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SERMONS
ON THE BOOKS OF :THE BIBLE

SERMONS ON THE
BOOKS OF THE BIBLE

selected FROM THE VOLUME OF
VILLAGE SERMONS

BY THE LATE
FENTON JOHN ANTHONY HORT, D.D.
SOMETIME HULSEAN PROFESSOR
AND LADY MARGAREt's READER IN DIVINITY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1900
All rights reserved

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.

PREFATORY NOTE
This series of addresses, which appeared in a volume
of Village Sermons published in 1897, is reprinted in
deference chiefly to a request from the Principal of
St. Stephen's College, Delhi, who writes that he finds
these sermons extremely valuable for Indian students,
whereas it is difficult to discover a text-book which
supplies just this kind of in.struction. " There is
something," he adds, " eminently suitable in Dr.
Hort's 'yet speaking' in this way to those in whom
during his life he took so deep and discriminating
an interest." It is hoped that in this form the
sermons may also prove more widely useful at home.
A. F. HORT.

CONTENTS

I.
PAGE
The Old and New Testaments, - • - 2

II.
The Old Testament a History of the Jews, - 13
III.
The Pentateuch. Genesis, - - - 24
IV.
Exodus to Deuteronomy, - - 35
V.
Joshua to David, - - - - - - 48
VI.
The Kings, the Captivity, and«the Return, - 59
VII.
The Prophets, - ... - - 71

PAGE 83

viii CONTENTS VIII.
Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, -
IX.
The Gospels,  ^^
X.
The Acts of the Apostles, ... 107
XI
The Epistles, - -  "^
XII.
The Apocalypse, - -  '3'

SERMONS
ON THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE

THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
" 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." — Hebrews i. i, 2.
I PROPOSE to begin to-day a course of sermons on
the Bible. In speaking to you from Sunday to
Sunday on the lessons contained in separate texts,
as I have hitherto done almost without exception,
I have often felt doubtful how much I might take
for granted as already known to the greater number
of the congregation. Every one here, I trust, knows
some little about the Bible ; every one has read, or
has heard, some parts of it, and has carried away
some impression from what he has read or heard.
Some few, of course, are well acquainted with most
of what the Bible contains. I imagine that all
except a few are tolerably familiar with the sound
of those chapters which are read in church, and some
other chapters ; that they have carried away with
them, and hold more or less clearly in their memories,

THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 3
a few of the most striking stories and the clearest
and most forcible sayings ; but that they could not
often tell the place in the Bible of what they do
remember, or explain how one thing follows after
another, and that of the greater part of the Bible
they have no knowledge at all.
I am not saying this by way of blame ; I am only
trying to put into words what seems to be the plain
fact. There is of course some blame attaching to
all wants of this kind. If we cared for the Bible
more, we should read it more, and take more pains
to understand it and remember it. Still there is
much excuse for a great deal of ignorance. Of
course those who have been at school have gone
through some of the most important books of the
Bible in a regular and careful way. But unfor
tunately we have not time at school to do as much
as we could wish, or to do anything as well as we
could wish. And after school-time it is only too
easy to forget what we have learned, if we do not
keep it up by constant reading for ourselves, and
trying to make sure of the meaning of what we read.
What I wish now to do is to help you to under
stand in a general way what there is in the Bible,
to explain to you the contents and the use of its
different parts and books, to point out how one joins
on to another, how we learn from one what we do
not and cannot learn from another. In this way dim
and hazy impressions may be changed into clear and
well-ordered knowledge, and the new interest in the
Bible which I trust some of you will gain may lead
you to read it for yourselves more eagerly and care-

4 THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
fully in future. Speaking about large parts of the
Bible at once, I shall not often have time or
opportunity to dwell on single texts ; but this is
much more an advantage than a loss. Such sermons
as those to which we are most accustomed, sermons
examining and explaining a single text, are at all
times useful and perhaps necessary. There is no
better way of bringing before a regular congregation
those great truths on which the whole Christian life
is founded. But sermons on single texts have one
great disadvantage : they help to keep up that mis
chievous notion which is everywhere so common,
that the Bible is nothing but a collection of texts,
into which we may put our hand and draw out at
random whatever we please without troubling our
selves to think where it came from. Few texts,
perhaps none, can ever be quite understood while
they are taken alone, cut away from the place in the
Bible in which they stand. And many of the most
precious truths of the Bible are not to be found in
any text at all ; they come into our minds only when
we think of whole chapters and books together.
A more serious objection to keeping to this one
subject for a long time together is that it takes us
away in some degree from the ever-pressing needs of
our own wants, and our own duties. It is in great
measure concerned with what is sometimes called
head-knowledge. It is quite possible for us to know
a great deal about the Bible, to be able to answer
questions about its books, and what there is in them,
to be able to tell its stories, and even to explain the
meaning of its sayings, and yet have no true sense of

THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 5
its divine power, to remain untouched by the voice
of the Holy Spirit within it speaking to our spirit,
to forget altogether that it has been given us after
all to teach us God's will concerning us, and to help
us to draw nigh to Him. I feel this most strongly,
and am anxious that you should now and always
feel it too. Yet I do not believe that it is unprofit
able for virtue and godly living and the love of
Christ to have our thoughts led in church to such
views about the Bible as require little more than dry
understanding. Knowledge is not religion ; yet
assuredly want of knowledge very often leads to
want of religion. If we were more interested in the
Bible, we should love it more, and drink in more of
its blessed spirit, and without knowledge it is im
possible to have more than a narrow and soon
exhausted interest.
Knowledge then, a knowledge of the mere contents
of the Bible, is really a step towards increase of
religion; it clears away many of the hindrances
which keep us from hearing what God speaks to us,
it makes us feel at home with the Bible, and that is
the beginning of learning to use it as our guide in
the daily thoughts and the daily actions of life.
There is no congregation in the whole Church
which needs nothing but warning and exhorting; all
need teaching likewise. It is not enough to be told
what we should feel, and think, and say, and do. We
want to have the story of God's wondrous dealings
with men in past time impressed on our minds ;
and many of us will never be able to understand it
unless it is explained to them. We want to have the

6 THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
great unchanging truths about God and man and the
world in which He has set man grasped firmly and
made a part of our constant belief ; and that we can
never do without help from others. God's kingdom
is indeed, blessed be His name, ever open to the
ignorant and the dull: it is the pure in heart who
shall see God. Yet in respect to the Bible especially,
it remains true that whatever helps our understand
ing helps also in the long run our praying and our
working. I hope to be able to carry on this course of
sermons with tolerable regularity. It maj'^ now and
then be interrupted, either by special days of the
Christian year, or by various accidental reasons. I
trust however that on the whole I may be able to
go on from week to week, so that what is said on one
Sunday may not be forgotten before the next time.
For the same reason I shall not at present attempt
to give a Sunday to each book. There are so many
books in the Bible that I could hardly expect to
carry your memories on with me throughout; and I
am especially desirous that you should at the end
remember the beginning, that you should be able to
take in the whole together, and to have the different
parts of the Bible before your minds at once, just as
we can see the different parts of a picture all at once.
Let me suggest also that you will find it a great
help to take your own Bibles when you go home, and
look over the part that you have been hearing about
in church, trying whether you cannot read for your
selves there some of the things which you have heard
mentioned from this place. Indeed, you will find

THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 7
enough to employ you if you have time to carry on
the subject during the week, and in this way you will
f.x it more firmly into your minds, and be better
prepared to understand what you hear the next time.
It will be enough to-day to speak of the Bible
altogether, and to point out quite shortly the two
great parts of which it consists. I do not propose
to dwell at any length on the character and value
of the Bible. Little is gained by using high-flown
language about it. It is a book literally above
praise: there is a kind of impertinence in praising it.
The best praise we can render it is to use it ; to read,
and practise, and read again. It was written for our
learning: let us take care that it finds us teachable,
willing to learn, possessed with a deep feeling of
needing its help. And how is it that it is able to
give us such help ? For two reasons : because it is,
above all other books, the book of man, and because
it is the book of God. It is the book of man, not
only because it was written by men, but because it
is full of the deepest thoughts, longings, desires,
struggles, victories of men, their best work done on
the earth, their most passionate cries to the heaven
above. It is the book of God, because in it we hear
what He spoke to other ages, and through every part
of it He speaks to us now, telling us what He has
done for men in the days of old, what He has done
for all mankind in all times, what He is doing for us
now; pointing out the way to Himself, encouraging
us to enter on that way, warning us of the dangers
which beset us by the way, giving us gleams of light
from above to cheer us and guide us on the way.

8 THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
This is all that I think it necessary to say at/
present about the Bible as one single book. At
later time we may perhaps return to this subjec
with greater advantage.. Let us now think of tne
Bible not as one, but as many books. This is an
important fact about it which is too often forgotten.
The latest part of it is very old — nearly eighteen
hundred years old — but the oldest part of it is far
older than that, going back into distant times, when
it is impossible to talk of years with any certainiy.
And from the time of the oldest books to the newest
the other books made their appearance one afjier
the other without much pause. Some were written
just as they stand : others evidently had small
beginnings, and have grown up by slow degrees to
their present form. Some were written by great
men, whose names are familiar to us for other
reasons ; others we have received without any sure
knowledge of who it was that wrote them. Kings,
priests, prophets, shepherds, fishermen, tentmakers —
these and other classes of men had their share in
building up our Bible. Some of the books had their
first beginnings in wild and barbarous times, others
in settled times of law and order. Some were
written in bright prosperity, others in the midst of
terrors and distresses from warfare with powerful
enemies, others from the depths of captivity itself.
One thing alone all the authors had in common:
they all alike belonged to one people — they were all
Jews, worshippers of the one God of Israel.
The first great division which meets us in the
Bible is that of the Old and New Testaments. You

THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 9
all know these names, but I do not think their
meaning is well understood. People often speak of
the Testament as if there were but one, when they
mean the New Testament. But the Old Testament
is as much a part of the Bible ; and we should go
strangely astray, if we were to take all our notions of
God's works and ways from the New Testament.
' Testament ' means the same thing as ' covenant.'
Neither word is very easy to explain shortly. I
think you will see its meaning best by regarding
it as the kind of understanding which God has with
men, the footing on which He deals with them at
one time or another. God Himself does not
change, but men are always changing ; and God's
ways of dealing with them cannot therefore always
be the same. A father is on different terms with
his son, according as he is still a child or has grown
up to manhood. Supposing the father to be wise
and loving, and the son to be dutiful and loving too,
still when childhood has passed there will be a
change in the outward form and the inward spirit of
the understanding between them ; there will usually
be less of actual commanding and obeying, more of
sympathy and mutual helpfulness.
Now the Jewish people went through a change
like that. God promised by the mouth of Jeremiah
(xxxi. 3 1 ff.) that in due time He would make a
new covenant, a new testament, with the house of
Israel, writing His law no longer on tables of stone,
but in their hearts and inward parts ; and that
promise was fulfilled when Christ came. Properly
therefore the Old Testament means God's manner

lO THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
of dealing with His people in the old time before
Christ came, and the New Testament His new
manner of dealing with His people after Christ
came. And then the books take their names from
the state of things described there. We call the
earlier books for shortness the Old Testament,
because they tell us about God's ways under His
Old Testament or Covenant. We call the later
books for shortness the New Testament, because
they set forth the nature of God's New Testament or
Covenant, which began for mankind with the death
and resurrection of His Blessed Son.
This leads us to the great difference between the
books of the Old and New Testaments, as declared
in the text. I have before preached on those words
from the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews as
a Christmas text : to-day they will help us to see
the likeness and the unlikeness of the two great
divisions of the Bible. " God, who at sundry times
and in divers manners spake in times past unto the
fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days
spoken unto us by his Son." First, Old and New
Testaments have this one thing in common — God
speaks in both. He spoke to the men of old time.
He spoke to the men of the apostles' generation.
What He taught both the one and the other is
written down in the two parts of the Bible, and
through that writing He still speaks to us.
So much for the sameness ; now for the differences.
Under the old covenant He spoke to the fathers, the
forefathers of the apostles — yes, and the spiritual
forefathers of us, for we too are the children of

THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS i i
Moses and David and Isaiah, drawing our life from
them and their work. But He could not speak to
them all at once, for they lived at different times;
many hundreds of years divided them. He could
not speak to them all alike, for they were in different
stages of growth and knowledge, and what would
suit one would not suit another. So He spoke to
them at sundry times and in divers manners, here a
little and there a little, making the different and
partial and broken declarations of His name and His
will combine together into one whole, bestowing thus
on the later generations a richer and fuller knowledge
than any of their forefathers had enjoyed. Lastly,
all this speech of His under the Old Testament was
through prophets, men liable to fall into weakness
and sin, each declaring some part of God's message,
but only a part, each bearing his witness chiefly by
words, each at best a trusty messenger, but nothing
more. But in those last days a new order of things had
come in. No longer in broken and scattered words
from the stammering lips of men, no longer by a
line of various messengers ; but in one perfect life full
of glorious words and full of deeds which had a yet
more powerful voice than words, God had spoken
once for all, and that life was the life of His only
begotten Son, the exact likeness of His own nature,
so far as it could be expressed in human character.
This then is the substance of the New Testament —
God speaking in His Son. The words apply in the
simplest and truest sense to the Gospels, but as we
shall see presently they may take in likewise what-

12 THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
ever is contained in all our books of the New
Testament, Acts and Epistles and Revelation as
weir. The Old Testament brings before us the hope
of man, the promise of God ; the New makes known
the glory and rest of man, the fulfilment of God.
Next time I hope to speak of the Old Testament
more particularly, especially of its first five books.
I trust we shall be able to see how little we can
afford to do without those records of an early time,
even now that we are living in the sunshine of the
gospel of Jesus Christ. He came not to destroy. He
Himself tells us, but to fulfil. Looking back into
the dim early world in which the faith in the one
true God began, we are enabled to read its story
not only with heightened interest, but with greatly
increased profit, now that we can turn upon it the
light which comes from the Perfect Son in whom
the Father was well pleased. And again, the form
of the Son Himself rises in far greater clearness
and glory before our eyes when we have learned to
know and love His many forerunners from Abraham
onwards, and so been duly prepared to welcome at
last the full message of the kingdom of heaven.

II

THE OLD TESTAMENT A HISTORY OF THE JEWS
"In Jewry is God known: His name is great in Israel." — Psalm
Ixxvi. I.
A FORTNIGHT ago we began to consider the Bible
and its different parts. We saw that first and fore
most it is divided into two great well-known parts,
the Old and New Testaments, neither of which
ought to be read and cherished without the other.
The name Testament, we saw, which is the same as
Covenant, means here properly the kind of under
standing between God and His people, the particular
footing on which He treats them. In old times they
were like children, they needed a different sort of
treatment from what they need in later days, and so
they were under the Old Covenant or Testament, and
the book called the Old Testament is the account of
what God spoke to them in one way or another u-nder
that Old Covenant. But when Christ came another
state of things began. God's people had grown ripe
13

14 THE OLD TESTAMENT
for a new and more advanced teaching. He took
them into a New Covenant or Testament. His
dealings with them were on a new footing; and the
book called the New Testament is the account of
what God has spoken to them in one way or another
under that New Covenant.
Still the old is not meant to be driven out by the
coming in of the new. When we pass from childhood '
to manhood, we are still the same creatures in body
and mind, though much be changed and much added.
We do not begin all over again. We carry with us
to our grave that which has been formed within us in
our early years. The teaching we have received as
children does not all at once lose its value. Some of
it having been learned once for all does not need to
be repeated, but still we should fare badly if it. were
lost out of our minds. Some of it again has till now
been obliged to be put in such shapes as a young
head and heart can receive : when we grow up, we
can take it in more truly and more completely in
another shape ; but still we shall do well not to for
get either, if we wish to have a hold on the perfect
truth. Lastly, even the best and ripest among us are
always liable to fits of what we must consider as
childishness, slipping back into a wild and ungoverned
state which they ought to have outgrown, and for
them assuredly the rougher and more childish kind of
teaching has not lost its use.
Even so is it with the Old and New Testaments.
There are many things in the Old Testament which
belong to the old state of things, and cannot without
mischief be applied to us now exactly as they stand.

