from that
Faith, who have yet need to be brought to the acknowledging of the truth as it is in Jesus; but rather as desiring to
put them who already have drawn in their faith, and that
from better sources, from the lips of their mothers, from the
catechisms of their childhood, from among the sanctities of
their home, in possession of the scientific grounds of that
belief, which already, by a better and more immediate
tenure, is theirs.
Nor may we leave wholly out of sight that in a time like
our own, of great spiritual agitation, at a place like this, of
signal intellectual activity, where oftentimes the low mutterings of distant controversies, scarcely heard elsewhere, are
distinctly audible-there can hardly fail to be some per-.plexed with difficulties, harassed, it may be, with doubts
which they do not welcome, but would give worlds to be
rid of for ever-doubts which, perhaps, -the very preciousness of the Truth in their sight alone magnifies into importance; for they feel that they are going to hang upon that
Truth all that is dear to them for life and for eternity; that it
must be to them as their spirit's bride; and therefore they
cannot endure upon it the faintest breath of suspicion. I
say, brethren, that we may not leave wholly out of mind
that one and another in such perplexity of spirit may be
among us here. Happy above measure he who has " a mouth
and wisdom" given him to meet the necessities of such an
one among his brethren; who shall help to bring him  into
the secure haven of belief, into the confession that in Christ
Jesus are indeed laid up " all," and those infinite " treasures
of wisdom and knowledge."




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                13
But if discourses of the kind which I am commencing
to-day, are indeed to be profit to any, there appear to be one.
or two preliminary conditions in the:choice of a subject,
most needful to be observed; which failing to observe, we
shall, of sure consequence, fall wholly short of those ends
of usefulness which we desire.
And first, a work of Christian defence will be marred, if
the subject which we select be one upon which none of the
great and decisive issues of the mighty conflict between
Truth and error depend; as when in jousts and tournaments
a knight touches the shield of some feeble adversary, passing
by and leaving the stronger and more accomplished unchallenged. For thus it is with us, when we go off upon some
minor point, which even were it plainly won, would leave
us in no essential degree the better, nor an adversary the
worse; which he might yield without being dislodged from
his strongholds of unbelief, without even feeling them  less
tenable than before.
Or again, it will be to little profit that we deal with hinderances to men's belief, which once indeed were real and
urgent, but of which the- urgency and reality have long
since departed; if we take our stand in some part of the
battle-field from which the great turmoil of the conflict has
now ebbed and shifted away; or conjure up phantom forms
of opposition, which once indeed were living and strong,
but now survive only in the tradition of books, and at- this
day practically weaken no man's faith, disturb no man's
inner peace. This, too, were a fatal error, to have failed to
take note of that great stream of tendency, which has
borne -us amid other shoals, and near other rocks, from those
among which our forefathers steered with manful hearts the
bark of their faith, and of God's great mercy made not
shipwreck of that faith amidst them all.
Or, once more, Christian apology fails in its loftiest aim,
when it addresses, not.the whole man, but the man only
2




14                    LECTURE L.
upon one side, and that not the highest, of his being; when
it addresses,-not the conscience, the affections, the will, but
the understanding faculties alone.  How often do we meet
in books of Christian evidence the attempt made to substitute a logical or mathematical proof of our most holy Faith
for a moral one; to ascend to that proof by steps which can
no more be denied than the successive steps in a problem in
geometry, and so to drive an adversary into a corner from
whence there shall be no- escape.  But there is always an
escape for those that in heart and will are alienated from
the truth.  At some stage or other of the process they will
successfully break away, or even if they are brought to the
end, they remain not with us long. And we may thank
God that it is so; for it is part of the glory of the Truth
that it leads in procession no chained, no unwilling captives
-none that do not rejoice in their captivity, and share in the
triumph which they adorn. It is not therefore that arguments
which address themselves to lower parts of man's being than
the highest, are to be rejected-but only their insufficiency
acknowledged; that they of themselves will never introduce
any to the inner sanctuary of the Faith; but can only lead
him up to the doors.  Most needful are they in their place;
most needful that Christianity should approve itself to have
a true historic foundation; that as a fact in history it should
stand as rigid a criticism as any other fact; that the books
which profess to tell its story should vindicate for themselves -an authentic character; that the men who wrote
those books should be shown capable and credible witnesses
of the things which they deliver; that the'outworks of our
Faith should be seen to be no less defensible than its citadel.
]But, after all, the heart of the matter is not there; when all
is done,. men will feel in the deepest centre of their being
that it is the moral which must prove the historic, and not
the historic which can ever prove the moral; that evidences
drawn from without may be accepted as the welcome but;




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                 15
tresses, but that we can know no other foundations, of our
Faith than those which itself supplies.  Revelation, like the
sun, must be seen by its own light; being itself the highest.
the ultimate appeal with regard to it cannot lie with any
lower than itself. There was indeed a sense in which Christ
received the witness of John, but there was another in
which IHe received not witness of any man, only his own
witness and his Father's.  Even so is it with his Word and
his doctrine.  There is a witness which they can receive of
men; there is also a witness which no other can yield them
than themselves.
I trust, then, that taking for my argument The fitness of
Ho7y $cripture for unfolding the spiritual life of men, and
finding in its adaptations for this a proof of its divine
origin, I shall not fail in these primary conditions, however immeasurably I shall of necessity fall below the greatness and grandeur of my theme.
For first, this question, Whether Scripture be not a book
capable of doing, and appointed to do, an higher work than
every other book, cannot be regarded as one which is not
vital. It is felt to be vital by all those whose'aim and purpose is to prove that it is but a book as other books, and
therefore underlying the same weakness and incompletenesses
as every other work of men's hands. And these are many;
since for one direct assault on Christianity as a delivered
fact, there are twenty on the records of Christianity, or the
manner of its delivery. Many a one who would not venture boldly to enter on the central question, whether the
Christ whom the Church believes, whom not any one passage alone, but the collective sum of the Scriptures has
delivered to us, be not the highest conceivable revelation
of the Invisible God, and his Incarnation the necessary outcoming of the perfections of the Godhead, will yet hover on
the outskirts of the conflict, and set himself to the detecting,




16                     LECTURE I.
as he hopes, a flaw in this narration, or to the proving the
historic evidence for that book insufficient. They who pass
by the consideration as one which never rose up before their
minds, whether there has not been a great education of our
race, reaching through all ages, going forward from the day
that God called Abraham from among his fathers' idols;
and whether this great idea be not as a golden thread, running through the whole woof and tissue of Scripture-they
who shun- altogether considerations such as these, will yet
set themselves diligently to look for petty discrepancies
between one historic book and another, or for proofs which
shall not be put by, of some later hand than that of Moses
in some notice in the- book of Genesis.  And however paltry
and petty this warfare may be, it is no doubt a true instinct
of hate which makes them hope to discover vulnerable points
in Scripture, as knowing that could they really find such,
through them they might effectually wound Him, of whom
the Scripture is the outcoming and the Word.
Nor, again, can it be said that this is a matter, which
though once brought into earnest debate, is now so no more;
or that the earnestness of the struggle has been now transferred to other parts of the gret controversy between the
kingdoms of light and of darkness. It is not so: the
Porphyrys, the Celsuses, and the Julians of an earlier age,
have never wanted their apt scholars, their worthy successors.
The mantle of the false prophet is as surely dropped and
bequeathed, as the mantle of the true.  Who that knows
aught of what is going forward among a people, who not in
blood only, but in much besides, are most akin to us of all
the nations of Europe, will deny that even now God's Word
is tried to the uttermost; that it still has need to make
good its claims; or knowing this, will presume to say how
soon we may not find ourselves in the midst of controversies,
which assuredly have not yet run themselves out, nor by




INTRQDUCTORY LECTURE.               17
the complete victory of the Truth brought themselves to a
quiet end?
Nor shall we with this theme ~be lingering about the outer
precincts of our Faith. Not the external authority with
which these books come to us, but the inner seal with which
they are scaled, the way in which, like Him of whom they
testify, they receive not witness of men, but by all which
they are, by all which they have wrought, bear witness of
themselves that they are of God, even the witness of power,
this is our high argument.
And to it perhaps there will be no fitter introduction than
a few general remarks on the connexion in which a book
may stand to the intellectual and spiritual life of men.
And would we appreciate the importance of a book received
as absolute law, for the mental and moral culture of those
who in such wise receive it, the influences which it will exert
in moulding them, if only that book contain any elements
of truth; let us consider for an instant what the Koran has
been and is to the whole Mohammedan world; how it is
practically the great bond and band of the nations professing that spurious faith, holding fast in a community, which
is a counterpart, however feeble, of a Christendom, nations
whom every thing else would have tended to separate; how
it has stamped on them the features of a common life, and
set them however immeasurably below the Christian
nations, yet well nigh as greatly above all other nations
of the world; —let us consider this, and then what the book
is that has wrought the mighty effects-the many elements
of fraud and folly Which are -mixed up with, and which
weaken, the truth which it possesses; and then let us ask
ourselves what by comparison must be-a Bible, or Scripture
of absolute truth, to the Christian world!
Or to estimate the shaping moulding power which may
lie in books, even when they- come not as revelations, real
or pretended, of the will of God, let us attempt to measure
2*




18                    LLECTURE I.
the influence which a few Greek and Latin books, (for the
real effective books are but few,) exert and have exerted on
the minds of men, since the time they have been familiarly
known and studied; the manner in' which they have modified the habits of thought, coloured the language, and affected
the whole institutions of the world in which we live; how
they have given to those who have sedulously occupied themselves in their study and drunk in their spirit, a culture and
tone of mind recognisably different from that of any other
men; and this, although they come with the seal of no
absolute authority; although, on the contrary, we feel that
on many points (and some of these the very chiefest) we
stand greatly above them. Let us take this into account,
and we shall allow that it is scarcely possible to overrate
the influence of a book which does come with highest sanction, to which men bow as containing the express image of
the Truth, and which is, as those are, only for a longer
period and in a higher region of the spiritual life, the appointed instrument for calling out the true humanity in
every man.
At first, indeed, it seems hard to understand how any
written word should possess such influence as that which we
attribute to this; difficult to set a dispensation of the Truth
in that form at all upon a level in force and influence with.
the same Truth, when it is the. living utterance of living
men, or to ascribe to it powers at all equal to theirs. But
when we consider more closely, the wonder disappears; we
soon perceive how, by the Providence of God, a written
word, be it of man's truth or of God's Truth, should have
been charged with such important functions to fulfil.  For
first, it is plain that the existence of a written word is the
necessary condition of any historic life or progress whatsoever in the world. If succeeding generations are to inherit
aught from those that went before, and not each to begin
anew from first rudiments,-if all is not to be always childhood




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                 19
-if there is to be any manhood of our race,-it is plain that
only thus, only through such an instrument could this be
brought about.
And most of all it is evident that through a Scripture
alone, that is, through a written record, could any great epoch,
and least of all an epoch in which great spiritual truths were revealed or reasserted, transmit itself unimpaired to the after
world. For every new has for a long while an old to contend
with, every higher a lower, which is continually seeking to draw
it down to itself.'The most earnest oral tradition will in a little
while lose its distinctness, undergo essential though insensible modifications. Apart from all desire to' vitiate the
committed word, yet, little by little, the subjective condition of those to whom it is intrusted, through whom it
passes, will infallibly make itself felt; and in such treacherous keeping is all which remains merely in the memories
of men, that after a very little while, rival schools of disciples begin to contend not merely how their master's words
were to be accepted, but what those very words were themselves.
Moreover it is only by-recurrence to such witnesses as
are thus secured for the form in which the Truth was at the
first delivered, that any great restoration or reformation can
proceed; only so can that which is grown old renew its
youth, and cast off the slough of age.- Without this, all
that is once let go would be irrecoverably gone-all once
lost would be lost forever. - Without this, all that did not
interest at the moment, all which was laid, deep for the.
uses of a remote posterity, of which they were first to discover the price and value, would long before it reached
them;-have inevitably perished. And when the Church of
the Apostolic age, with that directly following, is pointed to
as an exception to this general rule,-as a Church existing
without a Scripture,-even as no doubt for some while the
Church did exist with a canon not full formed, but forming,




20                    LECTURE T.
and for a little while without any Scriptures peculiarly its
own, is left out of sight that the question is not, whether a
Church could so exist, but whether it could subsist —not
whether it could be, but whether it could continue to be.
That for a while, under rare combinations of favourable
circumstances, with living witnesses and fresh memories of
the Lord's life and death in the midst of it, a Christian
Church without any actual writings- of its new Covenant
could have existed, is one thing; and another, whether it
could so have survived through long ages; whether without
them it could have kept ever before its eyes any clear and
distinct image of Him that was its founder, or stampedany
lively impress of Him on the hearts of its children.  No;
it is assuredly no happy accident of the Church that it
possesses a Scripture; but if the wonders of the Church's
first becoming were not to repeat themselves continually,
if it was at all to know a natural evolution in the world;
then, as far as we can see, this was a necessary condition of
its very subsistence.
This, then, brethren, will be the aim  of these Lectures
which I am about to deliver in your hearing. I Shall
desire reverently, and with God's grace assisting, to discover
what I may, of the inner structure of this Book which is so
essential a factor in the spiritual life of men-humbly to
trace where I can, the wisdom with which it is laid out to
be the nourisher and teacher of all men, and of all nien in
all ages and in: all parts of their complex being; also to
show, where I am able, how it has effcctially approved
itself as such.
And yet, brethren,. such considerations may not be entered
on without one or two needful cautions, which I should wish to
keep ever before myself, which I should wish to commend also
to you. And first, let us beware lest contemplating thisgoodly fabric, we be contemplators only; as though we




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                21
were to stand without Scripture and admire it, and not to
stand within it and obey it. That were a mournful selfdeceit-to see and marvel at its fitness for every man, and
never to have made proof of that fitness for the needs of one
heart, for the healing the deep wound of one spirit, even of
our own. And, indeed, only in this way of love and of
obedience shall we enter truly into any of the hidden
riches which it contains; for that only which we love, we
know. No book, much less the highest, yields its secrets,
reveals its wonders, to any but the reverent, the loving, and
the humble. To other than these, the door of higher understanding is ever closed.  We must pass into and unite ourselves with that which we would know, ere we can know it
more than in name.
And then, brethren, again, when we propose to consider
the structure of Scripture, it is not as though this were
needed before men could enter into its fullest and freest
enjoyment.  It is far from being thus; for as a man may
live in an house without being an architect, so may we
habitually live and move in Holy Scripture, without consciously, by any reflex act, being aware of. any one of the
wonders of its construction, the secret sources of its strength
and power. To know simply that it is the Word of God
has sufficed thousands and tens of thousands of our brethren;
even as, no doubt, in this one affirmation is gathered up and
anticipated all that the most earnest and devout search may
unfold.  We may say this, that it is God's Word, in other
language, we may say this more at large, yet more than
this we cannot say; after the widest range we shall only
return to this at the last.
But while this is true, it remains true also that "the
works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that
have pleasure therein," if only leisure and opportunities are
theirs-that if love is the way of knowledge, knowledge also
is the food of love, the appointed fuel of the sacred fire;




22                    LECTURE I.
that, if the affections are to be kept lastingly true to an
object, the. reasonable faculties, supposing them to have
been actively called out, must find also in that object their
satisfying employment. Many among us here have, or will
have, not merely to live on God's Word ourselves, but, as
our peculiar task, to unfold its secrets and bring forth its
treasures for others. We therefore cannot draw frol-a it
that unconscious nutriment which do many.  Whatever
may be the danger of losing the simplicity of our love for it,
and coming to set that love up on other grounds than those on
which the love of the humblest and simplest of our brethren
reposes, and so of separating themselves in spirit from him;
this, like any other danger bf our spiritual life, must not be
shrunk from, by shrinking from the duty to which, like its
dark shadow, it cleaves; but in other and more manful
ways must be met and overcome.  We all of us have need,
if not all from our'peculiar functions, yet all from our position as the highest educated of our age and nation, as therefore the appointed leaders of its thoughts and feelings, not
merely to prize and honour this Book, but to justify the
price and honour, in which we hold it ourselves, in which
we bid others to hold it.
May some of us be led by what shall be here spoken
to a fuller recognition of those treasures of wisdom and
knowledge which are or may be, day by day, in our hands.
May we be reminded of the high privilege which it is to
have a book which is also, as its name declares, the Book;
which stands up in the midst of its brethren, the kingly'
sheaf, to which all the others do obeisance (Gen. xxxvii. 7;)
— not casting a slight upon them, but lending to them
some of its own dignity and honour. May we in a troubled
time be helped to feel something of the grafideur of the
Scripture, and so of the manifold wisdom of that Eternal
Spirit by whom it came-and then petty objections
and isolated  difficulties, though  they  were multiplied




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.               ~23
as the sands of the sea, will not harass us. For what
are they all to the fact, (I am here using and concluding
with words far better than my own,) that " for more than a
thousand years the Bible collectively taken has gone hand
in hand with civilization, science, law,-in short with the
moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always
supporting, and often leading the way?  Its very presence
as a believed book has rendered the nations emphatically a
chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is more or
less generally studied.   Of those nations which in the
highest degree enjoy its influences, it is not too much to
affirm that the differences, public and private, physical,
moral and intellectual, are only less than what might be
expected from a diversity in species.  Good and holy men,
and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of
history enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have
borne witness to its influences, have declared it to be beyond
compare the most perfect instrument, the only adequate
organ, of humanity; the organ and instrument of all the
gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is
privileged to rise above himself, to leave behind and lose his
dividual phantom self, in order to find his true self in that
distinctness where no division can be,-in the Eternal I AM,
the ever-living WORD, of whom.. all the elect, from  the
archangel before the throne to the poor wrestler with the
Spirit until the breaking of day, are but the fainter and
still fainter echoes."




LECTURE II.
THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.
EPHESIANS I. 9, 10.
Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his
goodpleasure, which he hath purposed in himself; that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things
in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; even
in him.
IT is the necessary condition of a book which shall exert
any great and effectual influence, which shall stamp itself with
a deep impression upon the minds and hearts of men, that
it must have a unity of purpose: one great idea must run
through it all. There must be some single point in which
all its different rays converge and meet. The common eye
may fail to detect the unity, even while it unconsciously owns
its power; yet this is necessary still; this growing out of a
single root, this subordination of all the parts to a single
aim, this,returning of the end upon the beginning.  We
feel this in a lower sphere; nothing pleases much or long,
nothing takes greatly hold, no work of human genius or
art, which is not at one with itself, which has not form, in
the highest sense of that word; wThich does not exclude and
include. And it is hardly necessary to add, that if the
effects are to be deep and strong, this idea must be a great
one: it must not be one which shall play lightly upon the
surface of their minds that apprehend it, but rather one
which shall reach far down to the dark foundations out of
sight upon which reposes this awful being of ours.
Now what T should desire to make the subject of my lecture to-day is exactly this, that there is one idea in Holy
(24)




THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.               25
Scripture, and this idea the very highest; that all in it
is referable to this; that it has the unity of which I spake;
that a guiding hand and spirit is traceable throughout, including in it all which bears upon one mighty purpose, excluding all which has no connexion with that,-however,
from faulty or insufficient views, we might have expected it
there; however certainly it would have intruded itself there,
had this been a work of no higher than human skill.  I
would desire to show that it fulfils this condition, the necessary condition of a book which shall be mighty in operation;
that it is this organic whole, informed by this one idea;how this one explains what it has and what it has not; much
in its form, and yet more in its substance; why it should
be brief here, and large there; why it omits wholly this,
and only touches slightly upon that; why vast gaps, as at
first sight might seem  to us, occur in some portions of it;
infinite minuteness of detail in others; how things which
at first we looked to find in it, we do not find, and others,
which we were not prepared for are there.
And this unity if it can be shown to exist, none can
reply that it was involved and implied in the external accidents of the Book, and that we have mistaken the outward
aggregation of things similar for the inward coherence of
an organic body: since these accidents, if the word-may be
permitted, are all such as would have created a sense of diversity; and it is only by penetrating through them, and
not suffering them to mislead us, that we do attain to the
deeper and pervading unity of Scripture. Its unity is not,
for instance, that apparent one which might be produced by
a language common to all its parts.  For it is scarcely possible, I suppose, for a deeper gulf to divide two languages
than divides the two in which severally the Old and the
New Testament are written.  Nor can it be likeness of
form which has deceived us into believing that unity of
spirit exists; for the forms are various and diverse as can be
3




26                   LECTURE II.
conceived; it is now song, now history; now dialogue, now
narration; now familiar letter, now prophetic vision. There
is scarcely a form of composition in which men have clothed
theiir thoughts and embodied their emotions which does not
find its archetype here. Nor yet is the unity of this volume
brought about through all the parts of its being the upgrowth of a single age, and so all breathing alike the spirit
of that age; for -no single age beheld the birth of this
Book, which was well nigh two thousand years ere it was
fully formed and bad reached its final completion.  Nor can
its unity, if it exists, be accounted for from its having had
but one class of men for its human authors; since men not
of one class alone, but of many, and those the widest apart,
kings and herdsmen, warriors and fishermen, wise men and
simple, have alike brought their one stone or more, and been
permitted to build them  in to this august dome and temple
which God through so many ages was rearing to its glorious
height. Deeper than all its outward circumstances, sinse
these all would have tended to an opposite result, this unity
must lie-in the all-enfolding seed out of which the whole
book is evolved.
But this unity of Scripture, where is it? from what point
shall we behold and recognise it?  Surely from that in
which those verses which I have taken from the Epistle to
the Ephesians will place us; when we regard it as the story
of the knitting anew the broken relations between the Lord
God and the race of man; of the bringing the First-begotten
into the world, for the gathering together all the scattered
and the sundered in Him   when we regard it as the true
paradise Regained-the true De Civitate Dei, —even by a
better title than those noble books which bear these names
-the record of that mystery of God's will which was working from the first, to the end "that in the dispensation of
the fulness of times He might gather together in one all
things in Christ."




THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.               27
And all nearer examiRation will show how true it is to this
idea, which we affirm to lie at its ground. It is the story
of the divine relations of men, of the divine life which, in
consequence of those still subsisting relations, was struggling to the birth with more or less successful issues in
every faithful man; which came perfectly to the birth in
the One, even in Him in whom those relations were constituted at the first, and perfectly sealed at the last.  It is the
-story of this, and of nothing else; the record of the men
who were conscious of a bond between earth and heaven,
and not only dimly conscious, for that all people who have
not sunk into savage hordes have been, but who recognized
these relations, this fellowship, as the great undoubted fact
with which God had underlaid their life-the support not
merely of their personal being, butas that which must sustain the whole society of earth —whether the narrower society of the Family, or the wider of the State, or the allembracing one of the Church.
How many temptations there were to wander out of and
beyond this region, which yet every one of us must recognise at once to be the true region in which only an Holy
Scripture should move; how many other regions in which
had it been other than what it is, it might have lost itself?
For instance, other so called sacred books almost invariably
miss the distinction between ethics and physics, lose themselves in theories of creation, endless cosmogonies, subtle
speculations about the origin of the material universe. Such
a deep ground has this error, so willing are men to substitute the speculative for the practical, and to lose the last in
the first, that we find even after the Christian Faith had
been given, a vast attempt to turn even that into a philosophy of nature.  What, for example, was Manicheism,
but the attempt to array a philosophy of nature in a Christian language, to empty Christian truths of all their ethical
worth, and then to use them as a gorgeous symbolic garb for




28                      LECTURE IT.
clothing a system different to its very core?  But Scripture
is no story of the material universe.* A single chapter is
sufficient to tell us that "God made the heavens and the
earth."  MI:an is the central figure there, or to speak more
truly, the only figure; all which is there besides serves but
as a background for him; he is not- one part of the furniture of this planet, not the highest merely in the scale of
its creatures, but the lord of all-sun and moon and stars,
and all the visible creation, borrowing all their worth and
their significance from the relations wherein they stand to
him.  Such he appears there in the ideal worth of his
unfallen condition; and even now, when only a broken
fragment of the sceptre with which once he ruled the
world, remains in his hand, such he is commanded to regard
himself _still.
It is one of Spinoza's charges against Scripture, that it
does erect and recognise this lordship of man, that it does
lift him out of his subordinate place, and ever speak in a
language which takes for granted that nature is to serve
him, and not he to acquiesce in nature, that the Bible
every where speaks rather of a God of men than a Creator
of the universe.  We accept willingly the reproach; we
acknowledge and we glory in its entire truth,-that the
eighth Psalm is but a single distinct utterance of that which
all Scripture proclaim; for that every where sets forth man
as the crown of things, the last and the highest, the king to
rule over- the world, the priest to offer up its praises-and
- Compare the remarkable words of Felix the Manich san, and the
fault which he finds with it on this very ground (Augustine Acta c.
Fielice alctnichceo, ~. 1, c. 9:) Et quia venit Manichsus et per suam
predicationem docuit nos initium medium et finem; docuit nos de
fiabrica mundi, quare facta est et unde facta et qui fecerunt;
docuit nos quare dies et quare nox; docuit nos de cursu solis et
lunse; quia hoc in Paulo non audivimus, nec in coeterorum apostolorum scripturis, hoc credimus, quia ipse est Paraclitus.




THEI  UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.             29
deals with nature not as co-ordinated with him, much less
as superior; but in entire subordination; "Thou makest
him to have dominion of the works of thy hands, and thou
lhast put all things in subjection under his feet."  And
herein Holy Scripture'is one, that it is throughout the history of man as distinctfrom nature, as immeasurably above
nature-that it is throughout ethical, and does never, as so
many of the mythic accounts of heathen religions, resolve
itself on nearer inspection into the mere setting forth of
physical appearances.
It is then the history of man; yet not of all men, only
of a chosen portion of -our race; and such, if we have
rightly seized the purpose and meaning of a Scripture and
what it is intended to tell, it must needs be. It is true
that this is too often brought against it as a short-coming.
It is a frequent sneer on the part of the master-mocker of
France, that the Bible dedicates its -largest spaces, by far
the greatest number of its pages, to the annals of a little
tribe, which occupied, to use his very words, a narrow strip
of mountainous territory, scarcely broader than Wales, leaving almost unnoticed the mighty empire of Egypt and
Assyria; and he goes on to observe, that from a book which
professes to go back, as this does, to the very beginning,
and to be in possession of all authentic history from the
first, to have in its keeping the archives of our race, we
should gladly have received, even as we might have reasonably expected, a few notices of these vast empires; which
had been cheaply purchased by the omission or abridgement
of lives and incidents now written with such a specialminuteness.
Now it is no doubt remarkable, and a fact to awaken our
earnest attention, that in a Book, wherein, if in any, all
waste of room would have been spared, the lives of an Abraham, a Joseph, a David, fill singly spaces so large; while
huge empires rise and fall, and all their multitudes pass to
3*




304                   LECTURE II.
their graves, almost without a word.  These vast empires
are left in their utter darkness, or if a glimpse of light fall
upon them for a moment, it is only because of the relations
in which they are brought to this little tribe; since no
sooner do these relations cease, than they fall back into the
obscurity out of which they emerged for a moment.
But strange as it may at first sight appear, it belongs to
the very essence of Scripture that it should be thus and no
otherwise.  For that is not a world-history, but a history
of the kingdom  of God; and He who ever chooses "the
weak things of the earth to confound the things which are
mighty," had willed that in the line of this family, this
tribe, this little people, the restoration of the true humanity
should be effected: and each man who at all realized the
coming Restorer, each in whom that image of God, which
was one day to be perfectly revealed in his Son, appeared
with a more than usual distinctness, however indistinctly still,
-every such man was singly a- greater link in the world's
history than all those blind millions of whom these records
have refused to take knowledge. Those mountains of Israel,
that little corner of the world, so often despised, so often
wholly past over, was yet the citadel of the world's hope, the
hearth on which the sparks that were yet to kindle the
earth were kept alive. There the great reaction which was
one day to find place against the world's sin was preparing;
and just as, were we tracing the course of a stream, not the
huge morasses, not the vast stagnant pools on either side
would delay us; we should not, because of their extent,
count them the river'; but that we should recognise as the
stream, though it were the slenderest thread, in which an
onward movement and current might be discerned; so it is
here.  Egypt and Assyria and Babylon were but the vast
stagnant morasses on either side; the man in whose seed
the whole earth should be blest, he and his family were the




ITHIE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.              31
little- stream in which the life and onward motion of the
world were to be traced.
For indeed, properly speaking, where there are no workings, conscious or unconscious, to the great end of the
manifestation of the Son of God in the flesh,-conscious, as
in Israel, unconscious, as in Greece,-where neither those
nor these are found, there history does not and cannot exist.
For history, if it be not the merest toy, the idlest pastinme
of our vacant hours, is the'record of the onward march of
humanity towards an end.  Where there is no belief in
such an end, and therefore no advance toward it, no stirrings of a divine Word in a people's bosom, where not as
yet the beast's heart has been taken away, and a man's heart
given, there history cannot be said to be. They belong not
therefore to history, least of all to sacred history, those
Babels, those cities of confusion, those huge pens, into which
by force and fraud the early hunters of men, the Nimrodsand Sesostrises, drave and compelied their fellows; and
Scripture is only most true toits idea, wl-ile it passes them
almost or wholly in silence by, while it lingers rather on the
plains of Mamnre, with the man that "believed God, and it was
counted to him for righteousness," than by " populous No,"
or great Babylon, where no faith existed but in the blind
powers of nature, and the brute forces of the natural man.
And yet, that there were stirrings of a divine life, longings after and hopes of a Deliverer, at work in Israel, had
not been, of itself, sufficient to exalt and consecrate its history into -a Scripture.  These such a history must contain,
but also something more and deeper than these; else all in
Greece and elsewhere that was struggling after moral freedom, that was craving after light, all that bore witness to
man's higher origin and nobler destinies, might have claimed
by an equal right to be there.  But Holy Scripture, according to the idea from which we started, is the history of men
in a constitution-of men, not seeking relations with God,




8-2                   LECTURE Ir.
but having them, and whose task is now to believe in them,
and to maintain them.  Its mournful reminiscences of a
broken communion with heaven are evermore swallowed up
in the firm and glorious assurances of a restored. The
noblest efforts of heathenism were seekings after these relations with God, if haply man might connect himself anew
with a higher world, from which he had cut himself loose.
But here man does not appear as seeking God, and therefore
at best only dimly and uncertainly apprehending him; but
rather God appears as seeking man, therefore not seeking in
vain, but ever finding-man only as seeking God, on the
ground that God has already sought and found him, and has
said to him, "Seek my face," and in that saying has pledged
Himself that the seeking shall not be in vain. With this,
Scripture excludes all mere feelings after God, not as counting them  worthless,-for precious and significant in the
eyes of a Paul was the altar "To the unknown God,"
reared at Athens,-but.excludes them in that they belong
to a lower stage of religious life than that to which it ministers, and in which it moves. It has no mythology; no ideal
which is not also real; no dreams and anticipations of higher
things than it is itself destined to record as actually brought
to pass. These may be deep out-speakings of the spiritual
needs of man, precious recollections of a state which once
was his, but which now he has forfeited; yet being only
utterances of his want, cries of his need, confessions of his
loss, sharing, too, as they must ever, in the imperfections
of which they testify, therefore they can find no place in a
Bible.  For that is in no way a record of man's various
attempts to cuye himself of the deep wound of his soul; it
is no history of the experiments which he makes, as he
looks round him  to see if he may find on earth medicinal
herbs that will meet his need; but it presents him already
in an hospital of souls, and under a divine treatment. Heathen philosophy might indeed be a preparation for Christi



THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.              33
anity-heathen mythology, upon its better side, an unconscious prophecy of Christ; yet were they only the negative
preparation and witness; Jewish religion was the positive;
and it is with the positive alone that a Scripture can have
to do.
Thus we have seen what, under some aspects, such a book
must be: we have seen why it is not that, which men superficially looking at it, or in whom the speculative tendencies
are stronger than the moral needs, might have desired to be.
In the first place, that it is not the history of nature, but
of man; nor yet of all men) but only of those who are
more or less conscious of their divine original, and have
not, amid all their sins, forgotten that great word, " We are
God's offspring;"-nor yet even of all these, but of those
alone who had been brought by the word of the promise
into immediate covenant relations with the Father of their
spirits. We have seen it the history of an election,-of
men under the direct and immediate education of God-not
indeed for their own sakes only, as too many among them
thought, turning their election into a selfish thing, but that
through them he might educate and bless the world. That
it does not tell the story of other men-that it does not
give a philosophy of nature, is not a deficiency, but is rather
its strength and glory; witnessing for the Spirit which has
presided over its growth and formation, and never suffered
aught which was alien to its great plan and purpose to find
admission into it-any foreign elements to weaken its
strength or trouble its clearness.
Nor less does Holy Scripture give testimony for a pervading unity, an inner law according to which it unfolds itself
as a perfect and organic whole, in the epoch at which growth
in it ceases, and it appears henceforth as a finished book.
So long as humanity was growing, it grew. But when the
manhood of our race was reached, when man had attained
his highest point, even union with God in his Son, then it




34                   LECTURE II.
comes to a close. It carries him up to this, to his glorious
goal, to. the perfect knitting again of those broken relations, through the life and death and resurrection of Him in
whom God and man were perfectly atoned. So long as
there was any thing more to tell, any new revelation of the
Name of God, any new relations of grace and nearness into
which he was bringing his creatures,-so long the Bible was
a growing, expanding book. But when all is given, when
God, who at divers times spake to the world by his servants,
had now spoken his last and fullest word by his Son, then
to this Book, the record of that Word of his, there is added
no more, even while there is nothing more to add;-though
it cannot end till, it has shown in prophetic vision how this
latest and highest which now has been given to man, shall
unfold itself into the glory and blessedness of a perfected
kingdom of heaven.
For thus, too, it will mark itself as one, by returning
visibly in its end upon its beginning. Vast as the course
which it has traced, it has been a circle still, and in that
most perfect form comes back to the point from whence it
started.  The heaven, which had disappeared from  the
earth since the third chapter of Genesis, reappears again in
visible manifestation, in the latest chapters of the Revelation. The tree of life, whereof there were but faint reminiscences in all the intermediate time, again stands by the
river of the water of life, and again there is no more curse.
Even the very differences of the forms under which the
heavenly kingdom reappears are deeply characteristic, marking as they do, not merely that all is won back, but won
back in a more glorious shape than that in which it was
lost, because won back in the Son. It is no longer Paradise, but the New Jerusalem —no longer the garden, but
now the city, of God, which is on earth. The change is
full of meaning; no longer the garden, free, spontaneous,
and unlaboured, even as man's blessedness in the state of




THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.                35
a first innocence would have been; but the city, costlier
indeed, more stately, more glorious, but at the same time,
the result of toil, of labour, of pains-reared into a nobler
and more abiding habitation, yet with stones which, after
the pattern, of the "elect corner-stone," were each in its
time laboriously hewn and painfully squared for the places
which they fill.
And surely we may be permitted to observe by the way,
that this idea, which we plainly trace and recognise, of
Scripture as a whole, this its architectonic character, cannot
be without its weight in helping to determine the Canonical
place and worth of the Apocalypse, which, as is familiar to
many among us, has been sometimes called in question.
Apart from all outward evidences in its favour, do we not
feel that this wondrous book is needed where it is?-that it
is the key-stone of the arch, the capital of the pillar-that
Holy Scripture had seemed maimed and imperfect without it,
-that a winding up with the Epistles would have been no
true winding up; for in them the Church appears as still
warring and struggling, still compassed about with the
weaknesses and infirmities of its mortal existence  not
triumphing yet, nor yet have entered into its glory. Such
a termination had been as abrupt, as little satisfying as if,
in the lower sphere of the Pentateuch, we had accompanied
the children of Israel to the moment when they were just
entering on the wars of Canaan; and no book of Joshua
had followed to record their battles and their victories, and
how these did not cease till they rode on the high places of
the earth, and rested each man quietly in the lot of his conquered inheritance.
And again, this oneness of Holy Scripture, when we feel
it, is a sufficient, even as it is a complete, answer to a very
favourite topic of Romish Controversialists.  They are fond
of bringing out how much there is of accident in the structure nay, even in the existence of Scripture,-that we have




3 6                   LECTURE II.
Gospel (the third) written at a private man's request,another, (the fourth) because heresies had-risen up which
needed to be checked-epistles owing their origin to causes
equally fortuitous —one, because temporary disorders had
manifested themselves at Corinth, —another, because an
Apostle, having promised to visit a city, from some unexpected cause was hindered-a third, to secure the favourable
reception of a fugitive slave by his master-that of the
New Testament at least, the chiefest part is thus made up
of occasional documents called forth by, emergent needs.
And the purpose of this slight on Scripture is evident, the
conclusion near at hand-which is this,how little likely it is
that a book so formed, so growing, should contain an absolute and sufficient guide of life and rule of doctrine-how
needful some supplementary teaching.
But when once this unity of God's Word has been revealed to us, when our eye has learned to recognise not
merely the marks and signs of a higherl wisdom, guiding
and inspiring each several part, but also the relation of each
several part to the whole; when it has risen up before us,
not as aggregated from without, but as unfolded from within,
and in, obedience to an inner law, then we shall feel that,
however accidental may appear the circumstances of its
growth, yet this accident which seemed to accompany its
production, and to preside in the calling out of the especial books which we possess, and no other, was no more
than the accident which God is ever weaving into the woof
of his providence, and not merely weaving into it, but
which is the staple out of which its whole web is woven.
Thus brethren, we have been led to contemplate these
oracles of God in their deep inner unity; we have seen not
merely how they possess, but how we can reverently trace
them in the possession of, that oneness of plan and purpose,
which should make them effectual for the unfolding the spiritual life of men. We have seen how men's expectations




THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.               37
of finding something there which they did not find, with
their disappointments at its absence, have ever grown out
of a mistaken apprehension of what a Scripture ought to
be; how the presence of that which they miss would indeed
have marred it, would have contradicted its fundamental
idea, would have been a discord amid its deep harmonies,
even as the discords which men find in it come oftentimes
as its highest harmonies to the purged ear.
Nor is it without its warning to ourselves, that these
murmurings and complaints do most often evidently grow out
of a moral fault in them that make them.  Men have lost
the key of knowledge-the master-key which would have
opened to them every door; and then they wander with
perplexed hearts up and down this stately palace which the
Eternal Wisdom  has builded, but of which every goodlier
room is closed against them, till, in the end, they complain
that it is no such peerless palace after all, but only as other
works which man's art has reared. Nor is this conclusion
strange; for unless they bring to it a moral need, unless
that moral need be to them  the interpreter of every part,
and gather all that is apparently abnormal in it under a
higher and reconciling law the Book, in its deepest meaning
and worth, will remain a riddle to them still.
But this moral need, what is it? It is the sense that we
are sundered and scattered each from  God, each from his
fellow-man, each from himself-with a belief deep as the
foundations of our life, that it is the will of God to gather
all these scattered and these sundered together anew-this,
with the conviction which will rise out of this, that all which
bears on the circumstances of this recovering and regathering
is precious; that nothing is of highest worth which does not
bear upon this. Then we shall see in this Word that it is
the very history which we require-that altogether, nothing
but that-the history of the restoring the defaced image of
God, the re-constitution of a ruined but Godlike race, in
4




38                   LECTURE II.
the image: of God,'s own Son-the deliverance of all in that
race, who were willing to be delivered, from the idols of
sense, from the false gods who would hold them in bondage,
and would fain make them their drudges and slaves.
And, brethren, what is it that shall give unity to our
lives, but the recognition of the same great idea which gives
unity to this Book? Those lives, they seem often broken
into parts, with no visible connexion between one part and
another; our boyhood, we know not how to connect it with
our youth, our youth with our manhood: the different tasks
of our life, we want to bind them up in a single sheaf, to feel
that, however manifold and apparently disconnected they
are, there is yet a bond that binds them into one. Our
hearts, we want a central point for them, as it were a heart
within the heart, and we oftentimes seek this in vain. Oh,
what a cry has gone up from thousands and ten thousands
of souls! and this the burden of the cry, I desire to be one
in the deep centre of my being, to be one and not many-to
be able to reduce my life to one law-to be. able to explain
it to myself in the master-light of one idea, to be no longer
rent, torn, and distracted, as I am now.
And whence shall this oneness come? where shall we
find,. amid all the chances and changes of the world, this
law-of our life, this centre of our being, this key-note to
which setting our lives, their seeming discords shall reveal
themselves as their deepest harmonies?  Only in God, only
in the Son of God-only in the faith that what Scripture
makes the end and purpose of God's dealing with our race,
is also the end and purpose of his dealing with each one of
us, namely, that his Son may be manifested in us-that we,
with all things which are in heaven and all things which are
in earth, may be gathered together in Christ, even in Him.




LECTURE IIT.
THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.
MATTHEW XIV. 20.
They did all eat, and were filled.
IT was the aim  of my preceding Lecture to trace the
unity which reigns in Scripture, that it has a law to which
each part of it may~be referred, a root out of which it all
grows. It will be my purpose in the present, to bring out
before you how this Book, which is one, is also manifold; a
fact which we may not be so ready to recognize the instant
that it is presented to us, as the other. For the truth which
occupied us last Sunday, of the Bible as one Book, not
merely one because bound together in the covers of a single
volume, but as being truly one, while it testifies in every
part of one and the same Lord, while it is every where the
utterance of one Spirit; this, whether consciously or unconsciously, has strong possession of men's minds in this our
land.  We feel, and rightly, that every attempt to consider
any of its parts in absolute isolation from the other, rent
away from the connexion in which it stands is false, and can
lead to no profitable result; and it is hardly possible to estimate too highly the blessing of this, that the band which
binds for us the parts of this volume together is unbroken
even in thought; that we still feel ourselves to have, not a
number of sacred books, but one sacred Book, which, not
merely for convenience sake, but out of a far deeper feeling,
we comprehend under one name.
Yet, on the other hand, there are other truths which,
if we mean to enter into full possession of our treasures, we
need also to make thoroughly our own.'This idea of the
(39)




40                    LECTURE IIIT.
oneness of Holy Scripture is incomplete and imperfect, till it
pass into the higher idea of its unity; till we acknowledge
that it is not sameness which reigns there; that, besides
being one, it is also many; that as in the human body we,
having many members, are onie body, and the perfection of
the body is not the repetition of the same member over and
over again, but the harmonious tempering of different
menlbers, all being instinct with one life-not otherwise is
it with Scripture. For in that, whether we look at the Old
or New Testament, the same richness and variety of form
reveal themselves, so that it may truly be said, that out of
the ground of this Paradise, the Lord God has made " to
grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for
food;" all that the earth has fairest appearing here in fairer
and more perfect form-the fable, only here transformed
into the parable-the ode transfigured into the psalm —
oracles into prophecies-histories of the world into histories
of the kingdom of heaven.  Nor is tragedy wanting, though
for Edipus, we have the man of Uz; nor epos, though for
"the tale of Troy divine," ours is the story of the New
Jerusalem, "coming down out of heaven as a bride adorned
for her husband."  And it will be my desire to show how
this also was needful, if it was to be the Book which should
indeed leaven'the world, which should offer nutriment, not
merely for some men, but for all men; which should not
tyrannically lop men till they were all of one length, but
should encourage in every man the free developement of all
which God had given him.  Thus it must needs have been,
if the Spirit by this Word was to sanctify all in every man
which was capable of being sanctified;  which, coming
originally from God, could be redeemed from the defilements
of this world, and in purer shape be again restored unto
Htim.
It will be mny task then to consider to-day the relations
of likeness and difference in which various parts of Scrip.




THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.           41
ture stand to one another; to show how the differences are
not accidental, but do plainly correspond to certain fixed
differences in the mental and moral constitutions of men;
how there is evidently a gracious purpose of attracting all
men by the attractions which shall be most potent upon
them; of spreading a table at which all may sit down and
find that wherein their soul delights, till those words of our
text, "They did all eat and were filled," shall not be less
true in regard of all the faithful now,-true rather in a
higher sense,-than they were in regard of those comparatively few, whom the Lord nourished with that bread of
wonder in the wilderness.  And truly this Book, in the
plainness and simplicity of many, and those most important,
parts of it, might be likened well to the five barley-loaves
of the Lord's miracle. Seeing them about to set before the
great spiritual hunger of the world, seeing the multitudes
waiting to be fed, even disciples might have been tempted
to exclaim, "What are they among'so many?"  But the
great Giver of the feast confidently replies, "M Gake the men
sit down;" and they have sat down-wise men and simple,
philosophers and peasants,;" besides women and children,"
-and there has been enough and to spare; all have been
nourished, all have been quickened; none have been sent
empty away.
And first, let us take those books which must ever be
regarded as the central books, relating as they do to the
central fact, to the life of our blessed Lord, and which will
afford the fullest illustration of my meaning. It is a fact
which would at once excite every man's most thoughtful
attention, were it not that familiarity had blunted us to its
significance, that we should have, not one history only, but
four parallel histories, of the life of Christ-a fact which
indeed finds a slight anticipation in the parallel records
which the Old Testament has preserved of some portions of
Jewish history. None will call this an accident, or count
4*




42                     LECTURE III.
that the Providence which watches over the fall of a sparrow, or any slightest incident of the world, was not itself
the bringer about of a circumstance which should have so
mighty an influence on all the future unfolding of the
Church.  It is part, no doubt, of this spreading of a table
for the spiritual needs of all, that we have thus not one
Gospel, bhut four; which yet in their higher unity, may be
styled, according to that word of Origen's, rather a foursided Gospel* than four Gospels, even as out of the same
instinctive sense of its unity, the whole Instrument, which
contained the four, was entitled Evangetiunm  in the early
Church.
And if we follow this more closely up, we can trace, I
think, a peculiar vocation in each of the Evangelists for
catching some distinct rays of the glory of'Christ, which
the others would not catch, and for reflecting them to the
world-so that the terms, Gospel according to St. Matthew,
according to St. Mark, and so on, are singularly happy, and
imply much more than we, for whom the words are little
more than a technical designation of the different gospels,
are wont to find in them.  The first is the Gospel according
to St. Matthew-the Gospel as it appeared to him.  This
which he has portrayed is his Christ; under this aspect the
Deliverer of men appeared to him, and in this he has presented Him to the world; and so also with the others.  For
Christ, ever one and the same, does yet appear with different sides of his glory reflected by the different Evangelists.
They were themselves men of various temperaments; they
had each the special need of some different classes of men
in their eye when they wrote their Gospels; and as these
classes, though under altered names, still subsist, they have
in this respect also, as ministering to these various needs, an
everlasting value.
~ Evoawyysv  E puyyvov. Thus too Augustine (In Ev. bJoh.,
Tract. 26:) Quatuor Evangelia, vel potius quatuorlibri unius Evangelii.




THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.            43
Thus the first Gospel, that of St. Matthew, was evidently
a Gospel designed for the pious Israelite, for him who was
waiting the theocratic King, the Son of Abraham, the Son
of David; who desired to find in the New Testament the
fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old, and in Christianity
the perfect flower, of which Judaism was the root and stem.
And as among the Epistles that of St. James, so among the
Gospels, this of St.:Matthew' was to serve as the gentle and
almost imperceptible transition for so many as clung to the
forms of Old Testament piety; and desired to hold fast the
historic connexion of all God's dealings from the first.
But the second Gospel, written, as all Church tradition
testifies, under the influence of St. Peter, and at Rome,
bears marks of an evident fitness for the practical Roman
world —for the men who, while others talked had done;
and who would not at first crave to hear what Christ had
spoken, but what He had wrought. It is eminently the
Gospel of action.  It is brief; it records comparatively few
of our Lord's sayings, almost none of his longer discourses;
it occupies itself mainly with his works, with the mighty
power of his ministry, into which' ministry it rushes almost
without a preparatory note.  Some deeper things it has not,
but presents a soul-stirring picture of the conquering might
and energy of Christ and of his Word.
But the third Gospel, that of St. Luke, composed by the
trusted companion of St. Paul, and itself the correlative of
fiis Epistles, while it sets forth one and the same Christ as
the two which went before, yet in some respects sets Him
forth in another light.  Not so much with St. Matthew,
" Jesus Christ, a minister of the circumcision for the truth
of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers" —
not so much, with St. Mark, Jesus Christ, "tthe Lion of
the tribe of Judah," rushing as with lion-springs from
victory to victory; but Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all men,
is the object of his portraiture. This is what he loves to




144                     LECTURE InT.
dwell on,-the manner in which not Israel alone, but the
whole heathen world, was destined to glorify God for his
mercy in Christ Jesus; he describes Him as the loving physician, the gracious healer of all, the Good Samaritan that
bound up the wounds of every stricken heart; in whom all
the small, and despised, and crushed, and down-trodden of
the earth should find a gracious and ready helper. Therefore, and in accordance with this, his plan, has he gathered
up for us much which no other has done; he sets the
seventy disciples for the world over against St. Matthew's
twelve Apostles for Israel; he breaks through narrow
national distinctions —tells of that Samaritan that alone
showed kindness-of that other, who, of ten, alone remembered to be thankful; and his, too, and his only, the parable of the Prodigal Son, itself a gospel within the Gospel.
But to hasten- on from  the characteristics of the earlier
three, which might well detain us much longer, something
was yet wanting;-a Gospel in which the higher speculative
tendencies, which were given to men not to be crushed or
crippled, -should find their adequate satisfaction-a Gospel
which should link itself on with whatever had occupied the
philosophic mind of heathen or of Jew-the correction of
all which in this was false-the complement of all which
was deficient. And such he gave us, for whom the Church
has ever found the soaring eagle as the fittest emblem*-he
who begins by declaring that the Word of God, whereof
men had already learned to speak so much, was also the
Son of God, and had been made flesh, and had dwelt among
~ Thus the Christian poet:
Coelum transit, veri rotam    Volat avis sine met,
Solis ibi vidit, totam        Quo nee votes, nee propheta
Mentis figens aciem:          Evolavit altius;
Speculator. spiritalis        Tam implenda quam impleta
Quasi Seraphim sub alis       Nunquam vidit tot secrete
Dei videt fatcem.             Purus homo purins.