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS 15
There is an undying lesson in them, but it requires to
be well-considered and explained before it can be
applied. Yet, for all that, the value of the Old
Testament for us is not worn out and cannot wear
out. Though we are living in a late age of the
world, many of us are still so unripe in heart and
mind that the lessons of those early days have a
special fitness for us. For all of us the Old Testa
ment is a useful way of entrance into the New
Testament. We never can understand the New
Testament while we are ignorant of the Old Testa
ment. It supplies as it were the alphabet, the letters,
the simple thoughts, in which the higher and deeper
lessons of the New Testament are written. Nay
more, there is much about our life here on earth as
God would have it be which is taught plainly in the
Old Testament, and which is either not taught at
all or taught very slightly in the New Testament.
Any one who tries to carve out for himself a religion
out of the New Testament will assuredly make some
thing extremely unlike the true complete Christian
faith. He cannot throw away half his Bible without
throwing away half of what should be his belief too.
I said to you before that all the books of the
Bible, Old and New Testament alike, have one
thing in common: they were all written by Jews,
worshippers of the one God of Israel. Unless you
get this fact clearly into your minds, you never can
properly understand the Bible, least of all the Old
Testament. You may be able to snatch at single
stories and sayings here and there, but you will lose
the thread of the chapters which you hear or read,

l6 THE OLD TESTAMENT
and in losing the thread lose at the same time most
of the meaning. No doubt there is something weari
some and uninteresting in hearing much said in a
sermon about a people so little familiar to us as the
Jews. They seem such a long way off from us and
our concerns. We naturally wish to hear about some
thing nearer home, something which comes within
the borders of our own everyday thoughts and doings.
I know, brethren, this is so, and must be so, and
thus there is a great temptation to let the Jews
alone, and try to say nothing about old times. But
then I know also that by so doing I should be
leaving the greater part of the Bible a closed book
to you. My opportunities of speaking to you are
short and few, while you have your Bibles always
with you. At any time you please you have only
to open them, and find yourselves in the presence of
a teaching infinitely wiser and more heavenly than
that of any living man. You have also the promise
of the Holy Spirit to enkindle you and enlighten
you as you read. But still there does remain a veil
over the Bible, so long as the people to whom and
for whom it was first written are to us no more than
strangers and foreigners, and I believe I can do you
no greater service by way of bringing you face to
face with the Bible, than in trying to take away that
strangeness, and helping you to think about the Jews
as friends of your own, about whom you are always
glad to hear.
Every time that I speak to you about the Bible, I
shall be obliged also to speak about the Jews. In
trying to describe and explain the different parts of

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS 17
the Bible I shall be going through the different
stages in the life of the Jews. So far therefore
teaching about the Jews cannot come altogether in
one sermon, but must be spread over all. Not till
the course is ended shall we be in a position to
obtain a full and clear view of their wonderful career.
Yet now at starting some little explanation is
required, that there may be no mistakes hereafter;
and to make sure that we are not going on too fast,
I shall begin with very simple and easy matters.
We call the Jews a people. What does that
mean? It generally means a number of persons
bound together by three things : by having one blood,
one language, one land. Other bonds often, nay
usually, come in, such as one set of customs, one law,
one government, one religion. But the three I have
mentioned are the most constant.
First, one blood. Perhaps nothing binds men so
closely to each other as the knowledge or belief that
they are all of one race, as we call it, all sprung orig
inally from the same parents. The feeling of being all
more or less of kin, all connected by a sort of cousin-
hood, is in fact a true, though it may be a weaker, feel
ing of brotherhood. In late times the purity of the
race gets often broken in upon by intermarriage with
foreigners, yet still the new comers are thought of as
adopted into the great old family: the family feeling
is strong enough to embrace them without losing its
own power. The Jews mixed wonderfully little with
other people till quite late in their history, and the
family feeling was part of their religion. One of the
names by which they are called is 'the children of
b

1 8 THE OLD TESTAMENT
Israel.' Generation after generation was thus taught
to look back to the first beginnings of the people.
Each new life moved further and further away from
the days of Israel or Jacob, yet still it was their
delight to remember that Israel was the first father
of them all. Divine strength to do and to endure
came upon them whenever they cherished that
thought. It lifted them out of base and earthly
things. It carried them half-way to God. For God
Himself was likewise known to them in the same
form. Declaring Himself as the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, He brought Himself near to them
through the irrecoUections of their forefathers. And
again. He strengthened their attachment to each
other, their dutiful reverence for those who had gone
before, their care for their children and their children's
children by this name, which reminded them that the
one same unseen King and Friend, never dying,
never forgetting, was watching over one and all.
Secondly, a people is held together by speaking
one language. Most of you know, I suppose, that
almost every country has its own set of words, and
that the words used in one country are quite different
from those used in another to express the same
thing. Generally all the persons in one country
grow up able to understand what is said by other
persons in the same country, and to make themselves
understood by them ; but if a man leaves his own
country and goes to another, he finds everyone using
a totally different set of sounds when they speak,
and he cannot understand them or make himself
understood unless he has taken the pains to learn

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS 19
their way of speaking as well as his own. These
different ways of speaking are called languages ; and,
as I said, one of the things which most holds a
people together, which makes them in fact to be a
people, is speaking the same language. When they
are young children, they learn it little by little from
hearing it all round them, even if they are not
purposely taught; it grows up with them as part of
themselves, a part which they cannot possibly lose so
long as they are among their own people. They
seldom or never think about it, but they are for ever
using it as naturally as they put out their hand
to take what they want. If now they come across
men of another people, speaking another language,
this difference of speech makes at once a deep gap
between them. Even if they after a time get over
the difficulty of understanding and being understood,
they seem to themselves to have fallen in with
creatures of another world, and they go back to
their own people with an increased feeling of be
longing to them and of having far more in common
with them than with any others.
This bond of language the Jews possessed. One
or two other neighbouring nations may perhaps have
spoken languages not very unlike theirs. But their
own language, as time went on, acted more and more
powerfully in making them a people. Almost from
the first it became intermixed with their thoughts
about God. First the memory of His commandments
as written on the tables of stone or spoken by the
lips of Moses, then the possession of holy books, the
short beginnings of a Bible, led them to feel that

20 THE OLD TESTAMENT
their common speech was not merely the necessary
means of conversing with each other on the things
of everyday life, but also supplied the outward form
in which God spoke to their fathers and to them.
Thus once more they were brought near to God
through one of the things which kept them near
each other, and again the more they thought of Him
and the message of His will, the more they were
reminded how they belonged to one people.
Again, men are made one people by dwelling in
one land. We in England ought to understand this
better than any people that ever lived, for nothing
has been so helpful in making us of one heart arid
mind as the position of our country, smaller than
most of the countries and shut off from the rest
of the world by the sea all around it. Every
tie that makes up neighbourhood has its part in
fashioning into a people those who dwell in the
same land. They are always nearer to each other
than to foreigners, and how much does not that
carry along with it ? If a foreign enemy comes
against the land, they all alike suffer from his
violence : if he is to be resisted or driven back,
they must all make common cause and join together
against him, each making sacrifices for the good of
all. In each there naturally grows up an attachment
to the soil on which he has been born and bred. It
gives him a feeling of fixedness and lastingness in a
world where so much is ever changing. The land
has been present at all the acts of his life; he has
played upon it in childhood, worked upon it in man
hood. And what it is to him, that it is also to his

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS 21
neighbours, his countrymen. He cannot think of it
as something which belongs merely to himself, he
is too small a creature for that, he and all like him.
The land which all alike tread bears the clearest
evidence to the need which each has of all the rest.
It is all one ample home where each knows that he
has a right to find his proper place as a child of the
one family; a common ground in which every other
power of union is able to root itself.
And such was Judea, or Jewry, the land of Israel,
to the Jews, the children of Israel. It too was a
little land, partly divided from the lands of other
peoples by the sea on one side and barren wildernesses
on two other sides. The affection which they bore
it was one of the most powerful ties which helped
them to feel that they were indeed one at times
when other causes were tearing them asunder. God
saw fit that for their sins they should be carried
away prisoners into a strange land, and there they
seemed ready to be scattered away and leave no
trace on the face of the earth, till in due time part of
them obtained leave to return to their own country,
and then once more the people rose out of the dust.
And again, as in the memory of their common
forefathers, as in the language which father handed
down to son, so in this case also we cannot under
stand the religion of the Jews — that same religion
which is the foundation of our own, and to this very
day part of our own, if we leave out of mind their
land, and all of which their land spoke to them. It
was, as we shall hear presently, the Land of Promise.
They believed that God had promised it to their

22 THE OLD TESTAMENT
first father Abraham more than four hundred years
before they were allowed to claim it as their own.
Their entrance into it was marked by wonderful
signs of God's presence and favour, and He taught
them to look on continuance upon its sacred soil as
the highest earthly blessing, the best reward for
those who obeyed His laws. No wonder that it
became to them a kind of heaven upon earth, a
place which seemed full of God, so that banishment
from its holy places had something of the bitterness
of banishment from Him. No wonder that the land
which He had glorified with such marks of His love
made precious every rightful dweller upon it, and was
felt by all true Israelites to call on them in His
Name to rejoice together and suffer together
We have now considered, brethren, the three chief
signs which mark a people in the proper sense of the
word, and which the Bible shows to have marked
the ancient people of God, the Jews. They were all
descended from Abraham and his son Isaac and his
grandson Jacob or Israel. They all spoke the same
language, the language of the Old Testament.
They all dwelt in the same land. So far they were
in great measure like other peoples, old and new.
The difference was that God made Himself known
to no other people. That is what renders their
history a treasure of the highest and best instruction
to us; not a mere subject of curiosity for those who
have time and opportunity to busy themselves about
things that happened so very long ago, but a
possession meant for the use of every one of us.
What makes the Bible, as I said before, the book of

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS 23
God is that in it He is speaking to man, speaking
first and last of Himself, but also in a lesser degree
of all things which lead to Him. But He speaks to
us by acts as well as by words. The Bible is the
history of acts of His, as well as a collection of
words of His. If we know what He has done, we
know what He is. Now all the acts of His related
in the Bible are one way or another concerned with
the Jewish people, and all the writers in the Bible
were themselves members of the Jewish people.
The Old Testament is especially the history of the
Jewish people up to within a few years of its last
scattering, telling us as much of it as we need to
know for the sake of understanding the plan of
God's dealing with men. Next week we shall, I
trust, be able to take the first few books, in which we
read how the people first came into being.
Meanwhile let us take to ourselves the lesson
which a true Israelite in the middle or later time of
his nation's history drew from the acts of God which
already lay before his sight. " The merciful and
gracious Lord," he says, "hath so done his marvell
ous works that they ought to be had in remembrance.
They stand fast for ever and ever, and are done in
truth and equity. He sent redemption unto his
people: he hath commanded his covenant for ever;
holy and reverend is his name. The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom : a good under
standing have all they that do thereafter, the praise
of it endureth for ever."

Ill

THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS
"Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek
the Lord : look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of
the pit whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and
unto Sarah that bare you : for I called him alone, and blessed him, and
increased him." — Isaiah li. I, \e,.
Last Sunday we considered the Jewish people, the
children of Israel, because it was necessary to have
some sort of clear notion about them if we wished to
understand the greater part of the Bible. We saw
that, whatever God spoke to the rest of mankind,
He spoke through Jews and to Jews : that God's
acts, by which He speaks even more than by words.
His acts, that is, as told in the Bible, were acts in the
history of the Jews. We cannot therefore know at
all exactly what either His words or His acts really
meant unless we know something about the Jews
themselves. We saw that they formed a people, a
set of men bound together by being of the same
blood, by speaking the same language, and by
dwelling in the same land. We saw how these
24

THE PENTATEUCH -GENESIS 25
different ties which bound them to each other bound
them also to God. As they were the children of
Israel, that is, all having Jacob or Israel for their
father, so He was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, known to them as the same Lord who had
also been Lord of their family in all generations.
The language which they spoke in all common
business of life, and which made them closer to each
other than any foreigners, was the language in which
His Law was written on the tables of stone, and in
which in the course of time holy books were written
as a perpetual fixed message of His will. The land
in which they dwelt together as neighbours, or rather
as children of the same great family, in one wide
home, was also the Land of Promise, given them by
God more than four hundred years before they took
possession of it, holy in itself, containing within it
the holy place which was the outward sign of God's
presence on the earth.
To-day we begin to examine the early books of
the Old Testament itself The first five books stand
together by themselves. Sometimes they are called
the Pentateuch, which means only " The book of
five volumes." The Jews themselves used to call
them " the Law," because the latter part contained
the law of God given through Moses, by which the
people was more or less governed in the later times.
This name is full of meaning to us. God speaks to
us men with different voices, and one of those voices
is that of the Lawgiver. If our lives are to be right
and happy, and every way blessed, we must begin by
remembering that there are rules laid down for us to

26 THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS
follow, rules given us by One both higher and wiser
than we are, to guide us in the temptations and per
plexities of life, rules which we disobey at our peril.
This is only a part of what we ought to think about
God, but it is a part which it is never safe to forget:
for so long as there is any evil in the world, and any
inclination to follow evil, so long there must be
obedience to a law, and so long we must never forget
that God is the Maker of the Law.
We shall have to return to this subject in due
course presently. But first we must attend to the
place which these five books hold in the history of
the Jews. Speaking roughly, we may say that they
tell us the beginning of the Jewish people, the early
steps and stages by which they became a people.
All through these five books one of the three great
marks of a people which I mentioned last Sunday is
wanting to them. They are of one blood. They
speak one language, but they have no land of their
own. For four hundred years they are captives and
slaves in a foreign land ; for forty years they are eyer
on the move, wandering on through the trackless
wilderness. Just at the end we see that their
journeyings are coming to an end : in the next book
they enter the Promised Land and take possession
of it. But that does not concern us to-day. In the
books about which I am now speaking they are
always on the way ; on the way to a home of their
own, on the way to become a full grown and com
plete people.
I said just now that this is a rough account of
these five books. Speaking strictly, it is true only of

THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS 27
the last four out of the five. The first book, Genesis,
tells of a still earlier state of things, the time before
the four hundred years of the Israelites in Egypt
began, the time when as yet there was living but one
small family, from whom all that great multitude
were to spring. The greater part of the book of
Genesis, that is, the last thirty-nine chapters from the
twelfth chapter onwards, is taken up with the patri
archs, as they are called, the earliest heads of the
family, first Abram or Abraham, then his son Isaac,
then his son Jacob or Israel, then his twelve sons,
from whom came the twelve tribes of Israel.
This carries us back within a very few pages of
the beginning of the Bible. In those few pages we
find ourselves in the time before Abraham, yet earlier
ages of mankind, and at last in the first and second
chapters at the very beginning of the world. Here
at the very outset we are shown what is to be the
true subject of the Bible from its first page to its
last ; it is to be God speaking to us about Himself.
Mark that well : He has something to tell us about
the world in which He has placed us, much to tell us
about ourselves and our fellow-men ; but all that He
has to tell us in the Bible about any of these things
is for the sake of religion, for the sake of bringing
Himself near to us and drawing us near to Himself.
This is a very important matter, on which we
have great need to see our way clearly. The Bible
is the best of books, but it cannot take the place of
other books. It brings to us the highest, the most
life-giving, the most entirely necessary knowledge.
There are many things most useful for us to know,

28 THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS
still more which it is most interesting and delightful
to know, which are certainly not to be found in the
Bible. But it is a blunder to look for them there.
If we try to do that, if we try to force the Bible to
teach us what it was not meant to teach us, we
are in great danger of missing its true lessons, and
glorifying our own foolish fancies as if they came
from God.
For the purposes of religion all beings that exist
fall under three great heads : Man, nature or the out
ward world, and God. How they may be connected
with each other, what part one may have in the
others, is a secondary matter. The great thing is to
see the distinctness of these three and the rightful
place which the outward world and God hold towards
man. This is taught with marvellous power in these
opening chapters of Genesis. I do not in the least
pretend to be able to understand all in these chapters.
They are full of serious difficulties which will
perhaps never be cleared up ; at all events, no one
has cleared them up as yet. But I do not think
they do us any harm, if we read the chapters in a
right spirit.
Let us just look quietly at some of the great truths
which lie on the surface, truths by no means natural
and easy to reach for those who have not been bred
up in them, contradicting, in fact, many of the notions
which in former ages, and in part even in our own,
have been most widely spread among mankind.
We see at the beginning of all things God Himself,
making all things. He is not the earth, or the heavens,
or anything that is therein : He is distinct from them

THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS 29
all: He made them all: He was before them all.
He made them according to a plan and order. Each
part of the world had its own work to do, its own
place in His great scheme. Last of all came man
The world was older than man, it supplied the
materials for man : man was a part of the world, and
was meant to remember that. On the other hand,
there was that in man which could be found nowhere
else in the world. If his mere clay was kneaded of
the dust of the earth, the pattern was a heavenly one.
His truest likeness was to be found in God Himself.
Though he was younger than the world, he was to be
the first example of that which meets us so often in
the Bible, and in our own life. The elder was to
serve the younger. God gave man dominion over
the older world, and all that it contained. It was not
only to be beautiful and glorious for the delight of
its Maker, it was to be useful for the service of man.
But here came in a most necessary lesson. God
pronounced the whole world good. In the course of
time man in his pride would look down on the world.
Nay worse, when he became evil himself, he would
lay the blame on the world. He would pretend that
the only thing which made him sin was his connexion
with the earth, his own body, and all the things which
had charms for his bodily senses. " No," said God,
"that is not true, I made the world as truly as I made
you ; I made it, and so it is all good. Lift up your
eyes, and look to Me, for I have given you that power,
and you are sinking below your proper manhood if
you do not exercise it ; but do not try to leap off the
earth for all that. Delight in the world as My world.

30 THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS
and then there will be no fear of its leading you away
from me."
Here are some of the lessons of the Bible story of
creation. We do not see their full force till we have
experience of evil in ourselves. But in the lessons
themselves there is as yet no whisper of evil. All is
pronounced good ; God stands over His twofold work,
man and the world, the dwelling-place of man, and
His blessing descends on both.
The next step brings us into the state into which
sin has entered. I must not stop to point out the
particulars. But I wish you to notice especially two
things. First, the Bible does not begin with sin: it
begins with innocence and goodness. That is its
starting-point, and is meant to be our starting-point.
Sin is not a proper part of ourselves : it has come
into us as the mildew comes into the corn. We
are to regard it as something foreign to us which
we have to throw off. Our work is to purify not
to destroy. Secondly, observe that the first evil
is distinctly religious evil. The temptation comes
through the fruit ; but the great force of the tempta
tion lies in impatience of the restraint which God for
good reasons ordained ; in trying to be independent of
Him, in other words, of being as gods. And the first
loss is a religious loss. To fly from God's presence is
the immediate thought of those who before the fall
had rejoiced in it. Then the other outward curses
follow. The earth is no longer a garden but a place
of thorns for those who have become estranged from
its Maker and their own. Yet God does not hate
His rebellious creature, though He visits him severely.

THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS 31
From the very beginning He provides a way of
return. Toil and sorrow are henceforth man's lot.
But they are not mere curses, it is man's own fault if
he lets them be so. He may use them to lead him
back into communion with his true Lord.
That however is a later lesson. At the first the
rapid growth of evil is what is chiefly shown us.
Estrangement from God leads to estrangement be
tween men, even members of the same family. The
husband becomes the accuser of the wife. The elder
brother is jealous of the younger brother, and his
jealousy has its natural fruit in murder. As mankind
multiplies, so does crime. The earth, we are told,
was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled
with violence. Sin against God, cruelty and injustice
against other men, went hand in hand. Then the
just anger of God went forth, and used the powers of
the world for the punishment of man. A flood of
waters overwhelmed the sinful race, and only one
small family was preserved. To these survivors, to
Noah and his family, God renewed the blessing
which He had given to Adam. He spoke of a
covenant, an understanding, between Him and them
and all their children's children. He made them
understand that He was not a God who did accord
ing to His mere will and pleasure, but One whom
they might trust as faithful and true.
Immediately however, evil sprung up afresh. It
showed itself in a shameful want of respect in one of
Noah's sons towards his father. Presently we hear
of men joining together to build a high tower, whose
top might reach to heaven. This was evidently

32 THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS
done out of pride against God ; but He scattered
them abroad on the face of the earth, and with the
scattering came the beginning of different languages,
so that henceforth the different branches of the same
race became foreign to each other.
Such are the chief points in the first part of
Genesis. We have been shown first the outward
world, the heavens and the earth, under which and
on which all the work of man has to be done. Then
we have been shown all the sinful and distracted
world of man, seemingly going further and further
away from God, and falling into wild confusion
within itself At this point the new life begins,
which was to go on growing and growing till it
reached its full height in the person of Christ. God
called on an old man named Abram to leave his
country and his father's house and go into a land
which He should show him, promising to make of
him a great nation, and in him to bless all the
families of the earth. This was the seed of the
Jewish people : here we have in a few words the plan
of the whole Bible, God making Himself known to a
chosen few, that through them the whole race may
be partakers in the blessed gift. That which was to
be the glory of God's people Israel was also to be a
light enlightening the Gentiles far and near. And
the beginning of it all was the simple trust of one
man. "By faith," says the Epistle to the Hebrews,
"he obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he
went." The rest of his life repeats the same strain in
other forms. He who thus went forth into the wide
world at God's command, believed in God's promise

THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS

33

that he should have a son in spite of all appearances,
and then at last was ready to yield up that dear and
precious son, because such seemed to him to be God's
will. And so he became known as the Father of the
faithful, the father of all those who, seeing but a very
little way for themselves, delight to trust the Unseen
Lord above all things, and bear witness in the
simplest and purest way to that which is the true life
for man.
I do not intend to go through the well-known
stories of Isaac and Rebekah, of Jacob and Esau, of
Jacob's journey and double marriage and return, and
of all the changes of fortune which befel his favourite
son Joseph through the envy of his brothers. I
will only ask you to observe how wonderfully God's
providence worked through all those things which
seemed to be baffling it, and in particular what a
strange chain of occurrences brought Jacob and his
family into the land of Egypt, where it was needful
they should pass their four hundred years of silent
growth in the dark. There we must leave them for
to-day, hoping next week to see them go forth as far
as the borders of their Promised Land.
We began with the creation of the world : we end
with the passage of a starving family from one land
to another. In both cases the Bible is true to its
own character : in both God is made known. We
may see His working, if we will, in the boundless
glory and wonder of the heavens and the earth.
These are great and He is great in them. But
deeper truths of His nature are declared to us in the
thoughts and the doings of men ; and for this teach-
c

34 THE PENTATEUCH— GENESIS
ing we need neither to look on great and mighty
men nor on vast hosts of men. The noblest work
for mankind that He has ever ordained was begun
when Abraham went forth from his home, carrying
with him the undying seed of a true faith. We
cannot measure the power which often lies in things
which seem too small and trifling for our notice. It
is on such that the choice of God lights. He chooses
the weak things of the world to confound the things
which are mighty, and He does so simply in satis
fying the needs of their own spirits. Feeling them
selves helpless and blind they cast themselves on His
grace and wisdom ; the answer from above makes
them new men, lights shining in the darkness, and
God is glorified in the influence which they shed
around them, and pass on to their children's children.