TI-E MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.               45
us, full of grace and truth,-who, too, has brought out the
inner, and so to speak, the -mystical relations of the faithful
with their Lord, as none other before himl had done.*
It is true that this fulness under which the life of our
Lord has been set forth to us, being, as it is, one of the
gracious designs of God.for our good, has been laid hold of
by adversaries of the Faith, who would fain wrest it to their
ends. Taking the difference where it is the most striking,
they have bidden us to note how unlike the Christ of the
first three Gospels and of the fourth; {and what a diff'erift
colouring is spread over this Gospel and over those; and
they would draw their conclusion, that either here or there
historic accuracy must be wanting, that both portraits cannot
be faithful.  We allow the dharge, so far as the &derecc,
and only reject it when it assumes a diversit&,, of setting
forth.  There are features of our Lord which we should
have missed, but for his portraiture who lay upon the Lord's
bosom; deep words which he has caught up, for which no
other words that any other has recorded would have been
adequate substitutes.  But what then?  This is not a weak
point with us, but a strong.: We rejoice and glory in this,
rather than seek to gloss it over or conceal it.  So far
from  being first detected by a hostile criticism, an early
Father of the Church had expressed this very distinction in
words which in sound perhaps are almost over-bold, styling
the first three Gospels, veyycE7a auoactxa, and the fourth an
Ev7yy,6ov n.vsv-ateXOV.  Yet it is needless to observe, that
herein he meant not to cast the faintest slight on those by
*. See Origen's interesting discussion (Comm.. in Joan., Tom. I.)
on the relation of the Gospels- to the other Scriptures, and their
relation, within themselves, one to another. On this latter subject
he expresses himself thus: TotA.,u7ov reoLvvv  iAE1J'v  o,7 fpX?7v!Ev
AaOewPv YPnCpUv EAVEC  Eya,7AX  CAYV  /~ 7?O3ElV,PGtapzspJ 0
xatzaC4 dVIVJV.




46                    LECTURE III.
comparison with this, but would only imply that those set
forth more the outer,-and this the inner, life of Christ.
And for the fact itself, do we not find analogies to it,
however weak ones they may be, in lower regions of the
spiritual life? To take an example which must be familiar
to every scholar, —how different the Socrates of Xenophon.,
and the Socrates of Plato. Yet shall we therefore leap to
the conclusion, that if the one has painted the master truly,
then the other has portrayed him' falsely?  Such a conclusion may lie upon the surface; it might appear to us an
easy solution of the difficulty; yet were it a very different
solution from  that to which all the profoundest inquirers
into the matter have arrived.  Were it not wiser to suppose, with them, that each of the great scholars of the Sage
appropriated and carried away, as from a rich and varied
treasure-house, that which he prized the most, that which
was most akin to himself and his own genius, that which by
the natural process of assimilation he had made most truly
and entirely his own; —the practical soldier, the mall of
strong common sense, appropriating and carrying away his
world-wisdom, his popular philosophy; the more meditative
disciple taking as his portion the deeper speculations of
their common Master concerning the Good and the True?
And if thus it prove with eminent servants of the Truthif they are so rich and manifold that they present themselves under divers aspects to divers men, it being appointed
them  in their lower sphere to feed many,-if, like some
rich composite Corinthian metal, they yield iron for this
man's spade, and gold for the other's crown, how much
more was this to be looked for from Him, who was the
King of Truth, who has to feed and enrich, not some, but
all; and this, not in some small and scanty measure, but
who was to satisfy all in all ages with goodness and truth?
How inevitable was it that Hie, the Sun of the spiritual




TIIE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.                47
heaven, should find no single mirror large enough to take
in all his beams —should only be adequately presented to
the world, when many from many sides did, under the
direct teachings of God's Spirit, undertake to set him forth.
Doubtless the pregnant symbol of the early Church, according to which the four Gospels found their type and prophecy in the four rivers of Paradise, that together watered
the whole earth, going each a different way, and yet
issuing all from a single head; —a symbol, which we find
evermore repeated in the works of early Christian art,
wherein from a single cross-surmounted hill, four streams
are seen welling out; this symbol was so great and general
a favorite, because it did embody under a beautiful image,
this fact, namely, how the Gospels were indeed four, and
yet in their higher unity but one.* And so not less, when
the Evangelists, were found, as they often were, in the four
living creatures of Ezekiel's vision, of whom each with a
different countenance looked a different way, and yet all of
them together upheld the throne and chariot of God, and ever
moved as being informed by one and the self-same Spirit; this
too was something  more and better than a mere fanciful
* Allusions to it are frequent in the early hymnologists. Thus, in
one of them in a hymn, De SS. Evangelistis:
Paradisus his rigatur,         IIorum rivo ebretatis
Viret, floret, fecundatur,      Sitis crescat caritatis,
His abundat, his letatur,      Ut de fonte Deitatis
Quatuor fluminibus.            Satiemur plenius.
Fons est Christus, hi sunt rivi,  Horum trahat nos doctrina
Fons est altus, hi proclivi,   Vitiorum de sentina,
Ut saporem fontis vivi         Sicque ducat ad divina
Ministrent fidelibus.          Ab imo superius.
Another, too, in a hymn, De S. Joanne Evangelista:
Inter ilios primitivos          Toti mundo propinare
Veros veri fontis rivos         Nectar illud salutare
Joannes exiliit,                Quod de throno prodiit.




48~                       LECTURE III.
playing with Scripture; there was a deep truth lying at the
root of this application, and absolutely justifying its use.*
And as we have a Gospel which stands thus four-square,
with a side facing each side of the spiritual world, so have
we a two-fold development of the more dogmatic element of
the New Testament.  For, like as  the  seed, one in itself,
yet falls into halves in the process of its fructifying, or as'- The first that we know of who connected these with the four
Evangelists was Ireneus. He says (Con. Hcer., i. 3, c. 2, ~ 8,)
Terpdtoppat 7ya'   ad;C,   ErspcadopTov xca, E. oga77'YEov, and
draws out at length the fitness of each to represent each; on which
see Suicer's Thes. s. v. E*lay'7y s'5. It was taken up by many
after him; thus by Jerome, Comm. in Ezekc. c. i.; Prol. in Comm.
super. Matth.; and Ep. 50: Matthaeus, Marcus, Lucas, et Johannes,
quadriga Domini, et verum  Cherubim, per totum  corpus oculati
sunt, scintille emicant, discurrunt, fulgura, pedes habent rectos et
in sublime tendentes, terga pennata et ubique volitantia.  Tenent
se mutu6, sibique perplexi sunt, et quasi rota in. rota volvuntur, et
purgunt quoquumque eos flatus Sancti Spiritus perduxerit. Cf.
Augustine, De Cons. Evang. 1. 1, c. 6, and the Christian poet sings
thus:
Circa thronum majestatis          Formam formant figurarum
Cum spiritibus beatis             Formas Evangelistarum
Quatuor diversitatis              Quorum imber doctrinarum.
Astant animalia.                  Stillat in Ecclesia.
Formam primum aquilinam,          Hi sunt Marcus, et- iMatthmaus,
Et secundum leoninam;             Lucas, et quem Zebedseus
Sed humanam et bovinam            Pater misit tibi, Deus,
Duo gerunt alia.                  Dum laxaret retia.
And another:
Curami agens sui gregis           Quos designat in prophets
Pastor bonus, auctor legis        Forma pictus sub discret,
Quatuor instituit:'              Vultus animalium.
Quadri orbis ad medelam,
Formam juris et cautelam         H3is quadrigus deportatur
Per quos scribi voluit.           Mundo Deos, sublimatur
Ista area vectibus:
Circa thema generale              Paradisi htec fluenta
Tahbet qtiisque speciale          Nova fluunt sacramenta,
Sibi privilegium;                 Quse irrorant gentibus.




THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.;49
the one force of the magnet manifests itself at two opposing,poles, exactly according to the same law, reappearing in the
spiritual world, we have two developments of the same
Christian Theology, which'make themselves felt from the
very first, whereof St. Paul may be taken as chief representative of the one, and:St. John of the other.  We cannot
do more than trace the distinction in some of its broadest
features.  We see then St. Paul making man the starting
point of his theology.  The divine image in man, that
image lost, the impossibility of its restoration by any
powers of his own,;- the ever deeper errors of the sin-darkened intellect; the ever vainer struggles of the sin-enslaved
will';-it is from this human side of the truth that he starts;.these are the grounds which he first lays, —as eminently- in?his great dogmatic Epistle to the Romans.  And only when
he has brought out this confession of a fall, of an infinite
short-coming from the true ideal of humanity, and from the
glory of God, only when'the cry, "Oh, wretched man that
I am, who shall deliver me?" has been wrung out;from the,bond-slaves of evil, does he bring in the mighty Redeemer,
and the hymn of praise,',the. "I thank God through
Jesus Christ" of the redeemed. But St. John, upon the
other hand, starts from' thie opposite point, from thetheology
in -the more restricted sense of the word.; in this justifying:the title  3 ~ ozoyxoc, which  he:bears.  His centre and
starting point is the Divine Love, and out of that he unfolds
all; not delineating, as his brother Apostle, any mighty
birth-pangs, in which the new  creature is born; since
rather in that passing from  death unto life, and in that
abiding in the Father and in the Son which follows therefrom, the discovery of sin does not run long before, but
rather goes hand in hand with, the discovery of the grace
of God for forgiving, and the power of God for overcoming,
that sin which by the Spirit of Christ is gradually revealed.
Thus we have-man delivered in St.. Paul, God delivering in
5




50                    LECTURE III.
St. John; man rising in the one, God stooping in the other;
and thus each travels over a hemisphere in the great orb of
Christian Truth and they, not each singly, but between
them, embrace and encircle it all.
For this is a part of the glory of Christ as compared with
his servants, as compared with the chiefest of his servants, that- He alone stands at the'absolute centre of
humanity, the one completely harmonious man, unfolding all which was in that humanity equally upon all
sides, fully upon all sides —the only one in whom the
real and ideal met, and were absolutely at one. Every
other man has idiosyncrasies, characteristics-some features, that is, of his character, marked more strongly than
others, fitnesses for one task rather than for another, more
genial powers in one direction than in others.  Nor even
are the greatest, a St. Paul or a St. John, exempted from
this law; but, according to this law, are made to serve for
the kingdom  of God; and the regeneration, even that
mighty transformation itself, does not dissolve these characteristics, but rather hallows and glorifies them, using them
for the work of God.  And thus, in the power of these
special gifts, that which lay as a 1rbuitful germ in the doctrine, or more truly, in the facts of our Lord's life, was
by his two Apostles developed upon this side and upon that.
And as it was meant that the Gospel of Christ should
embrace all lands, should fix, at its first entrance into the
world, a firm foot upon either of its two great cultivated
portions, so.in these two, in St. Paul and in St. John, we
recognise wondrous preparations in the Providence of God
for the winning to the obedience of the cross both the
western and the eastern world.  Who can fail to see in the
great Apostle of Tarsus; in his discursive intellect, in his
keen dialectics, in his philosophic training, the man armed to
dispute with Stoic and Epicurean at Athens; who should
teach the Church how she should take the West for her inheri



THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.            51
tance? —nor less was he the man who by the past struggles
of his inner life and the consequent fulness and power with
which he brought out the scheme of our justification should
become the spiritual forefather of the Augustines and
Luthers, of all them who have brought out for us, with the
sense of personal guilt, the sense also of personal deliverance, the consciousness of a personal standing of each one
of us before God. And in St. John, the full significance
of whose writings for the Church is probably yet to be revealed, and it may be, will not appear till the coming in of
the nations of the east into the fold, we have the progenitor
of every mystic, in the nobler sense of that word-of every
contemplative Spirit that has delighted to sink and to lose
itself, and the sense of its own littleness, in the brightness
and in the glory of God. Shall we not thank God, shall
we not recognise as part of his loving wisdom, that thus
none are left out; that while there are evidently among men
two leading types of mind, he has made provision for them
both-for the discursive and the intuitive, —for the schoolman and the mystic,-for them who trust through knowing
to see, and for them also who believe that: only through
seeing they can know; —that, whatever in their intellectual
condition men may be, the net is laid out to catch them?
For then, when once they are taken, all that might have
been -in them  of overbalance in  one direction, all of
faulty excess, is gradually done away and redressed, till
they and those that have been brought in by an opposite
method, are more and more led to a mutual recognition and
honouring of the gifts of each other, and to the unity of a
perfect man in Jesus Christ.
Nor is it only that there is a different nourishment
for different souls, but the same nourishment is also so
curiously mixed and tempered, that it is felt to be for
all. As, perhaps, the most signal example of this, let
us only seek to realize to ourselves what the Book of




52                    LECTURE IIr.
Psalms, itself, according to that beautiful: expression of
Luther's, a Bible in little,' has been, and for whom-how
men of all conditions, all habits of thought, have here met,
vying with one another in expressions of affection and gratitude to this book, in telling what they owed to it, and
what it had proved to them.  Men seemingly the most unlikely to express enthusiasm about any such matter —lawyers
and statists immersed deeply in the' world's business, classical scholars familiar with other models of beauty, other
tandards of art-these have been forward as the forwardest
to set their seal to this book, have left their confession that
it was the voice of their inmost heart, that the spirit of it past
into their spirits as did the spirit of no other book, that it
found them more often and at greater depths of their being,
lifted them to higher heights than did any other-or, as
one greatly suffering man, telling of the solace which he
found from this book of Psalms in the hours of a long imprisonment, has expressed it,-that it bore him  up, as a
lark perched between an eagle's wings is borne up into the
everlasting sunlight, till he saw the world and all its trouble
for ever underneath him. I can imagine no fairer volume
than one of such thankful acknowledgments as I have described, and it is a volume which might easily be gathered,
for such on all sides abound; not a few of them as large,
as free, as rapturous as that of our own Hooker, which
must be present to the minds of many of us here. Nor is
it won'derful. that there should be such; for, to quote but
one noble utterance* in relation to this book, "the conflict
of naked power with righteousness, of the visible with the
invisible, of confusion with order, of the devilish with the
divine, of death with life, this is its subject. And because
this is the subject of all human anxieties, this book has
been that in which living and suffering men in all ages
- Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in. the Encyclop.
Metropolitana.




THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.                   53
have found a language, which they have felt to be a mysterious anticipation of, and provision for, their own especial
wants, and in which they have gradually understood that
the Divine voice is never so truly and distinctly heard,
-as when it speaks through  human experience  and syrmpathies."*
- The reader miay be well pleased to see a few more of these
brought at a single glance under his eye. St. Basil may fitly lead.
In a passage Hom. I. Psalmos, quoted at much greater length in
Suicer's Thess. s. v. Abrauos sisoftes maneri oarprvcv dvyavt v  
aeChd thisO pas0fg5 o 7f' hi  gro V EV east0er VXotEpoaVOCS  ina vaot5
xindJv riespnv. vneGo. c      omodhs  noto ess    beauCovvt yCandh A' hphsIs3vrponstuitpyoplex   yvvaet, pxoheiog. apnuoncuat, o   ar rEPUllasi Oxraist-   &yop OP5  0brpov bEst' EaEYO  Crtuos DXEs c   rpOXO',tV'eO
avci, m    erev vuln eos  slpeVeva ossPYi cXXr6tl crP oVi. OV.O.  ~f7 EQOpa5m
9"[16pVV6C 0tt05 ~2'4V,  xaWtV,Ex0V > 0r1 Y     V0r60tPYE te    t5i)0  tIP
xab Ex EW60BIvns  xap8bSI   &cXpvov EIxaX ImEtC 4UA0,5 eo ev Ay-'
rEnv  Epyov, Os6 oipa vov Aoh jEtvpa,'ro A VECLvea6xv ovbaoUta,
x.. x. St. Ambrose, as it was often his manner to reproduce
what he found in the Greek Fathers to his purpose, would seem to
have had this passage of his great eastern contemporary in his
mind when he composed his not less beautiful land of the Psalms.
Elnarr. in Ps. i. Here too it is but a fragment which can be quoted:
Historia instruit, Lex docet, prophetia annunciat, correptio castigat,
moralitas suadet, in libro Psalmorum profectus est omnium, et medicina qusdam  salutis humaner.  Quicunque legerit, habet quo
oproprie vulnera passionis speciali possit cura remedio.. Quantum
laboratur in Ecclesia ut fiat silentium, cum lectiones leguntur  Si
unus loquatur, obstrepunt universi: cum psalmus legitur, ipse sibi
est effector silentii. Omnes loquuntur, et nullus obstrepit. Psalmum
reges sine potestatis supercilio resultant. In hoc se ministerio David gaudebat videri. Psalmus cantatur ab imperatoriabus, jubilatur
a populis. Certant clamare singuli quod omnibus proficit. Domi
psalmus canitur, foris recensetur.  Sine labore percipitur, cum
voluptate servatur: psalmus dissidentes copulat, discordes sociat,
offensos reconciliat...Certat in Psalmo doctrina cum  gratia simul.
Cantatur ad delectationem, discitur ad eruditionem.  Nam violentiora precepta non permanent; quod autem cum suavitate perceperis, id infusum semel prsecordiis, non consuevit elabi. And Augus5*




5t4                     LECTURE III
Indeed, inthe: fact of suchi a book as the Psalter-formling
part of our sacred Instrument, we trace a most gracious
tine (Confess., 1. 9, c. 4,) speaks of the manner in which he exult(;d
in the Psalms at the time of his first conversion: Quas tibi, Deus
meus, voces dedi cure legerem psalmos David...acri dolor indignabar
Manichis et quomodo in te infiammabar ex eis, et accendebar
cos recitalr si possem  toto orbe terrarum  adversum typhum  humani: generis...Quam vehementi et miserebar eos rursus, quod illa
sacramenta, illa medicamenta nesicrent, et insani essent adversus
antidotum quo sani esse potuissent.
Jeremy Taylor, in his Preface to the Psalter of David, speaking
of the manner in which, by the trouble of the civil wars, he was deprived of his books and his retirements, and how in his deprivation
he found comfort here, thus goes on: "Indeed, when I came to look
upon the Psalter with a nearer observation, and an eye diligent to
espy any advantage and remedies there deposited...I found so
many admirable promises, so rare variety of the expressions of the
mercies of God, so many consolatory hymns, the commemoration of
so many deliverances from dangers and deaths and enemies, so
many miracles of mercy and salvation, that I began to be so confident as to believe there could come no affliction great enough to
spend so great a stock of comfort as was laid up in the treasure
of the -Psalter; the saying of St. Paul was here verified,'If
sin' and misery'did abound, then  did grace superabound;'
and as we believe of the passion of Christ, it was so great as
to be able to satisfy a thousand worlds; so is it of the comforts
of David's Psalms, they are more than sufficient to repair all the
breaches of mankind." And Donne (Sermon 66,) taking his. text
from Ps. lxiii. 8, proceeds: "The Psalms are the manna of the
Church. As manna tasted to every man like that that he liked best,
so do the Psalms minister instruction and satisfaction to every man
in every emergency and occasion. David was not only a clear prophet of Christ himself, but a prophet of every particular Christian;
he foretells what I, what any, shall do and suffer and say. And as
the whole book of Psalms is oleum eflsum, an ointment poured out
upon all sorts of sores, a searcloth that supples all bruises, a
balnm that searches all wounds, so are there some certain psalihs
that are imperial psalms, that command over all affections, and
spread themselves over all occasions; catholic universal psalms
that apply themselves to all necessities."




THE MANIFOLDN1SS OX SCRIPTURE.            55
purpose of God. For in the very idea: of a IRevelation is!
implied ratherda speaking of God to men than of men to
God; and such a speaking from heaven predominantly finds
place in all other books of Holy Scripture.  Yet how greatly
had we been losers, had there been no corresponding record of
the answering voices that go up from earth unto heaven.
How earnestly should we have craved a standard by which
to try the feelings, the utterances of our spirits,-a rule
whereby to know whether they were healthy and true,
the same voices, the same cries, as those of each other
regenerate man. Such a rule, such a standard we have*
here; man is speaking unto God; that which came fromr
heaven is returning to heaven once more. Here we have
insight into the mystery of prayer; streams of life are rising
up as high as the heights from which first they came down;
the mountain-tops of man's spirit are smoking, but smoking
because God has descended upon and touched them.
These are but a few  examples, brethren,-time will
allow us to adduce no more,-of that which all Scripture
will abundantly supply, —the  evidences, namely, of its
own adaptation for the needs of all, for all the needs
of each.   And these things being so, let us for ourselves gladly enter intothis many-chambered palace of the
Truth, whereof the doors stand open to us evermore. Let
us thankfully sit down at this feast of many spiritual dainties, which is spread for us and for all. And if not every
one of them at once delight us; if of some we have rather
to take the word of others that they are good than as yet
proved it so ourselves, let us believe that the cause of this
lies rather in the sickness of our palate, than in the faulty
preparation of that which the great Master of the feast has
set before us;-and let us ask, not that these be removed,
but that our true taste be restored; and this the more, seeing that unnumbered guests, who in time past have sat
down, or are now sitting down, at this heavenly banquet,




56                   LECTURE III.
have borne witness that these meats which may be dull and
tasteless to us, were life and strength to them, "yea, sweeter
than honey and the honeycomb." We are sick, and these
are medicines no less than food; and for us that word must
stand fast, Non corrigat ceyer medicamenta sua. Let us
thus bear ourselves towards Holy Scripture, and then presently, in that which seemed a stranger face we shall recognize the countenance of a gracious, a familiar friend. We
shall more and more see how  this Scripture was laid
out by One who knew what was in man, One who desired
also to unfold us on all sides of our moral and spiritual
being; who, too, in the largeness of his love, would send
none empty away; but who does herein open his hand, that
He may fill all things living with his plenteousness.




LECTURE IV.
THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.
HEBREWS I. 1, 2.
God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto
the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by
his Son.
WE have seen how in Holy Scripture one idea is dominant, the idea of a lost, defaced, and yet not' wholly effaced,
image of God in man, with God's scheme for its restoration
and renewal: we have seen how that, which is one in having
this for a subject, and in knowing no other subject, has yet
a manifold development, marvellously corresponding to the
manifold necessities of his nature to whom  it is addressed,
and who by its help should be renewed. But the progressive unfolding of God's plan in Scripture, may well afford
matter for another discourse, and will supply our theme for
this day.
Nor shall I herein be wandering from my argument, since
this progressiveness of Scripture is an important element
in its fitness for the education of man. For this we claim
of a teacher to whom we yield ourselves with an entire confidence, that there be advance and progress in his teaching;
not indeed that this should be at every moment distinctly
perceptible, but that it should be so when long periods and
courses of his teaching are contemplated together. The
advance may sometimes be rather in a spiral than in a
straight line, yet still on the whole there must be advance; he must not eddy round in ceaseless circles, leaving
off where he began, but evidently have a scheme before
him, according to which he is: seeking to lead on unto per(57)




58                    LECTURE -IV.
fection those that have committed themselves to his teaching. It is of the essence of a true teacher, be that teacher
book or person, thus to carry forward. If it be a book
claiming -to educate, it must be itself the history of an
education, the record of an intensive, as well as extensive
development.  We look for this, and we rest our expectation on a yet deeper feeling.  We feel that as each individual man was meant to go on from lower to higher, and
in the end to have Christ fully formed in him, so the
Church as a living body could not have been intended to be
a stationary thing, always conning over the same lessons,
but rather advancing in a like manner to perfection;-not
in this advance leaving aught behind which God has taught
it; but ever carrying with it into its higher state, as part
of its realized possession, all which it has gotten in a lower.
And if so, that Book which was to be the record and interpreter of these dealings of God, ever running parallel with
them, growing with their growth, explaining them as they
unfolded themselves, that must bear the stamp and impress
of the same progress.
Does a nearer examination of the Holy Scriptures bear
out this our expectation?   Does it speak of itself as a progressive revelation of the Name of God? And if so, can we
discern it to be such, to be the gradual unfolding of the
ideas of the kingdom, and of men's relations to it, to be a
continual calling out in them  the sense of new relations
and new faculties and powers?  I think, both.  And, first,
Revelation speaks of itself in such language.  "I have
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them
now;" surely this was what God had been saying to his
elect from the first, till that crowning day of Pentecost,
when they were made capable of all mysteries and had the
unction of the Holy One,- and knew all things; —and with
much before us, it needs not to tarry with the proofs of
this.




THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.               59
And as regards ourselves, we can trace, I think, the
Scripture to be this which it affirms itself to be. WXho, for
instance, can help feeling that in the three memorable epochs
by which it marks the greatest unfoldings of the kingdom
of God,-I mean,. in the calling of Abraham, the giving
of the Law by Moses, the Incarnation of the Son of God,
-we have the childhood, the youth, the manhood of our
race, of that elect- portion of it, at least, which God had
gathered into a Church and constituted for the while the.representative of all; and that we have this with marvellous correspondencies of these epochs to similar periods in
the lives which we ourselves are living?
In Abraham and the Church of the patriarchal age, we
have that which exactly answers to childhood. Their relations to God were as a child's to a father, —the same undoubting, unquestioning affiance; with as yet no fixed code
of law; the deeper evils of the heart not as yet stirring, the
awful consciousness of those evils as yet unawakened. So
Abraham and the patriarchs walked before God, in the
beauty and the simplicity of a childlike faith-love seeming
as yet the only law, and no other law being needed, since
not yet the whole might of the rebellious will had been
aroused, since e sheltering Providence had hitherto kept
aloof many temptations which should afterwards arrive.
But a very different stage of man's history begins with
Mloses. The father is thrBwn for awhile into the background
by the lawgiver; God appears the giver of a "fiery law:"
and the. race having outgrown its childlike estate, with all
the blessed privileges of that time, appears now as the youth,
aware of this terrible law, and struggling against it; and in
this struggle brought to a consciousness of that which before
was hidden from it, namely, the deep alienation of its will
from the perfect will of God. This seems, at first sight, as
though it were a retrograde step in man's progress, and
regarded apart from the final issues it were; as the Apostle




060                   LEOCTURE IV.
himself confesses, when he says, "TI was alive without the
law once, but when the commandment came, -sin revived,
and I died."  Yet not he, nor any, could have done without
this coming in of the law. The opposition of his will to
God's will being in man, most needful was it that it should
not remain latent, but be brought out, yea brought out in
all its strength, as a holy law could alone bring it out; for
thus only was it in the way of being subdued. God having
made himself known as a God of love, most needful was it
that men should know Him  also the God of an absolute
righteousness; since without this that love itself had shown
in men's eyes as a poor thing, as a weak toleration of their
evil, instead of being, as it is, that which more than all else
makes Him a consuming fire for all impurity and evil.
But with the entering of the Son of God into our nature,
the manhood of the race begins-that which it was meant in
its final perfection to be-that, for the sake of which it
passed through those lower stages. The consciousness of
the filial relation has again revived in all its full strength,
and the suspended privileges are restored. " Abba, Father!"
is once more on the lips of the Church, only with deeper
accents and a fuller sense than at that earlier day of all
which in these words is included.  The sense of God's love
which belonged to its childhood, of God's righteousness
which predominated in its youth, are reconciled; they have
met and kissed each other.  His love is seen to be righteous and his righteousness to be loving.  His law is no
lonwgr struggled against, for it is written in the heart,
and it reveals itself as that which to keep-is the truest
blessedness.
And how mysteriously, brethren, does this teaching of
-our race, which was thus written large, and acted out upon
a great scale in the history of God's chosen people, repeat
itself evermore in the smaller world, in the microcosm  of
jelect souls, which are under the same divine education.  Is




THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.               61'
there not many a one who' can trace in himself the'same
process and progress we have been following here?  First
was our childhood, corresponding to Abraham's state-the
undeveloped, yet true affiance on a heavenly Father, —when
we needed no more than this; when as yet we had not
looked down into the abysmal deeps of evil in our hearts,
when we too were alive without the law, and dreamt not of
the rebel, who was ready, when occasion came, to take arms
against his Lord, though that rebel was no other than ourselves.
But the years went on, with all which they brought,
with their good and with their evil: and childhood was
left behind; and to us, too, the time arrived for the giving
of the law; and then us, too, God led apart into the
wilderness, separated us from every other living soul, made
us feel the mystery of our awful personalityv, and spoke
to us as He had never spoken before, even face to face,
-revealing Himself to us no longer merely as the God
of our fathers, but with a higher revelation, as the I AM,
the Holy One. For us, too, was that terrible giving of the
law in the deep of our souls, which he who has known
will say boldly, that Sinai with its thunders and lightnings,.
its blackness and its darkness, its unendurable voice which he
who heard craved that he might hear no more, was not Abore
terrible; —and sin is no longer a word but a reality, is no
longer felt as the transient grieving of a parent's heart, but
as the violation of an eternal order, a violation which cannot
remain unrevenged or unredressed. But dreadful as this
law is, terrible and threatening shape as it rises over the
soul, does not each man make the same experience as did
Israel of old, and find out its helplessness for the true ends
of his life?  It can kill the sinner, but it cannot kill the
sin; that only shrinks deeper into its hiding-places in the
soul, and needs another charmer to lure it out.  This is our
state of condemnation, which is yet most needful for a right
6




62                    LECTURE IV.
entering into the state of life and freedom: this is the law
preparing for, and handing over unto, Christ.
And as there was the manhood of the race, as the Church
which God had been training and disciplining so long, was
introduced into the fullness of its inheritance, when Christ,
who had upheld it always, came visibly into the midst of it;
so is it in like manner when God brings his First-begotten
into the inner world of any single heart. Then that heart
understands all the way by which it had been led, and sees
how all things have worked for the bringing it into that
grace in which now it stands.  Then the child's faith returns; only is it now a mightier faith, a more heroic act of
affiance, for it is a faith in God despite of and in full knowledge of our evil, instead of a faith in God in ignorance of
our evil.
Marvellously does He thus run oftentimes the lives of his
children parallel with the life of the Church at large, as
that life is unfolded in Sacred Writ, bringing each in particular under the same teaching as the whole. Yet this is
not all: we have not merely in Scripture God carrying
Israel his Son through successive stages, which may serve to
explain to us the stages of our own innermost spiritual life;
but we may trace there another sequence, another progress
-that by which He is training his people into a sense of
ever-widening relationships, and this also making answer
to the sequence in which He trains each one in particular of
his children into the same, and serving as a pattern thereto.
For what are the great fellowships of men, which rest not
upon man's choice, but upon God's will, which are not selfwilled associations into which men gather of themselves, but
societies wherein they are set by the act of God? Each
will at once reply, The Family, The State, The Church.
And this too is their order; The Family must go before the
State, being itself the corner stone on which the State is
built; and the State, which is the fellowship of certain men




THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.               63
to the exclusion of others, waits to be'taken up into the
Church, which is the fellowship of all men who believe in
the risen head of their race.
And this sequence is that maintained in the Bible; for
what is the early history of the Bible, but predominantly the
history of the Family? of the blessing which awaits reverence for the family order, of the. sure curse which avenges
its violation. On the one side, we have the men who were
true to this divine institute; who, amid many weaknesses,
recognized and honored it the Seths and Enochs before the
flood, the Abrahams and Isaacs, the Jacobs and Josephs
after.  On the other side we have the Lameehs and Tubal
Cains, and at a later day, the builders of Babel, the men
who thought to associate themselves, to say, a confederacy,
where God had not said it, to knit themselves into a body
by bands of their own, instead of owning that God had knit
them already-skilled masters, as we learn, in the arts of
life, starting up, as we are told, into a premature civilization; yet having in themselves, through violations, which
we can plainly trace, of that family order, of the primal
institutes of humanity, the seeds of a sure and swift decay:
so that presently they are lost to our sight altogether; while
the Patriarchs, the honourers and sanctifiers of these rela.
tions, walk before us heads of a nation, of that kingly and
priestly nation in which all other nations should be blest.
But Holy Scripture does not linger here. It passes on,
and its middle history is the history of this nation, of national
life; showing us, by liveliest example, all that can exalt, all
that can degrade, a people: how Israel, so long as it believed
in its invisible Lord and King, its righteous Lawgiver, was
great and prosperous —how, when it lost that faith and bowed
to idols of sense, it became of a surety inwardly distracted,
externally enslaved-forfeiting those very outward gifts for
the sake of which it had turned its back upon the Giverrighteousness and truth and justice perishing between man




64                    LECTURE IV.
and man, while IIe in whom  alone these have any substantial existence was no longer held fast to and believed.
And then in the New Testament, not the conditions under
which the Family can exist, not the conditions under which
the State, but the idea of the Church, of that fellowship,
which, including all, may itself be included by none, is
unfolded to us. There we behold the laws of the universal
kingdom, and Christ, not the King of a single nation, but
the Head of humanity, the Saviour of all.
And this order of Sacred Scripture, is also the order of
our lives.  [ mean not that we first become members of a
family and then of a State, and lastly of a Church; but this
is the order in which we become conscious of relations. For
what is it that a child first discovers? that it is the member
of a fasmily —that it has kindred.  What are its earliest
duties? a faithful entering into these relations; its earliest
sins? a refrusal to enter into them.  And what next? that
there is a wider fellowship than this of home-love and homeaffections, to which it belongs; that there are other men to
whom  it owes other dgties; that it is the member of a
State no less tha'n a family, that it must be just as well as
loving. And last of all is perceived that there is yet another
fellowship at the root of both these fellowships, which gives
them their meaning, which alone upholds and sustains them
against all the sin and selfishness which are continually
threatening their dissolution-a fellowship with the Lord of
men, and in Him with every man of that race which He has
redeemed, of that nature which He has taken.  And so the
cycle of God's teaching is complete, and that cycle in which
the Scripture shows that He taught the world, is found here
also again to be the cycle in which he teaches the individual
soul.
But to pass to quite another province of our subject:we must not leave unobserved the manner in which prophecy




THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.              65
bears witness to this progressive unfolding of God's purpose
with ours race. Often we dishonour prophecy, when the
chief value which it has in our eyes is the use to which it
may he turned as evidence; when we regard it as serving
no nobler ends, as having no deeper root in the economy
of God than in this are presumed;- when it is for us merely a
miraculum  scientice, which, with the miracles properly so
called, the miracula potentice, may do duty in proving
against cavillers the divine origin of our Faith; when all
that we can find is that the doers of the works and the
utterers of the words did and said what was beyond the
reach and scope of common men. But the fact that prophecy should constitute so large an element in scripture
finds its explanation rather in that law which we have been
tracing throughout all Scripture-the law, I mean, of an
orderly development, according_ to which there, is nothing
sudden, nothing abrupt or unprepared in his counsels, all
whose works are known to him from the beginning. It is
part of this law that there should ever be prefigurations of
the coming, that truths so vast and so mighty as those of
the New Covenant, so difficult for man's heart to conceive,
should have their way prepared, should, ere they arrive in
their highest shape, give pledge and promise of themselves,
in lower forms and in weaker rudiments.
Thus was it good that before the appearance of the Son
of God in the flesh, there should be, in the language of
Bishop Bull, "preludings of the Incarnation," transient
apparitions of Him in a human form, though not in the
verity of our human nature. Thus was it ordered that
each one of the mighty acts of our Lord's life should not
stand wholly apart, and without analogy in any thing which
had gone before, but ever find in something earlier its lineaments and its outlines.  Weak and faint these lineaments
may have been, weak and faint they must have been, when
compared with the glory that excelleth; yet sketches and
6*




66                    LECTURE IV.
outlines and foreshadowings still of the glory to be revealed.
Thus, more than one was wonderfully born, with many circumstances of a strange solemnity, with heavenly announcements,  with much that went beyond human expectation, ere
HE was born, by the annunciation of an Angel, through the
overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, whose name should be
called Wonderful, The Mighty God.  So we may say that
in the shinining of Moses' face, as he came-down from the
mount of God, we have already a weaker Transfiguration, a
feeble fore-announcement of that brightness which, not from
without, but breaking forth from within, should clothe with
a light which no words could adequately utter, not the face
only, but the whole person, of the Son of God. So again,
in the translation of Elijah, the lineaments of his Ascension appear, who, not rapt in a chariot of fire, not needing
the cleansing of that fiery baptism, nor requiring that commissioned chariot to bear him up, did in the far sublimer
calmness of his own indwelling power arise from the earth,
and with his human body pass into the heavenly places.*
And once more, in the dividing of the Spirit which Moses
had, upon the seventy elders of Israel, so that they all did
prophesy, we recognize an earlier though a weaker Pentecost;
in which, however, the later was surely implied: for if from
the servant could be imparted of his spirit, how much more
and in what larger measure from the Son?  All these should
be contemplated as preparatory workings in a lower sphere
of the same Spirit, which afterwards wrought more gloriously
~  Gregory the Great (Hom. in Evang.:) Elias in curru legitur
ascendisse, ut videlicet aperte, demonstraretur, quia homo purus
adjutorlo indigebat alieno. Per angelos quippe facta et ostensa sunt
adjumenta; quia nec in coelum quidem aerium per se ascendere
poterat quem nature sum infirmitas gravabat. Redemtor autem
noster non curru, non angelis sublevatus legit-u' quia is qui fecerat
omnia, nimirum super omlnia suA virtute ferebatur.




TIIE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.             67
in the later and crowning acts; as knit to those later by an
inner law, as sharers of the same organic life with them.
The rending away of isolated passages, and then saying,
This Psalm, or That chapter of Isaiah, is prophetic, and has
to do with Christ and his kingdom, —and this without explaining how it comes that these have to do, and those
nearest them have not, can never truly satisfy; men's minds
resist this fragmentary capricious exposition. The portions
of Scripture thus adduced very likely are those in which
prophecy concentrates itself more than in any other: they
may be the strongest expressions of that Spirit which
quickens the whole mass; but it has not forsaken the other
portions to gather itself up exclusively in these.
Rather the subtle threads of prophecy are woven through
every part of the woof and texture, not separable from thence
without rending and destroying the whole.  All the Old
Testament, as the record of a divine constitution pointing to
something higher than itself, administered by men who
were ever looking beyond themselves to a Greater that
should come, who were uttering, as the Spirit stirred them,
the deepest longings of their souls after his appearing, is
prophetic; and this, not by an arbitrary appointment, which
meant thus to supply evidences ready to hand for the truth of
Revelation, in the curious tallying of the Old with the New,
the remarkable fulfilments of the foretold, but prophetic
according to the inmost necessities of the case, which would
not suffer it to be otherwise.
For how could God, bringing to pass what was good and
true, do other than make it resemble what was best'and truest,
which. he should one day bring to pass? Raising up holy
men, how could he avoid giving them features of likeness to
the Holiest of all? appointing themn functions and offices in
which to bless their brethren, how could these otherwise
than anticipate his functions and his office, who should come
in the fulness of blessing to his people?  Inspiring them to




speak, stirring by the breath of his Spirit the deepest chords
of their hearts how could He bring forth from  them  any
other notes but those which made the deepest music of their
lives; their longings, namely, after the promised Redeemer,
their yearnings after the kingdom  of his righteousness, —
mere longings and yearnings no longer now, since the Spirit
that inspired such utterances, being the very Spirit of Truth,
gave pledge, in sanctioning and working the desire, that the
fulfilment of that desire in due time should not by wanting?
If the poet had right when he spake of
"the prophetic soul
Of the great world, dreaming of things to come;"
by how much higher reason must a prophetic soul have
dwelt in Israel, by which it not vaguely dreamed, but
in some sort felt itself already in possession, of the great
things to come, whereof it knew that the seeds and germs
were laid so deeply in its own bosom?  We may say of
Judiasm, that it bore in its womb the Messiah, as the
man-child whom it should one day give birth to, and only
in the forming and bearing of whom it found its true
meaning. This was its function, and according to the counsel
of God it should have been saved through this child-bearing;
though by its own sin it did itself expire in giving birth
to Him who was intended to have been not its death but
its life.
This, then, is another remarkable aspect under which
the progressiveness'of God's dealings, and of that Book
which is their record, presents itself to us —this long
and patient training of his people through many a preceding word and institution and person into the capacity
of recognising his glory, of whom all that went before
was but the shadow and the symbol. In all this was a
preclude to prepare the spiritual ear for the full burst
of a later, and but for that, an overwhelming harmony;




THE ADVANCEOF -SCRIPTURE.             69
-a purpling of the east, which might tell in what quarter
the Sun of Righteousness would appear, and whither the
straining eyes must turn, that would catch the first brightness
Of his rising.
Nor is it unworthy of observation, that prophecy did
never run before that actual development, which alone would
enable it to speak a language which men should understand.
It did not paint upon air; but ever claimed forms of the
present in which to array its promises of the future. Thus
we have no mention of Christ the Prophet till a great
Prophet had actually arisen, till Moses could say, "The
Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet like unto
me." We hear nothing of Christ the King, till there were
kings in Israel-theocratic kings-who should give the prophecy a substance and a meaning; who should make men
know, though with many imperfections, what a sceptre of
righteousness was, and a king ruling in judgment.  And
thus (did time allow) we might trace in much more detail
how not only in the idea of type and prophecy there is
obedience to that law of advance and progress, which we
have every where been finding, but in the very order and
sequence of the prophecies themselves. Yet this matter we
must leave.  Sufficient for us to have seen how prophecy are
the outlines and lineaments which shall indicate, and fit men
to know the very body of the Truth, when that at length
shall come; —to have considered under another aspect today, how Scripture is its own witness, gives proof that it is
what it affirms itself to be, a Book for the education of men,
— in that it plainly contains the gradual unfolding of a great
idea, such a thought as only could have entered into the
mind of God to conceive, such a thought as He only who is
the King of ages could have carried out.
And without question, for ourselves, brethren, the lessons
which the Scripture contemplated as this Book of an everadvancing education may suggest, are not very far to seek.




70                    LECTURE tv.
And this first. God has taken our whole race by the hand
that He may lead it on together; even so will he lead every
single soul that will trust itself to Him.  He will speak to
us first as "little children," then as "young men," and
then as "fathers." -His Word in our hearts shall be as the
blade and the ear, and the full corn in the ear. He will
give us, as we are faithful, an ever larger horizon, a widening horizon of duty, with an increasing consciousness of
powers and faculties for fulfilling that duty.
And our second lesson lies also at the door,-that seeing,
as we do in Scripture, what the school has been in which
all God's saints have been trained, we- be well content to
learn in the same, nor count that we can learn better in any
other. The study of this Scripture shows us how, through
the everlasting ordinances of the Family, the State, the
Church, God trains into nobleness and freedom the souls
and spirits of men; how he calls out in their strength, first
the affections, then the conscience, and last of all, the reason
and the will of men. It teaches us that, not in self-willed
separation from common duties, but in a lowly and earnest
fulfilling of them, men have grown up to their full stature
as men. Often in that evil pride which makes us rather to
follow after that which will divide us from  our brethren,
that which will unite us to them, we have counted, it may
be, that we could discipline ourselves better, that we could
train ourselves higher, than by those common ways'in which
all our fellows are being trained,-better than through the
ordinances of the family, better than through the duties
which devolve on us as citizens, better than by the teaching and Sacraments of Christ's Church.  It has seemed to
us a poor thing to walk in those trite and common paths
wherein all are walking.  Yet these common paths are the
paths in which blessing travels, are the ways in which God
is met.  Welcoming and fulfilling the lowliest duties which
meet us there, we shall often be surprised to find that we




THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE.            71
have unawares been welcoming and entertaining Angels;
and nurturing ourselves upon these, it shall be with us in
our souls and spirits as it was with Daniel and his young
companions, when they showed fairer and better liking, and
had more evidently thriven upon their common food, their
ordinary pulse, than had all their compeers upon their
royal dainties, their profane meats, brought from the table
of the Babylonian king.




LECTURE V.
THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.
JOHN XII. 16.
These things understood not his disciples at the first; but when Jesus was
glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of him.
TILE subject of the Lectures which I am now permitted'to resuluc, is the fitness of Holy Scripture unfolding the
spiritual life of men, and the arguments which we may from
this fitness derive for its being the gift of God to his reasonable creatures, whom He has called to a spiritual fellowship with Himself. So many who are now present cannot
have heard the earlier discourses, so little have I a right to
expect that those who did, should vividly retain them in
their memories, that I shall just mention at this resumption of the course the point at which I have arrived, not
attempting to retrace even with hastiest steps, but indicating
merely by lightest hints, the way by which we hitherto have
gone. Passing by, then, the external arguments, not as
comparatively unimportant, but as not belonging to the
domain of my peculiar subject, I have sought, after some
preliminary observations which filled the chief -part of my
first Lecture, in the second to trace the oneness of Scripture;
how there runs through it one idea, that of the kingdom of
God, and how by that one are knit into unity its most,diverse parts and elements; in the third, hbw this Scripture,
which is one, is also manifold, so laid out that it shall
nourish all souls, and make wonderful answer to the moral
and intellectual needs of all men; and then in the fourth,
the latest of that series, I endeavoured to show how Scripture is fitted to be the Book of our education, the furtherer
(72)




THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.           73
of our spiritual growth, through itself being the history of
the progressive education of our race into the fulness of the
knowledge of God.
An ample task remains for us still: this day's portion of
that task will consist in an attempt, it must be indeed a
most imperfect one, to show how this treasure of divine
Truth, once given, has only gradually revealed itself; -how
the history of the Church, the difficulties, the trials, the
struggles, the temptations in which it has been involved,
hlave interpreted it to its own records, brought out their
latent significance, and caused it to discover all which in
them it had; how there was much written for it there as in
sympathetic ink, invisible for a season, yet ready to flash
out in lines and characters of light, whenever the appointed
day and hour had arrived. So that in this way the Scripture has been to the Church as their garments to the children of Israel, which during all the years of their pilgrimage
in the desert waxed not old, yea, according to rabbinnical
tradition, kept pace and measure with their bodies, growing
with their growth, fitting the man as they had fitted the
child, and this, until the forty years of their sojourn in the
wilderness, had expired.  Or, to use another comparison
which may help to illustrate our meaning, Holy Scripture
thus progressively unfolding what it contains, might be
likened fitly to some magnificent landscape on which the
sun is gradually rising, and ever as it rises is bringing out
one headland into light and prominenee, and then another;
anon kindling the glory-smitten summit of some far mountain, and presently lighting up the recesses of some near
valley which had hitherto abided in gloom, and so travelling on till nothing remains in shadow, no nook nor corner
hid from the light and heat of it, but the whole prospect
stands out in the clearness and splendour of the brightest
noon..
And we can discern, I think, in some measure, causes




74                    LECTURE Y.
which in the wisdom and providence of God worked together
to constitute Scripture as this glorious landscape which
should ever reveal new features of wonder and beauty, this
boundless treasure with riches laid up for all future times
and all future needs.  The apostolic Church-that of which
the sacred writings of the New Covenant are a living transcript-was not merely one age and one aspect of the
Church, but we have in it the picture and prophecy of the
Church's history in every future age. All which in those
after ages should only slowly declare itself, is there pre-sented in one great image,-the most amazing contrasts, the
best and the worst, the highest and the lowest, the noblest
assertions, and the deadliest perversions, of the Truth.  It
is, if we may so speak, a rapid rehearsal of the great drama
of-God's providence with His Church, which should afterwards be played out at leisure on the world's stage. Nothing, which was after to be, was not there; although, by the
necessities of the case, all compressed and brought into
narrowest compass, and, so to speak, all fore-shortened, and,
as a picture of the future, wanting in perspective and in
distance. But this glimpse once vouchsafed to us all, the
wondrous picture dislimns and dissolves again; that era in
which were all other eras wrapped up, close, and the period
of gradual development begins; but yet not this, before
every error and the antidote of every error had been set
down, every heresy which should afterwards display itself
full-blown, had budded, and the witness against it had been
clearly borne; not till it had been seen how Jewish legality
and heathen false liberty would equally seek to corrupt the
Truth, and with what weapons both were to be encountered;
not till missions to the Jew and missions to the heathen
had alike been founded, and the manner of conducting them
been shown; not till many Antichrists had rehearsed and
prefigured the final one, and tried the faith of God's elect.
And thus it was ordained that the canonical Scriptures,




THE-PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.           75
which seem to belong only to one age, should indeed belong
to all ages; inasmuch as that age, that fruitful time, that
middle point of the world's history, in which an old world
died and a new world sprang to life, had the germs and
rudiments of all other times within its bosom.
It is this fact, —that the Holy Scripture contains within
itself all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, but only
renders up those treasures little by little, and as they are
needed or asked for,-which justifies us in speaking of a
development of doctrine in the Church, and explains much
in her inner history that might else startle or perplex. But
about this matter so much has lately been spoken, and
another theory of the manner in which the Church unfolds
her doctrine, looking at first sight the same as this, but at
heart entirely different, has so diligently been put forth,and that with purposes hostile to that sound form of faith
and doctrine. which it is given us to maintain and defend,that it might be worth our while to linger here for a little,
and consider wherein the essential difference between the
false theory and the true is to be found, and in what sense,
and in what only, the Church may be said to develope her
doctrine. It is familiar to many who -have watched with
interest the course of the controversies of our day, that
those who have given up as hopeless the endeavour to find
in Scripture, or in the practices or creeds of the early
Church, evidence for the accretions with whi'ch they have
overlaid the Truth, have shifted their ground, and taken up
a position entirely new. True, they have said, these additions are not there, but they are the unfolding of the Truth
which is there; they are but the producing of the line of
Truth, the later numbers of a series, whereof the earlier in
Scripture are given; they are necessary developments of
doctrine, such as the Church has ever allowed to herself,
and which will alone explain many of the appearances which
she presents.




.7 6LECTURE V.
Now doubtless there is a true idea of Scriptural developments, which has always been recognized, to which the great
Fathers of the Church have set! their seal;* and it is this,
that the Church, informed and quickened by the Spirit of
God, more and more discovers what in Holy Scripture is
given her; but it is not this, that she unfolds by an independent power any thing farther therefrom. She has always
possessed what she now possesses of doctrine and truth, only
not always with the same distinctness of consciousness
She has not added to her wealth, but she has become more
and more aware of that wealth; her dowry has remained
always the same, but that dowry was so rich and rare, that
only little by little she has counted over and taken stock and
inventory of her jewels. She has consolidated her doctrine,
compelled thereto by the provocation of enemies, or induced
to it by the growing sense of her own needs.  She has
bronght together utterances in Holy Writ, and those which
apart were comparatively barren, when thus married, when
each had thus found its complement in the other, have been
fruitful to her.  Those which apart meant little to her, have
been seen to mean much, when thus brought together and
read each by the ight of the other. In these senses she
has enlarged her dominion, her dominion having become
larger to her.
And yet all this which she has laboriously won, she possessed
~ Thus Augustine (Einarr. in Ps. LIV. 22:) Multa enim latebant.
in Scripturis et quum proecisi essent heretici, quoestionibus agitaverunt Ecclesiam Dei; aperta sunt que latebant, et intellecta, est
voluntas Dei....Numquid enim perfecte de Trinitate tractatum est
antequam oblatrarent, Ariani  numquid perfect' de poenitentibus
tractatum est antequam obsisterent Novatiani? Sic non perfecte de
baptismate tractatum  est -antequam  contradicerent foris positi
rebaptizatores. Cf. Enarr. in Ps. lxvii. 31; and Confess., 1. 7, c.
19. Improbatio hoereticorum facit eminere quid Ecclesia sentiat, et
quid habeat sana doctrina.




THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.          77
before implicitly though not explicitly,-even as the shut hand
is as perfect a hand as the open; or as our dominion in that
huge island of the Pacific is as truly ours, and that region
as vast in extent now, as it will be when every mountain
and valley, every rivulet and bay, have been explored and
laid down in our maps, and the flag of England has waved
over them all. All, for example, which the later Church
slowly and through centuries defined upon this side and
that, of the person of the Son of God —of the relation of his
natures and the communication of their properties-of his
divine will and his human,-all this the earliest had, yea
and enjoyed, not having arrived at it by analytic process,
not able, perhaps, as not needing, to lay it out with dialectic
accuracy, but in total impression, in synthetic unity. She
possessed it all, she lived in the might and in the glory of
it; as is notably witnessed by the prophetic tact, if one may
venture so to call that divine instinct, by which she rejected
all which was alien to and would have disturbed the true
evolution of her doctrine, even before she had fully elaborated
that doctrine; by which she refused to shut the door against
herself; and even in matters which had not yet come before
her for decision and definition, preservdd the ground clear
and open from all. that would have embarrassed and obstructed in the future.
We do not object to, rather we fully acknowledge, the
theory of the development of religious Truth so stated.
We no more object, than we do to a Nicene Creed following up and enlarging an Apostolic, which rather we gladly
and thankfully receive as a rich addition to our heritage.
But that Nicene creed in the same manner contains no new
truths which the Church has added to her stock since the
earlier was composed, though it may be some which she has
brought out with more distinctness to herself and to her
children, —as it contains broader and more accurately
guarded statements of the old. But the essential in this
7*




78                    LECTURE V.
progress of Truth is, that the later is always as truly found
in Scripture as the earlier —not as easy to discover, but
when discovered, as much carrying with it its own evidence;
— and there, not in some obscure hint and germ, putting
one in mind of an inverted pyramid, so small the foundation,
so vast and overshadowing the superstructure-as for instance, the whole Papal system, which rests, as far as Scripture'is adduced in proof, on a single text-nor yet there in
some passage which is equally capable of a thousand other
turns as that given; as, for example, when the worship of
the Blessed Virgin is found prophesied and authorized in
the Lord's answer to her at the marriage in Cana of Galilee.
But with, these limitations the scheme is altogether
different from that which some of late have put forward,
— different not in degree only, but in kind; and it is that
mere confusion of unlike things under like terms, which is
so fruitful a source of errors in. the world, to call by this
same name that theory which, refusing the Scriptures as,
first and last, authoritative in and limitary of the Truth,
assumes that in the conrse of ages there was intended to be,
not only the discovery of the Truth which is there, but also,
by independent accretion and addition, the further growth
of doctrine, besides what is there; which recognises such
accretions, when they fall in with its own notions, for its
legitimate outgrowths, and' not, as indeed they are, for
noxious misgrowths, of doctrine; and which thus makes the
Church from time to time the creator of new Truth, and not
merely the guardian and definer and drawer out of the old.
This is all that she assumes to be; whatever she proclaims,
she has ever the consciousness that she is proclaiming it as
the ancient Truth, as that which she has always borne in
her bosom, however she may not. have distinctly outspoken
it till now; as part of the Truth once delivered to her,
though, it may be, not all at once apprehended by her.
Thus was it felt in the ages long past of the Church;




THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.            79
thus also was it at the Reformation; for that too was an
entering of the Church on a portion of the fulness of her
heritage, on which she had not adequately entered before.
It is hardly too much to say, that the Reformation called
out from their hiding-places the Epistle to the Romans, the
Epistle to the Galatians, and generally the Epistles of St.
Paul, which then became to the faithful all which they were
intended to be.  It is not, of course, implied that these were
not read and studied and commented on before, or that much
and varied profit was not drawn from them in every age, or
that they had not been full of blessing for unnumbered
souls. But with all this, men's eyes were holden, and had
been for long, so that the innermost heart of them, the
deepest significance, was not seen. For they were the needs
of souls, the mighty anguish of men's spirits, which were
the true interpreters of these portions of God's Word.
When that vast and gorgeous fabric, the Papal Christendom
of the middle ages, dissolved and went to pieces, —that
which, as one contemplates it on its bright side or its dark,
one is inclined to regard as a glorious realization, or an impious caricature, of the promised kingdom  of Christ upon
the earth;-when the time arrived that men could no longer
live by faith, that they were members of that great spiritual
fellowship, (for it was felt now to be only the mockery of
such;) when each man said, " I too am a man, myself and
no other, one by myself, with my own burden, my own sin,
the inalienable mystery of my own being, which I cannot
put off on another, and, as such, I must stand or fall; it
helps me nothing to tell me that I belong to a glorious community, in-which saints have lived and doctors taught,
wherein I am bound in closest fellowship with all the ages
that are past; this helps me nothing,'unless I too, by myself, am  a healed man, with the deep wound of my own
spirit healed, unless you show me how my own personal
relations to God, which sin has utterly disturbed, may be




80                   LECTURE V.
made firm and strong again; —then, when men thus felt,
where should they so naturally turn as to those portions of
Scripture especially designed to furnish a response to this
deep cry of the human heart, and which are occupied with
setting forth a personal Deliverer from this personal sense
of guilt and condemnation? And not any thing else but
this mighty agony of souls would have supplied the key of
knowledge to the Epistles of' St. Paul, which had remained
otherwise to the faithful as written in a strange language, to
be admired at a distance, but dealing with matters in which
they had no very close concern. But with this preparation,
and thus initiated by suffering, men came to them with ineffable joy, as to springs in the desert, and found in them all
after which their inmost spirits had yearned and thirsted the
most.
Thus at the Reformation the relations of every man to
God, consequent on the Incarnation and death and resurrection of the Son of God, were those for which the Church
mainly contended;-that those relations were perfect,-that
by one oblation Christ had perfected for ever them that were
sanctified, that nothing might come between God and the
cleansed conscience of his children, to bring them nearer
than they were brought already,-no pope, no work, no
penance —that all which pretended to intrude and come between was a lie. And by consequence those records of
Scripture which were occupied with declaring the perfectness
of these relations, were those most sedulously and most
earnestly handled; bright beams of light flashed out from
them, at once enlightening and gladdening and kindling, as
they had never done until now.
But in our own day, as we see in that country where alone
a speculative philosophy, with which theology has to put
itself in relation, exists, the controversy has drawn, as was
to be looked for, even nearer yet to the very heart of the
matter. For now it is not, What is the meaning for us of,




THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.            81
*this constitution in the Son? but whether there is such a
constitution at all?- it is not what follows on the relations
which the Incarnate Word established between God and
men, but whether there have been any such relations at all
established —any meeting of heaven and earth in the person
of Jesus of Nazareth,-whether all which has been spoken
of such has not been merely dreams of men, and not, ag the
Church affirms, facts of God? And therefore the Gospels,
as we see, come mainly into consideration now; round them
the combatants gather, the battle rages: they are felt to be
the key of the position, which as it is won or lost, will carry
with it the issues of the day. Every one that would strike
a blow at Christianity, strikes at them; criticizes the recdrd
or the fact recorded;-the record, that it is a loose and
accidental aggregation of floating materials, of insecure traditions, which crumbles to pieces at any accurate handling
-or the fact recorded, that a man who was God, and God
who was man, is inconceivable, and carries its own contradiction on its front.
And as the Gospels are the point mainly assailed, so are
they the citadel in which they must make themselves strong,
from which they must issue, who would win in our day any
signal victory for the Truth. First, the record itself must
be vindicated, the glory and perfectness of its form, the
mystery of those four Gospels in their subtle harmonies, in
the manner wherein they complete one another, handing us
on, the first to the second, and the second to the third, and
the third to the last: —the wondrous laws of selection, and
laws of rejection, which evidently presided at their construction, and do continually reveal themselves to the deeper inquirer, however the shallow may miss or deny them. And
then, secondly, the facts, or, to speak more truly, the fact
must be justified, which in those Gospels is recorded, —tha.t
it is the highest wisdom,-that a Son of God, who is also
the Son of man, is the one, the divine fact, which alone ex



82                    LECTURE V.
plains either God or man,-is that which philosophy must
end by accepting at the hands of Theology as the crowning
Truth, and only in accepting which it will find its own completion, and the long and weary strife between the two
obtain an end.
And as it was at the Reformation with the Pauline Epistles,-as it is now with the Gospels, —so, I cannot doubt, a
day will come when all the'significance of the Apocalypse
for the church of God will be apparent, which hitherto it
can scarcely be said to have been; that a time will arrive
when it will be plainly* shown how costly a gift, yea rather,
how necessary an armour was this for the Church of the
redeemed. Then, when the last things are about to be, and
the trumpet of the last Angel to sound, when the great
drama is hastening with ever briefer pauses to its catastrophe,
-then, in one unlooked for way or another, the veil will be
lifted up from this wondrous Book, and it will be to the
Church collectively, what, even partially understood,. it has
been already to tens of thousands of her children-strength
in the fires, giving her "songs in the night," songs of joy
and deliverance in that darkest night of her trial, which
shall precede the break of her everlasting day; and enabling
her, even when the triumph of Antichrist is at the highest,
to look securely on to his near doom and her own perfect
victory.
But we are dealing to-day with the past development of
Scripture, not with the future —with what it has already
unfolded, not with what it may have still in reserve.  That
may well occupy us hereafter; for the present, let us ask
ourselves what is the great lesson which we should draw
from this aspect of the subject which we have been this day
contemplating. A lesson surely of the very deepest significance. For if other generations before us have had their
especial task and work, so also must we; a work which none
other have done for us, even as none other could; for just




'THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.           83
as each individual has some task which none other can fulfil
so well as he, for it is his task, so every. generation has its
own appointed labour, and only can be at harmony with
itself, when it has faithfully girded itself to that. Let us
not then, under show of humility, flatter our indolence, and
say that in this matter of the treasures of the knowledge of
God all is searched out; that for us it remains only to live
on the handed down, on that which others have already won
from his Word.  Let us not, in this manner, turn that into
a standing pool or reservoir, which might be a spring of
water springing up as freshly and newly to our lips as to the
lips of any who have gone before us.
Shall we determine, for instance, to know no other Theology, no other results of Scripture, save those of the Church
of the first ages? A-re we thus honouring Christ's promise
to His Church, when we imply, as so we do, that the Spirit
of wisdom and understanding was given to her once, but is
not given to her always? Shall all history, as an interpreter
of God's Word, go for nothing with us-be assumed to stand
in no relation to that Book, of which surely the very idea
is, that as it casts light upon all, so it receives light from
all? Or do we presume too far in believing that there are
portions of its vast and goodly field, which we can cultivate
with larger success than those who preceded us, to which we
shall bring experience which they did not and could not
bring, which will yield therefore to us ampler returns than
they yielded to them?
Or, again, were it not as great a mistake, as partial a view
upon another side, to require that the Theology of the Reformation should be the -ultimate term  and law to us,-to
say that we would know nothing further, and to look,
respectfully it may be, but still coldly, on any truths which
were not at that day counted vital? Surely our loss were
most real, refusing to take our part in cultivating this field
which the Lord has blest, and which he has now delivered




84                    LECTURE V.
to us,' that we in our turn might dress and keep, and enrich
ourselves from it; —a loss we know not how great! for we
too, had we been faithful and earnest, might have found hid
in that field some treasure, for joy whereof we should have
been ready to renounce all that we had, all our barren theories, and hungry speculations, and mutual suspicions, if only
we might have made that treasure our own; so reconciling,
so evidently fitted would it have shown itself for all our
actual needs.
We may purpose indeed to live on what others have done,
the mighty men of the days which are past, the fathers or
revivers of our faith; and we may count that their gains
will as much enrich us as they enriched them. But this
will not prove so indeed; for it is a just law of our being,
one of the righteous compensations of toil, that what a man
wins by his labour, be it inward truth, or only some outward
suppliance of his need, is ever far more really his own, makes
him far more truly rich, than aught which he receives or
inherits ready made at the hands and from the toils of others.
And they of whom we speak earned their truths, by toil and
by struggle, by mighty wrestlings till the day broke; watering with the sweat of their brow, oftentimes with tears as of
blood —yea, with the life-blood of their own hearts, the soil
which yielded them in return a harvest so large. So was it,
and so only, that they came again with joy, bearing their
sheaves with them. And would we do the same, let us first
indeed see that we let nothing go-that we forfeit no part
of that which we inherit at their hands. But also with a
just confidence in that blessed Spirit, who is ever with His
Church, who is ever leading it into the Truth which it
needs,-let us labour, that through prayer and through
study, through earnest knocking, through holy living, that
inexhausted and inexhaustible Word may render up unto
us our truth,-the truth by which we must live, —the truth,
whatsoever that be, which, more than any other, will deliver




THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.        85
us from the lies with which we in our time are beset, which
will illake us strong where we are weak, and heal us where
we are divided, and enable us most effectually to do that
work which our God would have done by us in this the day
of our toil,
8




LECTURE VI.
TIlE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.
ISAIAH XII. 3.
With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.
IT was my endeavour in my last Lecture to bring before
you the progressive unfolding of the Scripture for the
Church-the manner in which for the company of faithful
men in all ages, considered as one great organic body with
one common life, there has been such a lifting up of veil
after veil from the Word of God; they only gradually
coming into the knowledge of all the riches which in that
Word were their own. It were a worthy task for us to-day
to consider, what no doubt all of us must often have felt,
the way in which it has been ordained that the treasures of
HIoly Scripture should for the individual believer be inexhaustible also,-should be quarries in which he may always
dig, yet which he can never dig out,-a world of wisdom
in which the most zealous and successful searcher shall ever
be the readiest to acknowledge that what remains to know
is far more thanwhat yet he has known.
For this is a most important need for a Book such as we
affirm the Bible to be, a Book for the cultivating of humanity, for the developing, by the ministry of the Church,
through the teaching of the Spirit, the higher life of every
man in the world. It belongs to the very primal necessities
of a Scripture which is ordained for such ends as these, that
it should be thus inexhaustible;-that no man should ever
come to its end, himself containing it, instead of being contained by it;' as by something far larger than himself.  The
(86)




THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.           87
very idea of such a Book, which is for all men and for all
the life of every man, is that it should have treasures which
it does not give up at once, secrets which it yields slowly
and only to those that are its intimates; with rich waving
harvests on its surface, but with precious veins of metal hidden far below, and to be reached only by search and by labour.
Nothing were so fatal to its lasting influence, to the high
purposes which it is meant to serve, as for any with justice
to feel that he had used it up, that he had worked it through,
that henceforward it had no "fresh fields," nor "pastures
new," in which to invite him for to-morrow. Even where
this did not utterly repel him, where he maintained the
study of this Book as a commanded duty, his chiefest delight
and satisfaction in the handling of it would have departed;
he no longer would draw water with joy from these wells of
salvation, for they would be to him fresh springing wells no
more.
It will be my purpose on the present occasion to trace, as
far as I may, what there is in the structure and conformation of Scripture to constitute it this Book of unsearchable
riches for each; and in so doing I shall not, as might perhaps at first sight appear, be going over again the subject
which was treated last; for that was the organic unfolding
of the Word for the Church considered as a whole; this the
wealth which there is stored for each one of the faithful in
particular, and which all, given to him in his Baptism; he
yet only little by little can make his own, appropriating and
transmuting it into the substance of his own life.
Now the first provision made for this by the grace and
wisdom of God,-the first. at least which I would note,-is
one which by shallow or malignant objectors has been often
turned into a charge against it, I mean the absence of a systematic arrangement; for such is the shape which the complaint generally assumes. But this complaint of the want
of method in Scripture, what is it in fact but this, that it is




88                    LECTURE VI.
not dead, but living? that -it is no herbarium, no hortus siccus, but a garden? a wilderness, if men choose to call it so,
but a wilderness of sweets, with its flowers upon their stalks
— its plants freshly growing, the dew upon their leaves, the
mould about their roots-with its lowly hyssops and its cedars
of God.  And when men say that there is a want of method
in it, they would speak more accurately if they said that
there was a want of system; for the highest method, even
the method of the Spirit, may reign where system there is
none. Method is divine, is inseparable fiom the ideas of
God and of order; but system is of man, is a help to the
weakness of his faculties, is the artificial arrangement by
which he brings within his limited ken that which in no
other way he would be able to grasp as a whole. That there
should be books of systematic Theology-books with their
plan and scheme thus lying on their very surface, and meeting us at once-this is most needful; but most needful also
that Scripture should not be such a book. The dearest interests of all, of wise men equally as of women and children,
demand this.
It is true that one of the latest assaults on Scripture by a
living adversary of the faith, by one who, at first attacking
only the historical accuracy of the Gospels, has since gone
rapidly the downward way, till he has sunk at last, as his
latest writings testify, into the bottomless pit of sheerest
atheism,* —it is true that his assault is mainly directed
against this very point. HIe demands of a book, which
claims to be the appointed book for the guidance and teaching of humanity, that he should be able to-lay his finger
there upon a precept or a doctrine for each occurring need,
-that he should be able to find in one place and under one
head all which relates to one matter; and because he cannot
Strauss. Compare his Leben Jesu with his Christliche Glaubenslehre.




THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY -OF SCRIPTURE.          89
find this in the Bible, he opens his mouth against it, and
proclaims it insufficient for the ends which it professes to
fulfill. But Holy Scripture is not this book for the slothful
-is not this book which can be interpreted without, and
apart from, and by the deniers of, that Holy Spirii by whom
it came. Rather is it a field, upon the surface of which if
sometimes we gather manna, easily and without labor, and
given, as it were, freely to our hands, yet of which also many
portions are to be cultivated with pains and toil, eye they
will yield food for the use of man. This bread of life also
is to be often eaten in the wholesome sweat of our brow.
It is not a defect in Scripture, it is not something which
is to be excused and explained away, but rather a glory and
a prerogative, that there reigns in it the freedom and fulness
of nature, and not the narrowness and strictness of art;-as
one said of old who adorned this University, and is yet
numbered among the honored band of the Cambridge Platonists, when speaking of the delightful exercise of the
highest faculties of the soul, which is thus secured:  " All
which gratulations of the soul in her successful pursuits of
divine Truth would be utterly lost or prevented, if the Holy
Scripture set down all things so fully and methodically that
our reading and understanding would every where keep pace
together.  Wherefore, that the mind of man may be worthily
employed, and taken up with a kind of spiritual husbandry,
God has not made the Scriptures like an artificial garden,
wherein the walks are plain and regular, the plants sorted
and set in order, the fruits ripe and the flowers blown, and
all things fully exposed to our view; but rather like an uncultivated field, where indeed we have the ground and hidden
seeds of all precious things, but nothing can be brought to
any great beauty, order, fulness, or maturity, without our
industry,-nor indeed with it, unless the dew of his grace
descend upon it, without whose blessing this spiritual culture
8*




90                      LECTURE VI.
will thrive as little as the labour of the husbandman without
showers of rain."*
But to pass to another branch of the subject;-it is part
of this absence of system, with the presence in its stead of a
higher method, of this constitution of Scripture as a Book which
no man should ever search to the end, and then be tempted
to lay aside as known and finished, that so much of it should
be occupied with the history of lives. That which is to
teach us to live, is itself life-not precepts, not rules alone,
but these clothing themselves in the flesh and blood of action
and of suffering. A system of faith and duty, however intricate, one might come to the end of at last.  One might
posses thoroughly a Summa  Theologice, however massive
and piled up; for after all, however vast, it yet has its defined bounds and limits. But life stretches out on every side,
and on every side loses itself in the infinite.  An Abraham,
a David, a Paul-there is always something incomplete in
the way in which we have hitherto realized their characters;
they always abide greater than our conception of them, and
at the same time always ready to' reveal themselves in some
new features to the loving and studious eye. Beheld in some
new combination, in some new grouping with those by whom
they are surrounded, they will yield some lesson of instruction which they have never yielded before. And if they,
how much more HE, whom we are bidden above -all to consider, looking unto whom we are to run our course, and'
whose every turn and gesture and tone and word are significant for us.  We might study out a system; but how can
~ Henry More, in his Mystery of Godliness, B. I., c. 2. Another
in oui:own day has expressed himself in a like manner: " Scripture
cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after
all our diligence to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church,
it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and
valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path, and
close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures."




THE INEXIIAUjSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.        91
we ever study out a person? And our blessedness is, that
Christ does not declare to us a system, and say, "This is
the truth;" so doing he might have established a school:
but he points to a person, even to himself, and says, "I am
the Truth," and thus he founded, not a school, but a Church,
a fellowship which stands in its faith upon a person, not in
its tenure of a doctrine, or, at least, only mediately and in a
secondary sense upon this.
But another reason why the Word of God should be for
us this mine which shall never be worked out, is, no doubt,
the following: —that our own life brings out in it such new
and undreamt of- treasures. What an interpreter of Scripture is affliction! how many stars in its heaven shine out
brightly in the night of sorrow or of pain, which were unperceived or overlooked in the garish days of our prosperity.
What an enlarger of Scripture is any other outer or inner
event, which stirs the deeps of our hearts, which touches us
near to the core and-centreof our lives. Trouble of spirit,
condemnation of conscience, pain of body, sudden danger,
strong temptation-when any of these overtake us, what
veils do they take away, that we may see what hitherto we
saw not; what new domains of God's word do they bring
within our spritual ken! How do promises, which once fell
flat upon our ears, become precious now; psalms become our
own, our heritage for ever, which before were aloof from us!
How do we see things now with the eye, which, before, we
knew only by the hearing of the ear: which, before, men
had told us, but now we ourselves -have found! How much,
again, do we see in our riper age, which in youth we missed
or passed over! And thus, on these accounts also, the Scripture is well fitted to be our companion, and do us good, all
the years of our life.*
0 Fuller. "The same man at several times may in his apprehension prefer several Scriptures as best, formerly most affected with
one place, for the present more delighted with another; and after



,9 2                  LECTURE VI.
Another provision which in it is made for awakening
attention, and for summoning men to penetrate more deeply
into its meaning, is to be found in its apparent, I need not
say only apparent, contradictions.  But it is not at pains to
avoid the semblance of these.  It is not careful to remove
every handle or objection which any might take hold of.
On the contrary, that saying,'Blessed is he whosoever
shall not be offended in me," finds as true an application to
Christ's Word as to his person.  For that Word goes on its
way, not obviating every possible misconception, not giving
anxious pains to show how this statement which it makes
and that agree. It is satisfied that they do agree, and lets
those that are watching for an offence take it. They whose
hearts were already alienated from the Truth are suffered to
stumble at this stone, which was set for this very fall and
rise of many, that the thoughts of many hearts might be
revealed, and that they who were longing for an excuse for
unbelief might find one.
And with the same challenge to the false-hearted, the
same fruitful sapply of suggestive thought for the devout
inquirer, these matters claiming reconciliation will meet us,
not in the history only, but also in the doctrine. For it is
ever the manner of that Word with which we have to do,
now boldly to declare its truth upon this side, and then presently to declare it as, boldly and fearlessly on the othernot painfully and nicely balancing, limiting, qualifying, till
the whole strength of its statements had evaporated, not
caring even though its truths should seem to jostle one
another. Enough that they do not do so indeed. It is conwards conceiving comfort therein not so clear, choose other places as
mnore pregnant and pertinent to his purpose. Thus God orders it
that divers men, (and perhaps the same man at divers time) make
use of all his gifts, gleaning and gathering comfort, as it is scattered
through the whole field of Scripture."




THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.           93
tent to leave them to the Spirit to adjust and reconcile, and
to show how the rights of each. are' compatible with the
rights of the other —and not compatible only, but how most
often the one requires that the other have its rights, before
it can have truly its own. Thus how profitable for us that
we have the divers statements of St. Paul and St. Jamesdivers, but not diverse-each, in the words of St. Cbrysostom, declaring the same truth, ouaTopco, but not Evavroshow do they summon us to a deeper entering into the doctrine than might otherwise have been ours, bidding us not
to be satisfied till we reach that central point where we can
evidently see how the two are at one, and do but present,
from different points of view, the same truth.  How useful
to find in one place that God tempted Abraham, and in
another, that God tempteth not any.*  Should we have
learned so well the significance of temptation, should we have
been set to think about it so effectually by any other process? Or when the Lord sets before the pure-hearted, that
they shall see God, that God whom his Apostle declares that
no man hath seen nor can see,t how does this set us to meditate on that awful yet blessed vision of God, which in
some sense shall be vouchsafed to his servants, even as in
some it shall remain incommunicable even unto them.
If indeed these difficulties had been artificially contrived,
if they had been puzzles and perplexities with which the
Bible had been sown, that it might last us the longer, that
in the explaining and reconciling of them we might find
pleasant exercise for our faculties, they would be but of
slightest value. But they grow out of a far deeper root
than this; they have nothing thus forced and unnatural
about them.  Rather is it here as in the kingdom of nature.
How often does nature seem to contradict herself, so beck- Compare Gen. xxii. 1, with Jam. i. 13.
t Comupare Matt. v. 8, with 1 Tim. vi. 16.




94                    LECTURE VI.
oning us onward to deeper investigations, till we shall have:
reached some higher and more comprehensive law, in which
her seeming contradictions, those which lie upon her surface,
are atoned. And this because she is infinite; for it is of the
essence of manifold and endless life that it should at times
thus present itself as at variance with its own self.  It is the
glory of Scripture that its harmonies lie deep, so deep, that
to the careless or perverse ear they may be sometimes mistaken for discords. There might have been a consistency
of its different parts-a poor and shallow thing-lying on
the outside, traced easily and at once, which none could
miss; but such had been of no value, had been charged
with no deeper instruction for us.
To look, on another side, at the manner in'which Holy
Scripture presents itself as this inexhaustible treasure, —
what riches are contained in its minutest portions!  As it
can bear to be looked at in its largest aspect, so it challenges
the contemplation of its smallest details-in this again like
nature, which shows more wonderful, the more microscopic
the investigation to which it is submitted. Here truly are,maxima in minimis-the sun reflecting itself as faithfully
in the tiny dewdrop, as in the great mirror of the ocean.
The most eminent illustrations of this widest wealth laid up
in narrowest compass must naturally be found in single sayings of our Lord's.  How do they shine, like finely polished
diamonds, upon every face! how simple and yet how deep!
apparent paradoxes, and yet profoundest truths! Every one
can get something from them, and no. one can get all. He
that gathers little has enough, and he that gathers much has
nothing over: every one gathers there according to his eating.*  For example, "Whosoever will save his life shall
A`- Augustine (Enarr. in Ps. ciii.) making spiritual application of
the words, "All beasts of the field drink thereof," (Ps. civ. 11,) to
the streams of Holy Scripture, beautifully says; Inlade bibit lepus,




THE INEXI-IAUSTBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.              95
lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall
find it;"-who  sees not that in these words the keys of
heaven and of hell are put into his hands? and yet who will
venture to affirm that he has come to their end?- that he has
dived down into all their deeps, or that he ever expects to
do so? that he has made altogether his own the mysteries
of life and of death which are here?, Or again, " Every
one that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted;"-what is all the history of
the world, if read aright, but a comment on, and a confirmnation of, these words? In the light of them what vast pages
of men's destinies, of our own lives, become clear!  Even
the sceptic Bayle was compelled to call them an abridgement
of all human history; and such they are, setting us as they
do at the very centre of the moral oscillation of the world.
These examples of that, whereof hundreds might be adduced, must suffice.
Nor is it only what Scripture says, but its very silence,
which is instructive for us.  It was said-by one wise man
of another, that more might be learned from his questions
than from another man's answers. With yet higher truth
might it be said that the silence of Scripture is oftentimes
more instructive than the speech of other books; so that it
inde onager: lepus parvus et onager magnus; lepus timidus, et
onager fernus, uterque inde bibit, sed quisque in sitim suam. Non
dicit aqua, Lepori sufficio et repellit onagrum: neque hoc dicit,
Onager accedat, lepus si accesserit, rapietur. Tam fideliter et tempeLat fluit, ut sic onagrum satiet no leporem terreat.  Sonat strepitus vocis Tullianta, Cicero legitur, aliquis liber est, dialogus ejus
est, sive ipsius sive Platonis, seu cujuscumque talium: audiunt imperiti, infirmi minoris cordis, quis audet illuc aspirare? Strepitus
aqua et forte turbatve, certe tamen tam rapaciter fluentis, ut animal
timidumn non anudeat accedere et bibere. Cui sonuit, In principio
fecit Deus coelum et terram, et non ausus est bibere? Cui sonat
Psalmus, et dicat, Multum est ad me?




96                     LECTURE VT.
has been likened to "a dial in which the shadow as well as
the light informs us."* For example of this, how full of
meaning to us that we have nothing told us of the life of
our blessed Lord between the twelfth and the thirtieth years
— how significant the absolute silence which the Gospels
maintain concerning all that period; that those years in fact
have no history, nothing for the sacred writers to record.
How much is implied herein! the calm  ripening of his human powers, —the contentedness to wait, —the long preparation in secret, before he began his open ministry.  What a
testimony is here, if we will note it aright, against all our
striving and snatching at hasty results, our impatience, our
desire to glitter before the world; against all which tempts
so many to pluck the unripe fruits of their minds, and to
turn that into the season of a stunted and premature harvest,
which should have been the season of patient sowing, of an
earnest culture and a silent ripening of their powers.
How pregnant with meaning may that be which appears
at first sight only an accidental omission! Such an accidental omission it might at first sight appear that the Prodi
gal, who while yet in a far country had determined, among
other things which he would say to his father, to say, "Make
me as one of thy hired servants," when he reaches his father's feet, when he hangs on his father's neck, says all the
rest which he had determined, but says not this.t  We
might take this, at first, for a fortuitous omission; but indeed what deep things are taught us here!  This desire to
be made as a hired servant, this wish to be kept at a certain
distance, this refusal to reclaim the fulness of a child's
* Boyle (Style of Holy Scripture:) " There is such fulness in that
book, that oftentimes it says much by saying nothing; and not only
its expressions, but its silences are teaching, like a dial in which
the shadow as well as the light informs us."
t Compare in Luke xv. ver. 19 and 21.




THEE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.         97
privileges, was the one turbid and troubled element in his
repentance.  How instructive then its omission;-that, saying all else which he had meditated, he yet says not this.
What a lesson for every penitent,-in other words, for every
man. We may learn from this wherein the true,growth in
faith and in humility consists-how he that has grown in
these can endure to be fully and freely blest-to accept all)
even when he most strongly feels that he has forfeited all;
that only pride and the surviving workings of self-righteous
ness and evil stand in the, way of a reclaiming of every
blessing, which the sinner had lost, but which God is waiting
and willing to restore.
Many other of the apparent accidents of Scripture, on
what deep grounds do they rest! Thus, for example, in the
history of Pharaoh's trial, that God should ten times be
said to have hardened his heart, and he ten times to have
hardened his own, or to have had it hardened, without any
reference to other than himself.  The least attentive reader
will scarcely have failed to observe this hardening attributed
sometimes to God, and, sometimes, more or less directly,
traced to the king's own willfulness and pride.  But in the
history of that great strife between the will of God and the
will of his creature, in this the pattern history of that struggle, such exactly equal distribution of the, language which
assumes the freedom of nman's'will, and that which assumes
the ultimate lordship of God over the course of the world —
a lordship which even the resistance of the wicked does not
derange or impugn-this exactly equal distribution of either
language is surely most remarkable.  The great, however
mysterious, fact of the freedom of man's will going hand in
hand with the sovereignty of God is not put in question by
an exclusive use of a language resting on or assuming one
of these truths or the other-nay rather, exactly equal rights
are given to them both; for both are true, both of paramount importance to be affirmed.  The sinner does harden
9




LECTURE VI.
his own heart; his resistance to God is most real; and yet
there is a sense, a most true sense also, in which God hardens it; for, to use the old distinction, He who is not the
auctor is yet the dispositor malorum-determines that the
evil of the sinner shall break out in this form or in that,
works even the dark threads of that resistance into the woof
of providence which He is weaving; and as Solomon, in
Jewish legend, compelled the wicked spirits to assist in the
temple which he was building, so does God compel even his
enemies, and them, when they are striving most fiercely
against Him, to do his work, though they mean not so, and
to contribute their stones to that heavenly temple of which
He is the buifder and the maker.
Neither let us leave out of sight, when we are taking into
account the provision which Scripture makes for nourishing
the faithful in all the stages of their spiritual life and growth,
that infinite condescension, according to which, like the
prophet who made himself small, that he might stretch himself, limb for limb, upon the dead child, it, in some sort,
contracts itself to our littleness,* that we, in return, may become able to expand ourselves to its greatness.  We see
this gracious condescension in nothing more strongly than
in that teaching by parables and similitudes, which there
occupies so prominent a place. No one turns away from
them in pride, as too childish; none retreat from them in
despair, as too high. In the parable the truth of God is
not sought to be transplanted, ds a full-grown tree, into our
minds; for, as such, it would never take root and flourish;
we never could find room for it there.  But it comes first as
a seed, a germ-small to the small; but with capacities of
indefinite expansion; it grows with our growth, enlarging
- Or as one said in the middle ages; Tota sacra Scriptura loquitur nobis tanquam balbutiendo, sicut mater balbutiens cum filio suo
parvulo, qui, aliter non potest intelligere verba ejus.




THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE.          99
the mind which receives it to something of its own dimensions. Little by little the image reveals itself more fully;
some of its fitnesses are perceived at once, and more and
more, as spiritual insight advances; all of them perhaps
never, lying as they do so deep, and having their roots in
the mind of God, who has constituted this outward world
to be an exponent of the inner, a garment of mysterious
texture which his creative thoughts have woven for themselves.  But for this very reason, we come back again and
again to these divinely chosen similitudes with fresh interest,
with new delight, being continually rewarded with glimpses,
unperceived before, of the strange and manifold relations,
in which the visible and the invisible stand to one another.
Thus, brethren, have I endeavoured to present to you this
day a few of the aspects under which this Word of the Scripture may be contemplated as one fitted evermore to provoke,
and evermore to reward, our inquiries. As one said of old,
Iabet Scriptura Sacra haustus primos, habet secundos, habet
tertios. There is, indeed, a tone and temper of spirit, in
Which if we allow ourselves, all its wells will seem dry, and
all its fields barren. The superficial dealer with this Word,
he who reads, formally fulfilling an unwelcome task, he who
feels in no living relation with the things which he reads,
who consults the oracle, but expects no living answer from
its lips, who has never known himself a pilgrim of eternity,
to whom life has never, like that fabled Sphinx, presented
riddles which either he must solve, or, not solving, must
perish,-such a one may say, as in his heart he will say,
What is this Word more than another?  It may bring to
him no other feelings but those of tedious monotony and
inexpressible weariness. But with the loving and earnest
seeker it will prove far otherwise: he will ever be making
new discoveries in these spiritual heavens; ever to him will
what seemed at first but a light vaporous cloud, upon closer




100                 TLECTURE VI.
gaze, to his armed eye, resolve itself into a world of stars.
The farther he advances, the more will he be aware that
what lies before him is far more than what lies behind-the
readier will he be to take up his hymn of praise and thanksgiving, and to wonder with the Apostle at "the depths
of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God"
which are displayed at once in his works and in his
Word.




LECTURE  VII.
THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE.
EZEIKIEL XLVII. 9.
And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth,
whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live.
THE aspect of my subject, which I desire this day to
bring under your notice is this, namely, the fruitfulness of
Holy Scripture; in other words the manner in which it has
shown itself a germ of life in all the noblest regions of
man's activity; has with its productive energy impregnated
the world; and how, to use the image suggested by my
text, every thing has lived where these healing waters
have come; so that in this way, too, this Word has attested
itself that which in my preceding lectures I have endeavoured to prove that it was fitted for being, that which we
might beforehand presume it would be, namely, the unfolder
of all the nobler and higher life of the world.  And these
are considerations which will suit as well at a period of these
discourses, when they are drawing nigh to their conclusion.
For it were to little profit to have shown how the Scripture
ought to have been all this, how it was fitted for being all
this, unless it could be shown also that it had been; unless
we could point to the world's history in evidence that it
had done that, which we say it was adapted for doing.
" The blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the dead are
raised;"-it was to these mighty works that Christ appealed
in answer to the question, "Art thou He that should come,
or look we for another?" And this is the true answer to
every misgiving question of a like kind.  The real evidence
for aught which comes claiming to be from  God, is its
9*               (101)




102                  LECTURE VII.
power-the power which it is able to put forth for blessing
and for healing. If the Scriptures manifested no such
power, all other evidence for their divine origin, howevor
convincing we might think it ought to be, yet practically it
would fail to convince.  Men will not live on the report
that aught is great or true, unless they so see it and so find
it themselves.  But if they do, no assertion on the part of
others that it is small, will prevail to make them count
light of it.  For a moment the confident assertions of gainsayers may perplex, or even seriously injure, their faith:
but presently it will resume its hold and its empire again.
Thus it has been well and memorably said, that the great
and standing evidence for Christianity is Christendom; and
it was with good reason, and out of a true feeling of this,
that Origen and other early apologists of the Faith, albeit
they had not such a full-formed Christendom as we have to
appeal to, did yet, when the adversaries boasted of their
Apollonius and other such shadowy personages, and sought to
set them up as rivals and competitors of the Lord of glory,
make answer by demanding, " What became of these men?
what significance had they for the world's after development? what have they bequeathed to show that they and
their appearance lay deep in the mind and counsel of God?
what society did they found? where is there a fellowship of
living men gathered in their name? or where any mighty
footmarks left upon the earth to witness that greater than
mortals have trodden it?"  And the same answer is good,
when it is transferred to the books which at any time have
made ungrounded claim to be divine records, and as such,
to stand upon a level with the Canonical Scriptures; and
which sometimes even in our day are brought forward in
the hope of confounding the Canonical in a common discredit with them. We in the same way make answer, Is
there not a difference? besides all other condemnation
under which they lie, besides the absence of historic attest



THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE.           103
ation, and the want of inward religious meaning and aim,
are they not self-condemned, in their utter insignificance —
in their barrenness-=-in the entire oblivion into which they
have fallen-in the fact, in short, that nothing has come of
them?  ~What men have they moulded? what stamp or
impress have they left of themselves upon the world?
Where is there a society, or even a man, that appeals to
them or lives by them?
Thus, let any one acquainted with the apocryphal'gospels,
compare them  for an instant with the sacred Four which we
recognise and receive.  It is not merely that there is an
inward difference between these and those, which would be
characterized not too strongly as a difference like that which
finds place between stately forest-trees and the low tangled
brushwood which springs up under their shadow; it is not
mnerely that those spurious gospels are evermore revolting
to the religious sense, abandoning earth without soaring to
heaven; robbing the person of Christ of its human features,
without lending'to it any truly divine; ever mistaking size
for greatness, and the monstrous for the miraculous.  It is
not this only, but the contrast is at least as remarkable in
this respect, that while the Canonical Gospels have been so
fruitful, from  those other nothing has sprung: while the
Canonical have been as germs unfolding themselves endlessly; winged seeds endued with a vital energy, which,
where they have lighted, have taken root downward and
sprung upward; those other might be likened to the chaff
borne about by the winds of chance, having no reproductive
powers; owing their origin to obscure heretical sects, never
extricating themselves from  those narrow circles in which
they first were born; and, save only as literary curiosities,
with the perishing of those sects themselves perishing for
ever.  They have remained as dry sticks, as the barren rods
which refused to blossom, —and as such not to abide in the
sanctuary. (Numb. xvii.) But the Canonical Gospels have




104                  LECTURE VII.
witnessed for themselves, as did Aaron's rod, when it
budded and clothed itself with leaves and blossoms and
almonds.  They too, blossoming and budding, have borne
witness to themselves, and to their right to be laid up in
the very Ark of the Testimony for ever. For it is not the
authority and decision of the Church which has made the
Canonical Gospels potent, and the apocryphal impotent,
those fruitful and these sterile; rather that decision is the
formal acknowledgment of a fact, which was a fact before;
a submission to authority, to the authority of the Spirit
witnessing to and discerning that Word which is the Lord's;
this, rather than any exercising of authority.  That decision
was the spiritual instinct of the Church recognizing and
setting her seal to a fact which was a fact before-namely,
that these were false and those true; she distinguished thus
the chaff from the corn, but it was not her decision which
had any thing to do with making these to be chaff and
those wheat.
It is the task which I propose to myself to-day, to consider a few aspects under which the Scriptures have thus'shown themselves strong; have approved themselves quickeners of the spiritual and intellectual life of men; although
here, in treating such a subject as this, one is tempted, as
more than once has been my lot, to start back at the greatness of the theme, the vastness of knowledge of all kinds
which to handle it worthily would require the fragmentary
nature of aught which, even were the knowledge possessed,
one could hope within the limits of a single discourse to
present.  As the matter, however, may not be passed by, I
will seek to present to you one or two reflections, in the hope
that they may be only as the first thoughts of a more fruitful series which your own minds will suggest.
And, perhaps one of the first which suggests itself, is
this, namely, how productive the Holy Scriptures have
been, even in regions of inward life and activity, where, at




THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRTIPTURE.        105
first sight, one would least have expected it, where we
should have been tempted, for many reasons, to anticipate
exactly opposite effects. How many things Christianity
might, at first sight, have threatened to leave out, to take
no note of, or indeed utterly to suppress, which, so far front
really warring against, it has raised to higher perfection
than ever in the old world they had attained.  With what
despair, for example, a lover of art, one who at Athens or
at Rome fondly had dwelt among the beautiful creations of
poet and of painter, would have contemplated the rise of
the new religion, and the authority which its doctrines were
acquiring over the hearts and spirits of men.  What a
death-knell must he have heard in this to all in which his
soul so greatly delighted.  He might have been ready,
perhaps, to acknowledge that our human life under this
new teaching, would be more rigorously earnest, more
severe, more pure: but dall its grace and its beauty, all
which it borrowed of these from the outer world, he would
have concluded, had been laid under a ban, and must now
vanish for ever. This was evidently, in great part, the
cause of the unhappy Julian's mislike of the rising faith —
of his alienation from it, as of that of many other heathens,
like-minded with him. It is true, their hostility lay much
deeper than this, that it grew out of a far bitterer root.
But this was evidently one of their griefs against the doctrine of the Nazarene. They could not consent to lose the
grace and beauty of the Hellenistic worship: all art seemed
inextricably linked and bound up with -the forms of the
old religion, and, if that perished, inevitably doomed to
perish with it: and so they resisted while they could; and
when they could resist no longer, they sat down and made
passionate lamentation at the grave of the old world, which
all their lamentations could not call back to life; instead
of rejoicing at the birth and by the cradle of the new, with
which indeed all the hopes of the future were bound up.