IV

EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY
" I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the
land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." — Exodus xx. 2.
We began last Sunday to examine the first five
books of the Old Testament. We saw that they are
chiefly taken up with describing the history of the
Jews in the early days before they reached their own
land of promise, and became in the strictest sense a
people. We had not time to go beyond the first
book, that which is called Genesis, which word
means ' birth ' or ' beginning of growth.' There we
found several beginnings, one behind the other — the
beginning of the Jews, the beginning of mankind,
the beginning of the world ; all told however in
such a way, and such a way only, as is required for
the purposes of religion, that is, for enabling us to
know and act upon our true position before God,
and to give us a true idea of the greatness and
goodness of His works and His acts.
This applies especially to the first eleven chapters
3S

36 EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY
of Genesis, and above all the first two chapters.
There we have the great objects, God on the one
side, the world on the other, and man in the midst
between the two, set clearly before us in the true
light. God is seen as distinct from the world, as
making the world according to a regular plan or
order, as making man after the world out of a part
of the world, yet in His own heavenly likeness, as
giving man dominion over the world, and teaching
him that the world is for his use, whatever other
purposes it may serve ; as blessing the world and
man alike, and calling both good. Then as a
secondary thing, a blight coming from without upon
that which was originally good, we see sin breaking
in through the senseless pride and wilfulness of man.
Then come fresh forms of sin ever growing from
worse to worse— jealousy, hatred, murder, and a host
of other abominations, rebellion against God going
hand in hand with wrong-doing towards fellow-men,
till the Flood came and swept them away. The
world which God had given to be their home had
within it powers of destruction as well as powers of
nourishment ; and at His command the waters went
forth to destroy, to show that He hates evil, and
that He is mightier than all.
One righteous man, Noah, and his family alone
were saved. But the waters of the Flood had not
washed away the taint of evil. Within Noah's own
household appeared foul disrespect of the son for the
father, a dark and threatening sign of the plague
which, beginning within the family, should spread
confusion and misery in all the dealings of men with

EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY

37

each other. We hear little of the dim ages which
followed, as the race of Noah multiplied more and
more and became scattered into different peoples.
Suddenly out of the darkness rises a bright point of
light, a true Star in the East, which has been
growing and changing, and changing and growing
from that moment till now, when it has become the
bright world of the Christian faith. That point of
light was the simple trust of one man, Abram the
Hebrew, the first of the Jews, and so the beginner
of the long course in which God has made Himself
known to mankind through the Jews, our own true
forefathers in things of the spirit. At God's com
mand he went forth from the land where his family
had dwelt, not knowing whither he went. This was
the mark set on the chief actions of his life, that he
walked by faith and not by sight, that he let him
self be guided by Him whom no man can see,
instead of trusting to the deceitful appearances of
things which meet the bodily eye.
After Abraham came Isaac his son, after Isaac
his son Jacob or Israel. About these three, the
three patriarchs, the book of Genesis has much
to tell us which, as I said last Sunday, you will do
well to read for yourselves, but which would be only
confusing were I to repeat it now. Then we hear
about Israel's twelve sons, and especially his son
Joseph. The great point in all this for us to attend
to is the way in which the family was in God's good
providence brought into Egypt. First, there is the
accident of the famine, then the accident of Joseph's
extraordinary advancement in Egypt, so that what

38 EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY
the mean jealousy of his brothers meant for his
harm turned out not only for his own good but for
the saving of them all. Here is an undying lesson
of the way in which accidents are in the hands of
God, and how He uses them for His highest pur
poses. The purpose in this case was that the infancy
of the Jewish people should be spent in Egypt, a
land already far advanced in building and manu
factures and all the useful and ornamental arts of
life, but sunk in gross darkness in the higher things
of worship and virtuous living. It was a necessary
school for God's people, a school in which they
learned evil as well as good, but without which their
later growth was, as far as we can see, impossible.
Thus far, at the end of the book of Genesis, we
reached last Sunday. Four hundred years, at least
so it seems, have passed away when the story of the
next book, the book of Exodus begins. We have
now to hear how the children of Israel came to leave
Egypt. The four books about which I have to speak
to-day take in only forty years, indeed, properly
speaking, only the beginning and the ending of those
forty years. But they are forty years which the Jews
never forgot, and which we should never forget, for,
except at the time of Christ, no other time of forty
years has told so greatly and so lastingly on the fate
of mankind and on our own. Those forty years were
spent in the passage from Egypt to the Land of
Promise. What our four books tell us falls under
two heads, the more important events that happened
on that journey, and the laws which God gave His
people by the way. These two subjects are brought

EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY 39
close together in the text, which, as many of you
know by the way it is quoted in the Catechism, is the
proper heading to the Ten Commandments, the
weightiest part of the law. " I am the Lord thy God
which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of
the house of bondage : thou shalt have none other
gods but me," and so on.
It is impossible to take these four books one by
one for our purposes. They all declare some part of
the Law, all but one tell some of the events which
happened on the journey. In the book called
Exodus we have the story of the departure from
Egypt and the early times of the wandering, the
giving of the Law, and part of the Law itself. In
the book called Leviticus we have chiefly those
directions of the Law which had to do with the out
ward service of God. In the book of Numbers we
have the numbering of Israel and many stories
belonging to both the earlier and the later times of
the forty years again with some parts of the Law.
Lastly, in the book called Deuteronomy Moses is
represented as in a manner repeating what has gone
before in other words, recalling to the people shortly
before his death some of the chief things that had
befallen them preaching to them solemn warnings
about their own conduct in the time to come, and
pronouncing once more in an altered and improved
shape many of the laws which had been earlier given.
Then follows his death and burial, and so the book
of Deuteronomy the fifth in the Bible, ends.
In what I have to sa)? to-day I shall not attempt
to keep these four books distinct. It will be much

40 EXODUS-DEUTERONOMY
clearer to treat them as if they formed one book, of
which the contents should all be considered at once.
One name binds the whole together. The first
chapter of Exodus tells of the birth of Moses, the
last chapter of Deuteronomy tells of the death of
Moses. All that lies between is in one way or
another concerned with Moses ; he is always either
leading the people or speaking to the people. Here
we have at once a great step forward from what
chiefly occupied us last Sunday. Then we had
before us a single man, Abraham. That one man
was the beginning of the Jewish people, they were all
sprung from him, we might think of them as gathered
up in him. That one man was also the friend of
God, receiving messages direct from God, speaking
to God as a man speaks to his friend. In him, the
first of the Jews, notwithstanding his occasional
wrong-doings, we seem to recognize once more that
happy trustful intercourse with God which Adam is
described as enjoying before his fall. But now at the
beginning of Exodus God's promise to Abraham has
been already fulfilled when He said to him, " I will
make of thee a great nation." Instead of a lonely
wanderer we have a whole people of wanderers..
Instead of a single friend of God, conversing with
God of the affairs of his own life, we have Moses the
prophet of God speaking in God's name to the
whole people, about the affairs of the whole people,
speaking in the people's name to God; in a word, as
St. Paul calls him, a mediator, or middle man between
God and the people. Moses is the first example in
the Bible of a true prophet, that is, of a man who

EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY

41

speaks to other men in the name and authority of
God, whose own heart is first filled with a message
which he knows to be from God, and then pours
forth from his lips that which he feels himself con
strained to speak. What his work as a leader was
we learn from every chapter which describes what
befel the people between Egypt and the Promised
Land. In the latter days of the stay in Egypt the
children of Israel suffered much from the cruelty of
King Pharaoh, who made slaves of them, and ground
down their lives under the lash with the severest
labour. Most of you know, I hope, the story of
Moses' infancy and early manhood. You will remem
ber how his heart was stirred up within him when
he saw one of his brother Israelites ill-used by an
Egyptian, so that he slew the Egyptian, and how he
was obliged to flee away into the desert and keep
sheep. There in the burning bush God made Him
self known to him as the God of his father, the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He in whom those
honoured forefathers had trusted and not been con
founded was speaking now to the outcast slave,
declaring His own purpose to deliver his enslaved
brethren out of their bondage and bring them into
the good Land of Promise, and appointing him to do
the work. Moses returns to Egypt and fulfils God's
command. After a series of wonderful signs which
do not move the obstinate king, he leads out the
children of Israel on the night of the Passover. The
Red Sea is divided before them, and they march
safely over, while the Egyptians, who follow, are

42 EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY
overwhelmed by the waters. Moses leads them on
through the wilderness, following the guidance of
God, in spite of their murmurs and doubts. Though
they were the chosen people of God, they were also
a crowd who had only just ceased to be slaves, and
who had all the vices of slaves, who disliked the pain-
fulness of being beaten and forced to work against
their will; but, when they had been set free from
that, shrank in a lazy and cowardly way from the
duties and responsibilities of freedom, and would
have been content to go back to slavery, if only
they might have along with it once more the animal
pleasures which, as slaves, they had been able to
snatch. They hankered, we are told, after the flesh-
pots of Egypt. But this could not be. God loved
them too well to indulge them. His purposes for
them were higher and better than they could imagine.
He desired to train them to the full glory of freedom
and manhood. He intended through them in due
time to bless all the nations of the earth.
How then was He to begin to mould this dis
orderly half-brutish crowd into a true people fit
to carry His name? There was but one way: by a
law, by fixed commandments and rules which had to
be obeyed. Till they were placed under the disci
pline of such a law, taking charge of all their actions,
regulating their dealings with each other, their deal
ings with God, there was no possibility of their
making any progress. But observe well what pains
are taken to show that these restraints, these strict
rules, these threats of punishment did not come from
any mere love of power on God's part, any desire to

EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY 43
put forth His strength against His weak creatures,
much less from any spite or cruelty in His feeling
towards them, but solely from His anxious care to
make them a great and holy people. Before a word
is said about the Law, before God shows Himself as
a strict ruler who will have His commands obeyed.
He first lets Himself be seen only as a Saviour and
Deliverer. He lays the foundation of all true know
ledge of Himself in that. For fear they should for
get or mistake the lesson. He repeats it in the most
distinct words just before He begins to utter His
commandments. 'I, who now speak to thee and am
about to tell thee what thou must not do on pain of
my displeasure, I am the Lord thy God, which have
brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage.' Observe also what care is taken
that they should not suppose His demand for their
obedience and worship to come from any petty
greediness after honour such as a man might show,
and that they should not expect Him to be in
different how they treated each other provided they
give Him His due tribute of worship and reverence
and Sabbath-keeping. Both these natural mistakes
are guarded against beforehand. In six out of the
ten commandments it is the rights of men, not
the rights of God, that are protected. We saw last
Sunday how at the Fall estrangement from God was
immediately followed by estrangement among men,
how before the flood the corruption of mankind
before God is mentioned along with their violence
against each other. It is the same here and all
through the Bible. In the divine law the duty to

44 EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY
God and the duty to our neighbour stand side by
side for ever. We are warned, on the one hand,
against a religion which loses itself in mere religious
ness, and neglects the common duties of life: we are
warned, on the other hand, against the empty dream
which deceives so many, that it is enough to be
content with justice and kindliness to our fellow
creatures, while we render no homage to God in His
own name and for His own sake, and remain strangers
to His love and fear.
The Ten Commandments form but a very small
part of the Law ; but they are the part which con
cerns us far the most. The other precepts are rules
for the guidance of a particular people at a particular
time. After a while many of them seemed to have
dropped into disuse : the people, in fact, outgrew
them ; they lost their original use, and became a mere
burden too heavy to bear. But at first they were
needed. When a people is in a young, unformed
state, above all, when it is so disorderly and wilful as
the children of Israel were in those days, nothing
could serve but stiff rules to be obeyed, going even
into the lesser matters of life. The laws given by
Moses were chiefly intended to enforce just and
merciful dealings among themselves, to keep them
separate as a people set apart to God from the idol-
worshipping and foully immoral nations around them,
and in a great many different ways to lay down rules
for the outward service of God. The people were
not to invent for themselves ways of doing Him
homage which they would be apt to regard as bribes
to His majesty. They had simply to do as they

EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY 45
were bid, to offer to Him just what He commanded
to be offered. But it was in offerings that their
worship was chiefly to consist. Public prayer, such as
makes up the greater part of our worship, was as yet
unknown. They approached God through sacrifice —
to yield up to Him a portion of the good things He
had given them, to acknowledge in this practical way
that they owed all to Him. This was the natural
religious service of men who as yet had far more to
do with acts than with words; and the spirit of that
service remains the very Christian spirit. When we
never tire of calling upon God to give, while we
grudge every self-denial on our part for His sake,
we are making no advance on the religion of those
ancient Jews, we are but moving away from, all true
religion of any kind.
The tale of the wanderings of the children of
Israel is a tale of murmurings and rebellions, followed
by chastisements from God by which He strove to
discipline and train them into a purer and more
orderly state. The long continuance of the wander
ings for the space of forty years was a punishment
for the disobedience and threatenings against Moses
and his brother Aaron, when the people were fright
ened at the report of the Promised Land brought
back by the messengers, and refused to enter in. We
keep up the memory of that time every morning
service when we repeat God's warning in the Psalm,
" To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your
heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temp
tation in the wilderness: when your fathers tempted
me, proved me, and saw my work. Forty years long

46 EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY
was I grieved with this generation, aind said, 'It is a
people that do err in their heart, and they have not
known my ways.' " For indeed, brethren, these
things were written for our learning. We often hear
the earth compared to a wilderness. In some moods
of our minds, more especially in advanced life, that
appears to us a sadly true comparison; we are ready
to cry out that we meet with little but barrenness and
hopeless labour and suffering. In other moods, and
at a younger age, we are angry when a world so full
of brightness and enjoyment appears to be condemned
in this kind of language. In either case let us at least
remember that the true sense of the word comes to
us from those wanderings of the children of Israel in
the wilderness, about which we have been hearing
to-day. For our life here is truly a passage, a journey.
We have left Egypt behind. God has called us as
His children out of the darkness of nature. We are .
not, we cannot be, as those who have never heard
His name or Christ's name. We may hanker back
after the thoughtless fleshy self-indulgence natural to
those who have never learned that there is a God in
heaven, and a law of God to be obeyed on earth ;
but we never can satisfy ourselves with such things.
They too often after a while turn to ashes in the
mouth. Before us lies the land of rest, the state in
which the peace of God so rules our hearts that we
carry with us a perpetual heaven. Between our
Egypt behind and our Land of Promise before we
are ever moving, sometimes backwards, sometimes
forwards. But God calls on us to press ever forwards,
holding the beginning of our confidence steadfast

EXODUS— DEUTERONOMY 47
unto the end. The hardening of heart through the
deceitfulness of sin, which makes us, like dead stones,
unable to feel the presence of the living God, the evil
heart of unbelief and mistrust which cannot enter into
His rest, — these are the things which mix thorns with
the flowers of life and bitterness with its fruits, which
prevent refreshment. We are on our way to God.
Let us enjoy thankfully what He sends us by the
way; but let us never forget whither we are bound,
or allow ourselves to rest satisfied with anything short
of Him who alone is our eternal home.