106                   LECTURE VIT.
And the Christian himself of those earliest ages might
almost have consented to take the same views-even as we
do find a Tertullian, and others of his temper, actually
doing: nor in this was he at all to be wondered at, least of
all did he deserve the sneers with which the infidel historian
of the later empire has, on this account, visited him.  His
exaggerations were only those into which a man of strong
moral earnestness might most naturally have fallen. So had
all skill and device of poet and of painter engaged then in
the service of the flesh, so did they do exclusive homage to
the old idolatries, so deeply polluted, for the most part, were
they, so far sunken with a sunken moral world, that the
Christian neophyte, when he renounced, in his baptismal vow,
all pomps of the devil, might easily have deemed that these
were certainly included; and that to forego them wholly and
for ever, was his one duty, his only safety.
How little, at any rate, could one or the other, could friend
or foe of the nascent faith, have forecast that out of it,-that,
nourished by the Christian books, by the great thoughts
which Christ set stirring in humanity, and of which these
books kept a lasting record, there should unfold itself a
poetry infinitely greater, an art infinitely higher, than any
which the old world had seen; —that this faith, which looked
so rigid, so austere, even so forbidding, should clothe itself in
forms of grace and loveliness, such as men had never dreamt
of before? that poetry should not be henceforward the play
of the spirit, but its holiest earnest; and those skilless
Christian hymns, those hymns "to Christ as to God," of
which Pliny speaks, so rude probably in regard of form,
should yet be the preludes of strains higher than the world
had listened to yet. Or, who would have supposed that those
artless paintings of the catacombs had the prophecy in them
of more wondrous compositions than men's eyes had ever seen
— or that a day should arrive when, above many a dark vault
and narrow crypt, where now the Christian worshippers




THE FRUITFULNESS OF'SCRIPTURE.          107
gathered in secret, should arise domes and cathedrals,
embodying loftier ideas, because ideas relating to the eternal
and the infinite, than all those Grecian temples, which now
stood so fair and so strong, but which yet aimed not to lift
men's minds from the earth which they adorned.
I-ow little would the one or other, would Christian or
heathen have presaged such a future as this-that art was
not to perish, but only to be purified and redeemed from the
service of the flesh, and from whatever-was clinging to and
hindering it from  realizing its true glory,-and that this
book, which does not talk about such matters, which does not
make beauty, but holiness, its end and aim-should yet be
the truest nourisher of all out of which any genuine art ever
has proceeded; the truest fosterer of beauty, in that it is the
nourisher of the affections, the sustainer of the relations
between God and men; which affections and which relations
are indeed the only root out of which any poetry or art
worthy of the name, ever have sprung.  For these affections
being laid waste, those relations being broken, art is first
stricken with barrenness, and then) in a little while, withers
and pines and dies-as that ancient art, which had been so
fertile while faith survived, was, when the church was born,
already withering and dying under the influence of the skepticism, the profligacy, the decay of family and national life,
the extinction of religious faith, which so eminently marked
the time: only having a name to live, resting merely on the
traditions of an earlier age, and on the eve of utter dissolution. Such was its condition when Christ came, and cast
in his Word, as that which should make all things new, into
the midst of an old and decrepit an-d worn-out world.
Yet here it may be as well to observe that when I use this
language, it is not as assuming that the Bible, merely as a
book apart had done, or could have done, this, or aught else
whbereof presently there may be occasion to speak-not as
though the book had been cast into the world and had leavened




108                   LECTURE VII.
it, itself the sole and all-sufficient gift which Christ had
bequeathed unto men. Rather, the Spirit, the Word, and
the church are the three mighty factors which have wrought
together for the great and glorious issue of a Christendom
such as that in the midst of which we now stand. The
church, taught and enlightened by the Spirit, unfolds and
lays out the Word, and only as it is informed and quickened
by that blessed Spirit of God, can lay it out for the healing
of the nations.  We cannot think of this book by itself
doing the work, any more -than we can think of the church
doing it without this book, or of the two doing it together
without the ever-present breath of an Almighty Spirit.
But while this work is thus the result of a three-fold
energy; while we can never, so long as we think correctly,
separate one of its factors, save for distinction's sake, from
the others; while therefore speaking of the Scripture and
what it has wrought, we must ever conceive of it as in the
possession of a living body of interpreters, the company of
the faithful, and of them as enlightened by the Holy Spirit
to use it aright; yet not the less may I ask you to contemplate the mighty work of the world's regeneration in those
features upon which the influences of a Scripture are mainly
traceable, to note the part which this scripture has borne in
bringing about that new creation, wherein the old things of
the world have passed away, and all things have become
new.
For, without running into the tempting error of painting
the old world black, for the purpose of bringing out, as by
a dark back-ground, the brightness and glory of the new-;
without denying to that old world what it had of noble and
true, or calling, as some have done, its virtues merely show'y
and splendid sins; yet it is not easy to estimate how much was
to be done, how much to be undone, ere a Christendom, even
-such as we behold it now, could emerge out of that world
which alone yielded the materials out of which the new




THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE.            109
creation should be composed.  The word of the Cross had
need, as a mighty leaven, to penetrate through every interstice of society, leavening language, and laws, and literature,
and institutions, and manners.  For it was not me'rely that
at that change the world changed its religion, but in that
change was implied the transformation, little by little, of
every thing besides; every thing else had need to reconstruct
itself afresh. And in this Word there resided a power equal
to this need. The pattern of Christ, kept in the record of
Sdripture, ever clear in all its distinctness of outline before
men's eyes, his work thus ever repeating itself for them over
again, has'given, aa we ourselves see and feel, a new, inasmuch as it is infinitely higher, standard of ideal goodness
to the, world-has castl down usurping pretenders to the
name of virtues from their seats, has lifted up despised
graces in their room.  That Word has every where given to
us graces for virtues, and martyrs for heroes; it has,so
reversed men's estimate of greatness, that a wreath of thorns
is felt to be a far worthier ornament for a brow than a
diadem of jewels-a Christ upon his cross to be a spectacle
more. glorious far than a Coesar on his throne.
From that Word, too, we have derived such a sense of
the duties of relation, of the debt of love which every man
owes to every other, as was altogether strange to the heathen
world. For when, in that well known story, the poet awoke
shouts of a tumultuous applause by declaring nothing
human alien from himself who was a man, deep as was the
feeling in men's hearts which was here appealed to, yet in
those very shouts of applause, it was declared to be as new
as it was deep. In those was the joyful recognition of a
truth which lay deep in every man's bosom, but which had
not taken form or shape or found utterance until then. Yet,
with all our practical shortcomings in love to our brethren,
how different is the condition marked by this little incident
from ours, in which this noble utterance of the Roman poet
10




110                   LECTURE VII.
is felt to be so true as hardly to escape from being a truism;
and the love which men owe to one another on the score of
their common stock, is so taken for granted, and the idea of
it has so penetrated even into our common speech, that kind
and kinrned, human and humane, are, with us, but different
pronunciations of the same words.
And, at least as wonderful,-at least as fruitful, is the
incoming of the Word of Christ, not into the midst of an
old and corrupt civilization, but when it kindles for the first
time a savage people into life. How does it seem to brood
with a creative warmth and energy over all the rudiments
of a higher life, which lays in that people's bosom, and yet
but for this never could have come to the birth, rather were
in danger of utterly dying out. How does it arrest at once
that centrifugal progress of sin, which is ever drawing the
men or the nations that have wandered out of the sphere of
the divine attraction, farther and farther from God, the true
centre of their being.'Tribes which were in danger of
letting go the last remnant of their spiritual heritage, nay,
of utterly and literally perishing from the face of the earth,
victims of their own vices, and of that uttermost degradation
which had caused them at length to let go even those lowest
arts by which animal existence is sustained, even these, that
Word finds, even in these nurses up the dying embers of
life; till the savage re-awakens to the consciousness of a
man, and the horde begins, however feebly at first, to knit
itself into the promise of a nation.
There may be spectacles which attract us more, there may
be tidings to which we listen with a keener interest, but
surely there can be no tidings worthier to be listened to, no
spectacle upon which angels look down with a livelier sympathy, than those which such a land and time will often
present; when, it may be, some grey-beard chief, stained in
times past with a thousand crimes, but now having washed
away them all in the waters of baptism, hangs upon the words




THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE.            11l
of life, makes himself, perhaps, the humble willing scholar
of some little child, that he may learn to read with his own
eyes of that Saviour who has-pardoned even him. And ever,
as he reads of " the gentleness of Christ," of his prayers for
his crucifiers, of Him  who, being first, made himself the
last, who, being Lord of all, became servant of all, there
dawns upon him more and more the glory of meekness, of
over coming evil with good, of serving others in love,
instead of being himself served in fear: and he understands
that this only is truly to live, and all which he has lived
contrary to this, has been not life, but a hideous denial of
life. Such sights other days have seen; such are to be seen
in our own: for, blessed be God, it is not our fathers only
who have told us of such things done in their times of old,
but our own report the same.  We too, ".see our tokens."
In New Zealand, in the far islands of the Pacific, we, have
proof that this Word is yet mighty, through God, for casting down the strong holds of Satan and of sin.
Nor needs it to look thus far abroad to be reminded of
what this Word has done. The Scripture itself is full of
remembrances of its own power. He who, tolerably acquainted with the past history of the Church, with the
struggles which accompanied the unfolding, fixing, and
vindicating of her dogma, —he who, furnished with this
knowledge, passes over Scripture, may in some moods of
his mind pass over it as over a succession of battle fields.
He may be likened to a traveller journeying through some
land, which, by the importance of its position, or the greatness of its attractions, has drawn contending hosts to its
soil, and been a battle ground for innumerable generations.
Besides in all those pages which speak more directly to
himself, they are'eloquent to him with a thousand stirring
recollections. For at every step which he advances, he
recognises that which has been the motive of some mighty
and long-drawn conflict, in which the keenest and brightest




112                  LECTURE VITI.
intellects, the kingliest spirits, the Bernards and the Abelards
of their day, were engaged.  Here, there, and every where,
be it that he wanders among the extinguished volcanoes of
controversies which have now burned themselves out, or among
those which are flaming still, he meets with that, to maintain their conviction about which, men have been content to
spend their lives, to make shipwreck of their worldly hopes,
have dwelt in deserts, in caves, and in dungeons, yea, gladly
have encountered all from which nature most, and most naturally shrinks. And whatever there may have been of earthly
and of carnal mingling in the motives of the combatants,
however in some of them he can recognise only the champions of error, yet in these mighty and passionate strivings,
in these conflicts which generation has bequeathed to generation, he reads the confession which all past ages have
borne, that this Word was worth contending for, —being
felt by those worthiest to judge, dearer than life itself, and
such that things else were cheap by comparison with it,
Strange, too, that even where there have not been these
stirring excitements, where there has been no trumpet-peal
sounding in men's cars, and summoning them to do battle
for some perilled truth, that even here, too, multitudes of
men should have been well pleased to employ their lives
in learning themselves better to understand, in seeking to
make others understand better, this one Book —should have
counted those lives.worthily spent, and all other wisdom
and knowledge then only to have found their true meaning
and destination, when doing service as of handmaids unto
it. For vast as is the apparatus of helps of all kinds which
have accumulated round such,other books as are signal
monuments of human intellect and power; many as we find
well satisfied to be nothing as independent-laborers in the
fields of knowledge, content to be only ministrant to the
better understanding of this author or that book; yet are
these taken altogether few and. insignificant beside those




THE FRUTTFULNESS OF-SCRI!TURE.           113
that have thus felt in regard of the one Book with which
we have to do.  Surely the spectacle of any great library,
and of the volumes there which stand in immediate relation
to this one, with the certainty, that so long as the world
stands, they will go on accumulating and multiplying, must
to a thoughtful mind suggest many meditations of what
the meaning and significance of that one must be, and the
manner in which it must set in motion the minds of men.
Nor will he, in estimating this, fail to call to mind that
those which stand in direct relation to that Volume, which
bear upon the front that they are thus connected with it,
multitudinous past all count as they seem, are yet but a
small fraction of those which owe to this one all which is
most characteristic in them —their impulse, their motive,
their form, their spirit; that all modern European literature
is there as in its germ; that even the works which seem to
stand remotest from it, least to own a fealty to it, do yet
pay to it the unconscious, it may be the unwilling homage
of-being wholly different from what they would have been,
- had they indeed at all existed,-without it.
Such, brethren, are a few aspects under which I would
ask you to consider how the Holy Scriptures have justified
themselves by the effects which they have brought about,
by the mighty deeds which they have done; showing themselves seeds of life, leaven of power in the world. And I
should be untrue to my position here, did I conclude without asking you to make personal'application of the things
which you have heard to yourselves. This Word which has
thus been fruitful every where, which has supplied what was
lacking and healed what was sick, and revived what was
ready to die, will it be less effectual in us, if only we receive
it aright? This, which has made so much else, like the dry
rod of Aaron, to blossom and to bud, will it not be as potent
in our hearts, till they too are clothed with foliage and fruits
10*




114                  LECTURE VII
and flowers which are not naturally their own?  Shall we
say, " I am a dry tree," when we might be as trees planted
by rivers of water, which should not fear the drought of the
desert, nor see when the heat cometh? All things have
lived whithersoever these waters which issue from the sanctuary have come. Shall not our hearts live also, until we
too have like reason with the Psalmist for prizing these testimonies of God, even because with them He has quickened
us?




LECTURE  VIII.
THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.
REVELATION VI. 2.
Conquering and to Conquer.
AN earlier lecture in this present course was dedicated to
the manner in which Holy Scripture had, little by little, laid
bare its treasures to the Church; and in my very latest I
had occasion to speak of the victories which the Truth had won
and was winning still —the way in which the word of the
Scripture was vindicating itself to be all that it claimed to be,
showing itself mighty, through God, for doing its appointed
work; how, like the personal Word, it had ridden forth and was
riding yet, a victorious conqueror over the earth. It remains
to consider, and with this consideration we shall fitly conclude our subject, in what way it is likely to approve itself
a conqueror to the end;, what preparations we can trace in
it for meeting the future evils of the world, the future needs
of the' Church; how far we may suppose that this Book,
which has revealed so much, may yet have much more. to
reveal.And this is our confidence, that as the Scripture has sufficed for the past, so also it will suffice for the time to come;
that it has resources adequate to meet all demands which
may be made on it; that it has in reserve whatsoever any
new conditions of the world,-any new shapes of evil, any
new, if they be righteous, cravings of the spirits of men,may require. We believe that as the Scripture is an armory
in which the Church has found weapons for all past conflicts,
so will it find them  there for all which are yet to come(115)




116                  LECTURE VIII.
conflicts, which, it may be, we as little forecast or dream of
now, as we do of the weapons which are ready wrought in
this armory for bringing them  to a glorious termination;
and the' weapons, too, themselves being oftentimes such, that
they who were by God employed to forge them, while they
knew  that they would serve present needs, yet hardly
knew, perhaps knew not at all, what remote purposes they
should also serve, to what great ulterior purposes they should
one day be turned.  Yet thus, no doubt, it shall be: for
just as in works of man's mind, talent knows all which it
means, but genius, which is nearer akin to inspiration,
means much more than it consciously knows; even so wise
men and prophets and evangelists, who were used for the
uttering of this Word, knowing much of that which they
spake and recorded, yet meant still more than they knewthe Holy Ghost guiding and shaping their utterances, and
causing them oftentimes to declare deeper things, and things
of wider reach and of more manifold utility, than even they
themselves, enlarged and enlightened by that Spirit as they
were, were conscious of the while. That which they spake
being central Truth, presented a front, not merely to the
lies of their day, not merely to the falsehood which they distinctly had in their minds to encounter, but presents a front
to every later lie as well; and so we have entire confidence
that the Truth being ever, in the language of Bacon, "a hill
not to be commanded," the same those Scriptures, which
are Scriptures of very truth, shall show themselves-a hill
which shall never be commanded, bnt which rather shall
itself command all other heights and eminences of the spiritual and intellectual world. However high these tower,.this
Word will always have heights which tower above them all;
judging all things, it will be judged of none; itself the
measure of all, no other thing will bring a measure unto it.
We can indeed guess but uncertainly what may be the
future unrolling of the world's history-what anti-christian




THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.   117
forms of society may rise up for the moment seeming to
keep their promise, consecrating the flesh, breaking down
the walls of separation between the holy and profane, making all profane while they pretend to make all holy-what
master-works of Satan, his latest and crowning forms of
opposition to the Truth. Or, again, we can only uncertainly
apprehend what heresies may appear, subtler and more
attractive even than any which the world has yet beheldcoming with greater semblance of holiness, and well-nigh
causing even the elect to fail. But our reliance in this
Word and the revelation of the Name of God which is there,
is this, that out of it the Church will be able to refute those
heresies -by the help of its warnings and intimations to
detect and to defy the attractions of Antichrist, even when
he comes with all the lying wonders, and in all the false
glory of his kingdom.
For while it is hard for us to say what may be the exact
forms of those future evils, while we cannot discern accurately beforehand the lineaments and proportions of these
latest monstrous shapes which shall ascend from the pit,as neither would this foreknowledge profit us much;-yet
the hints which in God's-prophetic word we have, the course
of the mystery of iniquity as it is already working, seem
alike to point to this, that as there has been an aping of the
monarchy of the Father, in the absolute despotisms of the
world, au aping of the economy of the Son, as though he
already sat visibly on his throne, in its spiritual despotisms,
and eminently in that of Rome; so there remains yet for the
world, as the, crowning delusion, a lying imitation of the
kingdom and dispensation of the Spirit-such as in the lawless Communist sects of the middle ages, in the Familists of
a later day, in the St. Simonians of our own, has attempted
to come to the birth, though in each case the world was not
ripe for it yet, anti the thing was withdrawn for a time.
Yet doubtless only for a time; to reappear in an after hour




118                  LECTURE VIII.
-full of false freedom, full of the promise of bringing ail
things into one; making war on the family, as something
which separates between man and man, breaking down and
obliterating all distinctions, the distinctions between nation
and nation, between the man and the woman, between the
flesh and the spirit, between the Church and the world. So
seems it; and when we translate St. Paul's words, with
which he characterizes the final Antichrist, as though he had
simply called him " that wicked one,"* we lose a confirmation of this view which his words more accurately rendered
would have given us. IIe is not simply the wicked one, but; avo/uo the lawless one; and the mystery is not merely a
mystery of iniquity but of lawlessness (&votiulas.) Law, in
all its manifestations, is that which he shall rage against,
making hideous misapplications of that great truth, that
where the Spirit is, there is liberty.
Then, when this shall have come to pass, then at length
the great anti-trinity of hell, the dragon, the beast, and the
false prophet, will have been fully revealed in all deceivableness of unrighteousness;-and yet not so mighty to deceive,
but that the Church of the redeemed, armed and forewarned
by this Word of God, shall see in all this, only what it
looked to see, only what it had been taught to expect; and
in the might of the counter truth, in the confession of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, shall be saved even
in its weakest and simplest member, from that strong delusion which shall be too much for every one besides.
And in thus speaking of Holy Scripture, I am but expressing a confidence which those who have searched the deepest
into it have oftentimes expressed.  Thus to take but one
name and another out of the noble catalogue of English
worthies, Robert Boyle expresses himself thus: "I consider
here that as the B]ible was not written for any one particular
2 Thess. ii. 8.




THlE FUTURE IDEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.   119
time or people, but for the whole church militant diffused
through all nations and ages, so that there are many passages
very useful, which will not be found so these many ages;
being possibly reserved by the prophetic Spirit that indited
them, (and whose omniscience comprises and unites in one
prospect all times and all events,)-to quell some future foreseen heresy, which will not, perhaps, be born till we be dead,
or resolve some yet unformed doubts, or confound some error
that hath not yet a name." And Bishop Butler uses language well nigh the same: " Nor is- it," he says, " at all
incredible that a Book which has been so long in the posses-,
sion of mankind should yet contain many truths as yet
undiscovered. For all the same phenomena and the same
faculties of investigation from which such great discoveries in
natural knowledge have been made in the present and last age,
were equally in the possession of mankind several thousand
years before. And possibly it might be intended that events
as they came to pass should open and ascertain the meaning
of several parts of Scripture."
But, besides these mighty mischiefs which may hereafter
arise, of which we can at most discern now only the dimi
beginnings, the obscure foreshadowings, there are also others
which have already taken form and shape-some of them
such as have stood strong and in the main unshaken for
thousands of years; which yet we believe, which indeed yet
we know, shall one day be overthrown by the greater power
and prevalence of the Truth. For we are sure that the
religion-of Christ is as the rod of Moses, which did in the
end swallow up every rod of the magicians-that the Church
shall possess the earth-that " the field" in which the Son of
MIan sows his seed is not this land or that land, but " the
world."  And anticipating, or to speak more truly, being
sure of this, it may not be unbecoming to see if we can at
all discern in Scripture the preparations which have been
there made, and the might which is there slumbering, agair




120                 LECTURE VIII.
each of those closer conflicts, which the Church, by its help,
must one day wage with those forms of untruth and error.
Such inquiry will, at any rate, not be foreign to our subject;
for that subject being the fitness of Holy Scripture for
unfolding the spiritual life of men, a great part of that fitness must lie in its capacity to meet and overcome each
deadlier form of superstition and error, which, under one
name or another, cramps and confines, or wholly hinders, the
true.developmnent of the spirits of men.
How profitable were it, in regard of the more effectual
conducting of Christian missions, to be more conscious than
generally we seek to be. of what is our peculiar strength,
and what the peculiar weakness of each of those systems of
error, which we seek, in love to the souls which were made
prisoners by it, to overthrow;-so- that we should not blindly
run a tilt against it, with no other preparation save a confidence in the goodness of our cause, but wisdom and insight
assail it there, where there were best hope of assailing with
success.  For every one of these, while their strength is in
that fragment of Truth, which, however maimed and marred,
with whatever contradictions and under whatever disguises,
they hold, have also eminently their weak side, that on which
they signally deny some great Truth which the spirit of man
craves, which the Scriptures of God affirm-a side, therefore,
on which, if assailed, they must sooner or later perish, or
rather will not always continue at strife with their own
blessedness. To know this, and to know, also, what engines
out of the divine armory ought to be especially advanced
against each of these strong-holds of confusion, to know not
merely that we are strong and they weak; but where and
why strong in regard of each, and where and why they are
weak; this is surely a needful, as it is a much neglected,
discipline; this is a duty not indolently to be foregone by a
Church like our own, a Church which God's providence and




THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.   121
leading has so clearly marked out to do the work of an Evangelist on vast continents and in far islands of the sea.
To give such a training as this, was no doubt the meaning
and purpose of the catechetical schools of Alexandria, so
famous through all Christian antiquity; they were instituted
to afford the highest culture to the evangelist, to give him
the fullest understanding of what he _was to oppose, and how
he was to do it. And such an insight as this, could we
have it clear, into Scripture and its adaptation for overcoming
each shape of falsehood, how would it make us workmen
that did not need to be ashamed.  How would it enable us
at once, and without beating the air, to address ourselves to
the points really at issue between us on one side, and Jews,
Mohammedans, and infidels, on the other.  For the Truth
which is still the same, which might not give up one jot or
tittle of itself, though it had with this the certainty of winning a world, may yet of infinite love continually change its
voice, and present itself ever differently, according to the
different necessities of those whom it would fain make its
own.
And on the other hand, we address ourselves but in a
slight and inefficient manner to our work, when, without discrimination, without acquaintance with those systems which
hold souls in bondage, which hinder them from coming to
the light of life, we have but one method with them allone language in which to describe them all-one common
charge of belonging to the devil on which to arraign them;
instead of recognising, as we ought, that each province of
the dark kingdom  of error is different from every other;
instead of seeing that it is not a lie which can ever make
any thing strong —that it is not certainly their lie which has
ever made them  strong, and enabled them to stand their
ground so long, and some of them, saddest of all! to'win
ground for awhile firom Christendom  itself; but the truth
which that lie, perverts and denies.  Handling them in that
11




122                 LECTURE VIII.
other way, we turn but to little advantage that manifold
Word of wisdom with which God has enriched his Church,
and which containing as it does its own special antidote for
every error, would allow, and indeed demands, a much more
special dealing with each, and one which would get much
more nearly to the heart of the matter.
Thus the Mohammedan is strong in that he affirms God
to be distinct from the creature, so that he may not without
blasphemy be confused with it-a jealous God, who will not
give his glory to another. In the might of this faith, in the
conviction that God had raised him up to assert this truth in
the face of all who were forgetting it, he overran half a
world. But he is weak, and the moon of Islam, as it has
waxed, so will it wane before the Sun of Righteousness, inasmuch as he makes the gulf which divides God and man to
be a gulf which can never be bridged over, an impassable
chasm, fixed for eternity; he is weak, because he knows not,
and will not know, of one, the Son of Mary, the Son of God,
in whom the human and divine were not confounded, nor lost
one in the other, but united. He does not satisfy the longings of the human race, which was made for this union as
its highest end and crowning perfection, which will be satisfied with nothing short of this; and therefore we are sure
that the day will come, however little we may as yet discern
its signs, when the fiery sword of Mohammed will grow pale
before the ever brightening lustre of the cross of the Son
of Man; when the Scripture3 will show themselves over all
the dark places of the earth mightier than the Koran. We
are sure of this, because those Scriptures maintain all which
is there of truth-are as jealous and:more jealous of the
incommunicable name of God,-say, and say far more
clearly, Our God is one *God; but in addition to this,
affirm that which is there denied, but which the spirit of
man will never rest until it has found and known, a Son of
God, and him also the Son of MIan.




THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.   123
The Indian religions, —they, too, are not without their
elements of an obscured truth-and in this mainly, that they
declare it to be most worthy of God to reveal Himself as man
-that this is the only true revelation of Him, that an incarnation is the fittest outcoming of the glory of God. But, not
to urge that what they have to tell of such matters are only
dreams of men, and not facts of God-besides this, they are
comparatively worthless, in that they do not concentrate and
gather up this revelation of God in one incarnation, but lose
and scatter it through unnumbered. -For while one incarnation is precious, a thousand are worth nothing; they
become mere transient points of contact between God and
man, momentary docetic apparitions of the divine under
human forms. And the books which are the records of
these, and the religion which rests on those books, must
give way before that Book, which can say in holiest, yet soberest earnest, " The Word was made flesh " —and which knows
not merely of an incarnation, but of a Resurrection and
an Ascension, in which the Son of God made manifest that
he had wedded the humanity for ever, that he had not come
merely into transient relation with it, but had made it his
own for eternity; sitting down in it on the right hand of
the Majesty on high.
And that other later birth of Hindooism, that other vast
system of further Asia, which we are continually perplexed
-whether to call it a pantheism, or a gigantic atheism, that
which in the end loses every thing in God, and makes absorption in Him the ultimate end of being, that, too, begins
with fairer promises. For it starts with that which is so
deeply true, that in God we live and move and have our
being- that as man came from God, so he must return to
God —that there is but one Spirit which moves through all
things. But then, refusing to know aught but the Spirit, refusing to know the Father and the Son from whom that Spirit
proceeds, so neither can it save its votaries from that gulf




124                  LECTURE vIII.
wherein all things, and man the first, are annihilated in-an
abysmal dee.p which is not the less dreadful, because it calls
itself God; that gulf which is ever yawning for every nobler
and deeper speculator in theology, who has not the mystery
of the ever-blessed Trinity, three Persons and one God, for
his safeguard and his stay,-an ever-abiding witness to him
for the distinctness of personal being. And we are sure that
neither will this system stand before that Word which affirms,
and only with far higher clearness, that "God is a Spirit;"
but affirms also, that "there are three that bear record in
heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost;" without which that other truth is only as a noble river presently
to lose itself among the sands.
These, brethren, are the great rival religions to Christianity,
which yet contend with. it for the possession of the worldeach of them, as you see, presenting points of contact for
the absolute Truth; and at the same time all presenting
points of weakness-sides upon which they dumbly crave to
be fulfilled by this Truth, even while they are striving the
most fiercely against it; the Truth in Holy Scripture being
at once the antagonist and the complement of, them all.
Nor may I not observe that any other dealing with them
than this, which, even while it wars against them, welcomes
and honours the wreck and fragment of Truth which they
may still retain-any ruder and less discriminating assault
on that which men have hitherto believed, and which, however mixed up with falsehood and fraud, has yet been all
whereby they have holden on to a higher world,-any such
attack, even when it seems most successful, may be full of
the utmost peril for them whom we thus coarsely seek to
benefit, and with these unskilful hands to deliver. For, indeed,
there is no office more delicate, no task needing greater wisdom
and patience and love, than to set men free from their superstitions, and yet, with this, not to lay waste in their hearts the
very soil in which the Truth should strike its roots-to disen



THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.   125
tangle the tree from the ivy which was strangling it, without,
in the process and together with the strangling ivy, destroying also the very life of the tree itself, which we designed
to save. Where this process of men's extrication from error
has been rudely or unwisely carried out, either by their own
fault or that of others, where they have been urged to rise
up in scorn, and to trample upon their past selves, and all
that in time past they have held in honour, how mournful
frequently the final issue! Thus, how unable do we often
prove to retain the converts from Romanism which we have
won. They do not return to that which they have left, but
they pass on, they pass through the Truth into error on the
other side. They pass from darkness into the sunlight, and
that sunlight scarcely gilds and brightens them for an instant, ere they glide into another and thicker darkness again;
scarceLy are they in the secure haven a moment, ere they put.forth, as though incapable of enjoying its repose, among the
shoals and eddies once more.
And so, too, the Hindoo children in our Indian schools,
when we have gathered them there, and shown them in the
light of modern philosophy, the utter absurdity and incoherence of their sacred books, and provoked them to throw
uttermost scorn on these, we yet may not have brought them
even into the vestibule of the Faith, rather may have set them
at a greater distance than ever; for to have taught them to
pour contempt on all with which hitherto they have linked
feelings of sacredness and awe, is but a questionable preparation for making them humble and reverent scholars of
Christ.  Wiser surely was St. Paul's method, who ever
sought a ground common to himself and him whom he would
persuade, though it were but a handbreadth, upon which to
take his stand.-who taught men reverently to handle their
past selves and their past beliefs,-who to the Athenians
said, "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I
unto you," and spake of the Cretan poet as "a prophet of




126:                 LECTURE VTIT.
their own;" who re-adopted into the family of the Truth its
lost and wandering children, however they might have forgotten their true descent, in whatever far land, under whatever
unlikely disguises, he found them. Thus, and because he
thus dealt, he became, in the language of a Greek father,
which contains scarcely an exaggeration, the vvpuqao'yos5 wa
ozxovp"En, he who led up the world as a bride unto Christ.
But I must draw my subject to an end, and with a few
general remarks on the aim and scope of what here 1 have
been permitted to deliver, will conclude.  My purpose has
been, as I trust even they may have gathered who have heard
but a part, and that the latest, of these discourses, to bring
out an inner witness for Scripture from that which, to an
earnest and devout examination, it shows itself as fitted for
doing-from  that which it has already done-from  that
which we may believe it will accomplish yet.  And this
subject I have chosen out of those which were before me,
because truly there is great strength and comfort and assurance for us in these evidences for the things that we have
believed, which are drawn, not from without, but from within-from  their inner glory, their manifest fitness.  Thus,
for example, if gainsayers at any time should adduce apparent disagreements between one Gospel and one book of
history and another, as between Matthew and Lukc, Chronicles and Kings, and seek to trouble and perplex us with
these, surely the true way to meet them were to bring first
the whole question into a higher court.  Let ts put rather
the -:question to be resolved as this, in what traceable connexion do these books, each by itself, each in relation to the
whole of the other books, stand to the great purpose of God
with humanity? Can they be shown evidently to form
integral parts of a migh-tier whole?  Do they reveal the
Name of God?  Do they yield their nourishment for the
divine life of man? Have they yielded such for our own?.




THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE.   127
And then-not indeed to refuse entering into those lower
and merely critical questions of detail; but if it has been
found that the book satisfies higher needs, fulfils loftier
requirements-clFaiing for it on the score of this, the entire,
the trustful confidence of faith, that it will justify itself in
all lesser matters, that it will come out as clear, and clean in
them, as in its greater. purpose and aim.  Here too that
word will hold good, " He that believeth- shall not make
haste."  He will be content to wait.  For what weakness
does it manifest, what inner mistrust of the things which we
have believed, how feebly must we hold them, how little can
they have blest us, when we raise a cry of fear at any new
and startling results to which science or criticism may have,
or may seem to have, arrived. These too, will presently be
shown what they are; if true, they will fall into their place,
and that place a place of subjection to revealed Truth: if
false, however noisy now, however threatening to carry the
whole world before them, will vanish away in a little while.
But to dread any thing, to wish that any thing which has been
patiently sought or honestly won, should be ignorqd or kept
back, betrays an extreme weakness; Christ has not laid his
hand on us with power, or we should not be so easily
persuaded to believe his cause tottering, or his Truth endangered.
And, indeed, as regards aught which may be brought forward with purposes hostile to the Faith, may not the past
well give us confidence for the future?  One and another
adversary has risen up; for what has not the world beheld
in this kind?  Essays on the M3iracles, Ages of Reason,
Lives of Jesus, Theories of Creation.  And then, in the
first deceitful flush of a momentary success, oftentimes the
cry has gone forth, It is finished; and the fortress of the
Faith is held to be so fatally breached, as henceforward to'
be untenable, and its defenders to have nothing more to do
than to lay down their arms, and surrender at discretion. And




128                 LECTURE VIII.
already those that dwell upon the earth begin to make merry
over the slain witnesses; and already the new Diocletians rear
their trophies and stamp their medals, the memorials of an
extinguished Faith-they themselves being about to perish
for ever, and that Faith to go forward to new victories. For
anon the floods retreat; and temple and tower of God, round
whose bases those waters raged and foamed and fretted for
an instant, stand calmly and strongly as ever they did before.
We, too, some of us have heard, and probably we shall hear
again, such premature hymns of an imaginary triumph.
And when such are confidently raised, the unstable are perplexed, and the waverers fall off, and seeds of doubt, to be
reaped in a harvest of weakness, are sown in many minds.
But let us, brethren, have a sanctuary to retreat to, till each
such tyranny is overpast, as overpass it surely and shortly
will. Let us have that immediate syllogism of the heart,
against which no argument is good. Let us be able to say,
These words, we have found them words of healing, words
of eternal life. This is our sole security —to have tasted
the good Word, to have known the powers of the world to
come. And what if Theology may not be able, on the
instant, to solve every difficulty, yet Faith will not therefore
abandon one jot or tittle of that which she holds, for she has
it on another and a surer tenure, she holds it directly from
her God.
THE END OF THE LECTURES FOR 1845.




CIJR1ST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS;
OR,
THE UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM,
BEING
THE HIULSEAN LECTURES
FOR THE YEAR MDCCCXLVI.








CHRIST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS, OR THE UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM.
LECTURE I.
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.
HAGGAI II. 7.
The Desire of all nations shall come.
ALTHOUGH the Founder of these Lectures, which it is
permitted me a second time to deliver in this place, did by
no means offer a narrow range of subjects, from which the
preacher should make his choice, but on the contrary, so
expressed himself, that it would be quite possible to adhere
to the letter of his injunctions, and still, at the same time,
altogether to quit the region of Christian apology; yet I
cannot but believe that in so doing I should be forsaking
the spirit of these injunctions, and hardly fulfilling th6 intentions with which these Lectures were founded by him. Those
who have gone before me in this honourable office, arguing,
probably, from the subjects which he has placed in the foremnost rank; from the purpose which kindred foundations, by
him established among us, were evidently meant to serve; from
the especial importance attached, by good men in the age
wherein he lived, to such defences of our holy faith, have generally concluded that they should.best be fulfilling his intention, to which they felt a pious reverence was due, if they
undertook the maintenance-of some portions of the truth,
which had been especially assailed or gainsayed.  Nor do I
purpose, on the present occasion, to depart from the practice
which the example of my predecessors has sanctioned; having
(131)




132                   LECTURE I.
rather chosen for my argument a subject recommending
itself to me, first, by a certain suitableness, as I trust will
appear, to,our present needs, and to controversies of our day,
such as are approaching, if we were not actually in the midst
of them as yet; and secondly, by an evident bearing which
it has upon one of the two great branches of study cultivated
among us in this University. Christ the Desire of all Nations,
or, The ULtconscious Prophecies of Hleathendom-such appears
to me the title which will best gather up and present at a
single glance to you the subject, which it will be my aimn in
the following discourses, if God will, under successive aspects
to unfold.
Leaving aside, as. not belonging to my argument, what
there was of positive divinely constituted preparation for the
coming of Christ in the Jewish economy, I shall make it
my task to trace what in my narrow limits I may, of the
implicit expectations which there were in the heathen world
-to contemplate, at least under a few leading aspects, the
yearnings of the nations for a redeemer, and for all which
the true Redeemer only could give,-for the great facts of
his life, for the great truths of his teaching. Nor may this
be all: for -this, however interesting in itself, would yet
scarcely come under the title of Christian apology; of which
the idea is, that it is not merely the: truth, but the truth
asserting itself in the face of error.  It will therefore be my
endeavour further to rescue these dim prophetic anticipations
of the heathen world from the abuse which has sometimes
been made of them, to show that these dreams of the world,
so far from helping to persuade us that all which we hold is a
dream likewise, are rather exactly that which ought to have
preceded the world's awaking: that these parhelions do not
proclaim every thing else to be an optical illusion, but
announce, and witness for, a sun that is travelling into sight;
that these false ancilia of man's forging, tell of a true which
has indeed come down from  heaven.  I would fain show




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                133
that there ought to have been these; the transcending worth
and dignity of the Christian revelation not being diminished
by their existence, but rather enhanced; for its glory lies,
not in its having relation to nothing which went before itself,
but rather in its having relation to every thing, in its-being
the middle point to which all lines, some consciously, more
unconsciously, were tending, and in which all centred at
the last.
And this it is worth our while to show: for we do not
here, as the charge has sometimes been made against us, first
set up the opponent,-whom we afterwards easily overthrow,
for he was but the phantom of our own brain. On the contrary, it has been at divers times from the very first, and
is in our own day, a part, and a favourite part, of their
tactics who would resist the Faith, to endeavour to rob it
of its significance as the great epoch in the world's history,
by the production of anterior parallels to it.
These may be parallels to its doctrines and ethical piecepts; and they are brought forward for the purpose of
showing that it is therefore no such wisdom of God, no such
mystery that had been kept secret from the beginning of the
world; that what it professed to give as a revelation from heaven,
men had attained before by the light of reason, by the unassisted efforts of their own minds.  The attempts to rob
Christianity in this way of its significance are, as I observed,
not new. If such objections have been zealously urged in
modern times, they belong also to the very earliest.  To
take two examples, one old, one new. Celsus, in the second
century, quoting words of our blessed Lord's, in which he
exhorts to the forgiveness of enemies, remarks that he has
found the identical precept in Plato,-with only the difference, as he dares to add, that it is by the Grecian sage better
and more elegantly spoken.* And Gibbon, having occasion
Origen, Con. Cels., 1. 7, c. 58. In like manner Celsus affirmed
that our Lord's words, Matt. xix. 23, were transferred from
12




134                      LECTURE I.
to speak of one of Christ's most memorable moral precepts,
"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye
even so to them," cannot resist the temptation of adding"a rule which I read in a moral treatise of Isocrates four
hundred years before the publication of the Gospel." And
in like manner we all probably remember, if not the contents, yet the title which the book of an English deist bore,
one of the ablest of that unhappy band, " Clzhrstianity as
old as the'Creatlion;" a book which by that title at once
indicated the quarter from which its author advanced to the
assault of revealed religion.
And not seldom  this charge appears in an aggravated
form; and it has been sought to be proved, not meirely that
others had said the same before the Gospel, but that it had
covertly borrowed from  them-that so far from being more
and higher than another birth of the human mind, it possessed so little vital and independent energy, as to have been
compelled to go back to prior sources, and to build with the
materials of others, and to adorn itself with their spoils.
Urged by their desire to prove this, hoping to convict it thus
of being in possession of things not its own, the adversaries
of the Christian faith have gone far to seek for the anticipattions and sources of its doctrine. Thus, with Voltaire, India,
Plato, De Legg., 1. 5. 742.  (Con. Cels., 1. G., c. 16.)  Augustine
too (De Doctr. Christ., 1. 2, c. 28) makes mention of some in his own
time, readers and lovers of Plato,-.qui dicere anusi sunt omnes
Domini nostri Jesu Christi sententias, quas mirari et preedicare
coguntur, de Platonis libris eumr didicisse. St. Ambrose also, as we
learn from Augustine, (Ep. 31,) had found it necessary to write
against such; which he did in a work that now has perished. How
excellent is Augustine's own answer (Enarr. in Ps. cxl. 6:] Dixit
hoc Pythagoras, dixit hoc Plato....Prapterea si inventus fuerit aliquis
eorum  hoc dixisse quod dixit et Christus, gratulamur illi, non
sequimur illum. Sed prior fuit ille quam Christus.  Si quis ver'a
loquitur, prior est quam ipsa Veritas?  O homo, attendc ChrisLtun
non quando ad te venerit, sed quando te fecerit.




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                  135
and still more, China, were the favourite quarters from which
he laboured to show that its wisdom had been drawn;
although his almost incredible ignorance exposed him to the
most ridiculous errors, and made him  the dupe of poorest
forgeries, palmed on him as works of the ancient wisdom of
the East, and which by him were again confidently produced
as such.* Somewhat later the Zend-Avesta and the religion
of Zoroaster were triumphantly appealed to, as having been
the true sun from which the borrowed light of Judaism and
Christianity had proceeded. Then again, men said that our
blessed Lord had been educated and initiated in the secret
lore of the Essenes, and that he, the Wisdom of God, had
first learned wisdom in these schools of men. Or by others,
Rabbinical parallels-to various sayings in the New Testament,
to evangelical parables and doctrines, have been solemnly
adduced, as solving the riddle of Christianity, as enough to
dissipate that nimbus of glory with which it had been hitherto surrounded, to refute its loftier claims, and prove its
origin of earth, and not of heaven. So has falsehood
travelled round the world, as inconsistent with itself as it
is remote from the truth, each later birth of it devouring
the preceding.
* There is a curious account of a fraud which was played off on
him, in Von Bohlen's ZDas Alte Indien, v. 1, p. 136, connecting itself
with a singular piece of literary forgery. A Jesuit missionary,
whose zeal led him to assume the appearance of an Indian Fakir, in
the beginning of last century forged a Veda, of which the purpose
was, secretly to undermine the religion which it professed to support, and so to facilitate the introduction of Christianity-to advance,
that is, the kingdom of truth with a lie. This forged Veda is full
of every kind of error or ignorance in regard to the Indian religions.
After lying, however, long- in a Romanist missionary college at
Pondicherry, it found its way to Europe, and a transcript of it came
into the hands of Voltaire, who eagerly used it for the purpose of
depreciating the Christian Books, and showing how many of their
doctrines had been anticipated by the wisdom of the East. The book
had thus an end worthy of its beginning




136                    LECTURE r.
And they have wrought in the same spirit, and in reality
with the same weapons to the same ends, who yet, somewhat
shifting their ground, have not so much sought to turn our
Christian faith into a doctrine which had been often taught
before, as into a dream which has been often dreamed before;
who have not therefore laboured to produce parallels to its
isolated sayings or doctrines-to rob it here and there of a
jewel in its crown; but have aspired to a completer victory,
striking at the very person and acts of Him on whom it rests,
and out of whom it has unfolded itself. And in this way;
-they have ransacked all records of ancient religions for
such parallels, nearer or more remote, as they could in
them find, not now any more to the sayings, but rather to
the doings, of this life; and having mustered and marshalled
in threatening order as many of these as they could draw
together, they have turned round and said to us-" In all
times, and all the world through, men have been imagining
for themselves, as you see, sons of God, expiations by sacrifice, direct communications with a higher world, oracles and
prophecies, wielders of a power mightier than nature's, restorers of a lost Paradise, conquerors of Hades, ascensions
into heaven. They have inagined them, and nothing more;
for the things which they thus in spirit grasped at, never
found an historic realization, however men may have enriched
themselves, and we do not deny that they did so, with the
thought that such things had been, or one day should be."
And then it has been further asked us, What right had we to
difference our hope from the hope of all others? They
longed so earnestly, that at last their longing wove a garment,
made even a body, for itself; what right have any to affirm
that it is otherwise with the things which they believe?
And thus, because men have hoped for, and reached after,
that which in Christ is given, and hoped. so intensely, that
they have sometimes imagined it to be actually theirs, so pro-.jecting their hope, as to give it at last an objective reality,




INTRODUCTORY TLECTURE.                13 7
we are bidden to believe that ours is but such an ardent
desire, fashioning at length a body for itself.  Parading a
long line of shadows, these adversaries require us to acknowledge the substance we have embraced to be a, shadow also;
showing how much false money is in the world, and has at
different times passed current, they demand of us, how we
dare to assume that which we have accepted to be true;when they should see that the shadows imply a substance
somewhere, that the false money passes only under shelter
of a true. Proving, as it is not hard to prove, those parallels
to be groundless and mythical, to rest on no true historic
basis, they hope that the great facts of the Christian's belief
-will be concluded to be as weak-that they will be involved
in a common discredit*-and the faiths of which those other
formed a part having come to nothing, or evidently hastening to decay, that this may be assumed to underlie the same
judgment, and to be hastening to the same inevitable dissolution, however the signs of it as yet may not appear.
This scheme of attack has been so long and so vigorously
plied, so much success has been expected from it, that in
the works of the latter assailants of revelation from  thip
quarter, there speaks out a certain indignation, mingled with
astonishment, at the resistance which it is still presuming to
offer; as though it were not to be endured, that every other
religion should have confessed itself a mythology, and that
this should deny it still-that each other, like a startled
ghost, should have vanished-at the first cock-cirowing of an
- Tertullian (Apol. 47,) speaks of the way in which these parallels were played off against the Christian verities-Elysium not only
having forfeited belief in itself, but having helped to destroy a
belief in heaven —linos and Rhadamanthus having rendered the
judgment-seat of Christ a mockery;-though in his narrow fashion
he sees in them nothing but the adulteria veritatis-the work of
the jealous envy of evil spirits, quv3 de similitudine fidem infirmarent veritatis. But if the truth was hard to- receive with these,
might it not have been impossible to receive without them?
12*




138                    LECTURE I.
intellectual morn; but that this should continue to affront, as
boldly and as confidently as ever, even the light of the
world's middle day-that each other should have crumbled
into nothing at the first touch of the wand of a critical
philosophy, but that this should entirely refuse to obey its
dissolving Spell.
Now all charges against the truth, however destitute of
any solid foundation, out of whatever perversity of heart or
mind they may have sprung, yet, when continually re-appearing, when repeating themselves in different ages, and by the
mouths of different objectors, and those independent of one
another, have yet, we may be sure, something which has rendered them not merely possible, but plausible; which suggested them first, and, with the frivolous and thoughtless,
with those that have been eager to believe thep,' and to be
quit of the restraints of a positive faith, has given them currency and favour.  Let me seek, then, as an important element of my subject, to consider what that something is,
which has served to suggest, and afterwards to give a point
to these charges; and, not pausing here, to show that the
truth, which, however distorted, is at the bottom  of these
charges, is one which we may cheerfully and without any
misgiving, recognise.
And this is not all: for I would fain also show that it
would be a grievous deficiency, if that were absent from our
Christian faith, which has been the motive and hint to these
accusations —if that faith, as far as regards the whole anterior world except the Jewish, stood in relation to nothing
which men had thought, or felt, or hoped, or believed;
with no other coefficient but the Jewish, and resting on no
broader historic basis than that would supply. It will be my
purpose to inquire whether we may not contemplate the relations of the absolute truth to the anterior religions of the
world, in an aspect in which we shall cease altogether from
regarding with suspicion these apparent anticipations of good




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.              139
things given us in Christ, in which, instead of being secretly
embarrassed by them, and hardly knowing exactly how to
deal with, or where to range them, we shall joyfully accept
these presentiments of the truth, so far as they are satisfactorily made out, as enhancing the greatness and glory of
the truth itself-; and as being, so. far as they are allowed to
have.any weight, confirmations of it.
Nor will it be a small satisfaction,-if this be possible, as
I believe it easy,-to make our adversaries do drudging
work for us; to plough with their oxen; to enter, as we
shall do then, upon their labours; and all that they have
painfully gathered up with purposes hostile to the faith —to
appropriate and make defensive of it; not so much anxiously defending our own position, as confidently turning
theirs; wresting from them their own weapons, and then
wielding them against themselves.
And first, in regard to the ethical anticipations of what
is given to us in the gospel,-the goodly maxims, the striking precepts, the memorable sayings, which are gathered
from the fields bf heathen philosophy, and then sometimes
used to depress the original worth of the teaching of Christ
and his apostles,-I will not urge here, and I have no object
in urging, though I may, in passing, remark, how many that
are sometimes adduced of these are wholly deceptive, as paral.
lels to Christian truths. How often in their organic connexion they would be very far from containing that echo or
presentiment of truth which we deem we catch in them;
how often they have indeed a very different significance from
that which we first put in them, and only afterwards educe
from them. Nor yet will I press how the goodliest maxim
is indeed nothing, save in its coherence to a body of truth;
how a world of such maxims, were they gotten together,
would be only as ten thousand artificial lamps, failing altogether to constitute a day, and not in the remotest degree




140                     LECTURE-.
doing the work, or supplying to the world the place of a
single sun.
Not to press this, and accepting fully and freely what has
been said wisely and well before the gospel and apart from
the gospel, and allowing to the full that it has many times
touched the heart of the matter, yet still is there nothing
here which we need wish we could deny, which we should not
rather deoire to find. Indeed, so far from there having been,
in time past, a shunning or ignoring of these heathen parallels, the early apologists perhaps only admitted them too
freely: yet thus at any rate they testified that to acknowledge
them they felt to be no confession of a weakness in their
position. Thus more than one has likened the faithful delivered from an evil world to the children of Israel brought
out of Egypt, who borrowed and carried forth from thence
vessels of gold and vessels of silver, the same which probaibly afterwards furnished the precious metals which they dedicated to the holier uses of the sanctuary. In like manner,
they said, there was much which the faithful, delivered out,of'the spiritual Egypt, would leave behind him, as all its'abominable idolatries; but something also which he would
carry forth, and which he had a right to carry forth, for it
was not truly the riches of that land. This silver and this
gold had been originally dug from mines of divine truth,
and bearing it with him, he only reclaimed to its noblest purposes that which had been more or less alienated and per
verted from them.*
* Thus Augustine (De Doctr. Clhrist., 1. 2, c. 40:) Philosophi autem qui vocantur, si qua forte vera et fidei nostre accommodata dixwrunt maxime Platonici, non soluim forihidanda non sunt, sed ab eis
itiam tanquam injustis possessoribus in usum nostrum vindicanda.:icut enim 2Egyptii non solrm idol, habebant et onera gravia, quve!opulus Israel detestaretur et fugaret, sed etiam vasa atque ornamenta de auro et argentoj et vestem, quee ille populus exiens de iEXgypto
sibi potius tanquam ad usum meliorem clanculo vindicavit, non auctoritate propria, sed pruecepto Dei, ipsis 2Egyptiis nescienter- coin



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                   141
Nor need we deal more timidly with these parallels than
they did. So long, indeed, as we regard God's revelation
of Himself in Christ, as a revelation merely of certain moral truths, it may be startling to find aught that is therein
anticipated in any other quarter. But when we more rightly contemplate it as the manifesting of life, that the Life was
manifested, and dwelt among us, then we feel that they who
gave, and could give, precepts and maxims only, however
precious these were, whatever witness they bore to a light
shining in the darkness, to a divine spark not trodden out in
man, to a God nurturing the heathen, with all this yet gave
not that, which, for man, is the gift of gifts and blessing of
blessings. And this is the true way in which to contemplate
it. That which differences Christianity from all other religions,
is not its theory of morals; this is a most real, yet at the
same time only a relative difference, for there were ethics before there were Christian ethics.* But its difference is, that
modantibus ea, quibus non bene utebantur, sic doctrinse omnes Gentilium non soluim simulata et superstitiosa figmenta gravesque sarcinas supervacui laboris habent,.... sed etiam liberales disciplinas
usui veritatis aptiores,... quod eorum, tanquam aurum et argentum,
quod non ipsi instituerunt, sed de quibusdam quasi metallis divine
providentite, quta ubique infusa sunt, eruerunt,.... debet ab eis auferre Christianus ad usum justum  predicandi Evangelii.  Origen
(Ep. ad Gregor., t. 1, p. 30,) uses the same illustration, observing,
however, that, according to his experience, the gold that is brought
out of Egypt is oftener used for the fashioning of an idol, a golden
calf, the work of men's own hands, which they worship, -than for
the adorning of the tabernacle -of God.
* Grotius, indeed, says, (De Verit. Rel. Christ., 1. 4, c. 12:) Ejus
[scil. -religionis Christian]el partes singulve tantoe sunt honestatis,
ut suapte luce animos quasi convincant, ita ut inter paganos non defuerint qui dixerint singula, qua nostrse religio habet universa. Lactantius expresses himself more cautiously, and is careful to add how
none but a teacher sent from God could have knit these scattered
limbs into a body. He says, Inst. Div., 1. 7, c. 7: Nullam sectam
fuisse tam deviam, nec philosophorum quendam tam inanem qui non




142                     LECTURE I.
it is life and power, that it transforms, that it transfigures,
that it makes new creatures, that it does for all what others
only promised to do for a few.  Herein the essential difference resides. Men, for instance, before it came, could speak
worthy things, and could really feel them, iabout the duty
of overcoming their desires, of forgiving their enemies, of
repaying injuries with kindness, of coming to God with clean
hands and a clean heart. Such sayings abound in every code of
morals:* but the unhappiness was, that they who uttered these
sayings and they who admired them, did little more than this.
It was not that there was any falseness in their admiration: they
delighted in them after the inner man, but in the actual struggle with evil, they were ever weak to bring them  to effect.
There was a great gulf between the saying and the doing, which
never till in Christ was effectually bridged over; so that the
Christian speaker in that beautiful dialogue, the Octavius of
Minucius Felix, exactly hit the mark, when, to characterize
the practical of Christian life as distinguished from the speculative of heathen philosophy, he-exclaimed of that sect everywhere spoken against, to which he belonged, Non eloguimuwr magna, sed vivimus.
And yet, brethren, when we thus trace the miserable contradiction that ever existed in a world out of Christ, between
the good seen and the evil done, the vast chasm between the
two, let this be with no purpose of laying bare their sores,
with no thought of glorying in their infirmities, to whom in
a less favored time the only fountain of effectual strength
videret aliquid e vero. Quodsi extitisset aliquis, qui veritatem,
sparsam per singulos, per sectasque diffusam, colligeret in unum,
et redigeret in copTus, is profecti non dissentiret a nobis. Sod hoc
nemo facere, nisi veri peritus ac sciens, potest; verum autem non
nisi ejus scire est, qui sit doctus a Deo.
* See, for instance, in Von Bohlen, (Das 4lte indien, v. 1, p. 364,)
a beautiful collection of Indian sayings of this kind, on the love of
our neighbour, and the forgiveness of injuries.




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.               143
and healing had not yet been opened. For indeed,' brethren, may there not be many a one among ourselves to whom,
with far less excuse, all this explains itself, alas! only too
easily? many a one, it may be, who remermbers times of his
own life, before his moral convictions had been gathered up
and found their middle point in Christ-and in those times
repeated falls under temptation, which explain to him only
too vividly the condition in which this ever-recurring infidelity of men to their moral convictions found place-in which
they were thus able to trace the outlines of a righteousness,
but impotent to fill them up, and so ever leaving it in outline still-well-skilled to draw a ground-plan, but weak to
build any superstructure thereon-the virtue loved till the-opportunity came for practising it; the sin hated, till the moment for testifying that hatred had arrived.
]But to pass on to the other charge, to the resemblances to
the great facts on which our faith reposes, to the great events
of our Lord's life, which are adduced from other quarters,
with the requirement, because those have proved weak to
stand, that we should acknowledge these to be weak also;they only will consent to such a conclusion, who have failed
to perceive that according to the very highest idea of Christianity, such there needs must have been.  For what do we
affirm of Christ? when do we conceive worthily of Him?
When we conceive of Him, in the prophet's words, as " the
Desire of all nations"-the fulfiller of the world's hopesthe stiller of creation's groans-the great birth of time, unto
which all the unspeakable throes of a suffering humanity had
been tending fromn the first.  These resemblances disturb us
not at all, —they are rather most welcome; for we do not believe the peculiar glory of what in Christ we possess to consist in this, that it is unlike everything else, " the cold denial and contradiction of all that men have been dreaming of
through the different ages of the world, but rather the sweet
reconciliation and exquisite harmony of all past thoughts, an



144                    LECTURE I.
ticipations, revelations," Its prerogative is, that all whereof
men had a troubled dream before, did in him become a, waking
reality; that what men were devising, and most inadequately,
for themselves, God has perfectly given us in his Son; that
in the room of shifting cloud-palaces, with their mockery of
temple and tower, stands for us a city, which hath come down
from Heaven, but whose foundations rest upon this earth of
ours;-that we have divine facts-facts no doubt which are
ideal, in that they are the vehicle of everlasting truths; history indeed which is far more than history, for it embodies
the largest and most continually recurring thoughts which
have stirred the bosom of humanity from the beginning. We
say that the Idivine ideas which had wandered up and down
the world till oftentimes they had well-nigh forgotten themselves and their own origin, did at length clothe themselves
in flesh and blood; they became incarnate with the Incarnation of the Son of God.  In his life and person the idea
and the fact at length kissed each other, and ware henceforward wedded for evermore.
If these things be so, and it will be my desire in this place,
and in these lectures, to trace how they are, one or two considerations will lie very near to us; and with the pressing of
these on your thoughts and hearts I will this day conclude.
And first, the,general consideration, that what there may
have been in the world obscurely struggling to be Christian
before Christ and his Church, so far from suggesting to
us poorer thoughts of what in him we- possess, under how
far more glorious aspect does it present that to us! All
which men before could conceive, but could not realize, could
feel after, but could not grasp, could dream of, but ever when
they awoke found nothing in their hands, it is here; "the
body is of Christ." And the Church which he has founded,
we behold it as sitting upon many waters, upon the great
ocean of truth, from whence every stream that has at all, or
at any time refreshed the earth was originally drawn, and to




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.                145
which it duteously brings its waters again.*  We may contemplate that Church as having in that it has the Word and
Spirit of its Lord, the measure of all partial truth in itself;
receiving the homage of all human systems, meekly, and yet,
Ikie a queen, as her right; understanding them  far better
than they ever understood themselves; disallowing their false,
and what of true they have, setting her seal upon that true,
and issuing it with a brighter image, and a sharper outline,
and a more paramount authority, from her own mint.
Again, if the more excellent glory of that which we possess in Christ is, that it is not shadow but substance, not
anticipation but possession-not the idea, but the fact, or
rather the fact and the idea in one,-how are we letting-go our
most precious gains, when we at all let go, or when we even
slight, our historic faith, resting on and finding its object in
the person of the Saviour! What a miserable exchange, to
give up this, and to accept the largest, the most vaunted
theories concerning the godlike and the true in its room and
as its adequate substitute, the most magnificent ideas in the
place of the humblest affiance on the Son of God —soon to
find that we have gotten pebbles for jewels, words for things,
that we are in a world peopled only with ghosts and phantoms! Oh, loss unutterable, if we allow any to strip off for
us the historic realization of the truth in the person of Jesus
of Nazareth, as though it were not of the essence of the
matter, as though it were a thing indifferent, useful perhaps
for the simpler members of the Church, but for others hindering rather than helping the contemplation of the pure idea,
which they would persuade us it is alone needful to retain.
They promise, it is true, who invite to this sacrifice, that if
only we will destroy this temple of our historic faith, in three
-; Clement of Alexandria on this very matter (Strom., 1. 1, c. 5:)
PM&c HVX OV,'5  &a10~E&5 0,85- E'15 a'TV1 XadEpa  ~ 5 Wvv aO,7rorfupv, Expiovm6 Irai Pf[PX aU,>X 2XaQ0EVp
13




146                   LECrTURE 1.
days, yea, in an instant, as by a magic wand, they will raise
up forus a goodlier and more gorgeous fabric in its room.
Let it be our wisdom to give no credence to their words;'knowing this, that it was the very blessedness which the
coming of the Son of God in the flesh brought us, that it
brought us that, which these would fain persuade us to relinquish and renounce, that it lifted men out of and above
that condition into which these deceivers would willingly
persuade them to return.
No doubt there is a temptation to give in to this, a temptation working in each one of us-to take up, that is, with
a religion which shall consist in the contemplating of great
and ennoblin gideas, instead of in the serving with a straightforward and downright obedience a personal God. Those
ideas we feel that we can deal with them as we like; they
exert hlo constraining power upon us; we are their masters,
and not they ours: or if we have allowed them any rule over
us, when the stress comes, we can withdraw it again; allowing them  just as much authority as is convenient to us.
There is no "Be thou holy, for I am holy," in them-no
pointing to the rugged way of the Cross, with a Forerunner
walking there, and a command that we follow him in it.
Let us watch earnestly against so subtle a temptation, showing as it does so fair, and finding so much in our slothful and
rsinful hearts thai makes them only too ready to embrace it.
And surely, brethren, at this season the Church suggests
and presents to us mighty helps against all this. What help
so effectual as to enter truly and deeply into the Passion of
our Lord-to carry at no cold and careless distance from that
cross to which each day of this lenten season is now bringing us nigher? but to seek to draw forth the riches of grace
which are laid up for us in it, and in the considering of him
that hanged thereon.  Let us determine, brethren, that in
this coming week, the beginning it may be of a more holy
life, we will bring ourselves continually within the sphere of




INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.               147
those mighty, those transforming influences, which are ever
going forth from thence. Let us make proof how it can open
for us the fountain of purifying tears, sealed it may be
for long-how a burden can be laid down at its foot which
is crushing us to the earth, and from which nowhere else is
deliverance.  Let us seek to enter into nearer fellowship
with the Man of sorrows, with our crucified God. And then,
when we have proved how this fellowship can bless us, how
it can cleanse us from our impurities, how it can strengthen
us for our tasks, can enable us to tread under foot our enemies, we shall not readily exchange such a fellowship as this
with a living Lord, so full fraught with blessings, for that of
mere notions and phantoms; which, however much they
may promise, will desert us in the hour of need, and prove
utterly helpless, whensoever the real stress of life's trial
comes.




LECTURE II.
THE VANQUISHER OF HADES.
(Preached on Easter Sunday.)
MARK XVI. 3.
Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?
THE heathen expectations of a deliverer I ventured in my
preceding lecture to characterize as " the unconscious prophecies of heathendom;"- prophecies indeed which knew not
at what they pointed, of which the lines were most wavering
and indistinct when set beside the clear outlines of Jewish
hope-yet in a wider and laxer sense prophecies still; or, if
we'will not make that word common, but reserve it for the
highest of all, we may call them the world's divination at the
least.  For in these expectations of a world, which, though
deeply fallen, remained God's world still, it was divining
what it needed, and obscurely feeling after it. And this divination, these guesses at and reachings out after, the truth, so
far from shunning and keeping out of sight, we may use, I
said, not of course putting them in the forefront of our array, yet we may use them still, as arguments for that Faith,
to which all has thus tended from the first, which the world
was craving for before it received, and short of which it
never found its perfect satisfaction or rest.
It is the same argument, applied in a different region, of
Christianity as evidently the complement of all that went
before, which the early apologists were wont to use in their
conflict with Gnostic and Manichman. They urged the manner in which the Christian revelation as the Church received
(148)




THE VANQUISHER OF HADES.                149
it, rooted itself deeply in an anterior constitution, was evidently not a sudden improvisation, but the culminating fact
of an idea which had been realizing itself through all the sacred history of the past, was as the perfect flower, of which
all genuine Judaism had been the stalk and stem. And they
founded on this traceable connexion the superiority of its
claims to those of all rival systems, which could produce no
such accordance of their new with pre-existing and pre-established harmonies in the spiritual world; but had rather
abruptly and violently to force a place for themselves, than
to fit into one already prepared for their reception, which rested
on an undoing and denying of the past, rather than a sanctioning and perfecting of it.*  And as there was, no doubt, a
most real force in their argument, exactly so has it for the
thoughtful mind a deep significance, that Christ should have
met and satisfied all nobler longings of the heathen worldthat all deeper and better impulses which were anywhere at
work, should have been tending toward Him. The worth of
the unspeakable gift which in Christ is ours, is wonderfully
testified by the fact that all should have been in one way or
another either asking for that gift or fancying that they had
gotten it, or mourning its departure, or providing substitutes
for it. For, however in the one elect people, as the bearers
of the divine promises,-the beating heart of the spiritual
world,-the appointed interpreters to the rest of their blind
desires, this longing after a Redeemer came out in greater
clearness and in greater strength, and with no troubling disturbing elements,-their education being far more directly from
God, and being expressly aimed at the quickening of these
longings to the highest,-yet were those longings themselves
- See especially Tertullian, Adv. 3Marcion., 1. 3 and 4, passim, in
which this is his ever-recurring thought, re-appearing in an infinite
variety of forms. Oh Christum et in novis veterem! he exclaims,'having shown how the rudiments of almost all Christ's miracles are
to be found in the Old Testament.




150                   LE'CTUR.E if.
not exclusively theirs. They, indeed, yearned, and knew what
they yearned for: the nations yearned, and knew not for
what. But still they yearned: for as the earth in its long
polar night seeks to supply the absence of the day by the
generation of the northern lights, so does each people in the
long night of its heathen darkness bring forth in its yearning after the life of Christ, a faint and glimmering substitute
for the same.  From these dreamy longings after the break
of day have proceeded oracles, priests, sacrifices, lawgivers
and the like. Men have nowhere given up hoping; nor acquiesced in the world's evil as the world's law. Everywhere
they have had a tradition of a time when they were nearer
to God than now, a confident hope of a time when they
should be brought nearer again.
No thoughtful student of the past records of mankind can'
refuse to acknowledge that through all its history there has
run the hope of a redemption from the evil which oppresses
it; nor of this only, but that this hope has continually linked,
itself on to some single man. The help that is coming to
the world, it has ever seen incorporated in a person.  The
generations of men, weak and helpless in themselves, have
evermore been looking after one in whom they may find all
which they seek vainly in themselves and in those around
them-redressers of the world's wrong, deliverers from the
world's yoke, vindicators of the honour of the race, souls of
heroic stature, in which all the features of greatness that are
imparted with niggard hand unto others shall be found gloriously and prodigally combined. Such in almost every religion men have learned to look back to, as having already
come: such we find that they are every where expecting as
yet to appear.
As little can one deny that there is that in men, which
prepares them to welcome these at their appearing. There
is a natural gravitation of souls, which attracts them  to
mighty personalities; an instinct in man, which tells him




THE VANQUISHER OF HADES.               151
that he is never so great as when looking up to one greater
than himself —that he is made for this looking upward —to find,
and, finding to rejoice and to be ennobled in, a nobler than
himself. And doubtless this instinct in itself is divine. It
is the natural basis on which the devotion of mankind to
Christ is by the Spirit to be built; it is an instinct which,
being perfectly purified of each baser admixture, is intended
to find its entire satisfaction in Him. True it may stop short
of Him; true, it may turn utterly away from Him. It may
stop short of Him, resting in human heroes, in men glorious
for their gifts, eminent for their services to their kind; and
we have then the worship of genius instead of the worship
of God. Or it may turn utterly away from Christ, and then,
being in itself inextinguishable, and therefore surviving
even in those who have wholly forsaken Him, it will, thus
perverted and depraved, lay them open to all the delusions of
false prophets and of antichrists.
For it is this, this attraction' of men to a mightier than
themselves, which, being thus perverted, has filled-the world
with deceivers and deceived; which has gathered round the
hunters of men the ready instruments which have executed
their will. It is this which has drawn souls, as moths to the
candle, to rush into and to be scorched and to be consumed
in the flame, which some wielder of heavenly gifts for hellish
aims has kindled.  It is this which swells the train round
some conqueror's car, as he urges his destructive course
through the world.  What, for instance, to take a near
illustration, was the devotedness of the French soldiery to
theirsgreat leader but this?  Who does not feel that this
devotedness, out of which thousands and tens of thousands
were ready to meet, and did joyfully meet, dangers and fatigues and agonies and deaths, only for the hope of one word
of approbation, one smile from him, counting all more than'repaid by this-who does not feel that this was the inverted
side of something in itself most true and most noble, to




152                   LECTURE II.
which even in its degeneracy it bore witness; and only had
now run wild and lost its appointed destination? It is this,
this craving of men passionately to devote themselves to some
one, which makes an Antichrist possible, which will make
him so terrible when he appears-men by a just judgment
of-God being permitted to dedicate all which they ought
to have dedicated to Christ, to his opposite, to him who
comes in his own name,-because they refused to give it, because they refused to give themselves, to Him who came in
the name of his Father. It will then be fearfully seen that
there can be an enthisiasm of hell, no less than an enthusiasm
of heaven.
And as on the one side there is a preparedness to acknowledge these kings of men, these spiritual and intellectual chiefs
of our race, so soon as they show themselves; thus too,
upon the other hand, such have never been wanting to
claim the reverence and the homage of their fellows, to seat
themselves on the prepared thrones of the world.  Certainly
there is nothing in the study of the past which fills one with
more awe and wonder than the infinite significance of single
men in the development of the world's history. That history lies out before our'eyes no Tartarian steppe, no Indian
savannah, stretching out at one vast level, or with only slight
elevations or depressions; but with marvellous inequalities,
and here and there with ravines deep almost as hell itself,
and again with mountain summits towering well-nigh unto
heaven.  Every where we encounter those that bring to
their brethren a new blessing or a new curse, that gather as
at a centre the world's light or the world's darkness; from
whom that light, or that darkness diffuses itself anew and with
a new energy-beneficent lords or baleful tyrants in the spiritual kingdom of men's thoughts and feelings-each one for
weal or for woe, in narrower and wider circles, for longer or
shorter spaces, wielding his scepter over the hearts and spirits
of his fellows; helping to make them  slaves or to malie




TIE VANvQUISHER OP HADES.             153
them free, to exalt or to cast them down. On the one
side august lawgivers, founders'of stable polities, bringers
in of some new element of civilization, restorers, even
amid heathen darkness, of some purer knowledge of God;
on the other side, destroyers that have known how to
knit to them as with magic bands multitudes of their brethren, and to make them the passionate servants of their evil
will; proclaimers of sensual philosophies, that have assisted
to make our life cheaper than beasts', toempty it of its loftier
hopes and its faith in a higher destination; seducers after
whom the world has wondered; stars whose name has been
]Wormwood, that, falling from heaven, have made the waters
of earth bitter, so that the men died who drank of them.
Thus has it been, brethren, that the world has been ever
opening wide its arms to welcome its redeemers,-oftentimes
cruelly deceived, counting oftentimes, like Eve, that it had
gotten a man from the Lord, even him who should comfort
it under the curse, when indeed it was thus welcoming only
the deepener of the curse, and it may be the author of some
new mischief; yet hoping ever, with hopes that even at the
best were only most imperfectly and inadequately fulfdled.
Thus have the multitudes of men still gathered and grouped
themselves round central figures in history, giving testimony
even by an oftentimes fatal readiness for this, that mankind
was made for a Christ, for a divine leader in whom it should be
set free, by the mightier and holier magic of his will, by the
prevalence of a divine attraction which he should exercise
upon them, from all the potent spells of seducing spirits and
seducing men —that humanity was made for one to whom it
should be able to deliver itself perfectly and without reserve,
and to be blest in so delivering itself.  For he.being identical with righteousness, and wisdom and love, they who lose
themselves in Him, only lose to find themselves again for,
ever.
So much, brethren, we may say generally concerning the




154                   LECTURE It.
hope which the world has cherished of redeemers and saviours — a hope which at length was fulfilled so perfectly in
Him, and only in Him, who bears both these titles, that we
well nigh feel as if the titles themselves, to say nothing- of
any deeper homage or devotion, cannot, without wrong to
him, and encroachment upon his due honour, be lent to any
other.  And upon this day, brethren, upon this resurrection
morn, it will fall in well with the joyful solemnities of the
time, with the current in which our thoughts must needs be
running, and from which it would only be a loss, if the discourse you heard in this place should awhile divert them, to
address ourselves to a part of the subject, which, had not
this high day come upon us, might perhaps have been more
conveniently reserved to a later occasion; but which if now,
moved by the fitness of the season, I a little anticipate, you
will pardon me this wrong. The aspect of the subject which
I mean is this, —the world's hope of its deliverers as conquerors of death, its expectation of one who should lead captivity captive, in whom mortality should be swallowed up in
life, who should be a vanquisher of hell, a bringer back of
souls, and first and chiefly of his own, from the prison-house
of the grave.
Such expectations in abundance there were; for nowhere
have men sat down content under the heavy laws of death
which bound them. They have ever been imagining the reversal of the curse, a breach or a repeal of those inexorable
laws. The old world was ever feeling after "Jesus and the
Resurrection." And being full of this thought, it traced it
everywhere. Thus, in the cycle of the natural seasons, when
the earth in spring starts up from its long winter sleep, men
saw a symbol and a never-failing prophecy of life rising out
of death: that winter was as the world's death, this spring
as the world's resurrection.  The enthusiasm  which the
spring woke up, the rapture with which the outbursti/g of
bud and blossom, the signs of the reviving year were hailed




THE VANQUISHER OF HADES.                  155
-the way in which the chiefest and joyfulest feasts of almost all religions were coincident with, and evidently celebrated, this time, being full of this spring gladness,-all
this was not an evidence, as some would have us to believe,
that those religions were merely physical, did merely commemorate the revolutions of the natural year.  But this
rapture and delight with which the outer tokens of renovation
and revival were hailed, had their root in a profound and instinctive sense of the connexion between man and nature, in
a most true feeling that the symbols of renovation in nature
could not be aimless and unmeaning, symbols of nothing,
but must needs point to deeper realities in the life of man.*:. I may quote, though long, the sublime passa.ge in Tertullian on
the vestiges of a resurrection which we may trace everywhere in,
nature (De Resurr. Garnis, c. 12:) Dies moritur in noctem, et tenebris usquequaque  sepelitur.  Funestatur mundi honor; omnis
substanti, denigratur. Sordent, silent, stupent cuncta: ubiquejustitium est.  Ita lux amissa lugetur: et tamen rursus cum suo cultu,
curm dote, cum sole, eadem et integra et tota universo orbi reviviscit; interficiens mortem suam, noctem; rescindens sepulturam suam
tenebras; heres sibimet existens, donec et nox reviviscat, cum suo
et illa suggestu. Redaccenduntur enim et stellarum  radii, quos
matutina succensio extinexerat: reducuntur et siderum absentiae,
quos temporalis distinctio exemerat: redornantur et specula lune,
quee menstruus numerus attriverat: revolvuntur hyemes et mstates, verna et autumna, cum suis viribus, moribus, fructibus. Quippe etiam  terrva de coelo disciplina est arbores vestire post spolia,
flores denuo colorare, herbas rursus imponere, exhibere eadem quae
absumpta sunt semina; nec prius exhibere, qulm absumpta. Mira
ratio! de fraudatrice servatrix: ut reddat intercipit; ut custodiat,
perdit; ut integret, vitiat; ut etiam ampliat, prius decoquit...Nihil
deperit, nisi;n salutem. Totus igitur hic ordo revolubilis rerum,
testatio est resurrectionis mortuorum. Operibus eam proescripsit
Deus antequ.m literis; viribus proedicavit antequ:m vocibus. Pra,misit tibi naturam magistram, submissurus et prophetiam, quo facilius credas prophetiae, discipulus naturge; quo statim admittas,
cum audieris quod ubique jam videris, nec dubites Deum carnis
etiam resuscitatorem, quem omnium noris restitutorem.




156                   LECTURE II.
The spring time suggested such joyful solemnities, because
it was felt to be in some sort the Easter of nature, -and obscurely to give pledge, or at least intimation, of a higher
Easter in store for man.
And if it may be permitted me to take a little wider range,
and to gather proofs and confirmations of what I am affirming, of the manner in which human nature has claimed a
resurrection as its own, not from the heathen world only, but wherever in popular faith or tradition I can find
them, I would then adduce, as a remarkable illustration of
this, the exceeding difficultywith which the world has ever
persuaded itself of the death of any who have mightily blest
it, or with whom it has confidently garnered up its dearest
hopes-the eagerness with which it snatches at the thought,
that such a one has not truly died, making much of the
slightest hint that seems to give a colour to this hope; so
-congenial is it to the heart of man.  It was said of Moses,
"No  man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day," (Deut.
xxxiv. 6,) and these words, despite the plain declarati.on
that went before, were sufficient provocation for a whole family of Jewish legends, to the effect that he had not really
paid the debt appointed to every man living. In like manner we know how that word of the Lord concerning the beloved apostle, "If I will that'he tarry till-I come, what is
that to thee?" this was enough to cause the report to go
forth that he should not die; and not the express denial by
St. John himself of any such significance in the words, was
able to extinguish this belief, which continued to propagate
itself from age to age.*
In like manner we sometimes see a whole nation which
has found it impossible to believe that he on whom its
hopes were fondly built, whom it had trusted should at length
- See Augustine, In Ev. Joh., Tract. 124: Tertullian, De Animan,
c. 50; Hilary, De Trinit. 1. 6, c. 39; Jerome, Adv. Jovin., 1. 1, c.
26; Neander's.Iirch. Gesch., v. 5, p, 1117.




THE VANQUISHER OF HADES.                157
have delivered it, and with whose death those hopes have all
fallen to the ground,-that he indeed has come, like other
men, under the law of mortality,-has passed away, and left
his work, as it seems, unconcluded.  How long Britain was
waiting for her Arthur; how long did the legends that told
of him as surviving yet in the far valley of Avalon live on
the lips and in the hearts of a people.  And exactly in the
same manner, in a later and more historic age, Portugal
waited for her youthful king, looking fondly and with aching
expectation for his return-and this, for many a weary year
after he had perished, not obscurely, but in open fight,
among the sands of Africa.*
And may not some of us have known, brethren, in our
own experience, something that quite explains to us this difficulty of believing in death?  Have we not found this difficulty ourselves? and how, when the loved are -gone, when
they have left their places empty, it is only by repeated efforts that we can realize to ourselves that it indeed is sohow we have to say again and again to hearts half incredulous still, that it will never again in this world be otherwise
-that so much truth and faith and love have indeed been
withdrawn from hence and forever. Thus earnestly does
the spirit of man protest even against that semblanee of annihilation, which death seems to wear.
Thus Michelet (Hist. de France, 1. 17,) having told the death of
the last Duke of Burgundy: "Il n'etait pas facile de persuader au
peuple que celui dont on avait taunt parl6 eitait bien vraiment mort.
11 6tait cache, disait on, il etait tenu enferm6t, il s'etait fait moine;
des pelerins l'avaient vu, en Allemagne, a Rome, a Jerusalem; ii
devait reparaltre tot ou tard; comme le roi Arthur ou Frederic Barberousse, on 6tait suir qu'il reviendrait. II se trouvait des marchands, qui vendraient a credit pour etre payes au double, alors que
reviendrait ce grand due De Bourgogne." It is well known how
many obscure rumours have in like manner found favour with the
common people in different parts of Europe, that Napoleon is yet
alive.
14




158                   LECTURE II.
Nor need it of necessity be the loved or hoped in, those
in whom the expectations of others have been intensely centered: let it be only some terrible man, one that has curdled
the life-blood of the world with fear; and even such a one
as this, having once been so much to men, though only so
much to their fears, they will hardly be persuaded to have
indeed passed away from the earth which so quaked and shuddered at his tread.  How long after the death of Nero did the
firm persuasion survive, that he was only hidden for a season and that the earth should once more be cursed with his
presence-the Christians of the Roman Empire giving this
expectation a coloring natural to theml and conceiving of
him as the personal Antichrist, who should make presently
his terrible re-appearance from the East, to carry forward
against them the work of blood which he had commenced.*
But to return to the sphere more directly marked out for
me by my subject, and to look there for the evidences of the
manner in which the spirit of man is incredulous of death,
witnesses, protests against it, as by a second sight sees what
shall be in the fulness of time; and prematurely grasps at it,
-what frequent mention in the Greek fable we meet of visitcrs of HIades, of those that have descended and held intercourse with the. spirits there, those who have in a sense
" preached to the spirits in prison," and then returned from
the kingdom of night-or it may be burst for others, as well
as for themselves, the gates and barriers of the grave, rescuing and bringing back from  that dark region to the glad
light of life some delivered soul. I may spare any great
"details in proof of this; time would not allow them; such
might scarcely seem in place; and to a congregation like
that which I address they would be evidently superfluous.
By one example only I would indicate that which I mean,
but that example the most illustrious which ancient fable
*Tacitus, Hist., 1. 2, c. 8; Suetonius, Nero, c. 57; Augustine, De
Civ. Dei, 1. 20, c. 19; Lactantius, De Mort. Pers., 2.




TIHE VANQUJISHER OF HADES.               159
supplies.  It is familiar to us all how the great cycle of the
labours of Hercules was not finished till he had done battle
with Death.  Earthly exploits, even the mightiest and most
marvellous of these were not sufficient. It was felt, and most
truly, that to complete even the idea of the hero-champion
of men, something more was needed, a greater victory was
demanded at his hands: he must wrestle with, and in personal conflict overcome, foes mightier than those of flesh and
blood —even the last enemy, death and the grave. Nor even
then had his own life attained its perfect consummation;
since for this it was needed that all which was of earth in
himself should be burned out, that the dregs of m'ortality
should be cleansed away in the purifying flames of a funeral
pyre, willingly ascended-and this being done, that he himself, in sign that he could not die any more, that hle was indeed made partaker of immortality, that death could have
no more dominion over him, should be wedded to eternal
Youth amid the blissful mansions of the immortal gods.*
Such no doubt, is the interpretation of this pregnant symbol; and thus, brethren, by a thousand voices, in a thousand
ways, the world has been declaring that it was not made for
death, for that dread and alien thing, which, notwithstanding,
it found in the midst of it.  Thus has it looked round for
*In Buttman's?y/thologus, v. 1, p. 252 seq., the higher significance of the whole mythus of Herakles is unfolded with an exquisite
tact and beauty. Without entering into the merits or demerits of
other parts of the book, it may yet be as well to say that it is only
this single treatise which I wish to speak of in this language of admiration. If K. 0 Muller is right in his conjecture that A37~7.oS
ASdoa62os (11. 9, 158,) the indomitable, a name belonging to Hades,
and that Apollo's service of Admetus is his passing down to the infernal world in consequence of having slain the earth-born Python,
if this be true, and he brings much that is curious in confirmation
of this view, we may then add one more, and that not the least remarkable, to the Greek mythic narrations of this description. (See
his Scientific Mlfythology, p. 243-246 Engl. Transl.)




1]60                 LECTURE II.
one who should roll away the stone from the door of that
sepulchre, to which it had~ seen its sons one after another
unreturningly descend; and eking out the weakness of its
arguments for immortality by the strength of its desires, it
has been forward to believe that for this one and that the
stone had been actually rolled away. But yet presently again,
it has felt only too surely that it had but the shadow, and not
the very substance, of the things hoped for: and in doubt and
perplexity, in despondency and fear, has made the words of
the Psalmist its own: "Dost thou show wonders among the
dead? Shall the dead rise up and praise thee?" but, unlike
him, it has not known what answer to give to its own question.
And so it went on, until at length, after many a false dawn,
the world's Easter morning indeed broke, and from beside an
empty tomb they went forth, the witnesses of Jesus, preaching Him and the resurrection; men able to declare things
which they had seen,-that there was indeed a risen Head
of our race, one who had tasted death for every man, who,
not in poet's dreams, or in legend of olden time, but in very
truth, had burst its bands, because it was impossible He
should be holden by them; that there was one for whom
death was what men had so often, and so fondly and significantly called it-even a sleep; for He had laid Him down
and slept, and after his three days' rest in the grave, risen
up again, because the Lord had sustained Him. The day
at length arrived, when men were able to go forth, preaching
Him who had shown himself alive by many infallible proofs;
in whom too, being risen, mortality was swallowed up in life;
and who was now seated at the right hand of the Majesty
on high, angels and principalities and powers being made
subject unto Him.
Such was the word of their message-that the stone was
rolled away, that the riddle of death was solved; and hearts
unnumbered welcomed the tidings, and expandec tlhtmselves




TITE VANQUISISER OF HADES            161
to it, as flowers, shut through some long dreary night, unfold
themselves to the warmth and the light of the returning day.
And shall not we, brethren, bear our part in'the great jubilee
which that message of theirs has summoned the world to
keep, in the glory and gladness of this day and of this day's
-mystery, before which all phantoms and shadows of the night
flee away, before which all sadness and despair are weak to
stand? Truly, with a deep insight into the mystery of this
Easter morn, did the great poet of our modern world make
the Easter hymn-the glad voices which said Christ is risen,
these, caught by accident, of potency sufficient to wrest the
poison-cup untasted from the band of the despairing one,
who had already raised it to his lips.*
And how, brethren, fares it with ourselves? Is that word
for us a scatterer of sadnesses, a quickener of joys? Does it
enable us to put off the sackloth of our spirits, and to gird ourselves with gladness? Let us earnestly ask ourselves this question; for surely it is a sign that all is not right with us, when
other things make us glad, but not this-when the natural
spring fills our hearts with natural joy, but this with no spiritual-when we stand aloof, cold and unsympathizing, as the
wondrous cycle of the Christian year goes round, as the great
events of our Lord's life and death and resurrection and
glory succeed one another in a marvellous order; not humbling ourselves in the humiliations of that life, and therefore
not exulting in its triumph; never having stood beside the
cross of Jesus, and therefore having no right and no desire
to stand beside that open tomb, where he reared his first, his
everlasting trophy over death. If we feel not this gladness,
let us take shame to our dull hearts, and claim it as a gift
from our God, which he will not deny us.  Let us ask that
we too may be borne upward and borne onward on the great
stream  of the Church's exultation.  Let us ask this ear* See Goethe's Faust, Scene 1.




162                 LECTURE II.
nestly; let us ask it as something which we ought not to be
without.  For of this let us be sure, that now, after eighteen
hundred years, that announcement of the angel, " He is not
here, but risen," should be as fresh and new, as full of an unutterable joy to us, as it was to those weeping women, who
came to pay the last sad honours to their dead Lord, but
found only his empty and forsaken grave.




LECTURE III.
THE SON OF GOD.
ACTS XIV. 11.
And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted 2p their voices,
saying, in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in
the likeness of men.
IT was my endeavour when we last met, to traceout the
manner in' which humanity has ever been looking in one
quarter or another for its redeemers and saviours —for deliverers from physical, deliverers from moral evil. - Carrying forward my subject a step, it will be now my aim to show how
it has not merely been heroic men, men who triumphed over
all, even death itself, but divine men, for whom the world
has been craving; in whom it has felt deeply that its help
must lie-a most true voice of man's spirit ever telling him
that only from heaven the true deliverance of the earth could
proceed.  We shall see how men have been ever cherishing
the conviction of a real fellowship between earth and heaven,
and that not merely an outward one, but an inward; a conviction that the two worlds truly met, not by external contact
only, but in the deeps of personal life, in persons that most
really belonged and held on to both worlds. We shall see
how the world, with all its discords, has had also its preludes
to the great harmonies of redemption; has had its incarnations-sons of God, that have come down to live a human
life, to undertake human toils, to die a human death: its
ascensions-sons of men, that have been lifted up to heaven,
and made partakers of divine attributes: we shall see how tmen
have never conceived of this world around us as totally dis(163)




164                   LECTURtE Ir.
severed from that world above us, with an impassible gulf
between them, but always as in living intercommunion the
one with the other.
And to this subject the words of my text will form-a fitting
introduction, yielding, as they do, a signal testimony to a
wide-spread faith through the heathen world in these living
relations between heaven and earth; for no sooner did those
men of Lystra see in Paul and Barnabas, beneficent healing presences, with power to chase away the sicknesses of
men, than at once they leaped at the conclusion, "The gods
are come down to us in the likeness of men," and could
hardly be restrained from  offering  them  divine honours.
The words themselves are a noticeable evidence of the world's
preparedness, even in that day, when so much of an earlier
and more childlike faith had perished, to welcome its deliverer from heaven. Nor are we without a parallel evidence to
the same in that exclamation of the awe-struck heathen centurion, who, at sight of nature suffering with her suffering
Lord and setting her seal to the awful meaning of his death,
could come to no other than a like conclusion, and exclaimed,
"Truly this was the Son of God."
For indeed this, which is peculiar to our Christian faith,
namely, that in it at length, and in it only, a real meetingplace between heaven and earth has been established in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth-that the divine was born into
the human, and so not by transient and external contact, but
in very deed, heaven came down to earth, and the earth was
lifted up into heaven, God became a man, and man Godthis, which is the peculiar prerogative and glory of our Christian faith, is yet not so peculiarly ours, but that every religion has, in some shape or other, made pretensions to the
same. It was claimed of all, though fulfilled only in one.
"The tabernacle of God is with men, and he will be their
God, and dwell among them" —this in positive fulfilment
did only in the Only-begotten come true; yet, as far as the




THE SON OF GOD.                  1 A5
idea reaches, is the essence and centre, not of one religion,
but of all.  Men may conceive it under different aspects,
may imagine it to be brought about in various ways; some
of these ways will approach nearer to the heart of the matter than others; but this idea, in one shape or another, must
constitute the central one of every religion.
I will endeavour to trace a few proofs of this, as in the
heathen religions of antiquity they meet us every where,to hold up before you a few forms which, with more or less
distinctness, men expressed their desire after, or embodied
their belief in, this fellowship,-and more than fellowship,
this union between God and manf; and then to show how
far short, even in idea, not to speak of the realization of
that idea, all which men ever conceived of in this way fell
of the actual fact upon which the Church is founded.
And first, would we trace what is nearest to a nation's
heart, we should turn to its poetry; there we shall find not
what it has, but what it is reaching after-not its actual
work-day world, but that ideal world after which it is longing. If, then, we turn to the oldest, the epic, poetry of
Greece, we behold heroes and gods and men mingling familiarly together.  In this free intercourse, in this beaten and
well-trodden way between earth and heaven, we have what
we might venture to call the heathen counterpart to the heavenly ladder seen by Jacob in dream, on which angels were
ascending and descending, with the Lord himself at the summit; even as that was but the weak intimation of a closer
union between earth and heaven to be effected in the person
of the Son of Man-a union wherein God should no longer
appear at the summit of the ladder, but at its foot-no longer
a God far off, but near;-men now at last beholding the
" heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."
We may select one instance more which Greek art will
supply, of the sense of so intimate relations between God




I 66                   LECTURE IIT.
and man, as only the Incarnation could at length adequately
express.  We oftentimes take it as a matter of course, one
which therefore excites in us no reflection or surprise, that
the statues of the Grecian gods should be in human forms,
in the perfection of human grace and beauty, the highest which
the skill of the artist could attain. And yet what a wonderful
thing was this,-to have arrived at the conviction that the
human was the most adequate expression for the divinethat if God did reveal himself, it would be as man-that the
nearest approximation to the ideal of humanity was the worthiest type of the Godhead. These too in their kind we
must regard as prophecies of the Incarnation; not indeed,
of the deeps of that mystery, but weak prophecies of it still.
Not, however in the ideal world of art only did this faith
find utterance, but in the actual world as well. The whole
scheme of an Oriental court, and eminently that of the great
King, was laid out on the idea that it was the visible representation of the court of heaven, and the king himself a
visible incarnation, of the highest God. The sense of this
speaks out in every arrangement, in the least as in the greatest, and is the key to them all. Thus, the laws of that kingdom, when once uttered, could not be reversed or changed,
(Dan. vi. 8,) because the king who gave them was the inearnation of God, and God cannot repent, or alter the thing
which has gone out from his lips.*: God is  ps0og,  his counsels &tdsEoIUs~    and he not a man
that he should repent; and even such his visible representative on
earth must be. It was on this unchangeableness of what had once
gone forth from the lips of the king, which itself was thus no capricGius state rule, but grew out of the very idea on which the Persian monarchy rested, that the enemies of Daniel founded their confident expectations of success in their conspiracy against him. (Dan.
vi. 8, 15.) So, too, when then the purposes of Ahasuerus the king
were altered concerning the Jews, he yet could not reverse the edict
which permitted them to be attacked by their enemies: he could
only give another edict, allowing them to stand upon their defence.
(Esth. viii. 10, 11.)




THEE SON OP GOD.                 167
None, as again we learn from the book of Esther (iv. 11,)
might comrne into the kind's presence unbidden and live, save
by a distinct act of grace.  They must die, unless the golden
sceptre, in token of this grace, was held out to them; because
none but the pardoned can behold the countenance of God,
and not perish at its intolerable brightness.  So, as that
same book teaches us, it was forbidden to one clothed in
sackcloth to enter within the palace; (iv. 2;) and this, because heaven, of which that palace was the image, is the region of life and gladness, not of sorrow or of death; which,
therefore, as they might not enter there, so neither might
these things, which are their visible signs and symbols, enter into the palace of the king.  The seven princes that
stood nearest to the throne and saw the king's face, (i. 14,)
correspond to the seven highest angels that were supposed to
stand before, and nearest to the. throne of God.  Nor was
the adoration offered to the Persian king a mere act of homage or sign of fealty, but was most truly, and in the highest sense, a worshpping; and exactly because felt as such,
was so earnestly resisted, though from different motives, by
the Greek alike, and the Jew —by the Greek, as dishonouring
to himself, by the Jew, as dishonouring to his God. It was
a worshipping of the king's person for the presence of God,
which was supposed to dwell singularly in him.
Again, when the foremost place in all the earth had passed
into the possession of another, what was the apotheosis of a
Roman Caesar, in life or after death, but a troubled speaking
out of men's sense, that he who stood in the forefront of humanity, the chiefest of the sons of men, should also be more
than man?  This, in itself most true, did only become the
fearful blasphemy,it was, when the worship was misapplied,
and the object to which it was due had been mistaken. It
was indeed an irony of the heathen world, and of its magnificent pretensions, worthy of the great author of.mischief,
when the honour that it owed to Christ the Lord, being diver



168                   LECTURE III.
ted on the way, was rendered to a Nero or a Tiberius.  The
prince of this world was herein mocking his votaries, exactly
as he mocked the Jews, when they too welve led to incorporate their rejection of all that was best, and their choice
of all which was worst, in an outward fact, in that cry of
theirs-" Not this man, but Barabbas."
And I may perhaps be permitted to observe as not alien
to our present argument, but as another striking proof of
this craving of men for that which is given them in Christ
and in his incarnation, for such a bridal of two worlds as
was celebrated therein, that whenever, even in Christendom,
men have lost their faith in this gift, or have suffered that
faith to grow weak, then they have not rested till they have
created for themselves a substitute for that truth which thus
they have let go.  Thus, no sooner had men's faith in a
present, though invisible, Head of his Church waxed feeble
-no sooner did the God-man, because he could not be seen,
or touched, or handled, appear far off to carnal and sensebound generations, than they began to yearn for a substitute,
who should give them in palpable form all which they no
longer felt that they possessed in Him. And thus men began to lend questionable honours and ambiguous titles to a
pope; and ever as they more let go their sense of the reality
of Christ's headship, they lent more of his glories, of his names,
his honours, his divine attributes, to the man who had placed
himself in his seat, and offered them in a gross and visible
way that connexion between earth and heaven, which they
were intended to have found in him of whom it is written,
" The Head of every man is Christ."
Exactly in the same manner, a thoughtful observer of the
progress of Unitarianism in our own day, will not have failed
to note that a system which shrinks from saying " Christ is
God," yet finds it impossible to rest in that denial, and is
rapidly and inevitably hastening to say, even as it has already
said plainly enough by the lips of its most forward votaries,




THE SON OF GOD.                  169
"Man is God," giving in the end, to every man, that which
it started with affirming it was blasphemy to give to any,
even to the Son himself.  And were that, or any other yet
barrener form of unbelief, to succeed for a time in emptying
the throne in men's hearts wherein the Son of God is sitting,
on the instant we should behold impious and frantic enthusiasts springing up on every side, claiming the vacant seat,
and obtaining, too, the homage which was withholden from
H-im. For truly our deliverance from superstition lies not
in unbelief but in faith. In holding fast the truth, and only
in that, are we delivered from its distorted counterfeit.
Thus the'holy Eucharist, satisfying, as it does, the solemn
and mysterious cravings of the human soul, delivers the
Christian world from hateful mysteries and dark orgies.
Thus, again, faith in the sacrifice once offered upon Calvary
hinders and cuts off those hideous attempts at expiation,
which, but for that, the sin-laden heart of man would inevitably devise for itself. And thus, too an exalted Saviour
preserves us from blasphemous usurpers of divine honours,
the truth of God from the lie of the devil.
But let us see, brethren, what nearer to the heart of the
matter the old world had, of incarnations and ascensions; let
us see the highest form in which it presented these truths to
itself. Aud, contemplating that highest, let us still take
note how the Christian truth of the word made flesh, even
as a doctrine, was original-not to say that alone in Christ
it passed from a speculation, and became a fact. It will be
instructive to mark how all other'systems not merely did
not give what they professed to give, (for that of course,)
how even what they professed to give, fell short of,
and was only an approximation to, the actual needs of
humanity.
Thus the Greek mind could conceive of a much suffering?man lifted up for his toils' and virtues' sake into the highest
1S




170                  LECTURE HII.
heaven.  Their pantheon is full of such, —of heroes after the
toils and conflicts of a life worthily spent for their fellow-men,
made free of heaven, and admitted even into the circle of
the immortal gods; and so far they had in their popular belief
anticipations of Him, the man Christ Jesus,- whom, because
He humbled Himself, and for our sakes became obedient to
the death of the cross, therefore God greatly exalted Him,
setting him at his own right hand.
But yet how little was there here any true blending of
the human and divine, and how truly men felt this; as is
wonderfully testified by the fact that this exalted and glorified man, however many divine attributes were added to him,
yet did not get the name of God; he was but a aag4/v after
all; he was not, to use language which has been well used
of the Son, Deus ex radice. They felt with a right instinct
that a deified man did not thereby, and that indeed he could
not, become God-that no accumulation of divine honours
could make one truly God, who was not such already; even
as the church, in a later day, was not to be deceived into accepting the Arian theory concerning the Son of God as anadequate substitute for her own, by the utmost prodigality
of divine names, and titles, and honours which were proposed
to be lavished upon Him. She felt rightly that all these
would not in the least fill up the chasm that divided, and
must divide for ever, God from that which was not God. So
was it with the apotheosis of heroic men: the divine glory
did but gild and play upon the surface of theirsbeing; if a
man was to be also God, if there was to be any perfect union
of the two, it must be by other means, by a process which
must reach deeper and much farther back than this.
But, moreover, the other half, the other factor, even of
the idea of such a person as this, was altogether strange to
the Greek mind.  A God coming down from heaven, emptying himself of his glory, and in a noble suffering undertaking a human life, and, that he might be the helper and de



THE SON OF GOD.                  171
liverer of men, enduring all, even the hardest, for them,
tasting death itself, —all this, a God thus stooping, and suffering, and dying, was wholly alien to every conception of
theirs.  The very idea of the gods with them was of beings
free from all care, untouched by any sorrow, living ever joyful,
and ever at ease: or, if they sojourned for awhile in this
toilsome and tearful world, yet sojourning as visiters onlynot touching the burden of its wo with the tip of their finger-undertaking it might be human tasks, yet undertaking
them  in sport, not really coming under, or feeling their
weight  True, indeed, that this conception of a suffering
God, which was so strange to all western habits of thought,
was familiar to the mythologies of the East.  They have
their Osiris,-and not him alone, though in him  these sufferings of a divine nature come the most prominently and-gloriously out-who, in the-fulness of his beneficent purposes for
the race of men, and in mighty and earnest conflict with the
prince of evil, endure's all things, going down even to the
deeps of death: and thus, no doubt, the Eastern religions
were not without their anticipations of Him, who, though he
was rich, yet made Himself poor, even the poorest, for us,'that we through his poverty might be rich.
And yet how imperfect, even as regards the idea, was this
too. Humanity, however it craved a God for its deliverer,
yet craved just as earnestly a man; it wanted a redeemer
out of its own bosom, 9ne in whose every triumph over moral
or physical evil it could rejoice that "God had given such
power unto men."  It felt, and truly, that no other would
serve its turn —that, forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also, if he would be every man's
brother, and thus able to be every man's redeemer, must be
partaker of the same; "fairer than the children of men,"
and yet himself a child of man-that from the midst of itself,
from the depths of its own life, its redeemer must proceed.
A God who was onl~y God, might conquer for himself, but




172                  LECTURE III.
there was no pledge or proof in his conquest, that man could
conquer; a God who overcame death and rose from the dead,
gave no assurance thereby of a resurrection for the race of man.
And thus each of the great divisions of the Gentile world
had but a fragment, even in thought and desire, of the truth;
the Greek world, the exaltation of manhood-the Oriental,
the glorious humiliations of Godhead; and thus it came to
pass that each of these, even as a speculation, was maimed
and imperfect. These systems, so far from providing what
man needed, had not satisfactorily and on every side even
contemplated what he needed; much less had they given it.
And how indeed could it be given? This was the riddle
which He alone whose counsels were from everlasting, who
knew all the true needs of man, and meant to satisfy them
all, could solve. It seemed indeed that the world, craving
one who should be man no less than God for its deliverer,
put its demands in irreconcilable contradiction with themselves; and, again, that demanding for its redeemer one in
whom the human and divine should not slightly and transiently touch one another, but should be brought into innermost union, it here too required that which it was impossible
that it ever should receive. And yet the same wonder-stroke
of God solved both these problems.
The first difficulty was this, if the world needed a man,
yet where should it find the man that it needed? It had
often put forth its champions, but there was ever found an
attainder of blood in every man's descent, a blot on every
man's escutcheon, a flaw in every man's armour. If no helper of humanity but one born out of its bosom would do, and
yet every one born from thence partook in its sin, was one
needing to be healed, and who could not therefore be himself the healer, was a sharer in the diseased organism, and
could not therefore expel its poison from others, whence was
such a one to come? The answer was at length given in
the Virgin-born.  Men had long before had an obscure ap



TIlE SON OF GOD.                 17v
prehension that only so could the mystery be solved.  The
birth from a pure virgin had been attributed to many.*  For
there was that in men's hearts which told them that for one
to be an effectual Saviour he must be a new beginning, a
new head of the race; not a mere link in the chain of sinful
humanity, since of the sinful the sinless could never come;
but by such marvellous means as that miraculous conception
he must be exempted from the corruption transmitted from
generation to generation of the children of men.
But this was not all; this Virgin-born was also Immanuel, was that which men had asked for, "' God with us." He
had, indeed, a Fiather, but that Father was God; and thus
in the deepest deep, in the innermost core and centre of
his life, this man was also God. In the cradle of Bethlehem,'when a pure Virgin had been touched with fire from
heaven, and had borne a, Son, in Him, at length, the world
found all its longings fulfilled, its seemingly irreconcilable
desires all satisfied and atoned.
Thus, brethren, I have sought to trace out before you, today, that which was perhaps the worthiest element in the
religions of the heathen world —that which, indeed, entitled
them to the character of religions at all-their recognition,
with all shortcomings and deficiencies, of a real bond between earth and heaven, their sense that the divine could
reveal itself in no way so fitly as in the forms of the human,
that the human could be lifted up to, and made to bear
the weight of, the Divine-that man was God's offspring,
of the blood royal of creation. The pervading sense of this
was indeed what mainly constituted them, in God's providence, preparations and predispositions for the absolute
truth which should in fulness of time be revealed.  For that
there were upon these points certain predispositions for the
reception of the truth in heathendom, which did not exist
among the Jews, no one, I think, can deny. None can
* Especially to founders of religions, as Buddha, Zoroaster.
15*




174                   LECTURE IIr.
thoughtfully read the early history of the church, and mark
how hard the Jewish Christians found it to make their own
the true idea of the Son of God, as indeed is witnessed by
the whole epistle to the Hebrews-how comparatively easy
the Gentile converts; how the Hebrew Christians were continually in danger of sinking back into Ebionite heresies,
making Christ but a man as other men, refusing to go on
unto perfection, or to realize the truth of his higher nature;
— no one can mark this, and contrast it with the genial
promptness of the Gentile church to embrace the offered
truth, "God manifest in the flesh," without feeling that there
must have been effectual preparations in the latter which
wrought its greater readiness for receiving and heartily embracing this truth when it arrived. And what other preparations could they have been, but these which we have been
tracing?*
It is true that there was with this, infinitely too feeble a
sense, too feeble even in the best, of the manner in which
sin had cast them down from the high places of their birth
— a confession far too weak and wavering, (for only the HIoly
Ghost could have wrought a right confession,) of that attainder that was in their blood, the utter forfeiture of their inheritance which their sin had brought about. It was not
seen how man had ceased to be a son of God, could never,
but by a new adoption, a regeneration, become such again.
But man's divine original, his first creation in the image of
God, was so firmly held fast to by all nobler spirits, that St.
Paul, upon the hill of Mars, could at once take his stand
" The Christian apologists often find help here. Thus Arnobius,
(Adv. Gen., 1. 1, c. 37:) Natum hominem colimus. Quid enim, vos
hominem nullum colitis natum? Non unum et alium, non innumeros alios, quinimmo non omnes quos jam templis habetis vestris,
Mrortaliumn, sustulistis ex numero, et ccelo sideribusque donastis?
He could appeal to such passages as that of Cicero, (Tsc. Quast., 1.
1, c. 18? - Totum prope ccelum nonne humano geanere comapletur
est?