V

JOSHUA TO DAVID
' ' And David perceived that the Lord had established him king over
Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for his people Israel's
sake." — 2 Sai?iuel ¦v. 12.
We have now gone over the first five books of the
Old Testament, the Pentateuch, as they are called,
or the Law. We have watched the Jews passing
through the first stages of their growth into a people.
Two great names have stood out above the rest,
worthy to stand for ever among the chief of those
which ought to be remembered and honoured to the
end of time, the names of Abraham and Moses. All
mankind, and we all among the rest, have every
reason for gratitude to those two ancient men, for
the services which they rendered to their own people
were rendered to a seed in whom all nations of the
earth were to be blessed and have been blessed.
In Abraham, the best-marked figure of the book
of Genesis, the first forefather of the Jewish people,
we saw the Friend of God, the lonely man going
48

JOSHUA TO DAVID 49
forth into the unknown world in simple and sheer
reliance on a Lord whom he could not see. In
Moses, whose words and deeds fill the four later
books, the lawgiver and leader of the Jewish people,
we saw the Prophet of God, the receiver of a mes
sage not for himself only but for his whole nation.
These were the leading men. What about the
great unnamed, almost unnumbered people? We
saw their early beginnings in Isaac and Jacob and
Jacob's twelve sons, their passage into the rich and
civilized old land of Egypt. We lost sight of them
there four hundred years while they were undergoing
a discipline which should fit them for growing on to
more and more in the years to come. At the end
of the time we saw them toiling and groaning under
the yoke of cruel Egyptian masters, their delivery in
the name of the Lord their God by the hand of
Moses, their march forth into the wilderness, their
receiving from God, on the holy mount of Sinai, a
Law which was to rule them and restrain them and
make them into a people indeed by teaching them
how to obey, their wandering on still in the wilder
ness for forty years as a punishment for their
rebellious wanderings, and at last their second arrival
at the edge of the Promised Land. Then the first
stage was done. The wandering in strange lands
was over, the settled life in a home of their own was
to begin.
Thus far Moses had brought them. He was to
go no further. He too had sinned in the wilderness ¦
and was not allowed to enter himself into the land
of so many expectations. He went up into a

50 JOSHUA TO DAVID
mountain and looked far and wide over the new
world on which they were to enter without him, and
there he died. His work was done. When his
wandering was ended, his life was ended too, and he
entered into a different rest. Another took his place.
That other was Joshua the son of Nun. From him
the sixth book of the Bible, the book of Joshua,
takes its name. The story of that book is the story
of the taking possession of the Promised Land under
the guidance of Joshua. He, we are told, "was full
of the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands
upon him : and the children of Israel hearkened unto
him, and did as the Lord commanded Moses."
They crossed the river Jordan, that sacred river of
which we hear so often in the Bible, and then began
the advance by which one part of the land after the
other was occupied. For we must not suppose that
the country given to the Jews was empty, or filled
only with wild beasts. One of its names is the land
of Canaan, and various tribes of heathen called
Canaanites were already in possession of it. These
heathen had to be driven out before a resting-place
could be found for the Jews ; and so we hear much
of the taking of strong cities and battles with mighty
armies. This was the time spoken of in the well-
known words, "We have heard with our ears, O God,
our fathers have told us what thou hast done in their
time of old: how thou hast driven out the heathen
with thy hand and planted them (that is, Thy
people) in ; how thou hast destroyed the nations, and
spread them wide abroad. For they gat not the
land in possession through their own sword, neither

JOSHUA TO DAVID 5 I
was it their own arm that helped them; but thy
right hand, and thine arm, and the h'ght of thy
countenance, because thou hadst a favour unto them."
Such is the light in which it is best for us to
regard the terrible events of that time. The con
quest of Canaan was wrought out by slaughter, and
it is not easy for us who live in happier times to
know what to think about those deeds of blood.
Thus much however at least we may see, that God
speaks to men according as they are able to receive
His teaching. He does not go greatly beyond their
powers of feeling and understanding. To those who
can comprehend only in part He speaks in part ; and
there are lessons true and valuable at their own time
which at a later time it is dangerous to follow too
closely. The world under its great patient heavenly
Teacher has learnt much since the days when the
Jews entered into Canaan. To us God commands
the mercy and love which all Christians profess to
admire. For us to copy, or admire those who copy,
the merciless destruction which they carried on
against their enemies, would be wilful disobedience
to His plainest will. It is a sad necessity to fight
and slay at our country's bidding in ordinary war
fare ; yet even there every true soldier holds his
hands, and rejoices to spare an enemy when he can
do so with a good conscience. Even this much of
bloodshed is, we trust, only for a while : it is our
duty to pray and labour for the time when the cruel
and jealous passions of men shall have so far been
quieted that even just and rightful wars may cease.
And already we have learned or are learning from

52 JOSHUA TO DAVID
Christ and His apostles that the warfare of Christians
against that which is unchristian is not to be carried
on by violence. By persecuting in Christ's name, by
using in defence of the truth any weapons but those
ot example and persuasion, we do injury to the cause
of God ; we hinder, not hasten the true spiritual con
quest of men's hearts and minds.
Yet it would be well for us if we could look upon
ourselves as the soldiers of God as truly as the
Israelites. They were never allowed to think that
God was permitting them to follow their own desires
in all these wars. Achan, who took for himself some ,
of the spoil, was stoned to death by Joshua's order.
The Canaanites were to be destroyed, not for spite,
not for plunder, but lest they corrupt God's people
with their filthy idolatry, and beguile them away
from the service of the Holy One. And oh, let us be
sure that God hates all evil things as utterly as ever
He did in the old time, and that His true servants
now and always must hate them likewise and never
weary in seeking to destroy them. For this cause
the Son of God, the Prince of Peace, appeared on
earth that He might destroy the works of the devil.
The warfare has to be waged within and without,
against our own darling passions and against the
misery and wickedness which we see around us
The manner of the warfare is changed ; but so long
as anything opposes itself to God and His righteous
kingdom, so long life cannot cease to be a battle.
The next book is the book of Judges. It carries
us on a further stage in the history. Joshua dies,
and the advance of Jewish conquest comes to a

JOSHUA TO DAVID 53
stand-still. For many generations, no one can say
how many, there is a time of disorder and confusion.
Scattered remnants of the Israelites continue in the
land, and by their neighbourhood the children of
Israel are tempted into sin and forgetfulness of God.
They fall under the yoke of various oppressors. The
most dangerous of these were the powerful nation
who dwelt between them and the sea-coast, the
nation of the Philistines. Then from time to time
God raises up a mighty chief who brings back some
sort of order into the wild lawlessness of his people,
and enables them to shake off for a while the grasp
of their enemies. These different chiefs are called
judges, and give their title to the book. Four of
them are specially named in the Epistle to the
Hebrews for the divine faith which enabled them
to carry on an unequal struggle against powerful
oppressors. These are Gideon, Barak, Samson, and
Jephthah. The story of their deeds is full of life and
interest. We cannot look upon them for the most
part as men of great holiness of life or purity of
religion. But they had a rough work to do and they
did it manfully. Not only were their labours made
to serve a great purpose, not only were they in
struments in the hands of God. They knew and felt
that they were His instruments ; and whatever of
dark and earthly character may have been mingled
in their life, they suffered and strove in His name for
the cause of His people with a zeal which we might
envy in these lukewarm days.
After the book of Judges comes the book of Ruth.
Every one likes to read that beautiful story ; but it

54 JOSHUA TO DAVID
must not detain us long now. The chief point which
concerns us is one that we might easily miss, though
it is hinted at in the first chapter of St. Matthew.
The last verses are the key to the whole book. The
son. of Boaz and Ruth was the forefather of King
David and so of our Lord Himself. That highly
honoured Ruth was not of Jewish blood. She came
from Moab, that foreign nation which was so often at
war with Israel. In a later day St. Peter declared to
the Jews, " The promise is to you and to your
children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as
the Lord our God shall call," and even in that early
time the example of Ruth proclaimed to all the
people how they themselves owed everything, not to
any accident of their birth, but to the calling of God
in heaven, and that it was His will to call others
besides themselves to share the glory which He had
bestowed on them.
The only other books on which I propose to speak
to-day, making up five altogether, are the two books
of Samuel. Their fifty-five chapters carry us over no
great length of years, over not much more than a
long life-time. Three famous names fill the two
books — Samuel, Saul, David. One mournful verse
marks the last few chapters of the book of Judges,
occurring wholly or in part several times : " In those
days there was no king in Israel: every man did that
which was right in his own eyes. ' The books of
Samuel describe how that state of things passed away,
and by degrees the kingdom was set up, first in a
king after the people's own heart, then in a king
after God's own heart. Not till that late time, till

JOSHUA TO DAVID 55
the very reign of David himself, was the work ended
which Joshua began, the conquest of the land was
complete, and the people entered on the perfect
enjoyment of God's promises.
But we must first consider the earlier steps. In
the opening chapters we see the hopeless miserable
state of the land. There was no one to lead the way
to a noble life. The people had sunk into ungodliness
and evil doing. The memory of God and His service
was just faintly kept up at the holy tabernacle or
tent which had been the outward sign of God's
dwelling among His people while they journeyed
through the wilderness. We can see the harmless
but feeble old priest, Eli, too sinfully good-natured
to restrain his wicked sons, serving God himself, but
powerless to stir up any right spirit around him.
Then we see the young child set apart by his parents
to the Lord, ministering before Eli, waked by the
voice of the Lord in the stillness of the night and
sent with a message of melancholy prophecy and
rebuke to Eli his master. That is the beginning.
In the face and voice of that holy child we feel the
dawning of a new and better day. He grows up.
The Lord, we are told, was with him, and did let
none of his words fall to the ground, and all Israel
from Dan even to Beersheba, from the furthest
north to the furthest south, knew that Samuel was
established to be a prophet of the Lord.
A few chapters later we read, " Samuel judged
Israel all the days of his life." The judges of. the
wild time before him had been rough soldiers. Here
now was a judge who was also a prophet, renewing

56 JOSHUA TO DAVID
the memory of that Moses whose name was linked /
with all their highest recollections of the past. There/
were perhaps no very marked events of his long rule,
nothing, that is, which would make a striking story.
His influence seems to have been of that quiet bu^
never ceasing kind, the effect of which is hardly
noticed till afterwards. He lived to prepare the way
for that which should come after him.
In Samuel's old age the elders of Israel came to
him asking him to make them a king like the
nations round about. There is no reason to think
that it was against God's will for them to have a
king sooner or later ; but the temper in which they
asked for it now was displeasing to Him. It showed
that they did not believe Him to be really ruling
over them, because they could not see Him. It
betrayed a wish for a mighty captain to lead them
to battle rather than a just judge between man and
man, a restrainer of tyrannous great men, a friend of
oppressed humble men. Here came an ever memor
able lesson of the meaning of God's judgments.
This sin of theirs He could not but punish. But
why did He punish it? Was it to take revenge for
their neglect of Him ? No, it was that they might
repent of their sin and see the folly of it and cast it
away. And there was no way to bring this about
so sure as the letting them have their way. Then by
experience they would find out what true govern
ment contains.
So they were allowed to have the king they
desired. Saul, a mighty man of power, handsome
and tall, was anointed by Samuel in the Lord's

JOSHUA TO DAVID 57
name, and proclaimed king over Israel. His whole
story is most touching to read from its mixture of
worthy purposes and paltry actions. There is in
him no great deliberate wickedness. It always
seems as if he might so easily have grown strong in
goodness. But his course is a downward course.
With all our interest in him, we feel him to be a
poor and worthless king, indulging his people just
when he ought to have restrained them, wholly
unable at last to save them from the Philistine yoke.
In the last years of his life his story is inter
twined with that of David. After one of his foolish
acts of perverse disobedience, Samuel is sent to
anoint another king. The youngest of Jesse's seven
sons, who was busy feeding sheep, is chosen out by
the Divine command, because, unlike the foolish
elders of Israel, the Lord looketh on the heart, not
on the outward appearance. This young shepherd
was David. Soon after, he slays the giant Goliath
with a pebble from his sling, and excites the jealousy
of Saul by the praise which he receives. Presently
to save his life from Saul's attacks he has to flee
away and live the life of an outlaw ; yet ever in that
banishment from the ordinary ways of civilized men,
keeping up a high level of justice and honour, and
generously sparing Saul's life when he had the power
to take it. At length Saul is killed in battle with
the Philistines, and with him his son Jonathan,
David's dearest friend : and David pours forth his
sorrow for father and son together.
This was the worthy beginning of David's reign,
which fills the second book of Samuel. The spirit

58 JOSHUA TO DAVID
of the whole is expressed in the words of the text,
" David perceived that the Lord had established him
king over Israel, and that he had exalted his king
dom for his people Israel's sake." The growth of
the people was complete at last, the kingdom was
duly established, and the mark of a true godly
kingdom was upon it, for the king reigned not for
his own good but for his people's good. The earthly
king's government was a true image of the heavenly
king's government. A heart like the heart of God
was beating in the breast of him who sat on the
throne of Israel. His justice, his self-devotion were
worthy to teach men the true mind of their Lord in
heaven. Two things about David I pass over now.
His grievous wrong-doing will require a few words
next time. His psalms we shall have to consider
later on, when the book of Psalms is before us.
What concerns us to-day is his place in Jewish
history with reference to what has gone before, his
character as the crown and head of Israel. In him
the history of the Old Testament reaches its highest
point. No name that we have not yet touched is
equal to his till we come to Christ Himself, called in
the first verse of the New Testament the Son of
David and Son of Abraham. By that name He was
welcomed in shouts of triumph as He entered Jeru
salem, when the people cried, " Hosanna to the Son
of David, blessed be He that cometh in the name of
the Lord." By that name He was beseechingly im
plored by the blind and wretched, and we too now
repeat their cry so rich in meaning, when week by week
we pray, " O Son of David, have mercy on us ! "

VI

THE KINGS, THE CAPTIVITY, AND THE RETURN
" For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake
I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and
the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth." — Isaiah Ixii. I.
Last Sunday we considered the second five books
of the Old Testament : the books of Joshua, Judges,
Ruth, and Samuel. They conducted us through all
the early times of the stay of the Jews in their own
land and their complete growth into a people. We
saw how they entered the land under the guidance of
Joshua after the death of Moses, how they took
many cities of the Canaanites and destroyed the in
habitants, and established themselves in the midst,
the whole land being portioned out among the
different tribes descended from the sons of Jacob.
In the book of Judges we saw the rough and unsettled
state in which they continued for many generations,
helped forward now and then by mighty men called
judges, who rose up to lead them against their
59

6o THE KINGS, THE CAPTIVITY,
various enemies, and at times to bring their own
irregularities under something like order and govern
ment. Next we saw the young child Samuel in the
tabernacle by the side of the old priest Eli, and then
growing up into a judge of a higher and better sort ,
a judge who was also a prophet, who helped to draw
the people together in God's name, and spoke to
them the words of God. Lastly we saw this last of
the judges giving place to the kings, anointing them
himself before the Lord to their great office; first,
Saul, the king after the people's own heart, the tall
and stately soldier whom they rejoiced to have over
them to lead them against their enemies the Philis
tines, but who without any great wickedness only
dragged them down lower and lower by indulgence
to their fancies and his own, and allowed them to fall
a prey to their enemies; and then, as their second
king, David, the king after God's own heart. We
saw him chosen out by Samuel when he was a shep
herd boy, persecuted by Saul from jealousy of the
honour paid to him as the slayer of the giant Goliath,
upholding honour and justice while living as an out
law among outlaws, sparing his persecutor's life when
he had it in his power, mourning for his persecutor's
death, and at last himself becoming a king of the
noblest kind, one who lived for the good of his
people, and governed them in fearless righteousness.
Thus the people had in the end reached their full
growth, and all that was best in them shone forth in
their head and king. That later suffering King of the
Jews, who was also to be King of the whole earth,
whom we call our Lord, was hailed in the days of

AND THE RETURN g,
His earthly life as the Son of David, and is still wor
shipped by the whole Church throughout the world
under the same name.
Unhappily there was a worm in the bud of all this
greatness both of king and of people. Both had
reached a height from which it seemed impossible to
sink down. But let him that thinketh he standeth
take heed lest he fall. The wonderful beauty and
nobleness of character which rose higher and higher
through the various buffetings and troubles of David's
youth and early manhood, and which brought such
blessings to his people after he had become king,
was after all not strong enough to stand fast to the
end against the temptations of good fortune and the
power to do whatever he would. This pattern king,
the man after God's own heart, condescended to
adultery and murder. Most sincerely, most bitterly,
he repented the sin: the prophet's word convinced
him in a moment that he, the ruler and example of
his people, had been guilty of that miserable base
ness which it had been his pride all his life to scorn
and hate in others. When he humbled himself before
the King in heaven, God forgave him his disloyalty;
but the punishment had still to be borne. He was
hunted out of his city by his own favourite son,
Absalom, and made to taste once more in his old
age with tenfold bitterness the hardships and dangers
of his youth. He came back at last a broken and
saddened man, and there is a shadow over all the
rest of his reign. That which to him had been pun
ishment had been sin in the people. Their mad
wilfulness in following Absalom was a dark sign, it

62 THE KINGS, THE CAPTIVITY,
boded ill for the days to come. But for the present
all things seemed to go well.
We enter to-day on a new time, the time of the
kings after David. In a very few pages we read the
story of four hundred years. The two books of
Kings, after describing the last months of David's
life, are taken up with an account of all the kings
that came after him, and with the doings of the
people so long as they remained in their own land.
The books of Chronicles go no further. They repeat
the same history in a shorter form, sometimes telling
over again the same events, at other times bringing
in fresh matter. They begin with a long account of
the families of the Jews, and then go on with what
happened after the death of Saul. The first book of
Chronicles runs side by side with the second book of
Samuel, with which, we ended last Sunday, and the
second book of Chronicles with both the books of
Kings with which we begin to-day.
We have had one great king of the Jews, David
himself We come now to another great king of the
Jews, a son of David, Solomon. Each reign has a
character of its own : each is in its own way an
image of the everlasting kingdom of Christ Himself
" Thou hast girded me with strength of battle " is the
thanksgiving of David : he was a man of war, a
cdiiqueror. Solomon in coming after him succeeded
to a happier inheritance : he was a prince of peace.
David is the pattern of the righteous king, Solomon
of the wise king. Solomon reigned over a great.
empire. The kings of neighbouring peoples were
glad to do him honour. The Jews were never

AND THE RETURN 63
masters of so wide an extent of land before or after
as in his days. Trade and commerce flourished.
No outward mark of peaceful prosperity was wanting.
The king himself began his reign in a spirit which
promised well for the coming time. He asked God
neither for long life nor for riches nor for victory
over his enemies ; but for a wise and understanding
heart to discern between good and bad, that he might
be able to do true justice among so great a people ;
and immediately the wisdom given in answer to his
prayer was put to a sore trial, and proved itself equal
to the need ; and all Israel, we are told, feared the
king, for they saw that the wisdom of God was in
him to do judgment.
This is the first great mark of Solomon's reign.
The ruler of the people is also the wisest of the
people. The second mark is of another kind ; we
must attend to it well, if we would understand the
rest of the Bible. It is the building of the temple.
That we may see what the building of the temple
meant, let us go back a little. You will remember that
at the time when the children of Israel were journey
ing through the wilderness from Egypt to the Land
of Promise, having meanwhile no fixed resting-place,
no roof over their heads at night, but dwelling in
tents which they carried with them on the journey,
they carried also in the midst one great tent called
the Tabernacle. That was the tent of God, the
mark of His constant presence. Without such a
mark there was reason to fear that they might think
of Him as far off from them. He wished them to
know that He was in the midst of them. Wherever