TIHE SON OF GOD.                 175
on this as a great meeting point between himself and his
Athenian hearers-as the ground which was common to them
and him-: "Certain also of your own poets have said, For we
are also his offspring."  (Acts xvii. 28.)  Here at least,
they were at one.
And brethren, it is possible that we may learn a lesson
which we need, or at least remind ourselves of truths which
we are in danger of suffering to fall too far back in our
minds, by the contemplation of those, who, amid all their
errors and darkness and confusion and evil, had yet a sense
so deeply imprinted, a faith so lively, that man was frome
God, as well as to God; capable of the divine, only because
himself of a divine race. Oftentimes it would seem as if our
theology of the present day had almost lost sight of this, or
at least held it with only too feeble a grasp; beginning, as
it so often does, from the fall, from the corruption of human
nature, instead of beginning a step higher up-beginning
with man a liar, when it ought to have begun with man the
true image and the glory of God.
And then, as a consequence, the dignity of Christ's Incarnation, of his taking of humanity, is only imperfectly apprehended.  That is considered in the main as a make-shift for
bringing God in contact with man; and not to have been
grounded on the perfect fitness of man, as the image of
God, of man's organs, his affections, his life, to be the
utterers and exponents of all the life, yea, of all the heart of
God. It is oftentimes considered the chief purpose of Christ's
Incarnation, that it made his death possible, that it provided
him a body in which to do that which merely as God he could
not do, namely to suffer and to die; while some of the profoundest teachers of the past, so far from contemplating the
Incarnation in this light, have rather affirmed that the Son of
God would equally have taken man's nature, though of course
under very different conditions, even if he had not fallenthat it lay in the everlasting purposes of God, quite irre



176                  LECTURE 1IT.
spective of the fall, that the stem and stalk of humanity
should at length bear its perfect flower in Him, who should
thus at once be its root and its crown.  But the Incarnation
being thus slighted, it follows of necessity, that man as man
is thought meanly of, though indeed it is only man as fallen
man, as separated by a wilful act of his own from God, to
whom this shame and dishonour belong. In his first perfection, in the truth of his nature, he is the glory of God,
the image of his Son, as the Son is the image of the Father,
declaring the Son as the Son declared the Father: —surely
a thought, brethren, which if we duly lay to heart, will
make us strive that our lives may be holy, that our lives
may be noble, worthy of Him who made us after his image,
and when we had marred that and defaced it, renewed us
after the same in his Son.




LECTURE IV.
THE PERFECT SACRIFICE.
MICAH VI. 6, 7.
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high
God? shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves Sf a
year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousanlds of rams, or with
ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my bodyfor the sin of my soul?
THERE are few facts more mysterious, brethren, than the
prevalence of the rite of sacrifice through the world. Nations which it is impossible could have learned it of one
another, nations the most diverse in culture, the highest in
the scale, and well nigh the lowest, differing in every thing
besides, have yet agreed in this one thing, namely, in the
offering of things which have life to God,-or when the idea
of the one God has been lost,-to the gods many, of heathenism-the essential of that offering in every case being that
the life of the victim was rendered up.  And they have all
agreed in considering that this act of theirs had a value,
that it did place upon a new and better footing the relations
in which they stood to the heavenly powers; that by these
sacrifices they might more or less re-constitute the relations
between themselves and God, which by any cause had been
disturbed, bringing themselves nigher to Him, and rendering Him more favourable to them.
Now there are few or none in our day who would count
that they had explained the prevalence of these convictions,
in the conspiracy of the more artful few to hold the simpler
many in bondage.  These convictions were too wide-spread,
(177)




178                  LECTURE IV.
too universal; moreover, men were too direfully earnest in
carrying them out, to allow us to accept any such explanation
as this. Sacraments they might be, and often were,' of the
devil, and not of God, but yet dreadful sacraments still —
bonds and bands by which men knit themselves to one
another, and knit themselves also to a spiritual world, —if
not to heaven, yet to hell. Those who explain them into
artful contrivances, may so give witness for their own shallow insight into the past history of the world, for the absence
of any deeper needs at work in their own hearts, since if
there had been such, they would have suggested a profounder
explanation: but the time is past when they will find any
number of persons to accept their explanation as sufficient.
As little can their theory be historically justified, who
trace up the existence of sacrifice to the rude notions about
God which belonged to an early age; for then we should see
a people, as it attained worthier views about Him, gradually
outliving and renouncing the practice of this rite. But,
contrary to this, we find in the most cultivated nations the
theory, of sacrifice only the more elaborately worked out, the
sacrifices themselves only multiplied the more. Here and
-there there might be found in some obscure corner of the
earth, a savage tribe or horde, which had sunk below the idea
and practice of sacrifice; though one in which, in one form
or another, it did not survive, it would be difficult to point
out; but nowhere a people that had risen above it. Here
and there a philosopher may have set himself against the
popular belief, but nowhere has he been able to change it;
he has ever stood'single and alone, and has as little' carried
with him the more thoughtful and deeper spirits of his time
as the common multitude. He may have eloquently declaimed on the absurdity of supposing the gods would be
pleased with the death-struggles of animals, with the blood
of bulls and of goats; but there was ever something in men,
though they might not be able to explain it to themselves,




TIFioPERFECT SACRIFICE.             179
which told them that sacrifice had a significance and a meaning, which a few plausible words could not get rid of or
destroy.
Such, brethren, I think you will admit are the facts, for I
speak to those capable of judging. Whether we turn to
those pages of Greek and Roman literature, brought by our
studies in this place especially before us, or whether we take
a wider range within our ken, every where alike we encounter
a consciousness upon man's part, that the relations between
him and the powers in whose hand he is, have been interrupted and disturbed. The fact might be sometimes overlooked and forgotten by him in times of prosperity, but we
see it evermore mightily emerging firom the deep of his heart,
when the judgments of offended heaven were evidently abroad.
Every where, too, we encounter the effort by certain specific
and definite acts of expiation and atonement to restore those
disturbed relations again.  " Without blood is no remission
of sin," was a truth as deeply graven on the heart and conscience of heathen as of Jew.
For vast and complex as is the Jewish system of offering,
yet it is not a greater body of sacrifice than we meet almost
everywhere else, when we turn to the ritual of heathenism.
That Levitical system is of course in every way more complete: it is an organic whole; excluding all individual caprice, all too into which the true idea of sacrifice, when escaping from  God's control, would inevitably degenerate.
Moreover it was no will-worship, but the appointed way in
which God was to be sought, and not that in which men out
of their own hearts imagined that they would seek Him.
But with all this, it does not, I think, run into greater detail, nor take more entire possession of the whole life of
man, nor demand a more continual recognition of a distance
and separation from  God which has need to be removed,
than did the heathen systems of sacrifice with which it was
surrounded, when we take them in their sum total, when we




180                   LECTURE IV.
count up all their infinite forms and varieties. For doubtless it was meant that they too, by this their multitude and
repetition, should give testimony against themselves, should
witness as plainly as did the Jewish in the same way, for
their own weakness and unprofitableness; since of them, too,
we may say, that had they been effectual to do what they
professed to do, " would they not have ceased to be offered,
because the worshippers once purged would have had no
more conscience of sin?" But thus, by their endless multiplication, and by the confession of weakness contained therein, they pointed, though not with prophetic explicitness, yet
still in their degree, away from  themselves, and to that-one
all-sufficient sacrifice once offered upon Calvary.
Nor need we, when we look a little deeper into the matter, when we come to comprehend what was the central idea
of sacrifice, be so much surprised, as at first we are, to find
it this rite of an almost universal character. For then we
perceive that it was no arbitrary invention, for which a thousand others might have been substituted as well; but rather
that the essence of 11 religion lies in that of which sacrifice
was the symbol-namely, in the offering up of self, in the
rendering up of our will to the will of God, the yielding of
our life to him as something which had been rebellious
in time past, and therefore worthy to die, but of which
we desire that the rebellion may cease, that so we may of his
mercy receive it back a life pardoned and forgiven.  The
blood is the seat of the life, the seat therefore of the  tcOvv&c%,
the desire, which in fallen man is a desire at variance with
the will of God. In sacrifice, in the pouring out of the blood,
is the symbolic rendering up of this rebellious principle; a
confession that it is only worthy to die: that as the thing
offered died, so the offerer might justly die-the act having
of course only its true significance when the offerer did realize to himself what he did-rested not in the outward work,
but said to himself and to God, "I stand in living commu



TIE PERFECT SACRIFICE.               181
nion with this which I offer; even as this blood, so I offer
myself; dying that I may live; giving myself to Thee, that
I may receive my true life back again at thy hands; losing
my life that I may find it."  Of course, it is not to be supposed that each worshipper so distinctly gave to himself an
account of what he was doing; but this lay more or less obscurely in the background of his mind, and gave a meaning
to his act.  Our ordinary use of the word sacrifice, shows
how truly we have gotten to the innermost heart of its meaning; for it is ever used to signify the giving up of something dear. And what so dear as our self-will? The giving up of that is indeed the giving up of all.
But when we speak of the idea of sacrifice as being this
giving up of the self-will, there may seem a difficulty in applying this, when we come to the great and only perfect sacrifice offered by Christ on the cross. Of course it was not
there-no one would dare to suppose it was-the offering up
of a rebellious will; we hardly dare speak of such a thing,
though it be but to deny it. But it was the giving up of
his own will* —that will which had the liberty of choosing
for itself what the Father had not chosen for it, but in the
entire rendering up of which he realized the very central
idea of all sacrifice, which all that had gone before had only
pointed at weakly: " Sacrifice and burnt offering Thou
wouldst not; then said I, Lo! I come to do thy will, O
God." In other words, sacrifice and burnt-offering God was
weary of-those shadows of the true; and Christ came to
give the substance; and his actual pouring out of his soul to
death was the outer embodiment of the inward truth, that.
this yielding of his will to his Father's reached to the utter- And therefore the controversy of the Church with the Monothelites in the seventh century, a conflict in which commonly so little
interest is taken even by students of Church History, was one
for life and death. The denial of a human will in Christ was in fact
a denial of his sacrifice.




182                   LEOTURE IV.
most, did not shrink from, or stop short of, the last and most
searching proof to which it was put.
In sacrifice, then, was the confession of a life forfeited, and
this confession incorporating itself in an act, wherein the forfeiture was actually carried out. This, however, is but half
the idea of sacrifice; for it is ever this confession made in
another. If a man had given himself to death, because he
felt that he was worthy to die, he would but have involved
his already confused relations to God in deeper confusion.
He might be unworthy to live, but was not, therefore, at his
own choice to die. If, as a sinner, he owed God a death,
yet as God's creature, made to serve Him, he equally owed
Him  a life.' The premises are right that man's life is forfeited; but the conclusion fearfully wrong, when he carries
out himself, and in his own person, the forfeiture. Such
false conclusions tfom right premises they draw, the miserable victims that in our day fling their bodies to be crushed
benenth the wheels of some idol car-the same they have
drawn, who, in despair at the greatness of their sins, have
lifted up their hands against their own life; for even selfmurder, that most hideous perversion of the idea of sacrifice,
yet grounds itself on a sense of life being the only worthy
offering.  Thus a Judas goes and hangs himself, because he
feels his sin so great that it cannot be left without an atonement, and in the darkness and unbelief of his heart he has
put back the one atonement which would have been sufficient
even for a sin so great as his; and this, too, is the thought
of each other, who, by a like fearful act of self-violence, has
denied the love, though he cannot deny the righteousness of
God.
Never, then, in himself-never, by means of his own life,
could man's acknowledgment that that life was forfeited
rightly be carried out. It must needs be in another. And
the same reason exists against making that other some fellow-man.  His life, too, is a sacred thing-is itself an end.




TIIHE PERF.CT SACRIFICE.              183
It could not, therefore, be used as this means to some other
end.  In human sacrifices, in the offering of other men's
lives, there appear the same false consequences from right
grounds as in men offering of their own. It remained that,
if sacrifice was to be, the sphere of animal life must be that
of which it should take possession, and in which it must
move; the life of animals being the nearest akin to, and the
noblest after man, and therefore fitter than any meaner for
the setting forth his oblation of himself. And man thus
taking possession of this, either at God's express command,
or moved by his own religious instincts, was indeed taking
possession of that over which he had entire right-of that,
which having been given him for the use of the body, was
much more given him for the spiritual needs of his soul.
Such, I think, we may venture to say was the normal unfolding of the idea of sacrifice; the abnormal appears in
those revolting caricatures of the true idea, on which we
have lightly touched-in human sacrifices —in dreadful selfoblations-in Baal priests' cutting themselves with knives,
and so pouring out, if not all, yet a part of their life-in the
self-inflicted tortures and living death of Indian Fakirs —in
the blind despair of mighty sinners, who, with profane hand,
have broken in upon, and laid waste the awful temple of
their own lives.
Wonderful indeed, brethren, is the manner in which,
armed with the truth, we may look upon past pages of the
religious history of man-some of the most soiled and blotted-and decypher there an original writing of God, which
all those stains and blots have not been able to render illegible altogether.*  If we have only a ear to hear, marvelous
voices will reach us, and from quarters most unexpected,
which shall speak to us of Calvary and of the Cross, though
* Tertullian (De Animaz, c. 41); Quod enim'a Deo est non tam
extinguitur quam obumbratur. Potest enim obumbrari, quia non
est Ieus; extingui non potest, quia a Deo est.




184                     LECTURE IV.
bough they little mean it themselves: such voices, for instance, as his, who accounting for the human sacrifices of
the Gauls observed, that they were deeply persuaded that
only the life of man was a fit redemption for man.*  What
was this conviction of theirs but the dark side of that truth
which the apostle to the Hebrews proclaimed, when he said
that the blood of bulls and of goats could not take away
sin, but that it must be purged away by better sacrifices than
these.t  Nor do I think it will otherwise than repay us well
to follow a little into detail the convictions of the world concerning that which constituted a sacrifice of worth, and trace
how everything here pointed-whether it meant it, or not;
yea, when it seemed most to point away from  him-to the
central figure in the world's spiritual history, to the immaculate Lamb, which taketh away the sins of the world.
Csar (De B. G., i. 6, c, 16): Pro vita hominis nisi hominis
vita reddatur non posse aliter deorum immortalium numen placari
arbitrantur.  Cf. Miller's Darians, b. ii., c. 8, ~ 2. Out of a sense
of this arose the extreme difficulty of eradicating human sacrifices
in the Roman empire, and the long survival of some of them. Thus
Tertullian (Apol.' 9): Infantes penes Africam Saturno immolabantur
palam usque ad proconsulatum Tiberii. Cf. Scrop., c. 7; Minucius
Felix, p. 199, Ouzel's edit.; Pliny, H. N., 1. 30, c. 3, 4; Eusebius,
Prcep. Evang., 1. 4, c. 17.
~ Thus there was an obscured truth in those abject and crouching
superstitions, which Plutarch paints with such a masterly hand in
his exquisite little treatise, IIsps As6taeaA~ouovca —a truth which he
misses; a recognition, that is, of sin, of a great gulf fixed between
the sinner and the offended power of heaven, which the 8ea Fcouv,
however vainly, was seeking to bridge over. His terror and his
trouble had a true ground, and one which would hinder him from
accepting as sufficient such attempts to pacify his fears as those
which Plutarch offers him —namely, that the gods were kind
(,tF&xZob). There was something else besides this which he was
craving to know, before he could dare to believe that they were
other than enemies to him.




THE. PERFECT SACRIFICE.              185
Thus it is hardly needful to observe, that it lay ever in
the deepest convictions of men that an offering to be acceptable, must be an offering of value, not something which
cost the bringer nothing-that, while all was poor by comparison with Him to whdm it was offered, or considered in
relation to that for which it was offered, yet must it be the
best which the offerer had-not the lame and the blind, not
the scanty gifts of a -niggard hand-he thus giving token,
that if he had aught worthier he would bring it. Therefore
must the selected victim be pure of fault and of blemish, or,
having such, was unfit for the altar —the sense of this required perfection being as lively in heathen sacrifice as in
Jewish.  Therefore was the bullock brought which had
never yet submitted its neck to the yoke, the horse which
had known ho rider, or, in 1Hindoo ritual, no touch even of
rnan; in other words, that was brought which had not been
already used and in part worn out in the service of the world,
but which was thus wholly and from the first consecrated to
heaven.  Hence, too, as the offering must not be a niggard
one, the prodigality in sacrifice which startles us at times:
the hecatombs of victims, the rivers of oil, the cattle from a
thousand hills.
Herein, too, lay the explanation of yet direr sacrificeas of their sons and daughters in the Moloch-worship of the
Phoenicians-the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul;
— such offering, for instance, as we read of at Carthage, when,
instead of the cheaper substitutes with which they had satisfied themselves for long, they sought out, in the mighty peril
of the city the dearest things which they had, the choicest
children of the noblest houses, and cast them into the glowing arms of that merciless idol, which their sin-darkened
hearts had devised for their god.* Out of this same sense
that an offering grew in worth with the worth of that which
-- Diodorus Siculus, 1. xx., c. 14. Cf. 2 Kin. iii., 27; Eusebius,
Pirp. Evaung., 1. iv.. c. 16.
14*




186                     LECTURE IV.
was offered, sprang the rejoicing among the worshippers of
Odin; when the lot of the yearly sacrifice fell upon no meaner
man than the king-the pledge of a future felicity to the
nation which was esteemed herein to lie.* To what did all this
reaching out after the worthiest, the purest, the choicest, the
best, point, even in its dreadfulest perversions, but to Him
who was the fairest of the children of men, the choicest which
the earth had born, the one among ten thousand, who yet,
being such, did by the eternal Spirit offer Himself without
spot to God-who being the anointed king of the world was
thus in a condition to make acceptable atonement for all
men?
Nor less significant was the sense of a more prevailing
atonement, of an added value which was imparted to an offering, when one, not thrust on by necessity, not compelled to
die, but willingly, offered himself; the feeling of which was
so strong, that if not the reality, yet at least the appearance
of this willingness, was often by singular devices sought to
be obtained.t  When, for example, the foremost man of a
nation gathered upon his sole devoted head all the curses
which impended on his people, all the anger of the immortal
powers,: and with that upon him gave himself to a willing
* Witsius (De Theol. Gent., p. 633,): De SeptentrIonalibus populis
refert Dithmarus primo anni mense nonaginta novem sortito eligi
solitos qui diis immolarentur, idque durasse usque ad Henrici I.,
Germaniee regis, tempora. Faustissimum  veto id regno litamen
existimatum, si sors regem tetigisset; quam victimam totius populi
multitude summa cum gratulatione et applausu prosecuta sit.
t Thus Tertullian, of the parents that offered their children to
the Phcenician Moloch: (Apol. 9:) Libentes respondebant, et infantibus blandiebantur, ne lacrimantes immolarentur. Cf. Plutarch,
II p& A &dbs  sLaovbaS,  C. 13.
C Thus Livy, of Decius: (Hist., 1. 9:) Omnes minas periculaque
ab Deis superis inferisque in se unum vertit. On this whole subject
of men as qap1axoG, xcaOappitac,  t7oewpt uta,'Acoepstpao&, see
Lomeier, De Lustrat. Vet. Gent., c. 22.




THE PERFECT SACRIFICE.                187
death for all, so turning, it might be, into victory the tide of
disastrous battle, what have we here but in its kind a reaching out after Him, the chief and champion of the race of men,
whose life no man took from him, for He might have asked
of his Father more than twelve legions of angels against his
enemies-but who sanctified Himself, freely pouring out his
soul unto death-and who, not that He might deliver some
single people, but all the world, became the piacular expiation
of that world, drew upon his own head the penalties which
would else have alighted upon all, became a curse for man;
and, when all was at the worst, when all seemed for ever lost,
changed by his accepted death the certain defeat into the
glorious victory of our race?
We may not refuse, brethren, to recognise these references
to the cross of Christ: we shall read the history and mythology of the old world with little profit if we do. Nor need
we fear the recognition; for it is the marvelous, and at the
same time most natural prerogative -of Christianity, that, being the absolute'truth, it has, or rather itself is, the touchstone to discover all true and all false, detects the truth which
is hidden in every lie, finds witness for itself in that which
oftentimes seems, and indeed is, most opposed to itself, is
able to recognise in the fares of earth the degenerate wheat
of heaven-in the world's harshest discords, the wreck and
ruin of God's fairest harmonies-and, in Satan himself, the
lineaments of the fallen angel of God.
But besides the witness for the great coming sacrifice,
which was contained in the sacrifices of heathenism, how
mighty a sense of the cross of Christ, and of its significance,
do we meet in other regions of ancient life.  What a boding
of it, for instance, forms the background of the Greek
tragedy. How mysterious is the manner there in which, from
some far back -transgression, some ~~pXo S aVI7,* the curse
LEschylus, Agamnemnon, 1163.




188                  LECTURE IV.
clings to a family, passes on from generation to generation,
an ever-increasing load of transgression; until-at length the
great calamity, the headed-up guilt of all, lights not on the
most, but on the least guilty head, on the head of one that
by comparison is innocent. What an unconscious symbol,
this, of the curse cleaving to the Adamic race! For as in
each lesser circle of that race we most often see the burden
of the cross resting with the heaviest weight on the truest
heart in that circle, so in the great circle of humanity we behold Him of the truest heart of all, the only unguilty One,
bearing on the accursed tree the accumulated curse of the
whole Adamic family, which had come down through long
ages; and not bearing only, but bearing it away. For as in
those solemn and stately works of ancient art to which I
alluded, mild breaths of reconciliation seem to make themselves felt, when once the curse has alighted, the expiation
has been made-not otherwise, and only far more gloriously,
does the deep inner connexion between the judgment of the'
world and the forgiveness of the world appear in that death
of Christ, which was at once judgment andforgiveness in
which the world was condemned, and in which, being condemned, the world was also forgiven.
But another evidence of the sacrifice of Christ, as that to
which the world had been tending, lay in the endeavor of
those who, after that sacrifice had been finished, would not
accept it, to substitute something else of the same kind in
its room.  They felt that only so could they stand their
ground, could they recover or maintain any hold' upon the
hearts of men. With what monstrous exaggerations the idea
and practice of sacrifice re-appeared in the final struggle of
Paganism with the Christian faith, is abundantly known to
every student of Church history. The apostate Julian, for
instance, of whose life the revival of Paganism was the ruling
passion, ran here into extremes which earned him the ridicule
of the-more lukewarm adherents of the old superstition them



TIIE PERFECT SACRIFICE.               189
selves;*  and he, the same who had trod under foot the cross
of Christ, and counted the blood with which he was sanctified
a common thing, did yet submit himself to loathsome rites,t
seeking in the blood of bulls profusely poured on him, as in
a cleansing bath, that purifying which he had refused to
find in the precious blood-sprinkling of the Lamb of God,
slain from the foundation of the world.
Again, the inner neccesity of having somewhere a sacrifice
to rest on, the certainty that if men have not the true, they
will generate a substitute in its room, was signally proved
by the manner in which the doctrine concerning the mass
grew up in the Christian Church itself. No sooner did men's
faith in a finished sacrifice, one lying at the ground of every
prayer, every act of self-oblation, every acceptable work, grow
weak, than the feeling that they must have a sacrifice somewhere, produced, or, so to speak, by instinct developedl, a doctrine to answer their needs-turning that HIoly Eucharist,
which is the ever-present witness in the Church of a sacrifice
once completed on the cross, and continually pleaded in heaven-turning that itself into the sacrifice, and seeking to
supply by these poor but continual repetitions, the weakness
of their faith in the one priceless offering, upon the acceptance of which, as upon an unchangeable basis, the Church
everlastingly reposes.
And now, brethren, by way of practical conclusion from
all this on which we have been entering to-day-what a witness is there here against that shallow view of the truth
which should bless us, that would leave it a bare doctrine, a
system of morals, lopping away as superfluous and mystical,
a See the manner in which the heathen Ammianus Marcellinus
(1. xxiii., c. 12) speaks of the prodigality of his sacrifices. Victimarins was the title given him at Antioch, not apparently by the Christians alone.
t Those of the tauroboliad. Prudentius (Peristeph. x., 1006-1050,)
gives a description at large of this revolting rite.




190                   LECTURE TV.
as a remnant of Judaism, all which speaks of atonement, of
propitiation, of blood-sprinkling, of sacrifice. The contemplation of the benefits of Christ's death under aspects suggested by these words, so far from being this shred of Judaism, which a more perfect knowledge must strip off, finds on
the contrary as many anticipations everywhere besides as
there.  They are as busy about sacrifice in the outer court
of the Gentiles as in the holier place of the Jews; and as
little there as here is it a separable accident, the garniture
and fringe of something else, but in either case itself constituting the core and middle point of worship, recognised in a
thousand ways as that which must lie at the ground of all
approaches unto God.
And these things being so, how can we escape from owning that some of the deepest, the most universal needs of
the human heart have not yet been awakened in us, if we have
never yet desired to stand under the cross, nor ever claimed
our part in the great oblation which was made thereon, as
on the holiest altar ever reared upon the earth-needs which
that transcendent offering on Calvary was meant for ever and
perfectly to satisfy? It is plain, brethren, that we are leading an outside life,. playing but with the surfaces of things,
never having brought ourselves in contact with inmost realities, that there never yet has risen upon our souls the awful
vision of a holy God, that we have wholly shrunk from looking down into the abysmal deeps of our own corruption, if
as yet we have never cried, "Purge me with hyssop, and I
shall be clean; wash me,'and I shall be whiter than snow."
For when once we have learned aught of this, we then surely
feel that not amendment of life, that not tears of sorrow,
that not the most perfect baptism of repentance, that not all
these together, would of themselves reach our needs, or remove our stains, or give peace for the past, or confidence for
the future; that only in the Lamb slain is there purity; or
pardon, or peace.




THE PERFECT SACRIFICE.               191
Oh then, brethren, let us hasten there, where we may
make that precious blood-sprinkling our own; let us hasten
there, lest they rise up against us in the last day-those heathens, who set such a price on their sacrifices, which were at
best but shadows of the true; who made by them such continual acknowledgement of guilt which they had contracted,
of punishment which they deserved, of reconciliation which
they desired; lest they rise up, condemning us, who shall
have counted the blood with which we were sanctified a common thing, and brought into the awful presence of the Judge
a conscience stained and defiled, which yet might have been
purged and forever perfected by far better sacrifices than
theirs.




LECTURE V.
THE RESTORER OF PARADISE.
GENESIS V. 29.
And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which
the Lord hath cursed.
A WORD or two may be needful on commencing again
these lectures, which, after the lapse of some months, I am
permitted to resume; I may thus- hope to remind such among
my present hearers as have heard the earlier discourses, and
inform such as have not, what has been their course, and
what the road we hitherto have traveled over.  I have undertaken, then, to trace in a few leading lines the yearnings of
the world which was before Christ, or which, though subsequent to Him, has yet lain without the limits of Christendom, and beyond the mighty influences of His word and Spirit
-a world to which He was still therefore a Saviour to come
-to trace, I say, the yearnings of this world after its Redeemer, and the presentiments of Him which it cherished.
I have sought to show that if there was much in the world,
as in a fallen world there needs must have been, ready to resist and oppose the coming in of the Truth, prompt to take up
arms against it at its appearing, so also, on the other hand,
in that it was a world which came first from God, and which
had never been abandoned by Him, but which all along He
had been in highest wisdom and highest love preparing for
and leading to this glorious consummation, there were in it
certain predispositions for the Truth-there was that which
(192)




THE RESTORER OF PARADISE.              193
was ready to range itself under the banners of that Truth, so
soon as once they were openly set up. I have endeavoured,
too, to prove that the existence of unconscious prophecies of
the truth, resemblances in lower spheres of the spiritual life
to all which at last was perfectly manifested in the highest,
is one which we should have expected: so that it is not the
presence of these resemblances which need perplex us, but
rather their absence which would have been justly surprising,
which would have been indeed most difficult to account for.
I take up my subject at this point, and go forward to another branch of it, seeking to show that in another aspect beside those already contemplated by us, we have in Christ our
Lord " the Desire of all nations," inasmuch, that is, as we
have in Him one who was at perfect understanding with nature, wielded it at his will, declared that He was come to
restore it, to bring back the lost Paradise; and did not merely
declare this in word, but by first fruits of power exercised
upon it, by the mighty works that He did, gave manifest
tokens that He was come, at once to set it free from the bondage of corruption, and to set free the race of which He appeared as the Head from the blind tyranny which it exercised
upon them-to give to his people something more than the
Stoic freedom of opposing an intrepid and obdurate heart to
the assaults of fortune, or the accidents of nature.  For
though that in its place was well, which should enable a man
to say, amid a falling world, Impavidum ferient ruLine yet
better still his work, who should so bear up and strengthen
and establish the shaken pillars of the universe, that wreck
and ruin should find place in it no more.
But why, it may be asked, should this deliverance of nature have been, upon one side,'part of the world's expectation? or why, which is in fact the same question on its other
side, should the giving of this deliverance cohere so inti.
mately, as we shall sce it does, with Christ's redemptive
work, as to be in fact one aspect of that work itself?  For
17




194                    LECTURE V.
this reason-because of the closest connection'in which the
disorder from which the redemption was expected, stood related to the sin of man.  That disorder was felt truly to be
the echo in nature of the deeper discords in man's spiritual
being.  When man sinned, then in the profound and not
exaggerated la-guage of our great poet, A1ll nature felt the
wound."  Man was as the highest note in the scale of creation, and, when he descended, through all nature there followed a corresponding reduction.  It became subject tO
vanity, not willingly, not by an act'of its will, but by reason
of anoth-er, by reason; of him who subjected the same, by rea.
-on of man. (Reom. viii- 20.)  We behold the fa ct itself on
all sides ackowledged -the fact, I mean, of a primal perfection, of a present disor-der. - Of the sense of primal perfection we
bave singular witness in the language (and there is no such
witness as the unconscious one which language supplies) of
two of the most highly cultivated nations of the ancient world,
whom all the present confusions of nature could not hinder
from using words signifying order and elegance* to designate
the world which they beheld around them- for so to them
did this grace and beauty gleam through its present disorders)
so instinctively did they feel these to belong to the true idea
of.the universe, grievously as that was:now defaced and marred.-t  While with all this, on the other hand, its present
disorders appeared so great, its discords so harsh, that the
Epicurean poet found, as he thonght, warrant and ground
enough in these for his athiest conclusions, that no hand of
Eternal Wisdom presided at its planning, that no final causes
* Kolos and muncus. Pliny (H. N., 1. ii, c. 8): Quem xoau/ov
Grseoi, nomine ornamenti appellaverunt, eum nos i perfects absolutique elegantia mundum. Pythagoras is said to have been the first
who applied the word xosapos to the material universe-a word which
was in its way almost as great an acquisition for natural philosophy,
as was Plato's iGOi for intellectual and spiritual.'t Compare the De e  aturs& Deo tm, b. ii.




THErI   STORER OF PARADISE.           195
could be traced throughout. it, but that all was the. work of a
blind chance.* That conclusion of his was indeed most false,
yet this much was true, that Paradise had disappeared from
the earth; and man, the appointed prince of creation, did
stand among the rebel powers of nature; which had cast off
hls yoke, at the moment when he cast off the yoke of his
puperior Lord, practising upone him, by a just judgment, the
disobedience and contunmacy which it had learned from him;
and which did now, with its thorns and its briers, its wastes
and its wildernesses, its earthquakes and its storms, present
him too faithful a reflex of the sin and evil, the desolation
and barrenness of his own heart.
Yet, nevertheless, though Paradise was gone, he kept in
his soul the memory of that which once had been, and with
the memory the hope and the confidence that it yet would be
again-that perhaps, though his eyes could see it nowhere,
it yet had not wholly vanished from the earth.  If there
bloomed no paradise in the present, at least there lay one
before him  and behind. If it lay not near him, yet in
the distance-in the happy Iran-among the remote Hyperboreanst-in the far land of the blameless Ethiopians.  He
felt, indeed, that he was himself weak to win it back, but he
could not resign the trust that a champion would raise, and
accomplish for him that which he was unequal to accomplish
for himself.  Nor was it only when the son of Lamech was
born that men said in joyful expectation, " This same shall
comfort us because of the ground the Lord hath cursed."
Of many more the same hope was fondly conceived. The
world could hardly picture to itself any one of its leading
spirits, of the great benefactors of the past, the mighty
deliverers in the future, without thinking of the curse upon
in Lucretius:
Nequicquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
Naturum rerum, tantf statprcedita culp&.
t See Miller's Dorians, b. 2, c. 4.




196                  LECTURE V.
the earth as more or less lightened in his time and by his aid.
For it truly understood that however the resistance which we
find in nature, a resistance so stubborn that only with long
labour and toil we make it subject to our will, may be part
of the needful discipline of the present time —may be, though
good in itself, yet good for our present condition, and something which we could not be without —still that release from
all this, from this resistance and contradiction of the outward
world, is a portion of the blessedness in store, not indeed so
much for its own sake, as because it will go hand in hand
with, and be the outward expression of another and greater
healing and deliverance in the inner domain of men's spirits.
This yearning after a lost paradise, this belief that it should
some day or other be restored, we find existing every where,
and, as was to be expected, in the worthier religions the most
vividly. Thus it comes out with a remarkable strength and
distinctness in that which has so many noble elements in it,
which is in many respects so remarkably free from the more
debasing admixtures of most other worships of heathendom
-I mean the religion of the ancient Persians. Through
that all, there runs the liveliest expectation of a time when
every poison and poisonous weed should be expelled from
the earth, when there should be no more ravening beast,
nor fiery simoon, when streams should break forth in every
desert, when the bodies of men should cast no shadows, when
they should need no food to sustain their life, when there
should -be no more poverty, nor sickness, nor old age, nor
death.
And, what is most remarkable, makes these expectations
to belong to our argument is, that not in Jewish prophecy
alone were these hopes, and the fulfillment of these hopes,
linked with, and consequent upon, the coming of a righteous
king, one of whom, righteousness should be the girdle of his
loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins, who should re.
prove with equity the meek of the earth, (Isai. xi. 4, 5;)




THE RESTORER OF PARADISE.             197
but in all the anticipations upon all sides of these blessings
to men, they were thus connected with the expectations of a
king reigning in righteousness. In his time, and because
of his presence, these blessings should accrue: he should
be himself the middle point of blessing, from which all
should flow out. For there was a just sense in men, which
hindered them  from  ever looking'for, or conceiving of,
any blessings apart from a person with whom  they were
linked, and from whom they were diffused.  Even in the
Pollo of the great Latin poet, however little interpreters are
at one concerning the wondrous child, the kindler of such
joyful expectations, however unsatisfying the common explanation must be confessed to be, yet this much is certain, that
the poet could not conceive or dream of a mere natural golden age. It must centre in and unfold itself from a living
person: it must stand in a real relation to his appearing, being the outcoming and reflection of his righteousness. The
world's history can have no sentimental and idyllic, it must
needs have an epic and heroic close.
But, it may be asked, Are we justified in looking at this
expectation as the expectation of something which is to, be
indeed made ours in Him that is true? All will, I think,
allow that the prospect of a restored paradise-in other words,
of a world lightened of its curse, does belong to the very
essence of our Christian hope-that there was a truth in the
ancient Chiliasm, which all its sensual exaggerations should
not induce us to slight or to put aside, in so far, that is, as it
was a protest against the dishonour which would have been
put upon a part of God's creation, or rather upon the completeness of the redemption of that part, if it had been regarded as. so utterly and irrecoverably spoiled, that now it
could only be destroyed, and not renewed.  Assuredly, the
hope of this recovery forms part of the anticipations of prophets. The waste places of the world, those outward signs




198                    LECTURE V.
of sin impressed visibly on nature, shall disappear; " the
wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad."  What
glory the world yet keeps shall be enhanced and infinitely
multiplied: 1" The light of the moon shall be as the light of
the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the
light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the
breach of his people, -and healeth the stroke of their wound."*
(Isai. xxx. 26.)  All the discords-which have followed hard
upon the fall shall be hushed to peace: " The wolf also shall
dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the
kid." (Isai. xi. 10.) And apostles take up the strain: they
too declare how a" the whole creation groanoth and travaileth
in pain together untill now;" how " the earnest expectation
of the creature waiteth for the manifestation. of the sons of
God."  (Rom. viii. 19.)  They see, in ecstatic vision, not
merely a new heaven, but a new earth, and One sitting
upon his throne who says, "Behold, I make all things new."
(Rev. xxi. 5.)
And we have, not lying thus on the surface of Scripture,
other obscurer yet not less significant indications of the intimate connexion between the restoration of man and the restoration of the outward world —as, for instance, in the use
of the same word in the New Testament to signify the one
and the other. There is a r'egeneration of man; but the
same word (         clx~TsTrva;) is most significantly applied to nature also, and expresses that great and transcendant change
which for it is also in store. (Matt. xix. 28). There is for it
also a new birth, for so much this word thus applied tells us,
no less than for man-a casting off of its old and wrinkled
skin-a resurrection morn, when it, too, shall put on its
Easter garments; when, as some foster-nurse, it shall share
in the glory of the royal child whom it has reared; and who,; For the way in which the Jewish commentators understood such
passages as these, see Schoottgen, Hior. Heb., v. ii., pp. 62, 171;
and Eisenmenger's Entdeckt Judenthum, v. ii., p. 826.




-THE RESTORER OF PARADISE.             199
at length ascending the throne of his kingdom, is mindful
of her in. whose. lap in time past he has been nurtured.*
Man's regeneration is indeed a present one, and nature's, in
the main, a future; yet are they but workings, in narrower
and wider spheres, of the same almighty power, and so may
thus justly be called by the same name.
Nor by word alone, but also by pregnant symbol it was
declared that this redemnption was a part of that work which
the Son of Man came to effect.  For I cannot doubt that
there was a symbolic pointing at what had been lost, and
what was to be won back, in the fact of the temptation of
our blessed Lord taking place in the wilderness. The garden
and the wilderness are thus set forth to us as the two opposite poles.  By sin, the first Adam  lost the garden —which
henceforward disappeared from the earth, so that the very
site of it has since been vainly sought-and from that day
forth the wilderness was man's appointed home.  Christ,
therefore, the second Adam, taking up the conflict exactly
at the point where the first Adam had left it, and inheliting,
so to speak, all the consequences of his defeat, did, in the
wilderness, do battle with the foe, and triumphing in righteousness, won back the garden for man —which, though we
see it not yet, will in due time unfold itself from Him and
as one of the fruits of his victory; for the centre being won,
the circumference will be won also. We recognize a slight
hint of the meaning that lay in making the wilderness the
scene of this great conflict, in that which one Evangelist
alone records, and which might at first sight seem but as a
stroke added to enhance the desolate savageness of his abode:
" He was with the wild beasts." (Mark i. 13.)  But surely
it means that in Him, the ideal man, the paradise preroga5' Chrysostom: KaI.Odam7tp'yp,tO0&nv,,7tatcov rphiovcUa plUctXxov,
EA" et5 4PX5'CX SoyVYV YLvo/VJ. ytn5 c <PtXS,5, xab CONf cvvao o2'ECs
VJv aiyuOL', ov"x ca Xa  S xoats.




200                   LECTURE V.
tives were given back-the fear of Him, and the dread of
Him, were. over all the beasts of the field: "He was with
them," and they harmed him not, but did rather own Him
as their rightful lord.
Nor may we confine to that single act of our Lord's life
the tokens which he gave that he should be this deliverer of
nature; nor may we say that the glory of a redeemed nature
is a glory which as yet altogether waits to be revealed.
Rather is it already and most truly begun.  In his miracles
we see the germs and beginnings of its liberation. In them,
nature is no longer stiff, but fluent-its laws, so stubborn to
others, become elastic in his hands; before him, each of its
mountains becomes a plain-it listens for, and hears, and
obeys the lightest intimation of his will.
That all this had need so to be in the presence of one
claiming to be all which he claimed, that it all stood in vital
and intimate connection with his work, was most truly felt
by a world which evermore adorned its champions with like
powers, which evermore conceived of them as workers of
wonders, as bringers back in like manner, of the lost har,
r-onies of creation, and conceived of nature as plastic in their
hands and obedient to their will.  It was a true instinct,
however mistaken in the person to whom the wondrous works
were ascribed, out of which the world concluded that he who
professed to deliver his fellows must not be bound upon any
side with the same heavy yoke as they were-that the very
idea of a champion of mankind, was that of one in whom
should be found again all the lost prerogatives of every
man.
And when we thus say that the miracles which Christ
wrought were these signs and tokens of redemption, let us
not pause here, nor contemplate them as insulated factsonce, and once only, having been-but rather as facts pregnant with ulterior consequences; as the earliest steps of a series; as first fruits of a gracious power which did not stop




THE RESTORER OF PARAEISE.              201
with them, but has ever since continued to unfold itself more
and more.  What Christ once, and in them, wrought in intensive power, he works evermore in eztensi've.  Once or
twice he multiplied the bread; but evermore in Christian
lands famine is become a stranger-a more startling, because
a more unusual thing-the culture of the earth proceeding
with surer success and with a larger return. A few times
he healed the sick; but, in the reverence for man's body
which his gospel teaches, in the sympathy for all forms of
suffering which flows out of it, in the sure advance of all
worthier science which it implies and ensures, in and by aid
of all this, these miraculous cures unfold themselves into the
whole art of Christian medicine, into all the alleviations and
removemnents of pain and disease, which are so rare in other
(and so frequent in Christian) lands.  Once he quelled the
storm; but, in the clear dominion of man's spirit over the
material universe, which Christianity gives in the calm courage which it inspires, a lordship over the winds and waves,
and over all the blind uproar of nature, is secured, which
only can again be lost with the loss of all the spiritual gifts
with which he has indued his people. Already Paul was
de facto admiral in that great tempest upon the Adrian sea.
Thus, then, brethren, we see that the world's expectation
upon this side also has an answering fact. There is One who
does truly give what the hearts of men have desired. Their
longing after a redeemed creation was no delusive dream,
however the ways in which they realized that longing, and
gave it an outward shape, were premature and vain.  And
here you will bear with me, even though I repeat an admonition once made already, but the importance of which will
abundantly justify its repetition. Let us then for ourselves
take care that we view aright these askings after the true,
and understand what they mean: let us see that they be not,
by the fraud of men, used against us, to undermine, or, at
least, to embarrass, the faith which they ought to help to es.




LECTURE V.                    202
tablish.  We have spoken already of the way in w1::..h they
might be so used. The slight upon the miracle of Scripture,
and all other God's mighty gifts to the world by his Son,
through the adducing of other works seemingly of a like
kind, other similar pretensions made by, or on behalf of,
others-the miningling, and so losing sight of the divine facts
amid a multitude of phenomena apparently similar-this opposition to the truth has been often attempted, but is probably now working itself out into a more consistent theory,
and one more conscious of itself, and what it. means, and
what advantages it posseses, than ever in times past it has
done.
The evading of the stress of Christ's works by the reply,
that such have been the accompaniment of every heroic personage, glories and ornaments which the imagination of his
fellows has inevitably lent him, the halo with which it has
clothed him-for instance, that it has evermore been presumed that the outer world will obey him, no reluctant slave
to his material force, but a ready servant to his spiritual will;
-this manner of dealing with the marvelous works of
Christ, is likely to find great favour in our time.  Nor is it
hard to see the reason. It falls in remarkably with the tendency of our age.  It retains, and is consistent with a certain measure of respect towards the records of revelation. For
it does not presume those parts of them which affirm supernatural facts to be a fraud or forgery, nor yet to be the record of deceptions and sleights of hand, but only that the
men to whom we owe these accounts lay under the same
laws, were subject to the same optical illusions in the spiritual world as all their fellows, as'belong to the very essence
of man's nature, it fared with them but as with others, that
the mighty desire became father to the belief. This theory
offers a way of dealing with a great multitude of statements
presented as historic, which men are unwilling to brand outright as falshoods, and -yet as little willing to accept as truths.




THE RESTORER OF PARADISE.               203
It offers a middle course, decently respectful to Christianity,
and at the same time effectually escaping from its authority,
and presenting, as it seems to do, a calm and philosophical
explanation, both for its more perplexing phenomena, and
also for very much beyond it, it will be strange if, in our age,
which rejoices so much in large and inclusive points of viewj
it does not find a ready and a wide acceptance.
But in truth, brethren, this universal imagination these
consenting expectations upon all sides, in so many thousands
and thousands of hearts, these, if we believe in a divine
oligin and destination of man, if we believe that this man or
that may be deceived, but that all men cannot-since whatever there may be of:false at the surface, the foundations of
his being are laid in the truth, being laid in God-if we believe that this or that generation may be dreaming -fantastic
and feverish dreams, which have no counterparts whatever
in the actual world of realities, but not all generations-if
there is that in us which, prior to all argument, solemnly
binds us to believe that no such cruel falsehood would be
played off upon man as a great longing laid deep in his hieart,
without a corresponding object-then to us believing so,
these wide spread, or say rather these universal expectations,
will themselves give testimony to a truth corresponding to
them. lWe shall not indeed look for a truth answering to them
in all their accidents, for of these many will be local, temporary, varying, and the truth, when it comes to pass, must more
or less depart and differ from that form in which it clothed
itself to them who waited for it.  So of neccesity it must be;
for that form perforce was more or less injuriously affected,
distorted, and obscured by that sinful element, which in the
mind of each would mingle with, and in part debase and degrade it.  But tlere will be a testimony in these consenting
expectations for that which lies at the root of, and -after the
merely accidental is stripped off, remains common to, and so
constitutes the essence of them all.




204                 ILECTURE V.
And when we are deeply convinced of this, then in all
those in whom the world has greatly hoped-workers, as it
has been thought, of wondrous works-bringers back of a
golden age-utterers, as has been fondly deemed, of the forgotten spell of power-graspers anew of the scepter over
nature which had fallen from the hand of every one beside
-readers backward of the primal curse-in the mighty acts
attributed to each one of these, we shall trace proofs of the
exceeding fitness which there was, that He who indeed came
in the fullness of'the time, should come furnished with signs
Aind wonders and mighty works, so that even the winds and
the sea obeyed Him, and the bread multiplied in his hands,
and the wild beasts knew him for their lord, and in the
desert, Paradise bloomed anew at his presence. In legend
and in tale utterly worthless as history we shall yet read prophetic intimations, which indeed understood not themselves,
of Him who, in the days of his flesh, by first fruits of power,
declared Himself the promised Seed of the woman who
should comfort us for the earth which God had cursed, and
at length bring about its perfect redemption from that curse,
making it, thus redeemed, a fit dwelling-place for his redeemed people.




LECTURE VI.
THE REDEEMER FROM SIN.
ROMANS VII. 21, 23.
I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.
For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but 1 see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
WE were occupied, when last we met together, with the
world's expectation of one who should deliver all outward nature from its curse, of one in whom the Adamic prerogatives
should re-appear. To-day I shall be led, as by a natural
transition, to speak of a yet nearer deliverance, and one
which it imported to man yet more that he should win, or
that another should win for him-a harmony which he denlanded with a yet more earnest longing than this harmony
of nature with itself, or of nature with him-an inner harmony, a deliverance from his own evil, from that in himself
which was threatening his true being with destruction, from
lusts which embraced his soul, but while they embraced,
strangled and destroyed. For sin has never reigned so undisputed a lord in his heart, but that there were voices there
protesting against its lordship. His will was enslaved; but
he knew that it was enslaved, that freedom was its birthright, and that bondage, however it might be its miserable
necessity now, yet was not its true condition from the first.
It was the sense of this, of such an inner contradiction in
his life, which made one to exclaim that he felt as if two
18               (205)




206                     LECTURE VI.
souls were lodged within him;* and another to set forth the
soul of man as a chariot, which two horses, one white and
one black, were drawingt-so did the wondrous fact present
itself to him, of the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the
spirit against the flesh, so had he learned that if there is
that in every man which is drawing him up to God and to the
finding his true freedom in God, there is also that which would
fain draw him downward, till he utterly lose himself and his
own true life in the mire of sensual and worldly lusts, till
the divine in him be wholly obscured, and the bestial predominant altogether.4 It was the sense of this, which made
the image of the two ways, a downward and an upwardone easy and strewn with flowers, but a way of death; one
hard and steep and sharp set with thorns, but a way of life,
as familiar to heathen moralists~-as to us who hear of the
broad and narrow way, the wide and the straight gate, from
the lips of the Lord himself.
And thus the problem which each nobler system  proposed
* Xenophon, Cyropaed., 1. 6, c. 1, ~ 41. Cf. Seneca (Ep. 52):
Quid est hoc, Lucili, quod nos alio tendentes alid trahit et ed undo
recedere cupimus, impellit? quid colluctatur cum animo nostro, nec
permittit nobis quidquam semel velle?
f Plato, Phcedrus, c. 25.
t This sense of the latent beast, or the more latent beasts than
one, in every man, which may be fed and pampered, and roused to
fiercest activity, while the true man in him perishes with hunger,
supplies the groundwork of that famous and often imitated passage
in Plato. Rep., 1. 9, c. 12.
} Hesiod, 0p. 289-292; cebes, Tab., c. 12; Xenophon, Memorab.,
1. 2, c. 1, ~ 21 seq.; in regard to which last passage there is a very
interesting discussion in' Buttman's admirable elucidation of the
myths of Herakles.  (Mytool., v. 1, p. 252.) IIe there shows that,
according to all likelihood, the " temptation " of Herakles belonged
to the original legend, and was not the mere poetical invention of
Prodicus. Lactantius (Inst. Div., 1. 6, c. 3.) notes how heathen poet
and philosopher had already used this image of the two ways.




TIIE REDEEMER FRrOM SIN.             207
to itself was the delivering from this evil, the bringing of a
harmony into the inner life-its end to make man a king, so
that he should have dominion over himself, and over all of
his nature which was not truly himself-that which was appointed to rule in him, ruling, and that which was appointed
to serve, serving-the charioteer charioting, and not dragged in the dust at the heels of his horses. The promise
which it held out of giving this, was that which to every
more earnest spirit each system had of attractive, and only
as it promised this, had it an attraction to them.'They od.ly
felt drawn to it, as it undertook to give them this liberty,
and harmoniously to re-adjust the disturbed relations of their
inward life.
) I know that when we undertake to speak of these things,
and would fain show in how wonderful a degree the ancient
world was engaged with the same moral and spiritual problems as are engaging ourselves, there is a caution which we
must take home to ourselves, if we would not trace entirely
delusive resemblances, and be led away by merely accidental
likenesses in expression, which yet point to no real likeness
at the root; this caution, I mean-that since there are points
of apparent contact in almost all systems, it follows that before we can find any significance in these, or conclude one
because of them to stand in any real affinity to another, we
must strictly ask ourselves, how deep these resemblances go,
whether they lie merely on the surface, or reach down to the
central heart of the matter, to that which determines the
nature of each; whether we have been caught by words and
phrases which have a similar sound, but which, looked into
more nearly, will be found to conceal under language which
sounds nearly the same, statements which are really and essentially most diverse. This mistake no doubt has often
been made; phrases have been snatched at and claimed as
ours, as anticipating and bearing witness to Christian truths,
without waiting to inquire what place they really hold in the




208                   LECTURE VI.
complex of the system  from which they are taken.  Thus a
Latin Father* has spoken of Seneca as " one of uis" on the
score of certain showy maxims which sound, at fiirst hearing,
and till they are adjusted in their place, like great Christian
truths; and this, though perhaps there could not have been
two schemes more opposite at the heart to one another than
that Stoic, which in its pride would teach us to seek all in
ourselves, and the Christian, which bids us with an humbler yet truer wisdom to seek all out of ourselves and in
God.
But at the same time, and owning our liability to be thus
deceived, we must yet keep far from that other course, which,
shunning the faults and exaggerations of this, refuses to see
stirring at all in the heathen world the same riddles of life
and of death which are perplexing ourselves.  Into this extreme they run, who will give any explanation rather than a
moral one, and the more trivial the better, to the legend and
the tale of antiquity, obstinately refusing to hear in the most
earnest voices which reach them from the past cries after the
same deliverence for which we yearn. The tendency to this
is in truth at its root antichristian; for it grows, whether it
owns it or not, out of a conviction that all with which Christianity deals is in fact accidental, and does not belong to the essential stuff of humanity-that this revelation of which we
boast, has no claim to be considered as all answer to the
deepest and most universal needs of men —that echoes of it
therefore are nowhere to be listened foi or being caught, are
in no wise to be accounted more than accidental reverberations of the air.
Keeping then that caution in view, but as a caution only,
and resisting, as we are bound to do, the endeavour to rob
the whole heathen world, its philosophy and mythology alike,
of all moral significance for us, on the score that significance
* Jerome (Adv. Jovin., 1. 1, in fine): N oster Seneca.




TIlE RE,:DEEMER FROM  SIN.               209
has sometimes been found where -truly there was none, we
may boldly say that the highest philosophy of the old world
did concern itself with a redemption-not of course with a
Redeemer, for of such it knew not; but it did avowedly set
-before itself as its aim and purpose the helping of souls to a
birth out of a world of shows and appearances into the world
of realities, out of a world of falsehood into one of truth,
turning them from darkness to light, from the contemplation
of shadows to the contemplation of substance.*  That favourite saying of Socrates that he exercised still the craft of his
mother, that his task and work, his mission in the world,
was such a helping of souls to the birth, by the helping to
a birth the conceptions which were struggling there,t this
rested on no other thought-was in its kind, and however
remotely a prelude to far mightier truth, the earthly anticipation.of a heavenly word, of -his word who said, " Ye must
be born again."  It pointed, though at an infinite distance,
to the possibility of a birth into a kingdom, not merely of
reality as opposed to semblance, but of holiness as opposed
to sin.4
What again is "' Know thyself," that great saying of the
heathen philosophy, (in which, when it turned from being
merely physical, and a speculation about natural appearances,
the sun, the moon, and the stars, to the making of man and
* The great passage in the Republic of Plato. 1. 7, c. 1, 2, will
at once suggest itself to many.
t- Plato's Thlectetus, c. 6. Stallbatum's edit. p. 63. See Van
Heusde's Initia Philosophica Platonices, v. 2, p. 52 seq.
$ And so, too, there are counterparts, weak and pale ones they
must needs be, of the Christian idea of conversion, which find place
in the same philosophy.  How remarkable are the very terms,
ntacrP porpi UiA6 zev axLt itZ Ed tO qAg (Rep. l. 7, c. 13,) AeptotpoT'
4v x75 AtptLcyny4, (Rep. 7, c. 6,) with which we may compare the
%gr6p'p~as0oc of the New Testament, 2 Cor. iii. 16; 1 Thess. i. 9;
Acts xviii. 18.
18*




210                      LECTURE VI.
man's being the region in which it moved, the riddles of humanity, the riddles which it sought to solve* —-what was that
1" Know thyself," that great word in which it embodied and
expressed so well its own character and aim, and all that it
proposed to effect,'but a preparation afar off for a higher
word, the "Repent ye," of the Gospel?  Since let that
precept only be faithfully carried out, and in what else could
it issue but repentance? or at least in what else but in an
earnest longing after this great change of heart and life?
For out of this self-knowledge nothing else but self-loathing
could grow-so that men being once come, as they presently
must, to a consciousness of their error and their departure
from  goodness and truth, should hate themselves, and flee
from themselves to whatever higher guide was offered them;
to the end that they might become different men,,and not
remain the same which before they were.t  What could any
man behold himself, if only he beheld himself aright, but,
to use the wonderful comparison of Plato,4 as that sea-god,
* Cicero, Tusc. Qucest., 1. 5, c. 4.
t See the affecting words, which Plato (Synops., c. 32,) puts into
the mouth of Alcibiades, concerning the mysterious and magical
power of the truth, even as partially embodied in the words and
person of Socrates, to conceive of sin; until, as the young man owned, it seemed to him that it were far better not to live than to live
the man he was. (7OsE xo  ot;  pte } ~ 3o,~bv ~sivc E'Zow   W E'SO.)
j De Rep., 1. 10, c. 11:'o2rep ol  v Oa.dxie ov rxauvxov opJveE5S OVX 0v * 0     5'EOe' Ov  &O6~o V 1'78 V e pX zCav pOCrv, tO'O' ei tec
cE 7CnhCa'    fov OW'YUo'o05 lFpe'a &~v EXXE~,Xt50uoc aa ~ 6O &   c'w'-pttoau xatC 2dvtro; xsEro3XSoa&6 v'7b  ASv xvteaf&v, daxxa 68 Apo'iA7Eqx vo0 (oqifp'a es xac'VXtc xco; a~'pcg, ~a~*f c. ~if p ~.?,ov Ofp~'u E0oaV6b gvpbucv xaXzv. This Glaucus, as the Socialist tells us, discovered
the fountain of immortality, of which he drank; but not being able
to show it to others, was by them hurled into the deeps of the sea.
From time to time the fishermen catch sight of him, or hear him




THE REDEEMER FROM SIN.               211
in whom that pristine form was now scarcely to be recognized,
so were some limbs of his body broken off, and some marred and battered by the violence of the waves, while to the
rest shells and stones and sea-weed had clung and overgrown
them, till he bore a resemblance rather to some monster
than to that which by nature he was?  What was man but
such a wreck of his nobler self, what but such a monster
could he show in his own eyes, if only he could be prevailed
to fix those eyes steadfastly upon himself.
And when men, thus learning their fall, and how great it
was, learned also to long for their restoration, very interesting and instructive is it to observe how Christ realized for
yearning souls not only the very thing which they asked for,
but that in the very forms under which they had asked it;
most instructive to observe how the very language of Scripture, in which it sets forth the gifts which a Saviour brings,
was a language which more or less had been used already to
set forth the blessings which men wanted, or which from
others they had most imperfectly obtained-the Gospel of
Christ falling in not only with the wants of souls, but with
the very language in which those wants had found utterance.
Thus there had continually spoken out in men, a sense of
that which they needed to be done for them, as a healing, as a
binding up of hurts, a staunching of wounds. The art of
the physician did but image forth a higher cure and care,
which should concern itself not with the bodies, but with the
souls, of men. They were but the branches of'one and the
same discipline, so much so, that the same god who was conceived master in one, the soother of passions, was master also
in the other, the healer of diseases. It was conceived of sins
as of stripes and wounds, which would leave their iivid marks,
bewailing his immortality. The way in which this mythus is used
by Plato, is a testimony for the profound meaning which he found
in it.




212                   LECTURE VI.
their enduring scars, on the miserable souls which had committed them, and which carried these evidences of their
guilt, visibly impressed on them for ever, into that dark
world, and before those awful judgment-seats, whither after
death they were bound.*
How deep the corresponding image of Christ's work as
a work of healing, reaches in Scripture, I need not remind
you. His ministry of grace had been set forth in language
borrowed from this art, by prophets who went before; He
should be anointed to heal the broken-hearted, to bind up
the bruised; and when he began that ministry, He claimed
these prophecies for Himself, laying his finger on the most
signal among them, and- saying, "This day is this Scripture
fulfilled in your ears." (Luke iv. 21.)  And then, too, we
shall all remember how in another place He spake of sinners as being sick, and Himself as their physician, (Matt.
ix. 12.) and by the good Samaritan it has been often thought
more than likely, that He shadowed forth Himself, the despised of his own people, and yet the true binder up of the
bleeding hurts of humanity. But what need of more proof,
when we use the very word healtht as equivalent for salvation.  That fearful saying of the heathen sage'remains most
true, that every sin is a wound, that it leaves behind it its
scar, invisible now,-for it is a scar not on the body, but
the soul,-which will yet be only too plainly visible in the
day of the revelation of all things.  Yet Hle so heals them
whom, He takes in hand, He makes so perfect a cure, that
not even the scars of their hurts shall remain; "by whos6
stripes ye are healed."  He only waited till there was an
earnest desire awakened in men that they might find them.
~ Plato, Gorgias, c. 80, Stallbaum's edit. p. 314. Tacitus (Annal.
6) has a fierce delight in applying these words to Tiberius.
t Thus Plato (De Rep., 1. 4, c. 18, Stallbaulu's edit. p. 324:)
4pEvr, Patux'& p`5 vOtxoVs lVytEtcX ec rS5 XCW &" xa'  xoUUt xZG -EatF
4VXu51 xaxt'xl    00 ~~s tE ZUG (alaX6S xar 660E'YVE




THE REDEEMER FROMn SIN.               213
selves in an hospital of souls-till these desires came to a
head,-till it was felt that all which was offered elsewhere
reached not to an effectual binding up of hurts, was but a
healing of them  slightly, presently to break out anew, or a
covering of them  over with purple and with gold, leaving
them the while to fester unhindered beneath. He only
waited till it was owned that a divine Physician, and none
other, could take the great sufferer in hand, and then
straightway He stood by the sufferer's side, and proffered him
all that he had asked for, but had now despaired of finding,
even help and healing, and these in the very forms under
which he had asked them.*
Nor was it otherwise with the idea of freedom-an idea
which lies so close to the very heart and centre of the
Gospel, that its benefits and blessings are perhaps oftener
set forth by a word borrowed from this circle of images
than by any other, oftener described as a redemption or a
purchase out of slavery, and Christ as a Redeemer or purchaser, and thus a setter free, than by any other language.
It is true that we have come to use these words with so
little earnestness, have taken them so much in vain, we have
so lightly passed them  backward and forward from hand to
hand, that the sharpness and distinctness of their first outline has been for us almost lost and worn away, so that they
scarcely, or only now and then, with any vividness, bring to
our minds the truths which they affirm —the awful truth of
that slavery out of which we were delivered, the glorious
truth of that liberty into which we have been brought. But
still these words, though we may forget it, do evermore
proclaim this; and they are words by which, oftener perhaps than by any other, the Holy Spirit in the Scripture
* Augustine (Serm. 87, c. 10:) Jacet toto orbe terrarum ab oriente
usque in occidentern grandis ngrotus.  Ad sanandum  grandem
aegrotuim descendit omnipotens melicus. Humiliavit se usque ad
mortalem carnem, tamquam usque ad lectum vegrotantis.




214                  LECTURE VI.
declares the benefits whereof Christ has made us partakers.
And being this Redeemer or setter free, Ile was in this
regard also "the Desire of all nations."  For He, when
He said "Whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of
sin," (John viii. 34.) when his apostle characterized himself in his natural state as a slave " sold under sin," (Rnm.
vii. 14.) when another of His apostles spoke of evil men as
"servants of corruption," (2 Pet. ii. 19.) He and they,
using this language, were but affirming the same which had
been found out and felt by every sinner that ever lived, of
which the confession had been wrung out, too, from  the
lips of thousands. When, too, he offered freedom, a victory over all which was bringing into bondage, an overcoming of the world, as the issue of obedience unto Him,
He was but offering that, which -in one shape or another,
each guide and teacher of his fellows had offered before,with indeed the mighty difference, that He could make good
his offer, and they not. I need not remind you with what frequency we meet, sometimes almost to satiety, declarations of
this kind,-of wisdom  being the only freedom,-the wise
man, the only free man, the only king,- of the soul of the
sinner as a tyrant-ridden city,*-of lusts as evil mistresses
which enslave the soul and bring it into bondage; how the
promise of liberty is on the lips of each who would gather
disciples around him. All this is strewn too thickly over
the pages of heathen literature to need any proof in particular.
And meeting these, statements thus frequently and thus
earnestly expressed as we often do meet them there, we must
see how" they bear testimony that men continually envisaged
the highest benefits which their souls could attain, under the
aspect of freedom, of redemption-that the attaining of
this freedom was the object of their lives and hopes, however little they could make it their own, however they disPlfto Rep., 1. 9, C. 1s




THE REDEEIER FROM SIN.              215
covered and were meant to discover, through their fruitless
struggles and toils, that only when the Son made them free,
they could be free indeed.
Again, a pointing at the crowning gift which was at
length given unto the world in-Him, may be traced in the
idea of music which was so frequently and so fondly used
as the best outward expression of inner life-harmony.  This
indeed was felt to have so singular and profound a fitness,
that a term borrowed from this art, was, we may say, formally adopted as the aptest for setting forth that whole
discipline which occupied itself with the right composure
of the higher powers, with the bringing into one concent
the three-fold nature of man:-he in whom this language
comes most prominently forward, finding no worthier terms
in which to describe that wisdom with which he was enamoured, than as the fairest and mightiest of the harmonies;*
while sin, on the contrary, presented itself to him and to
many more, as a deep inner disharmony, as a discord which
had forced itself into the innermost centre of man's life, and
only through the expulsion of which he could again make it
what it ought to be, rhythmic, numerous, and harmonious.
All these thoughts, which, though first expressed by one or
two, yet found echoes in the bosoms of all, how did they in
their weakness to realize themselves, in the fact that discords ever made themselves too plainly felt in the lives, not
of the taught only, but of the teachers as well-how  did
they ask for One, the mighty master of all spiritual melo-'dies: whose own life, free from one jarring note, should
make perfect music in the ears of God; and not this alone,
but who should attune once more that marvellous instrument which had lain silent so long, or from which discords
only had proceeded, even the soul of man, and draw from it
" Plato ODe Leyy., 1. 3:) KasTv xa /'s~ v -T v R vE rtqvV&V,




216                   LECTURE VI.
again sounds which should be sweet even in the ears accustomed to the symphonies of heaven.
Surely all their language, though they knew it not,
pointed to such a mighty master of heavenly harmonies as
this.  For if it be true of Him, that as He emptied the
golden seats of Olympus, and swept their long line of
heroes and demi-gods and gods into the darkness and corruption of the tomb, He gathered from  each idol as it fell
its pretended majesty and dominion and power, claiming all
rightfully for his own, and weaving all the scattered rays of
light into one crown of glory for his own head; then of
none of these could this be more truly spoken than of Him
whom men feigned to be the god -of harmony, to have potency thereby over the spirits of men, with power to exalt,
to purify, and to soothe, whose music acted as a charm to
tranquilize the passions and attune the spirit to a peace
with itself, and with all which was around it.* For Christian peace, the peace which Christ gives, the peace which
He sheds abroad in the heart, is it aught else than such a
glorified harmony —the expelling from man's life of all that
was causing disturbance there, all that was hindering him
from chiming in with the music of heaven, all that would
have made him a jarring and a dissonant note, left out from
the great dance and minstrelsy of the spheres, in which
mingle the consenting songs of redeemed men and elect
angels.t
- Miiller's Dorians, b. 2, c. 8, ~ 11.
t It is remarkable enough that although Christian art shrunk,
and, so long as there was a heathenism rampant round it, rightly
shrunk, from any large use of symbols borrowed from heathen mythology, yet pictures of Christ as Orpheus taming the wild beasts
with his lyre, are probably as old as the third century. (Christl..Kunst-Symboli7c, p. 134, and Piper's iMythologie der Christl. Kunst, p.
121.)  Compare the opening of the latter Clement's Cohort. ad
Gentes, and Eusebius, De Laud. Constantini, c. 14, p. 760, ed.
Reading.




THE REDEEMER FROM  SIN.                217
Thus did the Son of God at his coming in the flesh, take
up the unfulfilled promises of all human systems.  For they
were unfulfilled; those systems had wrought no deliverance
worthy of the name in the earth. How scanty was the
number of those whom they would even undertake to save,
-a few highly favored or greatly gifted spirits of the world:
-not the poor, the ignorant, the weak; in this how different from  that Gospel which is preached to the poor, and
whose tidings are good because they are these,-that the
Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of his people shall put
their trust therein! But' theirs was essentially an aristocratic salvation,: which should help a few, setting them
apart from  their fellows, on pinnacles from whence they
were in danger of looking down far more with gratulation
at their own deliverance, than with any inward and bleeding compassion for the multitudes which were toiling and
vainly seeking for a path below.  And indeed often it was
not a salvation at all, even in the very lowest sense of that
word; how often was it Satan casting out Satan-one form
of evil expelling another, men finding food for pride and.
vain-glory in the very advances in wisdom and self-restraint
which they had madet —and thus those very victories which
they had won over fleshly sins, helping to make them slaves
~ See Origen's admirable words in his reply to Celsus (Con. Gels.,
1. 7, c. 59, 60,) showing how at the best the -philosophers were
taopot 6ytu7v, but Christ the t~epos Aoxa2iv.
t The well-known passage of Cicero (De Nat. Deor. 1. 3, c. 36)
has been often quoted. Men justly thank the Gods for the external
commodities which they enjoy; but, he proceeds, Virtutem neme
unquam acceptam Deo retulit. Nimirum recte, propter virtutem
enim jure la.udamur, et in virtute recte gloriamur. Quod non contingeret, si id donum a Deo, non a nobis haberemus...Nam quis, quod
vir bonus esset, gratias Diis egit unquan.2 At quod dives, quod honoratus, qudd incolumis. Jovemque Optimum Maximum ob eas res
appellant, non quod nos justos, temperantes, sapientes efficiat, sed
quod salvos, incolumes, opulentos, copiosos.
19




218                   LECTURE VI.
Of spiritual wickednesses-of the seven worse spirits which
take possession of the house, empty and swept and garnished; from which the one spirit of sensual lust has gone
out, but which has not been occupied by any nobler guest.
And if, brethren, even our struggles, after an inward conformity to a higher rule, are what they are-if with all the
helps at our command, we yet win no step without an eff6rt,
if oftentimes our premature hymns of victory over this sin
or that are changed into confessions of a shameful defeat,
and we, who went forth with victorious garlands too early
wreathed about our brows, have to come home and put ashes
upon our heads, how must it have been with them? how
continually must it have been a seeing of the better only
with a greater guilt to choose the worse! Surely the confession of the Jewish Pharisee that was zealous for the law
and for righteousness must have been the confession of unnumbered souls in all the world, wrung out from a deep
heart-agony, from the sease of defeats repeating themselves
with a sad uniformity, of ever deeper entanglement in the
defilements of the flesh and of the world-" That which I
do, I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what
I hate, that do I....I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members, warring
against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity
to the law of sin which is in my members.  0  wretched
man that I am  who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?"
Such voices no doubt, did make themselves heard.  ]For
indeed we shall not err, if contemplating the times which
went before'the Incarnation, we affirm that there had
been two cries which had long been going up into the ears of
the Lord of Hosts-two cries, although one was far more
distinct and articulate than the other. There was the voice
of appointed prophets and seers, watchers on the mountains of Israel, waiting for a Sun of Righteousness, who




ITHIE REDEEJMER FROM SIN.           219
as they surely knew, should in his time scatter the world's
gloom  and shed healing from  his wings.   There was
their voice who knowing this, would yet, out of a mighty
sense of the present evil around them  and within them,
have fain hastened the time,-psalmist and prophet who exclaimed, "Oh that the salvation were given unto Israel out
of Zion'" "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens and
come down?"  But there was another, a more confused cry
of multitudinous tones: it oftentimes knew not what its
own accents meant; it was often rather a groan within the
bosom of huumanity, which asked not, and thought not of a
listener, than a voice sent up unto heaven.  It was a cry
which only infinite wisdom and infinite love would have interpreted into that cry for heavenly help, which indeed at the
heart it was; a cry needing infinite kove to pardon all in it
which made it rather a cry against God than to him. But that
love it found.  He who said long before,  I have seen, I have
seen the affliction of my people," saw also the affliction of a
world hopelessly out of the way, translated its confused voices
into an appeal unto Himself, and sent forth his Son to be
Saviour of the lost.
And then, what not alone the Law could not do, in that it
was weak through the flesh, but what all wisdom had been
equally impotent to effect, for it underlay the same weakness,
He did; what they could not give, he gave.- For here we come
back  again  to a point which I have pressed already,
but which yet is so important, that I shall make no apology,
for pressing it once more, which is this, —that the prerogative of our Christian faith, the secret of its strength, is that
all which it has, and all which it offers, is laid up in a person.
This is what has made it strong, while so much else has
proved weak, that it has a Christ at its middle point —that
it is not a circumference without a centre,-that it has not
merely a deliverance, but a Deliverer,- not a redemption
only, but a Redeemer as well. This is what makes it fit for




220                   LECTURE VI.
wayfaring men; this is what makes it sun-light, and all else
compared with it but as moon-light,-fair it may be, but
cold and ineffectual; while here the light and the life
are one; the Light is also the Life of men.  Oh how great
the difference between submitting ourselves to a complex of
rules and casting ourselves upon a beating heart; between
accepting a system and cleaving to a person. And how
tenfold blessed the advantages of the last, if that person is
such a One that there shall be nothing servile in the entire
resignation of owHselves to be taught of Him, for He is the
absolute Truth-nothing unmanly in the yielding of our
whole being to be wholly moulded by Him, for that is not
merely the highest which humanity'has'reached, but the
highest which it can reach —its intended and ideal perfection,
at once its perfect image and superior Lord.
They felt this, that help must lie in a person, that only.
round a person souls would cluster,-those who when they
would fain make a final stand for the old beliefs of the world
and prove if these could not even now be quickened to dispute the world with the youthful Christian Church; —they
felt, I say, this, who set about marshaling, not merely
rival doctrines to the Christian, but rival benefactors to
Christ.  If He went about Judma doing good, they also
would point to sages of their own, who traveled on like
errands to the furthest East. This is, no doubt the meaning
of that half-fabulous life of Appollonius, which just as
Christianity was rising into notice and evident significance,
made its appearance; —this the explanation of that revived
interest in Pythagoras, which then found place. The votaries of the old religions felt that in this respect they must
not come short of that which they would oppose; and
rightly-however weak and flitting and unreal the phantoms
which they conjured up to their help.
For, brethren, had we a system only, it would leave us
just as weak as other systems have left their votaries. We




THE REDEEMER FROM SIN.               221
should have to confess that we found in ours, as they found i4
theirs, no adequate strength-that not merely now and then,
and at ever rarer intervals, we were worsted in our conflict
with the sin of our own hearts, but evermore. Our blessedness, and let us not miss that blessedness, is, that our treasures are treasured in a person, and are therefore inexhaustible-in one who requires nothing but what first He
gives-who is not for one generation a present teacher and
a living Lord, and then for all succeeding a past and a dead
one, but who is present and living' for all-as truly for us
in this latter day, as for them who went-up and down with
him in the days of his flesh. Our strength and our blessedness is, that what we have to know is "the truth as it is
in Jesus;" that what we have to learn, is to''learn Christ;"
that what we have to put on, is to "put on the Lord Jesus
Christ," and the righteousness which is by Him.
19*




LECTURE VII.
THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM.
HEBREWS XI. 10.
A city which hathfoundations, whose builder and maker is God.
WE have seen the manner in which He who was " the
Desire of all nations," met and satisfied/the yearnings of men
for an inward peacemaker, for one who, by the mighty magic
of his-word and Spirit, should change the tumult of man's soul
into a great calm; who should heal the hurts which each man
was conscious that he had inflicted upon himself; who should
set each man free from the bondage to those lords many,
his own lusts and inordinate affections, under whose cruel
tyranny he had come. But besides these longings for harmony and health and freedom in the region of his own inner
life, there are other longings and other desires which crave
satisfaction. For each, besides being simply a man, is also
a man among men: besides the sinful element which so perplexes his own inner life, in'thejrelation of one part of it to
the other, of the higher to the lower, which so threatens his
true life with destruction, not from foreign, but from intestine,
enemies-the same sinful element acting outwardly in himself, and in every other man, disturbs and perplexes his relation to them, and theirs-to him. That which remains in
himself, unsubdued, of evil, that which exists of the same in
every other man, brings about a collision between two selfishnesses.  "From  whence"-in  the wonderfully simple,
yet profound language of Scripture, language applicable to
the pettiest village brawl, and to the mightiest conflict that
has ranged one half of the world against tile other-" from
(222)




THE FOUNDER OF A!INGDOM.              223
whence come wars and fightings among you? come they
not hence, even of the lusts that war in your members?"
(Jam. iv. 1.)
At once the question has presented itself to every thoughtful man-it eminently did so to the great spirits of antiquity,-Is the warfare of these encountering selfishnesses
the necessary, the only condition of society? Is it our
wisdom to acquiesce in it, satisfied if this evil will allow
itself to be'kept within certain bounds-to be so far restrained, that a society; a living together of men for
social conveniences unattainable in their isolated state, becomes possible?  And is society such a fellowship of men
that have holden back, by mutual consent, so much of their
selfishness and evil, as would render habitation within the
same walls or in the same neighbourhood impossible,'and
would thus defeat them of the gains which they desired by
this combination to attain?
There have never been wanting,, -there were not wanting
of odd, —those who dared to avow this wolfish theory of
society for their own-that is, as a theory: for no community of men has ever subsisted upon it; no sooner have they
attempted to put it in practice, than, biting and devouring,
they have presently been utterly consumed one of another.
And they who even avowed it as a theory were few-a profligate sophist of the old or the new world, a Thrasymachus*
or a Mandeville;t the exceptions and not the rule.  For
rather it was truly seen that the fellowship of man with man,
so far from being an artificial product of his wants, something
added on to his true humanity, that lriy circular and complete
in himself already; something therefore which he might have
forgone without any necessary imperfection,-is that rather
which constitutes the very humanity itself —animals lerdi6g,
men only livings together.  It was seen that this fellowship
is the sphere in which alone his true life, that which belongs
N Plato's Republic,               t Fable of the Bees.




0o24                  LECTURE VII.
to him as man, can unfold itself —*in which alone he can
reach, it is little to say, the perfection of his being, but
without which he cannot be conceived otherwise than as a
monster, such a monster as the world never saw. It was
truly perceived of that other condition of absolute isolation,
that so far from being the state of nature, it is rather a stato
so unnatural that no man has ever perfectly reached it-the
most absolute savage, not having become an isolated unit,
not having been able to strip himself bare of all moral relations-being at most able to act as though he had not, but
never, able to cease from having these. And they understood therefore that not this tamed selfishness was the idea in
which the state consisted, and on which it reposed, but that
there was another to which every state and fellowship of
men, as it deserved the name, as it would'be any thing better than a pirate's deck or a robber's den, must be a nearer
or more remote approximation: a condition in which men
were holden together by invisible ties, —by sanctions which
not the flesh, but the spirit owned to be binding-by common rites,-by sanctities which men dared not neglect,tby a god Terminus keeping the boundaries of fields, —by a
dread of vengeance, not as the mere human recoil of outrage on the wrong-doer, but as being itself divine,-a condition in which men have felt that they were one people, not
so much in their common interests and common aims, or
even in their common history and descent and language, as
in the one tutelar deity that overlooked their city, and to
whom they had confided its keeping.
If it was so-if there was this sense existing in the hearts,
showing itself in the acts, of men, that the relations between
man and man rest on something out of sight, are spiritual
~ As is remaikably witnessed in the words, civilized, civilization.
The civilized man, as contradistinguished from the savage or utterly
degenerate man, is essentially the civis, belongs to a civitas.
t Sophocles, Antigone, 450 —460.




THE-IFOUNDER OF A KINGDOM.                225
relations, not those of force, or fraud, or convenience-that
men do not huddle together as cattle, to keep themselves
warm, nor band together as wild beasts, that they may hunt
in company; that law is' not a result of so much self-will
which each. man might have kept, yet for certain advantageous considerations throws into a common stock, but that
rather there is a law of laws, anterior to, and constituting
the ground of, each positive enactment-if men had any
sense of this divine order, which they did not themselves
constitute, but into which they entered; which to accept
was good, which to deny and fight against was evil,-if they
did thus believe in a kingdom of righteousness and truth,
and that we were ordained for that, (in the words of the
father of Roman philosophy, Nos ad justitiam esse natos,)if there was any true feeling that those lusts and desires, so
far from being the ground of the state, the cement which
held it together, were rather the element of decay which was
ever threatening its dissolution, and were to be denied as the
violations of the humanity, not recognized as its essentials;
then we have implicitly here the acknowledgment of, and
the yearning after, the kingdom of God.* They who be* Thus Cicero (De Legg.,) 1. 1, c. 7:) Universus hie mundus una
civitas communis Deorum atque hominum existimanda. Cf. De Fin.
1. 5, c. 23, and the glorious passage in Juvenal, (Sat. 15, 131-158,)
one of the noblest in antiquity on the fellowship of men with one
another, as resting on their divine original. I may be excused for
quoting a few lines:
Separat hoc nos
A grege mutorum, atque ided venerabile soli
Sortiti ingenium, divinorumque capaces,
Atque exercendis capiendisque artibus apti
Sensum' coelesti demissum traximus arce,
Cujus egent prona et terramin spectantia. Mundi
Principio indIlsit communis conditor illis
Tantium animas, nobis animum quoque; mutuus ut nos
Affectus petere auxilium, et prestare juberet,
I)ispersos trahere in populum, migrare vetusto




226                   LECTURE VIr.
lieved this, believed in - "the city which hath foundations."
in that only one which can have everlasting foundations, for
it is the only one whose foundations are laid in perfect
righteousness and perfect truth-the city "whose builder
and maker is God," which Abraham looked for, and because
he looked for, would take no portion in the cities of confusion round him, but dwelling in tents witnessed against
them, and declared plainly that he sought a country-the city
of which we already are made free, and which it was given
to the latest seer of the New Covenant, ere the book was
sealed, to behold in the spirit coming down from heaven in
its final glory.  (Rev. xxi. 2.)
And can we say that there were not such thoughts and
expectations stirring in the hearts of men-that the idea of
a perfect state, as well as of a perfect man, had not risen up
before the eyes of them, the men of desire, the souls to
which any spirit of higher divination was imparted? Were
not the latest speculations of the wisest sage, those to which
he fitly came after he had accomplished each other task,
concerning this very thing? Nor needs it to press that
derivation of religion which would make it the band and
bond, which binding men to God, binds them als% to one
another; for it is a derivation at the least questionable;*
De nemore, et proavis habitatas linquere silvas;.Zdificare domos, laribus conjungere nostris
Tectum aliud, tutos vicino limine somnos
Ut collata daret fiducia; protegere: armis
Lapsum, aut ingenti nutantem vulnere civem;
Communi dare signa tuba, defendier iisdem
Turribus, atque una portarum clave teneri.
5' Nitzsch (Theol. Stud. u. Krit. v. 1, p. 632) seeks elaborately to
prove that, according to the genius of the Latin language, the only
possible derivation of religio is Cicero's (De Nat. Deor., 1. 2, c. 28:)
Qui omnia, quie ad cultum Deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarent et tanquam relegerent, sunt-dicti religiosi ex relegendo. It will
thus have for its first meaning, the conscientious anxiety and accu



THiE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM.                 227
and the fact, to which such an etymology would give only
an additional proof, is unquestionable without it-I mean,
that the invisible ties were those in which every state was
acknowledged to consist, so that with their weakening it must
grow weak, with their perishing it must perish; while to
strengthen and to multiply these, was justly regarded as the
noblest mission of its noblest sons.  What if here too heathendom had but the negative preparation, and Judaism the
positive? what if the Jew could point to a state which did
realize, though through his own sin most inadequately, this
kingdom in its unripe and early beginnings, and if he was
upheld by the sure word of prophecy, that one day the King
of this kingdom  should be revealed, and should reign in
righteousness; while for the heathen they were for the most
part dreams to which he could impart no reality, realities
which tarried infinitely farther behind the idea which they
professed to embody —this was only according to the distribution, in God's manifold wisdom, of their several parts to
racy in the performances of the divine offices. The passage which
best explains how the the word obtains a wider meaning is this
from Arnobius, (Adv. Gen. 1. 4, c. 30:) Non enim qui solicite religit
et immaculatas hostias coedit... numina consentiendus est colere,
aut officia solus religionis implere.  This etymology was called in
question by Lactantius, who derives the word not from relegere, but
religare, to which derivation allusion is made in the text. He says
(Inst. Div., 1. 4, c. 24:) Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati
sumus, unude ipsa religio nomen accepit; et non ut Cicero interlpetatus est, a relegenldo. He has Lucretius on his side, to whose
words he alludes:
arctis
Religionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo.
Augustine, too, who at first had consented to Cicero's etymology,
inclines at a later period (Retract., 1. 1, c. 13) in favour of the other.
Freund (Lat. IWrtacrbuch, s. v.) without expressing himself at all
so strongly as Nitzsch has done in regard of the absolute inadmissibility of the other derivation, yet accepts as certainly preferable
the Ciceronian.




228                 LECTURE VII.
Jew and Gentile, in the preparation for Christ's coming; to
the one being already given the stamina and rudiments of
that which afterwards should unfold itself more fully, to the
other being given little more than the expectation and the
want-yet both so conspiring to prepare the way for his
appearing.
This want and this expectation Christ came to satisfy; for
I-e came not merely to awaken a religious sentiment in the
minds and hearts of his disciples, or to declare to them certain doctrines of which before they were ignorant; but to
found a kingdom, as He himself declared -from the first; as
St. John, the herald of his coming, had declared before
Him; "The kingdom of God is at hand;" "The kingdom
of God is among you."  For this term, "kingdom  of
God," we must not impoverish as though it were- merely
a convenient abstraction to express the sum total of the religious sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions of his disciples.  But this kingdom, as it is a kingdi'om, points to a
visible fellowship, and the embodiment therein of a number
of persons, constituting an organic whole, owning a single
head. And as it is a kingdom of God, it declares God to
be its author and its founder; it declares itself to be lifted
above the caprice of men, neither having been made, nor yet
being to be marred, by them; which they indeed may
deny, but which cannot deny itself, nor by their denial be
annulled.
The practical Roman saw as imuch as the natural man
could see of this in a moment-that the question at issue
between Christ and the world was not a question of one
notion and another, but of one kingdom and another; and
seeing, he came at once to the point, "'Art Thou a king,
then?"  And that empire which tolerated all other religions,
would have tolerated the Christian, instead of engaging in a
death;struggle with it, to strangle or be strangled by it, but
that it instinctively felt that this, however its first seat and




THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM.              223
home might seem to be in the hearts of men, yet could not
remain there, but would demand an outward expression for
itself-must go forth into the world, and conquer a dominion of its own-a dominion which would leave no room in
the world for another fabric of force and fraud i for it was
his dominion who, sitting on his throne, should scatter away
all evil with his eyes; who had said in a thousand ways,
" All the horns of the ungodly will I break, but the horns
of the righteous shall be exalted."
It is quite true that this kingdom, in the men who at any
time compose it, may misunderstand and mistake itself, even
as it has often done.  There are times when it caricatures
itself into a popedom, when knowing rightly that it ought to
have a real and outward existence, yet it will not believe
that it has this, or is a kingdom at all, unless it can outdo
the kingdoms of the world on their own ground, and in their
own fashion; unless it can be a kingdom like unto them,
and greater than they in their kind of power and magnificence and glory. It is quite true thalt times arrive
when it cannot believe in its own oneness unless it can
see that oneness represented to it in a visible Head. Yet
this only proves that times may arrive, when, through
the sin of its members, its consciousness of itself as God's
Church grows weak, when it has only too much lost hold
of the great truths on which it was founded, and which it
was intended to proclaim; and having done so, does, by
an inevitable necessity, act over again the unfaithful request of the children of Israel, when they desired a king
to go forth with their armies, as onie went forth with
the armies of the nations, and would not believe, unless
they could thus see him there, that "the shout of a king
was- among them:" (1 Sam. viii.) And the reaction from
this error must not make us to count that this kingdom can
only be spiritual when it ceases to be real, when retiring
into the hearts of men, and dwelling there apart, it claims
20




230                  LECTURE VII.
no more~ the world for its possession, and each region and
province of man's actual life for its own.
But to return. This kingdom, as it was a consummation
of all that men had ever hoped in the way of a kingdom of
righteousness, as it was a protest and witness against the
evil into which each kingdom  of the world, each fairest
polity of man's founding, was ever presently degenerating,
was not all. Christ came to give more than this; to give
not merely a kingdom of truth for some men, but for every
man; to found a fellowship which should be for men as men,
which should leave out none, which should call no man
common or unclean. This indeed was new, not merely in fact,
but even in theory; for it had hardly risen over the horizon
of their minds who stood in wisdom and in goodness upon
the mountain-summits of the world. The Greek ever left
out the barbarian; the freeman, the slave; the philosopher,
the simple. The highest culture of some was ever built
upon the sacrifice of others; they were pitilessly used up in
the process.  So far from  men themselves producing the
thought of a universal spiritual fellowship, even after it was
given, they were long in making it their own.  Thus Celsus
mocks at the madness of the Gospel, (for so to him it,
showed,)-adduces as enough to convince its author of a
shallow impracticable enthusiasm, that he should have proposed such a dream  as this, that Greeks, and Barbarians,
and Lybians, and all men to the ends of the earth, should
be united in the reception of one and the same doctrine.
Nor can we greatly wonder: the sense of diversity was
so strong, that which was differencing men was so mighty,
the intellectual superiority of the Greek over the Barbarian
was so immense, that we cannot be so much surprised to
find one thus mocking at the scheme for bringing all men
into one, as the shallow dream of an enthusiast's brain.
Such it must. have seemed to him, who had not insight
enough to perceive that the real ground of separation be



TItE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM.              231
tween men lay, not in natural distinctions of race, of customns, of language, but in different objects of worship, in the
gods many of polytheism. These were what kept men apart,
and rendered their union and communion impossible. -They
were not at one in the highest matter-of their lives: how
should they be in the lower? An'd if this was the ground
of division, then the walls of partition might yet be thrown
down, would indeed fall away of their own selves, when
once there was revealed to faith one God and Father of all,
-one Christ, a common object of love and adoration for all,
in whom  the affections of all might centre,-one Spirit
effectually working in, all. Then indeed the Babel mischief, the confusion of spirits, whereof the confusion of
tongues was only the outward sign, would cease; even as
for one prophetic moment on the day of Pentecost, in the gift
of tongues, it had ceased,* in sign that the Church which
that day was founded was for all nations and tongues and
tribes. The distinctions between men were indeed infinite,
reaching far down into the deeps of their being, yet not to
that being's centre; and in the regeneration, in that mighty
act of God's which does not obliterate distinctions,' but
-reconciles them in a higher unity, they might all, so far as
they were elements of separation, be annulled.  When to
all alike it was permitted to say, " We are Christ's, and
Christ is God's," then the secret of a fellowship was imparted, which should include all. nations, in which there
should be neither wise nor simple, Greek nor Barbarian,
bond nor free, but Christ should be all in all.
Of all this the world had, beforehand, scarcely,the faintest
intimations-the poorest parodies. - Yet parodies perchance' Grotius; Pceno linguarum dispersit homines (Gen. xi.,) donum
linguarum dispersos in unaum populum reeollegit. In the Persian
religion there was the expectation of a day coming when, with the
abolition of all evil, Eva jl ov xg  KIEv t    oao~ev &vOpXo0v  pcxap[ov
xa,,~oy4xaov &adcvVt  y Es,10au. (Plutarch, DeIs. et Osir., c. 47.)