64 THE KINGS, THE CAPTIVITY,
they moved He moved too. Their many tents
clustering round His one tent were a sign to them
how He was the Lord of one and all, and how in
drawing near to Him they were drawing near to
each other. In that tabernacle He was worshipped.
The religious services which He appointed were
performed there. There too was the ark of the
Covenant, the most sacred thing of all, in which were
lodged various memorials of His great deliverance.
He was a God of men, not a God of a mountain or a
river. When they looked on His tabernacle sharing
in all that befel their own tents, they were helped to
believe in Him as indeed the God of Israel, bound
up with their recollections of the past and their hopes
for the future.
After they entered the Promised Land, the taber
nacle of the wanderings did not lose its honour and
holiness. While the conquest of the land was being
carried out, the tabernacle went with the army ; and
when the people settled down in their own homes it
was fixed at Shiloh. When the ark was carried off
by the Philistines, the tabernacle which had been as
an outer covering to the ark came to be less thought
of In the days of Samuel, Saul, and David, it
rested at different places, and at last at Gibeon,
while David made a new tabernacle for the ark in
his own new city of Jerusalem. It was impossible
that both tabernacles should continue to stand, and
David proposed in place of either to build at Jeru
salem a fixed temple, a house of God instead of a
tent of God. It was indeed a time to be remem
bered in the history of Israel. Till then the land

AND THE RETURN 65
had had no capital, as we call it, no great mother
city, to give the middle point for all the people.
Think what England would be without London, and
you can have some slight notion of the change made
when David took the old heathen city of Jerusalem
and made it the head city, the middle place of his
kingdom. Then first, as I said before, the people
was fully £rown. Their divisions were healed ; they
were joined for a while as one man. Their rest in
the land of rest till now had been broken by having
to struggle with enemies within it. Now it was
become quite their own, and they could rest indeed
in settled homes. The time was come for a glorious
house of God to rise in the midst of the houses of
men. " See now I dwell in a house of cedar," said
King David to the prophet Nathan, " but the ark of
God dwelleth within curtains." He could not bear
the thought that the place of God's presence should
be lodged meanly, while he was lodged richly. But
he was forbidden to build the temple himself. That,
he was told, was for his son, and so when the peaceful
Solomon was settled in his kingdom, he began to
build the temple of the Lord. He knew, as he said,
that the heaven of heavens cannot contain the Most
High ; yet he rightly prepared for Him a house set
apart from all common uses, which should bear His
name and be the sign of His presence, and he rightly
poured forth upon this house of God all his riches to
make it beautiful and wonderful to behold. That
temple of Solomon, brethren, was the beginning of
our churches. The temple holds the middle place in
all the rest of the Bible, Old Testament and New
E

66 THE KINGS, THE CAPTIVITY,
Testament. When Jerusalem was trodden down and
destroyed in the days of the latest apostles, as our
Lord had foretold, the temple, which stood on the
same ground as Solomon's temple, was destroyed.
God was henceforth to be worshipped no longer only
at Jerusalem ; He was to be known as the Lord of
all nations. The only one temple henceforth was
the temple which St. John in the Revelation saw ¦
opened in heaven ; but there was the same need as
ever for marking the presence of God among His
people. Our churches are much more than temples.
Christian worship is far better than any worship
offered in the temple at Jerusalem, because it has in
it more of the spirit and more of the understanding.
Our churches are places where we ourselves meet to
praise God together, to pray to Him together, to
hold communion with Him together. But they are
also His houses, His temples, signs that where we
are dwelling. He is dwelling too.
The latter end of Solomon's reign is sad to think
of His many heathen wives turned away his heart
after other gods. He had freely spent his riches in
building a temple for the Lord, but he did not keep
his own heart pure and true to the Lord ; that divine
temple he neglected. His sin no doubt spread far
and wide among the people. The worship of idols
came in once more in the very sight of the new
temple. When he died, and his son Rehoboam
became king, a day of reckoning followed. By his
bad conduct as a ruler Rehoboam goaded a large
part of the people into rebellion. Ten out of the
twelve tribes, or, as we might say, counties, refused to

AND THE RETURN

(>!

obey him and set up another king: only two re
mained faithful to him. Thus the one people of
God was henceforth split into two kingdoms, some
times at war with each other, nearly always separate,
cursed with a divided worship, divided laws, a divided
name. From this time the ten tribes are called the
kingdom of Israel or Ephraim, the two tribes are
called the kingdom of Judah.
It would be quite beside my purpose to repeat to
you the story of the two kingdoms. I can only
mark out for you the great turning-points of the
Bible. Cut off from Jerusalem and the temple, the
kingdom of Israel fell at once into idol worship.
That and the sins which accompanied it stained the
whole people from first to last. Yet great and true
prophets were not wanting; and the deeds of Elijah
and Elisha remind us that God did not forsake even
those who were estranged from His holy place and
from the kingly family of David. The story of the
kingdom of Judah is sad enough likewise. Now and
then, as in the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah, a
bright light seems to spring up, and then it fades
away once more into the gloom of sin and forgetful
ness of God. The end of both kingdoms is the
same. Both become the victims of powerful foreign
nations. The kingdom of Israel is destroyed by the
Assyrians, who carry the people away into captivity.
The kingdom of Judah, often threatened, often re
duced to sore straits, lasts on three or four genera
tions longer, and then its day of doom comes.
Jerusalem is taken, and the people of Judah are
dragged away as captives to Babylon. So end the

68 THE KINGS, THE CAPTIVITY,
books of Kings and Chronicles. From that day to
this no Jewish king has sat on David's throne. This
is the carrying away into Babylon spoken of in the
first chapter of St. Matthew as finishing the second of
the three great spaces of time between Abraham and
Christ. The first ends with David, the second ends
here. We know very little of what befel the people in
the land of their captivity. Various prophecies and
psalms, to which we must return another day, belong
to this time, and show what was in the hearts of the
best among them. But what happened to them can
only be gleaned from a few chapters of Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the book of Esther. All
particulars I shall pass over. But observe two great
facts. One is that for a considerable time there were
Jews dwelling in the heart of a heathen kingdom,
making their spiritual power felt there, and receiving
back new lessons which they were to carry with them
in after times. Another thing to be remembered is
the lasting effect of this sore chastisement from God.
Whatever their future sins might be, they had done
with idol worship for ever.
The two books which follow the books of Chronicles,
Ezra and Nehemiah, tell us how that miserable
captivity came to an end, at least for part of the
people. They had become at last the servants of
Cyrus, king of Persia, a wise and good ruler, whose
own religion was the purest and best of all heathen
religions. He is spoken of in the later chapters of
Isaiah as the Lord's own anointed, the Lord's shep
herd, who should perform all His pleasure. Thus

AND THE RETURN

69

God was making Himself known in new ways,
showing that other nations besides the Jews were
cared for by Him, and that He delighted in the
goodness even of those who were strangers to His
covenant. So a step was being taken towards the
great Christian doctrine, that God is no respecter of
persons. Cyrus sent forth the chief of the fathers of the two
tribes of the kingdom of Judah to go back to their
own land, and build the house of the Lord which was
in Jerusalem. He sent back with them the vessels
of gold and silver which had been carried away out
of the temple. In this way a remnant of the people
came back out of captivity. They had hindrances of
all sorts in building the temple. But at last the work
was done, and regulations made for keeping the
people istrictly separate from their heathen neigh
bours. So ends the history of the Old Testament.
A few chapters of the prophets come a little later
down, but only a little. ¦ Above four hundred years
more were to pass before Christ should be born, and
for that time we have only the books called the
Apocrypha, a few chapters of which are read in
church on saints' days: books full of excellent teach
ing mixed with some fables ; well worth reading, but
never to be put on a level with the Old and New
Testaments. What we require to know about the
Jews in the times before Christ came is sufficiently
told us in the Old Testament itself As I began by
saying, the purpose of the whole Bible is to teach us
the ways of God: whatever does not help towards
that, we can do without knowing.

70 THE CAPTIVITY AND THE RETURN
The story of the people who sprang from Jacob's
sons begins with a deliverance out of bondage: the
Lord God who gave them the law was He who had
brought them out of the land of Egypt. Their story,
so long as it belongs to the Old Testament, ends with
a second deliverance from bondage, a deliverance
carrying with it a message not of love only, like the
first deliverance, but of forgiveness. For the bondage
in Babylon was due to their sins; the deliverance
from Babylon is a pledge that God's love is not
quenched by sin, though sin compels it to take new
forms. God's dealings with each separate soul among
us are written large in His dealings with His ancient
people. In his tender loving-kindness He brought
them back chastened and purified from Babylon.
Yet when they rejected His blessed Son He cast
them out once more as homeless wanderers on the
face of the earth. Yet not for ever, St. Paul bids
us believe: the gifts and calling of God He never
takes back. He goes unweariedly on, fashioning His
creatures to His own high ends. He cannot cease
to punish or to forgive so long as there is sin to be
punished or forgiven. And why? Because His
mercy endureth for ever, and He never forsakes the
work of His own hands. " For Zion's sake he will
not hold his peace, and for Jerusalem's sake he will
not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as
brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that
burneth."

VII

THE PROPHETS
"Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed
thee in the belly I knew thee ; and before thou camest forth out of the
womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.
Then said I, Ah, Lord God ! behold, I cannot speak : for I am a child.
But the Lord said unto me. Say not, I am a child : for thou shalt go to
all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt
speak. Be not afraid of their faces : for I am with thee to deliver thee,
saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my
mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in
thy mo-a\.\i."^/eremia>i i. 4-9.
The last time that I spoke to you about the Old
Testament, we had before us those books which
describe the history of the Jews from the end of
David's reign till the return from Babylon. In the
two books of Kings and the second book of Chroni
cles we had the events which befel the people in
their own land under their own kings. In the book
of Esther we had a single story out of the captivity.
In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah we had the
return from the captivity, and the means taken after
the return to preserve the people of God in separate-
71

72 THE PROPHETS
ness and purity. After these books, the last of those
which are often called the historical books of the
Old Testament, i.e. those which tell us about men's
doings and God's teaching by what befel them, we
come to a totally different set of books, which contain
men's sayings and God's teaching by the truth which
they contain. I do not mean that the first set of
books has in it nothing but doings, and the second
nothing but sayings. The book of Deuteronomy,
for instance, is in most parts more like a sermon than
a story. And in the books to which we are now
coming we shall find here and there chapters which
are nothing but story. Still, on the whole, the
distinction between the two sets of books is well kept
up, and you will find it a real help to yourselves in
reading the Old Testament to bear it in mind. In
the books from Genesis to Nehemiah we have the
works of God and man; in the books from Job to
Malachi we have the words of God and man.
The books which still remain for us to consider
belong to two great divisions. First come five called
in our English Bible Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesi
astes, and Solomon's Song. Then come seventeen
called the Books of the Prophets. Up to this time
I have been able to keep strictly to the order of
books as we find them in the Bible. But to-day I
shall venture to change the order a little, keeping the
five books which follow Nehemiah for another time,
and taking first the books of the prophets. There
are two reasons for doing this. One is that the books
of the prophets are more closely connected with the
history of the kings and of the captivity with which

THE PROPHETS

73

we were last occupied than even the Psalms and
Proverbs are with David and Solomon. The other
is that some of the lessons of the prophets have a
special fitness for to-day, the last Sunday before
Good Friday, and at the same time the last Sunday
before Easter Day.
It is particularly important to see the connexion
between the books of the prophets and the events
which befel the Jews under the kings and after the
two kingdoms had come to an end, because otherwise
it is not possible to understand more than a small
part of the prophecies. The prophets were raised up
by God chiefly at times of great need to speak to
His people the words which just at that moment it
was especially necessary for them to hear. They
were not men who lived away from their countrymen
and brought messages out of the air, as it were ;
messages that might just as well have been delivered
at any time, and which would be equally suitable to
all people under all circumstances. They were men
born and bred in the midst of the people, mixing with
the people in all the affairs of their lives, suffering
with the people in their sufferings, rejoicing with the
people in their deliverances and turns of good fortune,
feeling the burden of the people's sins as their own,
eagerly embracing God's great mercy and forgiveness
for themselves as sinners along with the rest of the
people. Their whole minds were thus fashioned by
all the changes within and without, the hopes and
fears, the troubles and the blessings, which were rising
and falling around them. Everything that came
near them entered more deeply into their hearts than

74 THE PROPHETS
into any hearts, left more lasting traces there, and
kindled more powerful and active feelings. Thus the
prophecy and the story fit into each other, as it were,
because the one grew out of the other, and was
intended in its turn to tell upon the other. The
story, as given us in the books of Kings and
Chronicles, for instance, is so short that we are not
always able to trace its bearing upon the prophecy.
But we ought never to forget that there was once a
story belonging to every prophecy: and thus it is
that the prophecies are still well suited to our own
story, able to teach us to understand what has
befallen us in our past lives, and able so to enlighten
us as to what lies still before us.
For there is another side to the matter. The
prophets were not only the men who shared most
deeply in all that befel the people. They were also
the men through whom God spoke to the people.
This indeed is just what makes them prophets. A
prophet in the strictest sense of the word is simply
God's spokesman to men. It does not follow from
this that the words are not his own too. It is not as
though God had written down in the prophet's mind
a particular set of words which he has nothing to do
but read off as if he were reading a book 'aloud.
The words are his own, nay, the thoughts are his
own : only somehow within and behind them all is
the Spirit of God, raising and purifying all the powers
of his spirit. The voice of God and the voice of man
are thus in a manner there together ; we cannot tell
the one from the other; the more completely the
voice comes from the innermost depths of the

THE PROPHETS 75
man, the more completely is it also the voice of
God. But in what way does the influence of the Spirit
of God show itself in the prophets? First, in their
tracing the happiness and the misery of men to the
true roots, their love of good or their love of evil,
their trust in God and keeping of His holy law, or
their forgetfulness of Him and sinning against His
commandments. We find in the prophets no fanciful
and forced contempt for prosperity or misfortune, for
any of the enjoyments of life or the miseries of life.
They do not pretend to say that these ought not to
be rejoiced in, or those felt as sore trials. But they
do teach most plainly that the people or the man
whose heart is set first on God and His blessed will
is in the right way, and has a peace and joy which
nothing can destroy. And they teach, on the other
hand, that the people or the man who leaves God out
of his thoughts and follows nothing but his own
pleasure or pride or advantage is in the wrong way,
however he may seem to prosper, and has within
him a running stream of bitterness which poisons
everything that he tastes.
This is one of the great lessons taught by the
prophets; but it is one taught also by all true and
wise preachers in all ages. There is another much
more rare, which is found more remarkably still in
the prophetic books of the Old Testament ; and that
is the necessity of looking backwards and forwards
if we would see our present way aright. " I stand
continually upon the watchtower" says Isaiah in one
place. This is just what the prophets are always

^6 THE PROPHETS
doing. They are standing as it were on watchtowers,
on places rising high above the level of ordinary life,
from which they can look over a great breadth of
country in all directions. Every one knows how
much we are deceived by the mere nearness of
things, when we cannot see more than a few things
at once. Small things appear great; everything is
seen only on one side. If we look back after we
have gone on a little distance, we are surprised to
see how different the same object looks now from
what it did a little while ago. Now this is just what
is happening to us every day in the serious affairs of
life. We forget to look backward, we forget the
experience which all looking back teaches, we are
taken up with what is just before us, and we let our
selves be tricked by all its deceitful appearances.
We live only for the moment.
Yet this is the destruction of all true and divine
life. Man is man because he is a being looking
before and after, one who makes full use of memory
and of foresight, that he may order his life not in
little single fragments but as one great whole, worthy
of a creature permitted to understand and to carry
out in part the counsels of the Most High God.
The great work of the prophets of the Jews was to
be ever rousing the Jews to a recollection of this
their high calling ; to be renewing in their minds the
memory of their own lives and of the life of the
people before they were born, explaining to them
God's dealings with their forefathers, and helping
them to see where they were themselves now stand
ing. This was their work as towards the past. It

THE PROPHETS

77

was a not less necessary work to lead the people to
keep the future ever in view. The Jews were above
all nations, as I have said on former occasions, the
people of hope : i.e. hope in the future was a leading
thought in the minds of all their best and greatest
men. The looking forward to the Promised Land
in their early days was a sign of that reaching ever
onwards which was never wholly to depart from the
people in later days. The foundation of the hope
was in the promises of God. Where faith in Him
died away, the hope unavoidably died away too. No
depth of misery appeared too great for Him to bring
to an end, as He had brought the Egyptian bondage
to an end. No depth even of sin appeared to kill
His promises, though it might render their fulfilment
far far distant, since the Holy One could never be
satisfied with continuance in unholiness.
In this way the prophets who were the spokesmen
of God were also distinguished by the keen and true
sight with which they looked into the future, and the
eagerness with which they spread forth before the
eyes of the people their visions of the future. Their
prophecies are not in the least like the pretended
forecasts of fortune-tellers, not mere readings of a
story of things to come just like readings of a story
of things already past. What they did was to cast
upon the future the light which came from so much
of God's everlasting counsels as He had revealed to
them through the past and the present. "In thy
light shall we see light" was the leading thought of
their minds. Even the darkness which covers all the
time not yet born is not wholly dark to those who

78 THE PROPHETS
have the light which comes from knowing God's
ways. But once more let me repeat, their great
task, as they looked forth from their watchtowers,
was to raise the people by turning the people's own
eyes steadily forwards. For us men, God and the
future are linked together in a wonderful union. In
this stage of the world it is difficult, almost im
possible, to look up constantly to God without the
help given by looking ever forward and forward to
the glory which shall be revealed. And it is equally
difficult not to be sunk in the cares and interests of
the moment, but to have an eye without ceasing to
the far-off life of ourselves and of our race, without
hearty converse with Him who is the. Lord of all the
ages. To keep down the fears which spring from a
knowledge of the evil in ourselves and the evil in
the world we need the ever renewed assurance that
His counsel shall stand, and that He will do all His
pleasure. I have dwelt at some length upon the office of the
Jewish prophets in general, because this is the master
key to the understanding of all their different books.
If these thoughts are impressed on your minds, it
will not be necessary to go minutely into the par
ticular characters of each. Still it is most important
to notice that they have each a distinct character,
and to observe how they were affected by the great
changes which befel the people.
When you read the books of Kings and Chronicles,
you will see many prophets mentioned there from
whom we possess no written prophecies. The fact
is that long written prophecies, such as make up our

THE PROPHETS

79

books of the prophets, belong only to the later times.
The earlier prophets wholly or chiefly spoke in short
and simple messages, valuable for their own day, but
not rising to the far-reaching wisdom of such men as
Isaiah. The beginnings of prophecy go a long way
back in the history. We have already seen that
Moses, the leader of the people on their first going
forth from Egypt, was a prophet ; and so was Samuel,
the leader and judge who prepared the way for their
being governed by kings. Nathan, who boldly re
buked King David for his great sin, was a prophet
likewise, and all his words have a true prophetic
sound. Afterwards we hear of various sayings and
doings of not a few prophets, and it is evident that
there were many more of whom no record has come
down to us. They were not confined to the kingdom
of Judah where Jerusalem was, and the holy temple
of God, and the true worship of God, and the kingly
family of David. After the miserable separation in
the days of Rehoboam, about which we heard last
time, when ten of the tribes were split off and formed
a new half-idolatrous kingdom of their own, the king
dom of Israel or Ephraim, God raised up prophets
there as well as in Judah. Indeed, I suppose the
most lively picture of a prophet which occurs to our
minds is that of Elijah, the rugged prophet of Israel,
who stood forth to rebuke the idolatries of king Ahab
and his queen Jezebel.
The prophecies of Joel were called forth by a
terrible calamity. The land had suffered much from
inroads of the heathen, much from a long drought,
but most of all from several visitations of locusts,