232                  LECTURE VII.
there were; and we may be allowed to trace dim indistinct
yearnings even for this, for the breaking down of the middle
wall of partition, for the making of twain. one new man.
Thus there were already in the centuries anterior to our Lord
nleeting-places for the Greek and Jew.  Remarkable in this
respect was the existence of such a city as Alexandria, where
the Jew and Greek met, and sought to exchange to mutual
profit the most precious commodities each of his own intellectual and spiritual land, the Jew making himself acquainted
with Greek culture, the Old Testament Scriptures becoming
accessible to Greek readers. Yet still these meetings were
intellectual only: no true blending did or could have followed from them. It is the fire of charity which must melt,
ere there can be any real moulcding into one. In vain had
the whole East and West jostled violently together; they
had hardly mingled any more for this. A certain surface
civilization had ensued, which was common to both; but
hearts waited for more prevailing bands than those which
even an Alexander could weave, ere they would knit themselves together in one.  And as far as any practical realization of the. hopes which at any time the world cherished
from this it now was further off than ever. T[he iron kingdom, the fourth beast, dreadful and terrible and strong
exceedingly, had broken all other, and was stamping the
residue under its feet; until it seemed now as if brutal force
was all that remained, or that had a meaning any more, and as
if the world only could be prevented from falling into pieces
by those links and bands of iron, which were forged
around it.
But how hateful such a world was to live in, how intense
a loathing it inspired in each nobler spirit, the works of
Tacitus seemed preserved to us especially to tell.  For
surely this is the key-note of them, the predominant
thought, —this indignation and scorn, which all words,
even his own, seem weak to him to utter, at the sight of the




THIM  REDErEMER FROM SIN.            23 3
high places of the earth, the seats of blessing, the thrones
of beneficent power, occupied by the meanest and basest of
their kind,-till we feel, as we read, this conviction to have
been branded as with burning iron on his soul, that it were
better ten thousand times not to be, than to witness the
things which he has witnessed, and to bear the things which
he has borne.*  Nor on his soul only was the conviction
branded, but on those, we cannot doubt, of multitudes beside, whose more dumb agony found only its adequate
expression in his words.
But these failures, these shipwrecks of the world's hopes,
these issues of things so different from the promise with
which they started, this agony, this despair, they were not
for nothing.  They were part of that severe discipline of,
love to which the world was being submitted: they helped
to constitute that fulness of time in which the Son of God
should come, and coming, find acceptance. Not till the
world's pride and self-confidence were thoroughly broken,
would it have been prepared to humble itself under his cross,
would it have accepted that cross for the standard round
which it rallied. For the breaking of this pride two great
experiments had been going forward at the same time, had
run through, as they gave a moral meaning to, all the anterior history of the world-experiments which needed both
to be thoroughly and fairly tried.  Of the Jewish it concerns us not-here to speak at large: it was this, if righteousness could come by the law; if there was a law which could
give life-an external rule of conduct, even though of divine
appointment, which could sanctify and save —if there was
not a weakness and falseness in man, which would defeat
and frustrate it all. This was most needful, and only
through the process of this could a Saul ever have been
transformed into a Paul.
Agricola, c. 2, 3, 45.
20*




234                   LECTURE Vr.
But the other, which may not seem to us so directly of
God's ordaining, yet was so indeed: for it was of its very
essence that He should not mingle in it so far, should seem
to have less to do with it; —that those to whom it was given
to try it out should walk in their own ways, and be left to
their own resources. The experiment was this, whether man
could unfold his own well-being out of hirhself-whether
art or philosophy or institutions could give it to him; whether in any of these he could truly find himself and the good
for which he was made. And of this experiment we cannot
say that it was unfairly tried, or imperfectly worked out.
All which was required for its success was there, and had
been given in largest measure. God had raised up men of
the most glorious gifts, of the mightiest strength of will;
and surely had deliverance lain in aught which man could
unfold, by his own strength, out of his own being, the world
had been indeed redeemed, and had found the fountain of
salvation in itself.
But fair and flattering, full of the promise of success, as
the results showed oftentimes for a while, there was ever a
worm at the root of this glory of the world. The moment
of highest perfection was evermore the moment of commencing decay. How deeply tragic, though in different ways,
the histories of the Greek and Roman world! how had the
paths -of glory led one and the other, though by diverse
ways, to the grave of all their moral and spiritual independence; the'intellectual conquests of the one and the worldly
triumphs of the other, however diverse, yet having agreed
in this, that they alike left the victors enslaved, degraded,
and debased-the Greek a scorn to the Roman,* and the
Roman to himself.  And now the fresh creative energy of
an earlier time had all departed and disappeared; and that
springing hope, which contemplated its objects, if not as
See such'passages as Cicero Pro Flacco, c. 4; Juvenal, Sat. 3,
58-113; 10, 174.




THE REDEEMER FROM SIN.               235
attained, yet at least as attainable, was no more.  The world
had outlived itself and its attractions —*saddest of all, had
outlived even its hopes; the very springs of those hopes
seemed to be dried up for ever. Yet was not this all without its purpose and its blessing.  It was'something to be
shut into the one remedy, all other devices having failed, —
to have come thus to the husks; for this alone would have
sent back the prodigal of -heathenism to claim anew his share
in the rich provision of his father's house. This was the
emptiness, of which Christ's coming should be the answering fulness.  In all this agony, this mighty yearning of
souls, the gates of the world were being made high and lifted
up, that the King of Glory might come in. Only in such
an utter despair, in such a sense of decrepitude, of death
already begun, would the world have welcomed aright the
Prince of Life, who cam'e to make all things young, and out
of the wreck and fragments of an old and decaying world,
to build up a fairer and a new.
And such he built up indeed.  "They went astray in the
wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in:
hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. So they
cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them
from their distress., He led them forth by the right way,
that they might go to a city of habitation." And this city
of habitation, this kingdom, was all which they had asked
for, or could ask. It was a free fellowship, the constraining
bands of it being bands of love and not of force; and He
that founded it fulfilling the idea of the true spiritual conqueror of men, who should subdue all hearts, not by force or
by flattery, but by the mighty magic of love-as some of old
had been reaching out after this, when they dreamed of
Osiris, that he went forth to conquer the world, not with
chariots and with horses, but with music; for so had they
Augustine: Mundus tantS rerum labe contritus, ut etiam speciem seductionis anmiserit.




236                  LECTURE VIT.
felt that the power which truly wins must be a spiritual one,
an appeal to the latent harmonies in every man-that in a
kingdom of heaven law must be swallowed up in love,-not
repealed, but glorified and transfigured, its hard outline
scarcely visible any more in the blaze of light with which it
is surrounded.
It was a large fellowship-larger than the largest-which
the heart of man had conceived; for it should leave out
none, it should trample upon none: He that was its Head
should " be favourable to the simple and needy, and preserve
the souls of the poor."  Nay, it should be larger than this,
for it should embraceheaven and earth.  That whereof the
great Italian sage had caught a glimpse, that qtam&* that
amity or reconciliation of all things, whether they he things
in heaven or things on earth, had found its fulfilment.
HIenceforward heaven and earth, angels and men, constituted one kingdom, " his' body, the fulness of Himn that filleth all in all."
It was a righteous fellowship.  If aught of unrighteousness was within it, it was there only as a contradiction to
the law of that kingdom, and presently to be separated off;
even as all of unrighteous that was against it was in due
time to be taken out of the way; for it,in its weakness was
yet stronger than the strongest.  It was only weak as the
staff of Moses was weak; which being one, and an -instrument of peace, did yet break in shivers all weapons of war,
the ten thousand spears of Pharaoh and his armies.
And being this righteous kingdom it was also an eternal
kingdom, having in it no seeds of decay, a kingdom not to
be moved, which should endure as long as the sun and moon
endureth, of the increase of which there should be no end.
0 Porphyrius (De Vita Pythag.:) ~GtLav  (;c(aEhr ) Vc<Vrw fpg
3ZOfVaS)   EL0& v TEc   0'p65 a V0p -$t95 hoY1E SOee  7BlpO5 CX7S\
E 6t  vpoV fpi5s c ou.  See Baur's Aaoonius von Tyana
und Chiris2Ius p. 194.




TIHE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM.             237
To this city, brethren, ye are come-the city of which
such glorious things are spoken, the city of our God. Not
only prophet and king of Israel, but sage and seer of every
land, have desired to see the things which we see, and have
not seen them-so truly are they the best things which man
can conceive, or God can give. And what do they require
of us but a walk corresponding? Citizens of no mean city,
whose citizenship is in heaven, we must notshow ourselves
unworthy of so high an honour. It is the very aggravation
of the sinner's sin that he deals frowardly in the land of
uprightness; and because he does so it is declared that he
shall not see the majesty of the-Lord. (Isai. xxvi. 10.) We
baptized men are in this "land of uprightness," in this
kingdom of the trnth.  For it is not that we shall come, but
in the sure word of Scripture, we are come to Mount Zion,
the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to
all the glorious company which is there.
And surely the apostle's argument which he drew fronm
this ought to stand strong for us, his exhortation to find
place in our hearts; " Wherefore we receiving a kingdom
which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may
serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear."
(Heb. xii. 28.)




LECTURE VIII.
CONCLUDING LECTURE.
1 THESSALONIANS V. 21
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
IT needs not, I trust, to remind you, brethren,- that in
these lectures which are now concluding, we have been engaged in the seeking to discern the prophecy of Christianity,
which has run through all history.  I have traced in them,
so far as under the conditions and limitations of such discourses I might, the manner in which the old world was in
many ways blindly struggling to be that better thing which
yet it never could truly be, except by the free grace and
gift of God,-to come to that new birth, which yet it could
not reach, until power for this mighty change was given it
from on high. We have asked ourselves whether we could
not discern an evident tending of men's thoughts ahd feelings and desires in one direction, and that direction the cross
of Christ, a great spiritual under-current, which has been
strongly and constantly setting that way; so that his bringing forth of his kingdom  into open manifestation, if in one
sense a beginning, was in another, and in as true a sense, a
crowning end.
And it has cohered intimately with the purpose of these
lectures, which, according to the purpose of their founder,
should assume more or less of a defensive character; to urge
the apology for our Christian faith which is here. It has
been to me an argument for the truth and dignity of his
mission who was its author, to find that in _im  all fulness
238




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                 239
dwelt, all lines concentrated, all hopes of the world were accomplished. For surely the King of Glory shows to us
more glorious yet, when we are able to contemplate Him not
merely as the Prophet and Priest and King of the Covenant but as the satisfier of vaguer, though not less real,
aspirations, of more undefined longings, of more wide-spread
hopes-when looking at minm, we take note with the inspired
seer, that on his head are maan?)i crowns,-and looking at
his doctrtne, that not Israel only, but the isles also had vwaited
for his law.
This my subject I have now brought to a close; or at
least I dare not, at this latest moment, open it upon another
side. I may perhaps more profitably dedicate the present
opportunity to the considering of some ways in which our
recognition of the intimate relation between all that has gone
before and all that now is between the hopes of the past, and
the fulfilnrents of the present, may practically and usefully
influence our study of antiquity.  For indeed a Christian
view of the ancient world, which shall neither despise it, because it is not what it could not be, itself Christian, because its
grains of finer gold, of purer ore, are mixed with so'much
impure and debasing; nor yet on the other hand to glorify
it, as though its imperfect anticipations of the truth were as
good as or rendered superfluous, the manifestation of the
perfect image of God in his Son, or its faint streaks of light
were as truly an illumination as the day-spring from on
high; this true, it is most profitable for us that we should
win.  It may preserve us from extremes -and exaggerations
on either hand, into which we are in danger of running.
It may preserve us, too, from  a listless, careless, unfruitful study of that which, unless we neglect the plain duties
that lie before us, must form one of the chief occupations of
several, the most precious and least recoverable years of our
lives,-years in which our minds are to be built up, if built
up at all; in which, more than in any other, our characters




240                  LECTURE VIII.
are being moulded, and are receiving that impress which
they shall bear to the end.
The exaggerations to which I allude are twofold. There
is that, first, against which one is almost unwilling to say
a word, springing as it so often does, out of a state of mind in
which there is so much that is admirable,- giving witness
for a moral earnestness, without which men would have been
scarcely tempted to it; I mean the exggeration of those,
who in a deep devotion to the truth; as it is a truth in Christ
Jesus, count themselves bound by their alleigance to Him
by his Name which they bear, his doctrine which they have
learned, his Spirit which they have received, to take up a
hostile attitude to every thing, not distinctly and avowedly
Christian, as though any other bearing were a treason to his
cause-a betrayal of his exclusive right to the authorship of
all the good which is in the world. In this temper we may
dwell only on the guilt and misery and defilements, the
wounds and bruises and hurts, of the heathen world; or if
aught better is brought under our eye, we may look askant
and suspiciously upon it, as though all recognition of it were
disparagement of something better. And so we may come to
regard the fairest deeds of unbaptized men as only more
showy sins. We may have a short but decisive formula' with
which to dismiss them: we may say, These deeds were not
of faith, and therefore they could not please God.  The men
that wrought them knew not Christ, and therefore their work
was worthless-hay, straw and stubble, to be utterly burned
up in the day of trial of every man's work.
Yet is it in truth a violation of the law of conscience, to
use so sweeping a language as this. Our alleigance to Christ
as the one fountain of light and life, deir~ands that we affirm
none to be good but Him-no goodness but that which has
proceeded. from Him: but it does not demand that we deny
goodness, because of the place where we find it-because we
find it a garden-tree in the wilderness; but rather that




CONCLUDING LECTURE.               241
we claim it for Him, who was its true source and author, and
whom it would itself have gladly owned as such, if, belonging
to a happier time, it could have known Him. We do not
make much of a light of nature, when we allow a righteousness in those, to whom in the days of their flesh the Gospel
had not come; we only affirm that the Word, though He had
not yet dwelt among, yet being the light which lighteth every
man that cometh into the world, had lighted them.  Some
glimpses of his beams, gilded their countenances, and gave
to them. whatever brightness they wore; and in recognizing
this brightness, whatsoever it was, we are giving honour to
Him, and not to them, glorifying the grace of God, and not
the powers of man.
I can well understand how, in the earnestness and exclusiveness of a first love to Christ, and to that word of Holy
Scripture which directly testifies of Him, all teaching of all
other books, in which is no explicit mention of his name,
should appear valueless to us; and all else taste flat and
dull, because we taste not there the sweetness of that One
Name which is sweeter than all. Yet were it good for us to
see that, without going back one jot from this entire devotedness to the Lord of our life, which everywhere looks for
Him, and finds everything savourless without him -a
devotedness.too'precious to be foregone, and for which no
other gains would compensate-that without, I say, going
back from this, we might yet enlarge the sphere of our Christian sympathies, and take a wider range of objects within
it. To this end let us learn to cultivate a finer spiritual ear,
and one which shall be more quick to catch the fainter echoes
and whispers of his name, which are borne to us from other
fields than those of Scripture; let us learn to look for Him
even where they thought not and could not have thought
directly of Him, whose pages we may hold in our hand.
Let us aim to take keener note of the manner in which all
things pointed to Hir, all things were asking for Hiim —the
21




242                     LECTURE VII.
world passing judgment on itself,* and out of its own lips at
once condemning itself and demanding its Redeemer,t demanding him in frequent acknowledgments of the vanity of
all things, in  confessions of its own incurable evils,J in
voices of deepest sadness and despair,-as theirs who by
word or solemn rite declared plainly that it was better
for man never to have been born than to live; or, if he lived,
that then the gods had no better boon for him than an early
death-~and this not in the Christian sense of death as a
passage into life, but only as the harbour from the world's
wo, the anodyne of the world's pains.
Let us take note, too, of the manner in which the language
of philosopher and of poet seems often marvellously overCicero (Tusc. Qzucest., 1. 2, c. 22:) In quo viro erit perfecta
sapientia, (queem adhuc nos quidem videmus neminem: sed philosophorum sententiis, qualis futuris sit, si mod6 aliquando fuerit, exponitur,) is igitur, &cc.  Compare Theogonis, 615, OWiv84   -oG &sst
ayaoQOv xa& IE'ptov avvpa vov vYv a'vOpw'usv r&xato5 xaop6.-Even
supposing a man were to reach the highest goodness, this could only
be, as was confessed, through a long process of,anterior mistake
and error: he must be as a diamond which is polished in its own
dust.  Seneca (De Clement, 1. 1, c. 6:) Etiam si quis tam bene purgavit animum, ut nihil obturbare eum amplius possit aut fallere,
ad innocentiam tamen peccando pervenit.
t Seneca (Ep. 52.) Nemo per se satis valet ut emergat; oportei
manurns liguis posrzigat; aliquis educat.
+ Thucydides, 1. 3, c. 45; Seneca, De Iiti, l. 2, c. 8.
& Compare the remarkable fragment of Euripides, quoted in the
original by Clemens of Alexandria (Strom., 1. 3, c. 3,) and in a Latin
translation by Cicero, (Tuse. Disp., 1. 1, c. 48.)
MEtsye,yep s/c&59, svoyov o;oeoveiVovv,
Tdiv cpiv6a Opnvsts 1,5 0d  EPZEe'are xUaxc
Tiov S' a  OGavovdca xao tobvov, 7tsetavt2tivov
XZapoveaS, SErVatovYfve   EXAsC'ES   86ttIoYv.
Compare Herodotus, 1. 6, c. 4; Pliny, H. 2N., 1. 7, c. 1 and c. 41.
Si verum facere judicium volumus, ac repudiata omni fortunic ambltione decernere, mortalium nemo est feli.r; Pindar, Pyth., 8, 131.




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                  243
ruled to have a deeper signifieance, to bear the burden of a
larger and completer thought, than it is possible that they
who uttered it could have had in their mind, or could have
attached to their words.  As for instance, when it is said*
that the highest righteousness must be approved in extremest trial, that if we would know certainly whether one be
indeed a lover of the good, he must be set in those conditions, in which to abide by the good shall bring upon him
every outward calamity, shame arid loss and scorn and torture and death, all which he might have avoided would he
ever so little have gone back from that good; the righteousness which he chooses must be stripped utterly bare of every
ornament, yea, must seem  to the world as the extremest
unrighteousness, and then only it will be seen whether he
loves it for its own sake-to us Christians shall not this possible case at once present itself as an actual one? Shall we
not catch here, as many indeed have caught,? a prophetic
word about the cross, and about Him who even in this way
was proved, by ignominy and scorn and suffering and death,
whether he would love the good and hate the evil;'and who
did, by a distinct act of his will, choose for his portion that
righteousness to which all these were linked, and which
could only lead Him by roughest paths to the shamefullest
and bitterest end?  Or when another expresses his conviction that a sacred Spirit dwells with man, yea, not with him
~ By Plato (De Repub. 1. 2, c. 4, 5.) I have not seen it noted
how the reverse of the picture, the perfectly unrighteous man,
whom Plato draws, is almost as remarkable a prophecy in its kind,
of Antichrist, and of the deceitful glory which will surround him.
t Grotius (De Yerit. Rel. Christ., 1. 4, c. 12:) Et verd letius esse
honestum, quoties magno sibi constat sapientissimi ipsorum dixere.
Plato, De Republica 11 quasi prevscius, ait, ut vere justus exhibeatur,
opus esse ut virtus ejus omnibus ornamentis spolieter, ita ut ille
habeatur ab aliis pro scelesto, illudatur, suspendatur denique.. Et
certe summre patientite exemplum ut exstaret, aliter obtineri non
poterat.




244                   LECTURE VII1.
only, but fin him, a Spirit which is not his own, however
freely it converses with him, a Spirit which treats him as he
treats it,* shall we refuse to acknowledge here a word which
was reaching out after that Spirit, the Spirit of the Father
and the Son, which, dwelling in God, does also dwell in
sanctified souls; which, if we grieve, will grieve us, which,
if we continue to provoke, will utterly forsake us? And in
many such ways as these we may disentangle the golden
threads of a finer woof than its own, which were running
through the whole tissue which the ancient world was weaving for itself; we may delightedly observe how the cross of
Christ was as an invisible magnet, drawing hearts to itself
by a mighty, though secret, attraction, in ages long before
it was openly lifted up, an ensign for the nations.
Let us remember too how little the world could have
done without these preparations which sometimes we are
tempted to despise. Difficult as was the world's reception
of the word, and its transition to the faith, of Christ, how
much more difficult would it have been if the way had not
been thus prepared.  What another thing would it have
been, if the word about the Son of God, where it first was
delivered, besides strengthening and purifying and enlarging, had needed also to create, the very foundations of religious belief and ethical science on which it rested; if it bad
been needful for it to be not merely the seed, but the soil,having first to form the very ground in which it should
itself afterwards find room and depth to germinate. If
instead of finding a language ready at hand which it could
appropriate, and needed only thus to rescue for itself,t if,
Seneca (Epist. 41:) Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet, malorum bonorumque nostrorum observator et custos; hie prout i nobis tractatus
est, ita nos ipse tractat...Quemadmodum iadii solis contingunt quidem terram, sed ibi sullt unde mittuntur, sic animus magnus et
sacer, et in hoc demissus ut propius diving nossemus, conversatur
quidem nobiscum, sed hlret origini sume.
t- Thus not merely the more obvious, but the more recondite rites




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                     em )
instead of'tllis, all nobler words and signs, all which spoke
of worship, of religion, of sanctity, of initiation, of atonement, of piety, had been absent from it, how different the
case would have been.  And with the absence of the things,
there would also have been inevitably the absence of the
iwords which are their correlatives; since language is no more
than thought and feeling permanently fixing and embodying
themselves; it is but as the pillars of Hercules, to mark
how far the conquests of spirit have advanced
No one can have thoughtfully perused the modern records
of missionary labour among savage tribes, and the almost
insurmountable hindrances opposed to the reception of the
Gospel by languages, if they deserve the name, stripped of
each nobler and deeper element,-languages in which is no
speculation, no distinction, no hoarded thought, no embodied morality, no unconscious wisdom,-no terms, in short,
but for the barest needs or the vilest doings* of the animal
of heathenism, have been made to set forth far better things than
themselves. For example, the mysteries yield the substratum of language and imagery and allusion to each word of the following noble
passage, in which Clement (Cohort. ad Gent., c. 12,) is exhorting the
Gentiles to become   iccs  of Christ:'a Acv  ytcov am 0nocp
v6npacov,' Xco qptos axnpaCtov. 6qhovovov~LC,  Z'tovS ovp, vo-v zaO to
~sEOv EAo7~voa5  >50o'Tv/Yxos, stvovxSV  O    ~ Spoqcpv' E v   6O Kvpto5,
Xbto16p'1 d(geCoL qsvarifv 6T ecuZaYa, qs pwPX OsCwea Ps lCsiaps'oyv 7etdGV6'eVxoa,  ac6Xos'e'povAs"ov.'TavLo''vov Ean v tvc6'e'spsOv'C paXEVfecT. Et PovMi, xcc s fV iCvov, -Gd XopEtrVEt5 asEt'  yyEQv
tMOb'eov aO Evvl~'Ov goxd avCGVSEOpov xams povov ovZ'co5 0Eov, svvvttvovvz'o5'uv tEov Osov A7Oov.
Languages like one of the North American Indian, which possesses a word for a tomahawk, but none for God; or that of a tribe
in Australia, which with the same deficiency, has yet a word
to describe the process by which an unborn child may be destroyed
in its mother's womb. On all this subject of language rising and
falling with the rise and fall of people's moral and spiritual life, and
on the speech of savages as not being the primal rudimlents, but
21*




246                    LECTURE VIII.
man, without feeling that a miserable necessity is imposed
on the Truth when it must weave for itself the very garments in which it shall array itself, and is in danger of losing its treasures in the very attempt to communicate them,
-so wretched are the only channels through which it can
convey them. And considering this, he will esteem it to
have been an infinite mercy, yea a very primal necessity,
that the Truth, where it uttered itself in that which should
be its normal utterance for all future, ages of the Church,
where it first took body and shape, should have found, as
regarded language, vessels ready prepared for its new wine,
and only waiting for a higher consecration,-an inheritance
which it had but to make its own, entering upon it, as the
childreti of Israel entered upon vineyards which they had
not planted, and wells which they had not digged, and
houses which they had not built, of which yet they became
the rightful possessors from henceforth.
Nor can we doubt that by that, which we with our fuller
knowledge, our larger grace, are inclined to slight, many
were preserved from defilements, in which otherwise they
had been inevitably entangled. This salt may have been
powerless to give the savor of life to that with which it came
in contact; but that progress of corruption, that dissolution
of social and personal life, which it was unable ultimately to
arrest, it yet retarded for a time.* It preserved many a
the ultimate wreck, of a language, there is much of deep interest in
De Maistre's Soirees de St. Petersbourg, Deux. Entret.
* The consideration of the Greek Philosophy as a Apoaou&8Eta
for the reception of the absolute Christian truth, is a more recurring one, and takes a more prominent place, in the writing of the
later Clement, than perhaps in those of any other teacher of the
early Church. Thus he speaks of it in one place as a step to something higher: (I]0V.opdY ogaa  d     xW a   Xptc6tv  qb?&oonqaU,
Strom., 1. 6, c. 8.) Again, as a preparatory discipline, and ordained
to be such by the providence of God: (Ix  V5 OEsa; ipovoux5 8s8oa0O6u, ~po7ta&8vov  e;V sEt Sz   b  Xplttov   Z~ ts,   Strom., 1. 6,




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                     247
man for something better than itself, and in not a few cases
of which we have distinct record, handed over in due time
c. 17;) and so again as an anterior culture of the soil of man's
heart for receiving the seed of life:;poxa0atpat xat ApoEOs6&& eq7v
4v:r1v EG  Apa8ooVn b6       (Strom., 1. 7, c. 3.)  It would seem
from more passages than one in his writings, that he felt it needful
to defend himself for the so high appreciation in which he held the
philosophy of Greece; 6v Ft5v 8&.3StVxo, X  scOS ova v eixova
Evapy7  OEtvy G&p~cL v'EXts&  MoEcswe v-.  There were those who
warned against its attractions, as being those of the "strange
woman" of Prov. v. 3-8, "whose lips drop as a honeycomb, and
her mouth is smoother than oil." (Strom., 1. 1, c. 5.) The heathen
philosophers were according to them the "thieves and robbers"
which " came before" Him who was the true Shepherd of men
(Strom., 1. 1, c. 17.) Tertullian may be taken as a representative
of the more intolerant view, (A4pol., c. 46:) Quid simite Philosophus
et Christianus?  Grmcim discipulus et cceli? famm negotiator et
salutis? verborum, et factorum operator...interpolator erroris, et
integrator veritatis? furator ejus et custos?  Whatever exaggeration there is in the language of Clement, yet this I think is certain,
that his strong expressions have their rise in a deep and solemn
feeling, that nothing anywhere which is good, by which men have
been kept back from any evil, or prepared to any good, but must be
traced up to God. He dared not trace it to any other; thus speaking of this very thing his words are, acvav  E vyap aiicos rv
0anv O  O e~S.  (Strom., 1. 1. c. 5.)  And that he did not make the
difference between the two a mere question of degree is plain from
such expressions as these: Xwcop'6eat''Ex:,rnXn   2OsEC0    5~ xU0O
pa      all tot3 Sowii~ js  O VOk  v   ~ m0 i ba  yETE  yrE EXs
xal U, &Eots&L XVpLCZ0tEpq,  XUL 0ff i' &Vvd 4Et  0so&L oXeO   Ydp s~65C
(Strom., 1. 1, c. 20.)  That other was the wild olive which had
need, ere it bore any nobler fruit, of insertion upon the good
(Strom., 1. 6, c. 15;) words which may suggest a comparison with
that most eloquent passage at the end of the first book of Theodoret, De Grec. Affect. Curat.  And those remarkable words have
been often quoted in which Clement likens heretics and founders of
human systems to the rabble rout that tore the body of Pentheus
limb from limb: so they tore the truth, and then each boasted of




248                    LECTURE VIIT.
its votaries to the school of Christ.  To mention but a single example.  Few who have once read, will forget the manner in which the falling in with the Hortesi'us* of Cicero
kindled the young Augustine, and inflamed him with a passionate love of wisdom.  What a moment it was in his life
when he lighted on that treatise, how greatly did it serve to
arrest him in that downward career which he was then too
rapidly treading, to hinder him  from  utterly laying waste
his moral life.  How  did it set him  to the seeking for
goodly pearls, though the goodliest of all, the pearl of great
price, he was not yet to find!  He himself in after years
describes all this, with thankful ascriptions of praise to the
guiding hand of his God, and telling how that book, though
it did not and could not bring him  into the inmost sanctuary of the faith, yet was to him in the truest sense a
porch to that auguster temple not made with hatnds, into
which at a later day he should be privileged to enter; and
did at once hand him over to the searching of the Scriptures, though as yet his eyes were holden, and he found not
in them till a later day their hid treasures of wisdom and
of knowledge.t
the fragment in his hands as though it were the whole (bdiaz'
O2tp EtCLECV, W5   A4VX' ai     1Pi~CfOLV.)
Otherwise called De Philosophi.  It has been lost, all' but a
few unimportant fragments. The subject was the superiority of
philosophy to eloquence.
t Conf., 1. 3, c. 4: Usitato jam  descendi ordine perveneram in
librum  quemdam  cujusdam  Ciceronis, cujus linguam  fere omnes
mirantur, pectus non ita.  Sed liber ille ipsius exhortationem continet ad philosophiam, et vocatur Hortensius.  Ille vero liber mutavit
affectum meum,...et vota ac desideria mea fecit alia.  Viluit mihi
repente omnis vana spes, et immortalitatem  sapientme concupiscebam mstu cordis incredibili.
He has very interesting acknowledgments (Conf., 1. 7, c. 9, 20,
21) of the effect which the Platonist books exerted upon him at the
great crisis of his life that went before his conversion,-what he




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                    249
But I spake of exaggerations on either side into which we
were liable to fall.  To take the very opposite extreme to
this of painting the old world to ourselves in lines and
colours of unredeemed blackness, we may dwell exclusively
on the fairer side which it presents, shutting wilfully our
eyes to each darker and more revolting spectacle which it
displays. We may find in its art and its literature that
which gratifies our taste, and out of a lack of any deeper
moral -wants, we may come to say with the poet, " Beauty
is Truth, Truth Beauty," and, where we find beauty and
proportion and harmony, may be ready to pardon the absence of every thing beside; just as those Italian literati at
the revival of learning, who preferred calling themselves
brethren in Plato to brethren in Christ, to whom the groves
of Academus were far more than the waters of Siloam, and
the cultivation of taste than the promotion of holiness-men
who so mourned over the vacant thrones of Olympus, that
to them a heaven opened, with angels ascending and descending upon-the Son of man, seemed but an insufficient compensation.
But such a nearer acquaintance with the world which was_
found in them, and what he did not find,-where they helped, and
where rather they hindered him: concluding with this declaration
of the things which he had looked for there in vain: Hoc illae litterae non habent, Lacrymnas Confessionis, Sacrificium tuum, Spiriturn contribulatum, Cor \contritum et humiliatum, Populi salutem,
Sponsam, Civitatem, Arrham Spiritis Sancti, Poculum pretii nostri.
Nermo ibi contat: Nonne Deo subdita erit anima mea? ab ipso enim
salutaro meum: etenim ipse Deus meus, et salutaris menus, susceptor
meus, non movebor amplidus. Nemo ibi audit vocantem: Venite ad
me qui laboratis...Et aliud est de silvestri cacumine videre patriam
pacis, et iter ad earnm non invenire, et frustra conari per invia, circum
obsidentibus et indsidiantibus fugitivis desertoribus cum principe
suo leone et dracone: et aliud tenere viam illuc ducentem, curd
ccelestis imperatoris munitam, ubi non latrocinantur qui coelestem
militiam deseruerunt; vitant enim earn sicut supplicium.




250                    LECTURE VIIM
before and out of Christ, as these studies faithfully pursued
must give us, Will teach us that if there are sides on which
heathen mythology stands related to, and has the recollection and intimation of something higher than itself, there
are also other sides upon which it lies under the influence of
man's corruption, is itself the outgrowth of his foolish sindarkened heart, with the impurities of its origin cleaving to
it,-does itself help distinctly to mark his downward progress toward idolatry, and toward the losing of the Creator
in the creature,-is often only the strangely distorted resemblance, never more than the faint prophecy, of the coming
truth. And if so, we shall feel that to linger with that is
ridiculous, whose only worth is that it hands on to something better then itself, and is capable of being translated
into a -nobler language than its own.  So too we shall feel
that if the ancient philosophy had glorious ethical precepts,
yet were they but adumbrations of the truth, since they
wanted, for the most part,-that body and substance which
action alone could give them; as is plain from unnumbered
confessions and complaints on all sides heard, that the world's
physicians had not healed themselves, much less theirpatients;
as is plainer still in the collossal character which sin had assumed,* till, at the time of Chris4's appearing, it sat as it
were incarnate, in the person of a Tiberius, on the throne of
the world.t In all this we shall behold how feeble all the
A In its two great aspects of lust and cruelty; the passages in
proof of the first may remain unquoted; but what a picture of the
last, this account of the gladiatorial games and of the manner in
which they had grown ever bloodier, presents! (Seneca, Ep. 7:)
Quidquid ante pugnatum est, misericordia fuit: nunc omissis nugis,
mera homicidia sunt...Plagis aguntur in vulnera, et mutuos ictus
nudis et obviis pectoribus excipiunt. Intermissum est spectaculum?
interim jugulantur homines, ne nihil agatur.
t With only slight exaggeration Seneca compares the aspect of
the world in which he was living to that of a city taken by storm
(De Benef., 1. 7, c. 27:) Si tibi vite nostrte vera imago succurret,




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                     251
barriers which the world's wisdom  could raise up, to stay
the overflowings of the world's ungodliness and evil.*
But to imagine yet a third position; we may read these
books, not indeed setting them up in our affections against the
truths which ought to be dearest to us, nor on the other
hand slighting them, because not themselves Christian; but
failing altogether to trace in them-any relation at all to the
great facts of the spiritual life of man.  WVe may read them,
forgetting that the meaning of books is to make us understand something else besides books, that we miss their si-gnificance to us, when they have their end in themselves,
when they do not hand us on to life and to action; when
videbevis tibi videre captin cummaxime civitatis faciem, in qua
omisso pudoris rectique respectu vires in consilio sunt, velut signo
ac- permiscenda. omnia dato. Non igni non ferro abstinetur: soluta
legibus scelera sunt, nec religio quidem, quse inter arma hostilia
supplices texit, ullum impedimentum est ruentium in pratdam. Hie
ex privato, hic ex publico, hic ex profano, hic sacro rapit: hic
eff-ringit, hic transilit: hie non contentus angusto itinere, ipsa quibus arcetur evertit, et in lucrum ruina venit.  Hic sine csede popuiatur: hic spolia cruenta manu gestat: nemo non fert aliquid ex
altero. Compare his 95th Epistle.
Thus the atrocity of the gladiatorial shows was by heathen
moralists abundantly felt and understood.  Cicero indeed makes
but a feeble protest against them (Tusc. Qucest., 1. 2, c. 17:) Crudele gladiatorum spectaculurm et inhumanum non nullis videri solet;
et haud scio an ita sit, nt nunc fit. But Seneca mlore distinctly
(Ep. 95:) Homo, sacra res, homo jam per lusum et jocum occiditur,
et quem erudiri ad inferenda accipncldaque vulnera nefas erat, is
jam nudus inermisque producitur; satisque spectaculi in homine,
nors est.  Cf. Ep. 7. And Lucian, in a collection of the notable
sayings of Demonax, a cynic philosopher of the second century,
tells of him, that once when the Athenians were planning a spectacle of the kind, he told them that they must overthrow the altia, of
Pity, before they proceeded further in this matter. Yet with all
this it remained for an unlettered Christian monk to put a stop to
these bloody shows.




25s2                 LEOTURE VIII.
they explain to us no mysteries of our being, help us in no
struggles of our souls, make clear to us no dealings of
our God.
There was a time in our lives,-yet a time which we who
are here present should now have left behind us,-when
this might have been natural enough, when it would have
been premature.to begin to meditate on the moral problems
which these works present, or to do more than first to master their difficulties, and those overcome, to walk up and
down admiring and enjoying the strange and wondrous world
into which they had helped to introduce us. But the time
is gone by, when that alone was our task.  Further duties
are ours-to study that classical antiquity in the light which
our Christian faith and experience throw back upon it, with
an open eye for its moral good and for its moral evil, with
an entire confidence that in Christ and in his Gospel is
given to us the touchstone which shall, enable us to recognize-the sharp and dividing sword which shall enable us
unerringly to separate between-the evil and the good, the
false and the true.
Let us feel that not by some strange inconsistency, sonme
traditional usage which we will not abandon, but cannot
defend, it has come to pass that a literature and philosophy,
not Christian but heathen, hold the place which they do
among us, members of the Church of Christ-are at this
day contemplated, as they have been contemplated in time
past, by each wiser and more thoughtful man, as an indispensable organ for all higher education, necessary instruments for the cultivating of the complete hurarnity.*  Let
* The intimate connexion between the Reformation and- the revival
of classical learning, with the zeal and success of the Reformers in
promoting this last, all will remember —Melancthon's especially, to
whom, beside other titles of honour, this of Preceptor Germaniae
was added. There is a very interesting letter of Luther's in which
thanking a friend, who had sent him a Latin Poem which he had




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                    253
us feel that this only could have been, inasmuch as they
stand in some real and intimate relation to the innermost
fact of our lives, to our Christian hope-a relation of defect
it will often be, yet a relation not the less, which should not
be overlooked or denied. And these things being so, let us
understand that we fall below our position, we fall short of
the purpose with which these books were placed in our
hands, when we fail to regard them in such a light as this.
And in this light to look at them will not mar nor hinder
that free spontaneous joy in them which in earlier times
may have been ours. We may keep that earlier delight,
and yet, keeping it, may pass on to a deeper and more meditative emotion. For indeed with what livelier interest shall
we occupy onrselves with this classical antiquity, when we
feel that it is not disconnected with the highest things of
our life, the most solemn questions which can employ us as
as baptized men.
How many will be the thoughts and emotions, and all of
them purifying and ennobling, which these studies in this
spirit pursued, will awaken and cherish within us I  Thus
composed, and had at the same time expressed his fears that the
cause of classical literature would suffer from men's zeal about
theology, Luther replies that it should not so with his consent:
Ego persuasus sum, sine literarum peritia prorsus stare non posse
sinceram theologiam, sicut hactenus ruentibus et jacentibus literis
miserrime et cecidit et jacuit.  Quin video nunquam fuisse insignem
factam verbi )el revelationem, nisi primdn; velut prmecursoribus baptistis, viam pararit surgentibus et fiorentibus linguis et literis.
Plane nihil minus vellem fieri ant committi in juventute, quam ut
poosin et rhetoricen omittant. In ea certe vota sull ut quam plurimi sint et poate et rhetores, quod his studiis videam, sicut nee
aliis modis fieri potest, mire aptos fieri homines ad sacra tam capessenda, quam dextr' et feliciter tractanda...Quare et te oro ut et meo
(si quid valet) precatu agas apud vestram juventutem, ut strenue et
potentur et rhetoricentur.  (Luther's Briefe, v. 2, p. 313. De
Wette's edit.)
224




254                    LECTUrt  VIII.
surely a divine compassion will oftentimes stir in our hearts,
as with an ear made open by love, we drink in the voices of
the world's deep disquietude, its confessions of an intolerable burden,* its acknowledgments that if there be nothing
prouder, so also there is nothing more miserable, than man.t
And these we shall not go far without meeting: for however the prevailing tone of that heathen world may be lightsome and gay, a summons to enjoy the present to pluck the
* In none perhaps so frequent and distinct asin Lucretius. There
is a very interesting lecture in Keble's Prcelectiones, on the witness
for and craving after that which Christianity only can give, that is
to be found by those who know how to look for it, in the reputedly
atheistic work of the great Roman poet.  He dwells on the many
passages in which he expresses his deep dissatisfaction with life,
and with all which life could offer-a dissatisfaction which yet was
not, like that of so many, on the score of the fleeting nature of life's
pleasures and the little of them which a man in his brief space could
enjoy —but had its rise rather in a. sense that these very pleasures,
even in fullest measure, did never truly fill the soul (Prcelect. 35:)
Campus hic ferme nobilium est poetarum, ut nenias canat ac quelimonias de vita flore fragili ac caduco.  Habet autem Lucretius noster illud, ni fallor, proprium ac modo non singulare, quod non tam
breves et augustus incuset mvi in terris agendi limites, quam ipsum
vitre hujus statum, vel optimwn acte: significet, rem eam unicuique
hominum  et fuisse, et fore semper, molestissimo omnium  oneri.
This is but one of the many memorable passages of the kind, 3.
IO16:'
Deinde animi ingratam naturam pascere semper,
Atque explere bonis rebus, satiareque nunquam,
Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum.
Cl'm redeunt, fcetusque ferunt, variosque labores,
NVec tamen exple7nur vitai fructibus unquacm;
Hoc, ut opinor, id est navo florento puellas
Quod memorant, laticem pertusum congrere in vas,
Quod tamen expleri nulla ratione potestur.
Compare 3. 1066-1097.
t Pliny (H. N., 1. 2, c. 5:0  Nec miserius quid quam homine, nee
superbius.




CONCLUDING LECTURE,                    255
roses of life ere they wither, yet if only we listen aright, we
may detect that in its laughter there is heaviness; and oftentimes that laughter is followed by a sigh drawn from deeps
of the heart far deeper than those where its smiles were
born.* Surely we shall find in these cries of a constant
unrest, a thousand confirmations of his word, who, heathen
as he was, yet likened man in his separation from God, to a
child torn from its mother's arms, and which nowhere could
be well, till it was given back to those arms once more.t
Again, as we acquaint ourselves with the lamentations of
mourners for their dead, lamentations so deep and so despairing, as to explain to us all the meaning of that sorrowing
without hope, which by the apostle is attributed to the
heathen;t as we hear too the wretched consolations of miserable comforters, the slight palliations of sharpest sorrows,
* Compare Herodotus, 1. 7, c. 46; Iliad, 17. 446; Odyss., 18. 129;
Lucretius, 5. 222; Moschus, Idyll., 3. 106; Sophocles, (Edipus Col.,
1225; Virgil, Georg., 3. 66. There is a striking collection of passages in which the vanity, the sorrow, the burden of life, are
acknowledged, in Plutarch's Consol. ad Apollon.
t Dio Chrysostom, Orat. 12, p. 405, ed. Reiske.: How affecting a picture does Augustine' give of what his feelings were, when, in the time during which he was still moving in
the element of heathen life, the friend of his soul was taken from
him (Conf., 1. 4, c. 4:) Quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum; et
quidqquid aspiciebam, mors erat.  Et erat mihi patria supplicium, et
paterna domus mira infelicitas: et quidquid cum illo communicaveram, sine illo in cruciatum immanen verterat.  Expetebant eum
undclique oculi mei, et non dabatur mihi; et oderam omnia, quia non
haberent eum, nee mihi jam dicere poterant: Ecce veniet, sicut
cum viverit quando absens erat. Factus eram ipse mihi magna
quaestio, et interrogabam animam meam, quare tristis esset, et
quare conturbaret me valde; et nihil noverat respondere mihi. Et
si dicebam: Spera in Deum, juste non obtemperabat; quia verior
erat et melior homo quem carrissimum amiserat, quam phantasma
in quod separare jubebatur. Solus fletus erat dulcis mihi, et successerat amico meo in deliciis animi mei.




256                   LECTURE VIII.
which were all that, with all their kindness, they could suggest, we shall know how to prize the oil and wine, the strong
consolations which are stored in the Gospel for each bruised
and smitten heart.
Or a compassion profounder yet will stir within us, as the
voices reach us, which proclaim that the veiy citadel of hope
was lost, voices of an utter uncertainty about all things, and
these coming from some of the earth's noblest spirits, who
asked of themselves, and could give no satisfying answer to
their own question, whether there was indeed a God governing in righteousness,* or whether all was not given over to
the blindest chance-whether they who did his will were a
care to Him; whether they survived the grave, and if there
were indeed any future and happy seats reserved for the
names of the just.
And even that of impure which we shall encounter, as we
must encounter it, there, proving, as it often has done, fuel
of dark fires in unholy hearts, setting them as with sparks
of hell in a blaze, it shall not be us, who go not to seek it, who
unwillingly encounter it, this incentive and provocative to
evil.  Rather shall this impure itself conspire to the same
ends with all else which there we meet. It shall make us
feel, in its light we shall more plainly see, what hideous sores
there were to be healed, how deep a corruption to be subdued, when men could thus glory in their shame, and some
comparatively pure in their lives, felt that in their works it
was not merely so permitted, but so expected that they
* The reader will remember the way in which the De Naturi
]Deorun'concludes, and the entire indecision in which all is left.
Pliny (I. N., 1. 2, c. 5) is more explicit yet in his open confession
of an utter skepticism in any moral govelmnment of the world: Irridendum vero agere curam rerum humanarum illud quidquid est
summum. Anne tam tristii multiplicique ministerio non pollui credamus dubitemusve?  Cf. Lucian's Jupiter Tr'agceedus, c. 17.




CONCLUDING LECTURE.                   257
should write.*  And intruding, as often that unholy does,
among the fairest creatures of genius, rising up like a plaguespot upon their foreheads, who were among the most gifted
of their age and nation; it shall teach us a solemn lesson,
even this-how  much of moral insensibility may coexist with
highest capacities of intellect-how little the sense of beauty
by itself avails to preserve purity of heart, —how needful it
is that hearts should be in better guardianship than thishow the highest of this earth's yields us no security against
the lowest; it shall teach us that if there are pinnacles of
heaven above every man, and that in him which prompts
him to ascend them, so also. are there abysses of sensuality
yawning beneath his feet, and that in him which tempts him
to engulf himself in these.-t
* See the elder Pliny, JEpist., 1. 4, ep. 14; 1. 5, ep. 3.
t I borrow these remarkable words from the answer of one, whose
position gave him full right to speak, to the proposal for publishing
an expurgated edition of the classics for the use of schools. Rather,
he says, he would have the works as the authors wrote them; and
encountering with his pupils any of those passages which, in such
an edition, would have been omitted, he would make them the occasion of some such comment as the following: "This lesson they
teach you, that refinement of intellect will not purify the heart;
that great mental endowments may co-exist with great moral insensibility: that vigour of understanding and delicacy of taste will
not reform the world. You see that these have been tried and
found wanting. Something more is needed. You may conclude
also that the depravity of an age and country was great, in which
those who were the most distinguished by their intellectual endowments and literary culture, thohght themselves not only licensed, but
expected thus to write. It follows that you have in these passages
an evidence of the divine power and purity of that influence which
did what all the wisdom of the world could never do. It is Christianity, and it alone, which has really expurgated the literature, not
only of Greece and Rome, but 6f the civilized world. These passages are the trophies of the triumphs of Christianity. They show
us, as in triumphal procession, what fearful enemies it has con22*




258                   LECTURE VITr.
Nor will this be all; there will mingle in these studies
thoughts and feelings of a liveliest thankfulness to God, as
amid the great shipwreck of the Gentile world, we recognise
the planks by which one and another attained, as we trust
safely, and through the mdrcy of a Saviour whom as yet he
did not know, to the shore of everlasting life —thankfulness
mingled, it may oftentimes be, with something of a wholesome shame to ourselves, as we contemplate the faithfulness
and fealty to the good and true, which even in the world's
darkest hour have been shown by them, whose knowledge
was so little, and whose advantages so few, as compared with
our own.  And perhaps it shall seem to us then, as if that
Star in the natural heavens which guided those Eastern
Sages from their distant home, was but the symbol of many
a star which twinkled in the world's mystical night-but
which yet, being faithfully followed, availed to lead humble
and devout hearts from far off regions of superstition and
error, till they knelt beside the cradle of the Babe of Bethlehem, and saw all their weary wanderings repaid in a moment, and all their desires finding a perfect fulfilment in
EHim.
quered. Without them you might have asked what social good has
the Gospel done?  What moral blessings have we derived from it?
These passages forbid, they answer, those questions. They remind
you from what, and into what you have been delivered, and by
Whom.' Therefore, had we expunged them, we should have diminished the strength and glory of that very cause which we desire to
serve. Being what they are, I fear not that you should pervert
them to an improper use. God forbid that you should dwell on
them with any other feelings than those of sorrow mingled with
thankfulness. Horace, had he lived when you do, would have-been
a Christian, and had he been a Christian, he would not have written thus: but if you who are Christians, love to read, what he, had
he been one, would have loathed to write, you, who ought to Christianize him, heathenize yourselves."
THE  END.