8o THE PROPHETS
large insects like grasshoppers, which devour a whole
crop in a few hours, and leave wide spaces of country
bare without a blade of green. Joel invites the
stricken and starving people to humble themselves
before the Lord, and then looks forward to a time
when the Spirit of the Lord shall be poured out upon
all flesh, and His love and favour to His people shall
be known before the world. Here we have the
simplest form of written prophecy. Prophecies of the
same kind, but with a stronger feeling that the people
of God were not less but more guilty than others
when they sinned against God, make up the book of
Amos, the herdman and gatherer of sycamore fruit,
as he calls himself, who came forth from his country
home to declare the word of the Lord, and boldly
faced the king's anger. In Hosea we have a striking
instance of the way in which the life of the prophet
himself was used by God as part of His teaching.
But it would take too long to go through all the
prophets. The marvellous words of Isaiah in some
of the early chapters were called out by a great
danger in the reign of Hezekiah, when the over
whelming army of the Assyrians was threatening to
destroy Judah, as they had destroyed Israel a few
years before. In Jeremiah and Ezekiel we are
brought to the miseries of the last days of Judah,
when the cup was at length full, and after great
troubles within the city the Babylonians were allowed
to carry the people into captivity. In the book of
Daniel, which is in many respects unlike any of the
other prophecies, we are made to feel how even in
captivity the people were still the people of God,

THE PROPHETS 8l
compelling in His name the respect of their heathen
conquerors, and, on the other hand, enabled to see
that all the nations of the earth were in God's hand,
and that He had a work for each of them to do in
His own due time. Then in the later chapters of
Isaiah, the greatest and loftiest part of all Old Testa
ment prophecy, we see the renewal of better times;
and the hope of the return from captivity broadens
out into a vision of new glory for Israel, spreading
light over the whole world. And lastly, in Haggai
and Zechariah, and a little later in Malachi, we are
brought among the returning Jews themselves, the
rebuilding of the ruined temple, and at last the fresh
growth of sins which called for God to come down
as a consuming fire to purify His people from their
dross. They are bidden to remember the Law of
Moses the first prophet, and are told that Elijah the
fearless prophet of Israel shall come once more to
prepare the way of the Lord, and so with a mingled
voice of prophets early and late, and a renewal of the
Law itself, the Old Testament ends.
Thus far it might seem as if the great promises of
God to Israel had closed in failure. But deep in the
heart of prophecy a new thought had meanwhile long
been growing. The hopes of deliverance by degrees
came together into the hope of a deliverer, a true
conqueror and king whom God should send. Then
when it became clearer that the people was its own
worst enemy, and that deliverance from locusts, and
plagues, and earthquakes, and foreign armies, was of
little avail while sin had the mastery, it was seen
likewise that the deliverer must be one who suffered

82 THE PROPHETS
with his people, a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief, who felt the people's sins as his own, and
bore on his own shoulders the iniquity of all. How
that expectation was fulfilled, we shall hear on Good
Friday. But again, it was mixed with brighter hopes than
Israel had known before. In the terrible captivity
Israel had seemed to go down into death; and the
return from captivity was like a return out of death,
a life restored to dry bones, which hinted an assur
ance that after all death need not be the last thing,
but that life might corne once again where death had
seemed to prevail. How that expectation was ful
filled, we shall hear on Easter Day.
The opposite feelings of passionate grief and exult
ing hope, which strive for the mastery in Old Testa
ment prophecy, meet together in the coming week,
which is filled with the Saviour's sorrows and ends
on the eve of His joyful resurrection. But remember,
brethren, to us God has given not a prophecy only
but a gospel. He has not merely taught us to ask
and to hope. He has given, and He has fulfilled.
Our faith is that Christ has died, and Christ has risen.

VIII

JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES
' ' When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning
of the thunder ; then did he see it, and declare it ; he prepared it, yea,
and searched it out. And unto man he said. Behold, the fear of the
Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil is understanding. "—Job
xxviii. 26-2S.
On the last Sunday before Easter we entered on the
second half of the Old Testament, that part of it
which deals chiefly with the words of God, which
words of God are also the words of men ; as the
earlier part described the acts of God, the ways in
which His Providence ordered the doings of men.
We took first the books of the prophets, and I tried
to show you how needful it is in reading their
prophecies to remember that they were first spoken
in the midst of stirring times, of which we have a
short account chiefly in the books of Kings and
Chronicles. A prophet, we saw, is a man who speaks
to other men in God's name and on God's behalf.
But he is prepared for his office by entering more
83

84 JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES
Strongly and deeply than other men into all that is
going on around him. Whatever he speaks is
coloured by the events, the thoughts, and the feelings
of his own time, which take hold on his own heart.
And again whatever he speaks is meant to tell upon
his own people and his own time: when he warns or
rebukes or encourages or inspires, it is of them and
their needs that he is thinking. Yet his words have
an abiding life in them, which makes them fit and
profitable to be spoken to us, because the Spirit of
God Himself is in them. This influence from above
shows itself not merely in the way in which all the
prophets insist on right and wrong, good and evil, as
the one great distinction without which our life goes
off into hopeless confusion and misery. It shows
itself still more in the way in which they stand, as it
were, on watchtowers, gazing far backward and far
forward, teaching us to judge the little things close
at hand by the light of God's great purposes, and
never to allow the trifles of to-day, which look to us
important now only because they are under our eyes,
to make us forget the great eternal world to which
we belong all the time. Lastly, the prophets lead us
to see God and His kingdom in the future. By
teaching us to fear and to hope, but above all to
hope, beckoning us to look onward to the days which
are still far before us, they lead our thoughts likewise
to the heaven above us and to God the King of
heaven. And again, by fixing our minds on Him
and the treasures of wisdom and goodness which
are hid in His counsels, they invite us to look
beyond the little round of present things and

JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES 85
admit the coming ages among our beliefs and our
desires. These are some of the benefits which we may
receive, if we will, more or less from all the prophets.
They have likewise, as I told you, their different
lessons, changing with the times for which they spoke
and with the events of their own lives. The ups and
downs of fortune which befel the Jewish people under
its kings, then the carrying away into a strange land,
and then the return of part of the people back to
their own land, give rise to different bursts of
prophecy. One particular thread of prophecy I
noticed as having special interest for us by the way
in which it prepares us for the New Testament.
The hopes for the people take shape by degrees
as hopes of a coming Deliverer. This expected
Deliverer, who at last was known as the Christ or
the Messiah, i.e. the Anointed One, was known better
and better as time went on. In the sufferings of the
captivity the prophets found out under the Spirit's
teaching that He too must be a sufferer, one who
shared all His people's sorrows and felt the burden
of their sins as His own. But they were further
taught to look beyond the time of suffering to the
time of glory. The return of the people from the
dust of captivity became an assurance that life is
possible after death as well as before it. Thus those
expectations were planted in the hearts of men
which were fulfilled on the first Easter morning,
when the true King of the Jews and of all mankind,
who had passed through suffering and death down
into the grave, rose once more from the dead, and

86 JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES
so led the way in the march of mankind back to
God. To-day we take a step backwards, not merely in
the pages of our Bibles, but in the order of time.
Parts of some of the books with which we have to
do to-day may perhaps have been written as late as
some of the later prophecies. But the names of
David and Solomon belong in one sense or another
to four out of these five books, and so we are carried
back to those two great kings who stand at the
beginning of the kingdom of the Jews, while it was
yet in the first bloom of its power and glory. The
names of the books which thus remain for us to
consider are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and
Solomon's Song. On this last book I do not pro
pose to say anything, for obvious reasons. A time
may one day come when it will be understood why
Solomon's Song has a place in our Bibles ; but, as
things now are, it can hardly be possible to speak of
it from the pulpit with advantage.
We come first to the book of Job. This wonder
ful book hangs in the air, as it were, without mark of
time and almost without mark of place. Job is set
in the land of Uz, outside the land of Israel. He has
no knowledge of tabernacle or temple or law or
prophet ; yet he has the faith of a Jew: he believes
in the one Lord whom the Jews worshipped. There
is nothing to fix at what time he is supposed to have
lived. He is cut off from everything: he stands
alone, alone facing God, and so his struggles are a
true picture of the struggles which are likely to come
to any man at any time in any place who is brought

JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES 87
into sore trials, and yet does not forget God. You
will remember that we are now in a part of the Bible
which has much more to do with words than with
works. The story of Job is not like the story of
David or of Elijah, such as we read in the earlier
books: it is rather like one of the parables in the
Gospels, such, for instance, as the parable of the rich
man and the beggar. The doctrines of the book are
the important part. All that is said to have happened
to Job is only a framework put in to carry the doctrines.
What then are these doctrines ? I have used the
word 'doctrines' for want of a better, but it is not a
very fit or satisfactory word here. The teaching of
the book of Job comes out partly in questions, partly
in answers to questions. We cannot pack the sub
stance of the whole into a small space. The different
parts are necessary to each other, even when they
seem to contradict each other. Job, a man who is
both prosperous and happy, enriched by God with
every blessing that life can bring, yet not injured by
his good fortune, but fearing God with all his heart, is
stripped one by one of all his blessings. His cattle
and his slaves, in those days the chief kind of riches,
are carried off by robbers or struck dead by lightning.
His sons and daughters are crushed to death beneath
a falling house. In the midst of his poverty and
desolation his own body is not spared: it is filled
with a loathsome disease. His wife, instead of cheer
ing him and encouraging him, mocks at him bitterly
because he still trusts in God.
In the midst of his trouble three friends come to
see him. They are full bf real pity for him. Their

88 JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES
wish is to mourn with him and to comfort him. For
a whole week they say nothing, but only sit down
with him in sorrow. Then at last he breaks forth.
He says nothing against God ; but he wishes no
longer to live since life has become so bitter, he feels
it a curse to have been born. The friends reply
with an appeal to the justice of God. They begin
softly and kindly; but as he answers that, their
doctrines, however true they may be, do not heal his
misery or show him the way out of his bewilderment,
they wax hotter and hotter, and pour forth reproaches
against him. The subject of the whole dispute is
the meaning of sorrow and trouble and why God
sends them. Probably every one in this church who
is more than a child has at some time or other tried
to see his way in the same difficulty. 'Do good, and
thou shalt find good; do evil, and thou shalt find
evil ' ; this is the first simple rough law. We express
it more roughly still when wc say that welldoing
leads to happiness, and wrongdoing leads to misery.
This is true, but it is not the whole truth. If it
were the whole truth, we should never see any mis
fortune happening to a good man or any good
fortune enjoyed by a wicked man. Yet we know
that we do often see both these things ; and so we
may be sure we cannot have learned the whole of
God's ways to man when we are satisfied to judge
men solely by this rule. Yet this was what Job's
friends did. ,They had their rule by heart, and had
no scruple about applying it to the sufferer before
them. Seeing him in misery, they thought that God
must have sent the misery as a punishment for some

JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES 8g
sins. They knew of no great sins to accuse him of
but they declared that he j?iusl have committed
great sins, or God would never have so afflicted him.
And when Job refuses to confess the truth of their
accusations, they grow more angry and pronounce
him guilty of self-righteousness.
And here let me point out one great mistake,
which is commonly made by readers of the book of
Job. It is often taken for granted that every word
which we find there in every chapter is pure truth, no
matter from whose lips it comes ; and the speeches
of the friends in particular are readily quoted, because
they agree so well with what is supposed to be the
religious and proper thing to say upon all occasions.
But the fact is that even the truths which the friends
utter become half-falsehoods in their mouths, and
will be equally false in our mouths if we use them
in the same reckless uncharitable way. Not the least
useful lesson of the book of Job is that it is quite
possible to be doing only the devil's work when we
pride ourselves on being on the side of God and
religion: there is a speaking for God, as Job bitterly
complains, which is a wicked speaking, and a talking
for Him which is a deceitful talking. On the other
hand. Job's own words, honest and in the main true
as they are, must still be, taken as the words of a
man in anguish who cannot see his way, and so is
often led to speak wild words ; who refuses to juggle
himself into repeating what he cannot believe merely
because he is told he ought to believe it ; and yet
who still feels that his own life and God's dealings
with it are a terrible puzzle.

90 JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES
When at last God answers Job out of the whirl
wind, he and his friends are alike put to silence. We
are made to feel the folly and falsehood of pro
nouncing that the greatest sufferers must have been
the greatest sinners (though indeed there ought to be
little need of such teaching for Christians who have
heard of the spotless Saviour's sufferings), and at the
same time we are shown how little we poor short
sighted creatures can understand of the counsels of
the mighty God. We are permitted to see at least
one purpose of suffering. Job was tried and purified
by what he endured. He came forth from his
sorrows with a deeper and wiser faith in God than
he had known before, and he received in the eyes of
men the assurance of God's undiminished love and
favour by being restored to more than his former
good fortune. The sufferings which God sends are
not a mark of His hatred or indifference: one reason
at least why He sends them is to purify us and
make us better and truer men.
The book of Psalms must be more familiar to us
all than any other book of the Bible, from its use in
church every Sunday. I have often had occasion to
preach to you about different Psalms, and may have
to do the same again. Still a few words will not be
out of place now about the whole book. The Psalms
taken altogether are often called the Psalms of
David. It must not be supposed that they were all
written by him. They come from all times between
his days and those of the latest prophets. In the
137th Psalm, for instance, we have the sighs of the
Jewish prisoners as they sat beside the waters of

JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES 91
Babylon and longed to be back in their own holy
and beloved land. The mark of place and time
which every one can observe in those words may
be traced more faintly in some other Psalms. But
David is the Psalmist. The fountain of devotion and
praise to God which sprung forth with such power
in his heart flowed on into the holy men of other
generations who read and sang his eager words ; and
for many a generation the Psalter or book of Psalms
went on growing richer and fuller. Almost every
thought which can enter the mind of a man com
muning with his God is there. Sometimes the tone
is of bitter anguish, sometimes of bounding joy, often
a mixture of both; but always the one assurance is
there, that God can and will be the help of them that
trust in Him and cry to Him. Many of the Psalms
are the outpourings of lonely men, pleading with
God as Job pleaded with Him. Others again are
thanksgivings written for the temple services, meant
like our best hymns to be regularly used by bodies
of singers in the public worship of the people, praises
of the Lord by the great congregation. This great
variety of the Psalms gives them no small part of
their value. They reach us in every mood of our
hearts, and turn every thought into a prayer.
No change can be greater than when we pass
from the Psalms to the Proverbs. The burning
words of the righteous king, who was a fighter for
the greater part of his life, give place to the calm
maxims of the wise king whose long reign was a
time of peace and trade and riches. Here too, as in
the Psalms, the proverbs which Solomon himself

92 JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES
uttered became the pattern after which many pro
verbs were fashioned, and the book of Proverbs, as
we have it, is a storehouse of the wise sayings of
different generations. Their wise sayings — this is the
mark of the whole book. A time had come in the
history of the Jews when they might at last rest :
the struggle to obtain complete mastery within their
own land was over : what they had to do now
was to dwell in it after a right and godly manner.
Up to this time they had been always on guard, a
kind of soldier life was a necessity. Now they were
to live the life of citizens, to dwell with each other in
a peaceable and orderly way, and throw into common
duties the whole strength which till now had been in
part required for defence against enemies. Simple
homely morality had to be cultivated by old and
young, rich and poor, parents and children, husbands
and wives : and the great need of all minds was
summed up in one word, 'wisdom.' TIfe natural
impulse of every one was, as it is now, to go off
after this or that object of desire in shortsighted and
reckless ways. Wisdom corrects this impulse by
teaching us to fix our minds on lasting and distant
things, so as not to be carried away by deceitful
shows. Sometimes in the book of Proverbs the
wisdom which teaches us seems to lose sight of God
in the petty matters of our daily work. But it is a
most needful lesson that the Bible declares these
common things, which we are apt to pursue without
thought of God, are the very field of our religion, and
that in them we have to show whether we do indeed
worship a holy and just God who will have us holy

JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES 93
and just like Himself For again and again we are
reminded that all lesser wisdoms meet together in
one highest victorious wisdom, the beginning of
which is the fear of the Lord.
Lastly, we come to the book of Ecclesiastes. It
is put into the mouth of a king of Jerusalem, a son
of David, i.e. Solomon. The writer of the book had
no care to thrust himself forward. All that he had
to say appeared to suit the character of the wise
king, such as he might have become in his old age,
after the ample experience of a long life upon the
throne. It was a melancholy message that he had
to deliver as what life had taught him. Job had
been perplexed with misery; the preacher was per
plexed with a less sharp but a commoner and perhaps
even a more depressing thing, with vanity, disappoint
ment, failure. To him life had promised much and
seemed to perform little : it brought only vexation
of spirit. Out of such an experience what lesson
could spring? This, a humble lesson, yet a true and
wise one. First, not to lose the blessings of the
present by wasting ourselves in empty expectation
of better things in store ; but to prize what we have,
and take heed that we do not throw away the true
riches which lie hid within it. Next, to remember
God, our Maker and our Judge, now at once, not
by and bye but to-day, and find in Him and His
law a refuge against the unsatisfyingness of all
things beside. There are certain states of mind only
too familiar to many among us in which our hearts
can be better reached by such a message as this than
by any other voice from above. But God forbid

94 JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS, ECCLESIASTES
that we should rest in such states of mind. We
have come to the end of the Old Testament; but
there is a New Testament waiting for us. God
Himself leads us through the wilderness, makes us
feel the world to be barren and dry, writes vanity of
vanities upon our hopes and desires. But this He
does that He may lead us at last into the heavenly
Land of Promise, when we have learned that all life
flows from Him, and then new life and brightness
return to the things which only wearied us before.
His Son's resurrection is the true answer to that sigh
of vanity. It calls us, brethren, to walk in newness
of life. It tells us that all things are ours, and we
are Christ's, and Christ is God's.

IX

THE GOSPELS
"The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God." —
Si. Mark i. i.
We have now gone through the Old Testament and
can understand in what sense, as the Epistle to the
Hebrews told us, God at sundry times and in divers
manners spoke to the fathers by the prophets. We
have followed the Jewish people through manifold
and great changes from their first beginnings in
Abraham the Friend of God. We have seen how
the Providence of God led them down into Egypt ;
how after 400 years, ending in cruel slavery, they
were delivered by God by the hand of Moses ; how
they went forth, led by Moses the prophet and
mouthpiece of God, and journeyed through the
wilderness towards their own land ; how they re
ceived from God through Moses at Mount Sinai a
Holy Law, which was to restrain them and guide
them in the right way, and make them a people
indeed ; how, because of their rebellious spirit, they
95

96 THE GOSPELS
had to wander forty years in the wilderness, and at
last entered into the Promised Land under the guid
ance, not of Moses, but of Joshua ; how they were
permitted to conquer the heathen nations whom they
found in the land, and take possession of their cities ;
how for many years of rough disorder they were
governed from time to time only by rulers called
judges, who led them against their enemies, and
enforced some kind of justice amongst themselves ;
how the last of these judges, Samuel, was set apart
to God while yet a little child, and became a prophet
as well as a judge, teaching the people from God as
well as ruling them from God ; how he brought all
the different parts of the people together, so that
they learned to feel once more that they were truly
one people, and began to crave for one king ; how
this natural desire of theirs was mixed with want of
faith in their unseen and heavenly King, and so
Samuel was permitted to anoint first the tall warrior
Saul, the king after their own heart; but then, when
he only led them deeper into misfortune, another
king was set over them, David the shepherd, the king
after God's own heart, the faithful and righteous,
though unhappily not the spotless, king ; how after
him came his son Solomon, the wise king, who built
the temple of the Lord, and carried the power and
honour of Israel higher and wider than it has ever
reached before or since ; how after the glorious reigns
of these two great kings, David and Solomon, there
followed a dreadful division, when the one people of
God was split into the two separate kingdoms of
Israel and Judah, and Israel soon gave itself up to

THE GOSPELS 97
the worship of idols. We saw how, after some gener
ations, both kingdoms came to an end through
conquering armies of foreigners, who carried first the
people of Israel and then the people of Judah away
into strange lands ; how for all this the spirit of
Judah was not broken, and the true people of God
yet lived in the midst of captivity; how, when a
favourable time came, they returned to their own
land under the guidance of Ezra, built up the holy
city and the temple of the Lord, and lived on without
kings and without idols till the time of Christ.
In all this long and varied story we have seen the
unfolding of God's counsels; the way in which He
made preparation for yet greater events than any of
these. Every step was a lesson about Himself and
His dealings with men. The Friend of man; the
God of a family, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; the
Deliverer from darkness and slavery ; the Giver of a
Holy Law ; a jealous Ruler who will not suffer His
laws to be broken, but takes vengeance on them that
hate Him, yet rejoices to receive them back into
favour; the Captain and Guide of His people in their
wanderings and their fightings; the Judge and King
of His people in their dealings with each other; the
Giver of wisdom to them that need it; the Restorer
from captivity and from death ; the Holy One who
delights in the praise and prayer of a worshipping
people ; — here we have the chief characters under
which God has declared Himself for evermore to
men in and through the story of the Jewish people.
Once more, in the latter part of the Old Testa
ment, we have found Him speaking yet more
G

98 THE GOSPELS
expressly and distinctly through the prophets. We
have seen how they were raised up by Him to speak
His words to His sinful or sorrowing people ; to
open their hearts to every thought and feeling of
their brethren on the one hand, and to His own
heavenly messages on the other; how they taught
the people to look backwards and forwards, but
chiefly forwards ; to regard their own little doings as
only a part of God's mighty plans, plans which,
because God is good, must also be good likewise,
and bring only evil to those who set themselves
against good ; how, in a word, they laboured in a
thousand different ways to lift men out of their sin
and misery by the mighty power of faith and of
hope. Lastly, the other books of the Old Testament,
which teach us more by words than by works, have
shown us, in Job the bitter struggles of a sorely tried
man to find out the meaning of God's afflictions, and
the answer which God makes ; in the Psalms the
prayers and praises of many generations of lonely
men or full congregations, beginning with the out
pourings of David's own heart ; in the Proverbs the
maxims which are needed for a wise and right
conduct of life, all leading down from and up to the
fear of God ; and in Ecclesiastes the needful lesson
that God is to be found in the present as well as the
past and the future, and that He is the one refuge
against the weary sense of vanity and emptiness
which is so apt to befal us in middle Ufe.
To-day, in beginning the New Testament, we enter
on a new world, and yet one which is the close and
completion of the old world that has engaged us

THE GOSPELS 99
for many weeks. Its character is expressed very
clearly in those words of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
which I have so often quoted, " God hath spoken
unto us by His Son." All through the New Testa
ment the voice of God comes to us through the
person of Jesus Christ. It is not that we have in
Him a new God, in place of the old God whom the
Jews worshipped. Our God is the same as theirs,
but He makes Himself known to us in new ways;
He bids us look on His Son, and through Him learn
His own character.
The New Testament, like the Old, may be divided
into two parts, the first made up of stories, God
teaching chiefly by works ; the second made up of
letters and prophecies, God teaching chiefly by words.
The Gospels and Acts of the Apostles form one
part, the Epistles and the Revelation of St. John form
the other. To-day I propose to speak only of the
Gospels. The very name at once calls for our attention.
We all believe that we possess something called the
gospel ; we all by this time, I hope, know that the
word means the Good News. In a certain way the
name gospel has come to belong to the Christian
faith in general, or to what are supposed to be its
most important doctrines in particular. Now we
may naturally ask, what has that meaning to do
with the four first books of the New Testament?
how can four stories be spoken of as if they were
the same thing as a set of doctrines ? The truth is,
brethren, that the name belongs first and properly to
the books ; and the doctrines have only a lesser and

lOO THE GOSPELS
imperfect right to it. Strictly speaking, the earliest
and simplest gospel was the message which Christ
Himself declared and bid His apostles declare, that
the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven was
at hand ; and it would be hard to find better words
to express for us the pith of all the Gospels. All in
their several ways, by everything which they tell us
of Christ's doings and His sayings, point us to Him,
and say to us, ' Look there, look on Jesus the Son
of God and the Son of man, and see in Him the
kingdom of God and kingdom of heaven brought
near at hand. You are accustomed to think of God
as far off in a distant world : you are accustomed to
think of heaven as a distant place to be reached in
some remote time, not before your earthly course is
ended, perhaps not for ages afterwards. But you are
wrong : look at Christ, and you will see that you are
wrong. In Him God and heaven are brought very
close to you, and you find yourselves already citizens
of a real powerful kingdom, when you understand how
He lived the life of God and of heaven upon earth."
For us then the true gospel is simply the life of
Christ. We may, without impropriety, give the name
gospel to any great truths which are established by
His life; but His life itself is the pure, simple, original
gospel. In speaking of His life I, of course, do not
mean to leave out His death and resurrection : they
are the most important and instructive parts of His
whole earthly existence : to St. Paul they alone were
sufflcient to form a gospel. But I mean by the life
of Christ all that is told of Him in these four books :
how He was born, and grew up to manhood, and

THE GOSPELS lOi
taught and wrought miracles, and suffered, died, and
was buried, and rose again from the dead. There
are a great many sayings and discourses of Christ set
down in the Bible. They are of course full of truth
most necessary for our use : the words of Him that
spake as never man spake should be treasured up by
us and studied as words of life. But it would be a
great mistake to suppose that they are themselves
the gospel, or make even the more important part of
the gospel. It is hardly too much to say that the
sayings of Christ are nothing without His doings.
Certainly we cannot rightly understand His sayings
unless we study His doings. The sayings and the
doings each help us to understand the other. Both
alike are fruits of His nature and character and work,
which are themselves the very gospel in the truest
sense. This is indeed a happy thought for those who
do desire to take hold of God's holy gospel, but
feel that they have not time or knowledge or
understanding enough for the study of difficult
doctrines. The gospel of gospels itself is, for all
that, within their reach. They can read and see
for themselves what Christ was ; and that is the
Good News. The picture which rises up before
them as they read is a truer and better thing than
any doctrines which can be reached by mere think
ing. We must all have felt that a knowledge of
the person and character of some one whom we had
reason to admire had really greater power both to
instruct us and to kindle us to a worthy life than
any lessons of a preacher or a book. So too it is

102 THE GOSPELS
with Christ. The power of the gospel is the power
of the image of Christ Himself, in His divine yet
most human goodness, to turn hearts of stone into
hearts of flesh and wake up a new life in dead
spirits. Properly then there is but one gospel, as there
is but one Lord and Saviour. What we call the
four Gospels are merely the one gospel seen from
different sides and set in different lights. It is only
in rapid and familiar speaking that we talk of the
Gospel of St. Matthew. The more exact name is
the Gospel according to St. Matthew; i.e. the gospel,
the one gospel, in that particular shape in which
it was understood and described by St. Matthew.
So, when we speak of the four Gospels, this is really
only for convenience of language : what we mean is
the four books in which the one gospel is variously
described. There are various advantages in having Christ's
life thus presented to us in four different ways. Not
the least advantage is that we are thus led away
from the mere books to the contents of the books.
If there were only one story of Christ's life, we
might be easily led into seeking in the book for a
kind of benefit that no mere book can ever give.
But now we see that the four books are only like
different cases or vessels which contain the one
precious jewel ; and we are led to see that the one
important thing for us is to know what Christ Him
self was. Again, it is a great advantage to have
the one life seen from different sides. It comes out
clearer and, as we say, more lifelike, when we are

THE GOSPELS 103
able to look at it in this way. There was some
one particular character in Christ's nature or work
which had the chief interest for each of the four
writers. St. Matthew saw in Christ the king who
fulfilled the hopes of the prophets and those humble
Jews of later times who were taught by the books
of the prophets. St. Mark saw in Him a true Son
of God, one whose words and works were always
true signs of God and God's kingdom. St. Luke
saw in Him the fulfilment of the hopes of all nations,
the sign that all mankind were now admitted to be
true members of God's people. St. John saw in
Him the eternal link between God and man, the
light and life of men, the one perfect representation
of God upon earth. Hence there are various say
ings and doings of Christ which it did not concern
one or the other evangelist- to mention ; and even
when they tell the same tale, they tell it in different
ways, drawing our attention to different points. The
impression which we thus gain by reading all the
four books is thus much fuller and richer than we
could form in any other manner. Above all, we are
led to discover that there is in truth no possibility
of ever exhausting or coming to the end of the
gospel of Christ. Whenever we approach it from new
points of view, it sends forth new light. Its outer
form contains within it endless riches of meaning
which reward those who seek them patiently and
humbly. The gospel which is so simple is also
in another sense beyond all comparison manifold.
There is no dark place in our own hearts or in the
great bewildering world without us which may not

104 "^^^ GOSPELS
find a light upon it from something in that mar
vellous fourfold tale of Jesus of Nazareth.
But we must not forget what I said long ago, that
both the Old and the New Testaments were written
by Jews for Jews, and that the teaching of both is
wrapped up in what befel the Jewish people. It
would be a great mistake to imagine that we have
done with the Jews because we have come into the
more familiar world of Christ and His apostles.
Do not suppose that you will ever understand much
of what the gospel is meant to teach you if you put
the Jews out of sight. Mark the very first words of
the New Testament, " The book of the generation of
Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham.''
Abraham and David are with us still ; they hang on
to the skirts of our Blessed Lord ; we cannot properly
have Him if we neglect them. The title over His
cross declared Him to be King of the Jews. We
should have made a very different Christ from the
Christ of the Bible, if we set to work to represent
Him only as our own personal Saviour, and to pass
over all that He was to the ancient people of God.
The life of the Jews as a people dwelling in their
own land was drawing near its end when He was
born. They had been wonderfully brought out of
Egypt to the Land of Promise in the old old time.
After iriany generations God had suffered them for
their sins to be led away into captivity. Then once
more He had brought them out with a yet more
marvellous deliverance, and restored life to the dry
and scattered bones. But a deeper and more deadly
corruption stole over them. Once upon a time they

THE GOSPELS 105
had worshipped false gods: now they worshipped the
One True God in an unbelieving and godless spirit.
The very heart of religion itself was diseased : it bore
no fruit of love and service to God or man. Then, as
we are taught in some of the parables, the Heavenly
King sent as a last messenger His only begotten
Son. But they hated Him and said, " We will not
have this man to reign over us." They had lost the
power of discerning the image of God when it came
in its own natural beauty without the blaze of glory
or the sound of trumpets. Unlike the later prophets
they could not recognize a king who was also a man
of sorrows, or a prophet who refused to astonish
them with signs, and spoke and did only that which
the work before Him required. Thus, as St. John
says, " He came to his own, and his own received
him not."
But the life of Christ was the first day of a new
world fis well as almost the last day of an old world.
Outside the Jews stood other peoples less highly
favoured by God, yet now become more worthy to
be owned by Him. Christ's death and resurrection
at last broke down the barrier. As St. Paul says,
" Now in Christ Jesus we who some time were far
off are made nigh by the blood of Christ." In the
Gospels we have beginnings of this mighty change.
To understand them rightly we must keep the re
collection of Jew and Gentile constantly before our
minds. We may, if we choose, treat it as a barren
matter of knowledge, a thing which has nothing to
do with ourselves or our own life. But, if we let the
Bible itself teach us, those words Jew and Gentile

I06 THE GOSPELS
will lead us into the midst of the most awful and
solemn thoughts which the mind of man can reach,
the thoughts of a gospel refused on the one hand,
accepted on the other. But high above all these
differences stands the one Divine form of the Son of
man, speaking as He spoke in the last days of His
sojourn among mankind, " All power is given unto
me in heaven and on earth." That was the reward
of His perfect obedience and sacrifice : that is the
word of hope with which He cheers us on to tread
in His blessed footsteps.

X

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
" And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them
the names of the twelve apostles of the \j3.xd!o." —Revelation xxi. 14.
We began last Sunday to consider the New Testa
ment. We saw its great mark to be this, that in it
God speaks to us in His Son, thus putting the crown
and finish to all that through long ages and in
different ways He had spoken before. His speaking
in the times of old had been about Himself and His
kingdom, about men and the world only so far as
they have to do with Him. It is the same still in
the New Testament. Here too we are not taught
to worship a new God, but the God of Abraham and
Moses and David is made known to us more per
fectly in the person of His Son.
We saw that the New Testament, like the Old,
may be divided into the books which chiefly teach
us by works, and the books which chiefly teach us
by words ; into stories of things that happened, and
direct teaching by lessons; the Gospels and the Acts
.107

lOS THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
of the Apostles making up the first part, and the
Epistles and Revelation of St. John the second part :
just as in the Old Testament we have first the long
history from Genesis to Esther, and then Job, Psalms
and the rest, and the books of the Prophets.
Our proper subject last Sunday was the Gospels,
which are in truth the very heart of the New Testa
ment, from which all the other books draw their life
and power. I pointed out that these books tell us
what the gospel really is, — not all the doctrines that
we believe, still less a few chosen doctrines, but the
simple message of good news that the kingdom of
God, the kingdom of heaven, I's close at hand, brought
near to us in the life and death and rising again of
Christ. The words of Christ are not by themselves
the gospel, even the deeds of Christ are not by them
selves the gospel ; but the picture which His words
and deeds, and especially His deeds, give of Him and
of God's dealings with Him, this is the gospel. This
one gospel, as we saw, is presented to us in four
books, the Gospel according to St. Matthew, i.e. as
understood and described by St. Matthew, the Gospel
according to St. Mark, and the rest. Thus we are
taught to look on through each of the four books at
Him who is the one subject of them all, and we are
enabled to see Him, as it were, from different sides
and in different lights.
We go on to-day to the book called the Acts of the
Apostles. The question at once arises. Why should
we want to hear about the apostles? When we
have had the words and deeds of the Master, we are
inclined to think little of the words and deeds of the

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 109
servants. If God has spoken to us once for all in
His Son, can we go further? Is it possible to have
anything in the Bible after the Gospels which it is
worth our while to hear ? We must face these ques
tions, brethren, if we want to understand the Acts of
the Apostles and their use for us. I do not think
that we half value the Gospels as we should do, or
half understand how completely they rise above all
the rest of the New Testament. But the truth is, the
better we know their surpassing dignity and value,
the more able shall we be to appreciate the excellence
of the other books of the New Testament. If the
Gospels were more highly prized, the Acts of the
Apostles would not be so little read, or so little cared
for as they are now.
There are two great purposes served by all the
books of the New Testament which follow the Gospels.
First, they are in their several ways a Divine explana
tion of the Gospels ; they teach us what we ought to
think of Christ, and of the light which He throws on
God and God's kingdom. Secondly, they carry us
gently onwards from the ascension of Christ into the
common life of men. The gospel was not flung
suddenly and nakedly into the midst of the world.
Christ appointed apostles to carry on the work which
He had begun, and through them He founded the
Church, which was to carry on the same work when
they were dead. We want for our guidance to know
not only what Christ was, but what changes His
coming began to make in the world. We are too
much accustomed to think of Him as a long way
off from us ; we should find Him far nearer if we

no THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
approached Him through His apostles and through
His Church.
The teaching which we receive through the
apostles is threefold. In the Acts we have the
teaching of their lives, what they did and what God
did with them. In the Epistles we have the letters
which they wrote to Churches or to single persons.
In the Revelation of St. John we have the visions of
prophecy which were vouchsafed to one of them.
The book of their Acts, with which we are concerned
to-day, manifestly carries on the story of the Gospels.
It was written by St. Luke, the author of the third
Gospel, and at the beginning he refers back to his
earlier book. " The former treatise {i.e. writing) have
I made," he says, " of all things that Jesus began
both to do and to teach." In his Gospel he had
written down the first part of what he had to say,
the doings and teachings of Jesus on earth. Now
he was about to tell what happened after Jesus had
ascended into heaven.
We must not however suppose that he has any
intention of putting before us all the acts of all the
apostles. None of the Gospel writers made any such
attempt as to our Lord Himself What St. John
distinctly says, " Many other signs truly did Jesus
which are not written in this book," must be borne
in mind for all the Gospels. Those things which
are told us about Christ are the things which it was
most important for us to know, the things which
were the best signs and marks to explain the whole
of Christ's life. So is it in the Acts. First, we have
nothing but the names of three or four apostles.

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES m
The rest of the apostles probably lived courageous
and devoted lives, each doing his own work in his
own portion of the world and helping forward
Christ's kingdom. But it was not necessary for us
to know what each did. So many different accounts
of different apostles would only have puzzled us,
and drawn away our attention from the work which
God was bringing to pass through one and all. Nor
again was it necessary for us to know all that befel
even the chief apostles. Even they were less to be
remembered than the counsels of God which were
wrought out through them. It was enough for us
to learn the great steps through which the kingdom
of God advanced and a new Christian order of things
grew up in the midst of the old worn-out order of
the world.
I reminded you last Sunday that, wherever we are
reading in the Bible, in the New Testament as well
as in the Old, we are always in the presence of the
Jews, and must keep them before our minds in order
to see what the Bible means. We saw how our Lord
Himself was a Jew, and how the burden of St. John's
complaint is His rejection by His own people : " He
came unto his own and his own received him not."
Our Lord's whole manhood was spent in the Holy
Land. He was crucified at Jerusalem as King of the
Jews ; and, when He ascended up into heaven, the
Jews, in spite of all their sins, and this last the
blackest of all, were still the people of God, and there
was no sign of any change in God's counsels towards
them. In a few years this state of things was over :
the Holy City was trampled under foot by the

112 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
heathen Romans, and God's only peculiar people on
earth were the despised and persecuted Christians in
all lands. That great crash however does not come
within the New Testament. We have prophecies of
it, but we have no account of it by any writer of the
Bible. Yet the book of the Acts from the first
chapter to the last shows us the preparation which
God was making for the approaching change. The
people of God was not to be scattered and cast out
till the Church of God was ready to take its place.
It will help you, I think, to understand better the
Acts of the Apostles, if you will observe in it four
different parts. Few here probably know it well
enough to be able at once to follow exactly what I
am saying ; and indeed I fear altogether that most of
our subject for to-day will be found less easily under
stood and less interesting than the parts of the Bible
which we have examined in former weeks. Still it
would be a great loss to pass over the Acts, and if
you will read the book over afterwards at home in
your own Bibles with a little care, I think you will
be able to make out the principal points. As I said
just now then, there are four steps in the Acts, and
they all mark the advances made by the Church in
taking its place as not only the true bearer of Christ's
image upon earth, but also the true wearer of the old
glories given to Israel before Christ came.
The first part is from the beginning to the middle
of the sixth chapter. It is the story of the birth and
stablishing of the Church in its first home at Jeru
salem in the very midst of the Jews. The second
part ends nearly with the twelfth chapter. It is the

THE ACTS OF THE 'APOSTLES 113
story of the spread of the Church from Judea to
Antioch by apostles belonging to the number of the
Twelve who had been with Christ in His lifetime.
The third part reaches to the twentieth verse of the
nineteenth chapter. It is the story of St. Paul's
travels as a missionary to preach the gospel in
distant lands. The fourth part is the story of St.
Paul's last journey back to Jerusalem ; the attempt of
the Jews to kill him there, as they had killed his
Master; his leaving of Jerusalem for ever and journey
to Rome, the chief city of the heathen world.
Let us now endeavour shortly to notice a few of
the leading events in the story, especially such as
help us to understand better the purpose of the
whole Bible. The beginning of the whole is our
Lord's ascension, which we celebrate in the service
of Thursday next. Though He had returned from
the grave unconquered and unharmed. He did not
mean to live any longer on earth either in the suffer
ing and shame which had gone before His death or
in the glory of His Father. The work for the sake
of which He had been made man was done. It was
time for Him to return to His Father, and leave to
His faithful disciples the task of spreading the glad
tidings among men. They were still the old glad
tidings, the news of the kingdom of heaven. His in
structions to the apostles, St. Luke tells us, were of the
things pertaining to the kingdom of God. But the
glad tidings were now clothed in a new and mighty
form. To tell of Him was the privilege of those who
preached them : " Ye shall be witnesses unto me "
were His words. The witness was to be borne first
H

114 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
in Judea and Jerusalem, but then far and wide, even
to the uttermost part of the earth. Above all, they
were to look for a new presence from heaven to take
the place of that presence of His which they were
losing. The Holy Ghost, of whom He had spoken
before His death, was to come upon them and clothe
them with power from on high. When this charge
had been given, the Lord disappeared among the
clouds, and the apostles were left alone. Their first
care was to complete their number, according to the
twelve tribes of Israel, by choosing one' to take the
place of the wretched traitor Judas. Then they
waited in patience for the coming of the Holy Ghost.
On the holy fiftieth day, what we now call Whit
sunday, He came with signs of power. They spoke
no longer in the one sacred language of the Jews,
but in the many languages of the Gentiles. In the
old time it had been thought that only those who
belonged to the same country could be joined
together; but here the new faith of Christ was seen
binding together men from all nations. As I told
you last year, that day was the birthday of the
Church. The kingdom which God now claimed over
man was a kingdom of the Spirit, ruling over men's
inward hearts, and its great mark was its breaking
down every barrier which kept men at variance with
each other.
In the next few chapters we have various marks
of the outward progress which the Church made,
ending with the appointment of deacons to relieve
the apostles from some of the increasing work thus
laid upon them, and the conversion of many Jews to

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 115
the faith of Christ. Then the second division begins
with the trial of Stephen, one of these deacons, by
the unbelieving Jews, and the shedding of the first
Christian blood by his stoning to death. The per
secution which followed scattered the infant Church
of Jerusalem; and so the efforts made by the enemies
of the gospel to destroy it only caused it to be
carried into fresh places. At this time the Church
gained one convert whose marvellous words and
works were soon to surpass those of all the original
apostles. St. Paul was a narrow-minded Jew who
had taken part in the murder of Stephen, and who
delighted to show his zeal for the Jews by vigorous
persecution of the Christians. Yet, while he was
breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the
disciples of the Lord, he was checked on a journey
by a blinding light from heaven and a voice which
said, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" and
that day was the beginning of a new life for him,
and through him for us and all distant nations beside.
During all this early part of the Acts St. Peter is the
true head of the apostles. By him the Church was
built up. Foremost in our Lord's lifetime he was also
foremost in these days of trial and persecution, and
his love and zeal were no doubt among the chief
powers which held the infant Church together. But
with the third division of the Acts a new state of
things begins. That St. Paul, who had been the
fiercest of Jews, was now anxious to bring all nations
within the true Divine fold. He could not rest
without spreading to distant nations the glad tidings
which had melted his own heart. So next follow

Il6 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
his travels in different lands. His usual plan was
first to address himself to the Jews, and form out of
them the beginnings of a fresh Church; and, only
when they rejected him, did he turn to the Gentiles.
Wherever he went, he did not roughly attack the old
beliefs that he found, but endeavoured to use them
as stepping stones to a purer and fuller faith, carry
ing out his Master's principle of not destroying but
fulfilling. After various journeys to and fro among
lesser places he resolved to go back to Jerusalem and
thence on to Rome. He felt it to be a dangerous
visit, and he was warned by the way not to persevere;
but his decision was made, and once more he cast in
his lot with his own dearly loved people. But they
valued the knowledge of God and of the kingdom of
God only as a pride and privilege to themselves:
they felt nothing but indignation at other men being
made to share their blessings, and so they bitterly
hated the man who was filling the earth with the
name of Christ. Christ Himself had been accused of
insulting the holy temple ; Stephen had been put to
death for the same reason, and for his refusal to
believe that God's favour was to be tied for ever to a
stiffnecked and rebellious people; and now it was
the turn for the persecutor of Stephen to have a plot
formed against his life on the same accusation. He
found protection against his own countrymen in the
justice of the heathen Romans ; and after a long
delay was taken to Rome to plead his cause, being
shipwrecked by the way, and showing then how one,
whose heart was filled with the loftiest thoughts of
the advancement of God's kingdom, was still the

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 117
calmest and wisest in the hour of outward danger.
At Rome the Jews finally cast him off, and so by no
act of his own he found himself and the Church
of Christ thrown upon the wide world, no longer
permitted to worship God at Jerusalem, but finding
His presence everywhere.
These are the main outlines of the story of the
Acts. But there is one feature which appears again
and again, to which I desire to call your attention on
this the last Sunday after Easter. The resurrection
of Christ, which is the end of the gospel, is the
foundation of the whole faith of the apostles. To
be witnesses of His resurrection, to declare that they
had once more had among them Him who had been
laid in the grave, was their first and most necessary
work. That experience had changed for themselves
the whole appearance of life: by making it known
to others they believed that they could change the
whole face of the world. And it was a well-founded
belief Though all the great ones of the earth were
gathered together against God's Holy Child Jesus,
they knew that the Lord of hosts was on His side
and on their side. Out of that wretched decaying
old world a new world was fashioned by the power
of faith in Christ dying and rising from the dead.
And, if we a^k how that wonder-working faith was
kept alive, again the Acts of the Apostles give us the
answer. They point to the Holy Ghost, and the
work of the Holy Ghost, in building up a Holy
Catholic Church. The apostles were able to believe
in an ever present, ever living Christ, the true
image of the everlasting God, because they believed

Il8 THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
in a Spirit of truth and love who dwelt in their own
hearts and taught them to cleave to one another
as members of the same body. "The multitude
of them that believed," says St. Luke, " were of
one heart and of one soul." Thus in His Church
God set before us one more image of Himself and
His kingdom. He taught us to find in charity and
peace and mutual help the true entrance into His
own life, which is also the life of heaven.

XI

THE EPISTLES
"These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly:
But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave
thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the
pillar and ground of the truth." — i Timothy iii. 14, 15.
The Word of God through the apostles, — that is the
subject which occupied us last Sunday, and which
will occupy us to-day and for one Sunday more.
We heard long ago how in the New Testament God
speaks to us through His Son. He speaks to us
through His Son in all parts of the New Testament
from the first word to the last. In the first four
books, which are called the four Gospels, Jesus Christ
is set before us Himself simply and clearly. That is
the gospel, the good news of God and God's kingdom
brought near to man. The Son of God stands there
before our eyes working and speaking, suffering,
dying, and raised from the dead by His Father's
might. His own words, " He that hath seen me
hath seen the Father," show how the Gospels may be
to us as a window through which we may look into
119

I20 THE EPISTLES
heaven. The other books of the New Testament
also speak to us from God through His Son, but in
a different way. As in the Gospels we see Christ, so
in the books of the apostles we learn to understand
the meaning of what we have seen. We ought to
be always carrying our eyes back to the original
picture : no explanations can take the place of that.
But it is a great help to us to know what those men
thought and felt who had lived in daily converse
with the Divine Master, and what sort of things they
did on the strength of their belief.
Last Sunday we had before us the book of the
Acts of the Apostles. There the story of our
Lord is followed up by the story of the faithful
followers whom He chose to carry on His work
after He had ascended into heaven. As in the
Gospels we have only chosen words and works of
our Lord, viz., those best adapted to give us a true
notion of Himself and of God's kingdom ; so here
we have only chosen words and works of the
apostles, viz., those which best show us how their
knowledge of Christ enabled them to begin to
conquer the world.
But we saw also that the book of the Acts is
very much more than a collection of the doings
of single men. These men were at once the
rulers and the servants of the Church, and the story
which we here read is, above all things, the story
of the beginnings of the Church. When. Christ
went away, He did not leave any one man to take
His place ; but He left a body of men, a brother
hood of men, to take His place, and that body or

THE EPISTLES 121
brotherhood we call the Church, the outward mark
and framework of the unseen kingdom of God.
Therefore the book of the Acts begins with that
great event which some of us met here last
Thursday to celebrate, the mounting up of our
Lord Himself into heaven, i.e. the end of His
earthly life, the outward sign of His return to the
Father. And the second chapter begins with the
event which we shall celebrate next Sunday — the
pouring forth of the Holy Ghost from heaven upon
the little flock of Christians, breaking down the
barriers which kept them strangers to each other,
making them of one heart and of one mind ; in a
word, declaring them to be the Church of the living
God. Thus the Church was born. We saw further in
the different parts of the Acts the steps by which it
grew into independence. At each step Jew and
Gentile stood before our eyes in rapidly changing
positions. In the first part, up to the middle of
the sixth chapter, we had the early stablishing of
the Church, with different tasks for different mem
bers, but one common purpose, in the midst of
God's old people at Jerusalem. Then came the
death of Stephen and the persecution which fol
lowed, scattering the leaders of the Church to other
places, and causing it to be planted in a new home,
Antioch. Then comes a great change. One of
the fiercest persecutors of Christians, a young man
who looked on with cruel joy at the murder of
Stephen, was himself changed in heart, and led to
take his place among the suffering few instead of

122 THE EPISTLES
the tyrannical many. This young man, whom we
now call St. Paul, felt himself called upon to travel
about the world preaching the good news which
had come so wonderfully home to himself. Wher
ever he went, he began by preaching to the Jews,
but if they refused to hear, he turned to the Gen
tiles ; and so the Church began to draw to itself
members out of different lands and peoples. These
missionary journeys of St. Paul fill the third part
of the Acts, from the thirteenth to the middle of
the nineteenth chapter. The fourth and last part
of the Acts carries us on a step further. St. Paul
goes up once more to Jerusalem to his own people,
dear to him in spite of all their sins ; but is rejected
by them just because they grudged the knowledge
of God to other people, and therefore hated the
man who was spending his life in spreading it. He
escapes death only by appealing to the justice of
the heathen Romans, and his appeal carries him
away for ever from Jerusalem to Rome, the great
city of the heathen world. Thus, at the end of
the book, the Church of God, in the person of its
foremost apostle, is cut loose from the ancient
people of God. It has no longer one single home :
its home is throughout the world : and we too,
strangers though we be, may claim the God of Israel
as our own.
Another important lesson is taught us by this
book, and indeed by all the later books of the New
Testament. Every reader of the Bible, who thinks
about what he reads, must often be struck with one
great difference between those old times and what

THE EPISTLES 123
he sees around him now. In the Bible God appears
as mixed up with the affairs of men, acting among
men, speaking among men, in a way of which we
have no present experience. We hear the wind
and the thunder, and the songs of birds, and the
voices of each other. We see the sky and the
earth and all the living things that grow or move
upon the earth, our brother men and all their works
and ways. But God Himself is hidden behind a
veil. When the heart is blind to His presence,
neither the eye nor the ear can avail to make Him
known. Yet, as I said before, God was brought
nearer to man in Christ than He had ever been
before ; and it would be a strange result indeed of
His coming if we were henceforth to be farther off
from God. But no. From the day that the Son
of God appeared among us as the Son of Man, the
presence of God has been making itself known
most of all in the heart and mind of man. He
who refused to astonish the crowd into belief by a
sign from heaven, was in effect teaching that our
inward spirits can take truer hold of God than our
outward senses. " The kingdom of God," He said,
"is within you." The Holy Spirit, whom He
promised to send in His own place, is not a voice
outside our ears, but a power from above, strength
ening and enlightening our own powers. And this
we see most clearly in the books of the apostles.
When they had need to know what to believe or
what to do, no trumpet spoke to them out of
heaven, but they prayed for the help and guidance
of the Holy Ghost. They used at the same time

124

THE EPISTLES

their best endeavours to find out what was right and
true, and in the endeavour they found what they
sought. The counsels and the doctrines which they
thus discovered for themselves, with the help of
the Holy Spirit within them, are written down for
our benefit. We find there the truths of the Gospel
used and applied to the common purposes of life,
and endless instruction supplied by this means to
ourselves. But we find also an example set us of
the way in which we too may find God within us,
and open our hearts to His enlightening Spirit.
We come now to the second division of those
books of the New Testament which deal with the
apostles, and with Christ only through the apostles.
The name given to this part of the New Testament
is the Epistles, i.e. the letters. They are not letters
about trifling and indifferent matters. If they had
been, they would not have been kept as part of the
Bible. But it needs no pains to discover that, for
instance, the Epistle to Philemon is exactly what we
mean by a letter ; and even the longest Epistles
may be seen to be real letters, if we read them
carefully. Three of them are addressed to private
persons ; three more to men who were entrusted
with the government of churches ; and the rest either
to the whole church in some one place, or to different
churches scattered about the world. The churches
were many, the apostles were few : yet when they
were absent, their advice and guidance under difficult
circumstances were sometimes asked by letter ; and
then they freely wrote back their mind. Sometimes
the news which they heard of what was going on

THE EPISTLES 125
at a distance stirred them up to write and send
messages of warning and encouragement. And
again sometimes the dangers which assailed the
Church were so widely spread that no single con
gregation or set of congregations required counsel
more than the rest, and then they sent a circular
letter to be passed on from church to church.
Much of what I said to you about the words of
the prophets in the Old Testament is equally true of
the letters of the Apostles. They were written by
men who had a keen and lively fellow-feeling with the
brethren to whom they were writing, men who be
lieved themselves to be engaged in the same struggle
of life or death, and whose sole desire was to make
others partakers in the gifts which they knew God to
have bestowed on themselves. What they wrote was
not a set of general preachings which did not refer to
any one state of things in particular : it was always
suggested by what was at that moment of most
pressing interest for those to whom it was written.
At the same time they never wrote mere orders,
" Do this," or " Avoid that " : they always spoke to
the reason and conscience by means of great and
wide truths which are true at all times and under all
circumstances. Lastly, on the one hand they spoke
in the name of God and His Son Jesus : they strove
first to kindle or keep alive the love and fear of Him
as the foundation of all true knowledge and all right
doing. On the other hand they taught that the
proof of true godliness lies in the simple duties of
life, and that they are the best Christians who are
the best husbands and wives, and best parents and

126 THE EPISTLES
children, and best masters and servants. But in
joining together the service of God and the service
of men they had one new doctrine to insist on, of
which the prophets had only a faint dream. They
could say boldly, " We are every one members one
of another," and on that ground call on every man to
study the good of his neighbour. They could do
this because Christ had set the example, and because
the very existence of the Church of Christ was
without meaning, if this were supposed to be a
thing with which religion had no concern.
Of the twenty-one Epistles preserved in the New
Testament fourteen proceed from St. Paul, while the
other seven, which are called Catholic or General
Epistles, bear the names of four other apostles. In
St. Paul's writings one word stands out above all
others, ' faith.' He fought all his battles in that
name. He saw around him dangers of various kinds
assailing the Church, all because faith was put aside,
and so he was never tired of showing his readers
that the want of faith, of trust in the Lord God,
who had been revealed in Jesus Christ dying and
rising from the dead, was the most deadly of all
wants. His words have often been misunderstood
and used in ways which he would have wholly dis
approved. But they will stand fast to the end of
time, warning mankind against trusting to the notion
that they can buy God's favour by outward works
and against crouching before God as a hard Master,
instead of trustfully leaning upon Him as one whose
delight is to save and to deliver from death.
I can but shortly notice the chief subjects of

THE EPISTLES

127

St. Paul's different Epistles. In the two Epistles
to the Thessalonians, which were the earliest written
of all, he chiefly teaches his readers in what
spirit to look for the coming of the Lord, calmly
and soberly doing their appointed work. In the
Epistles to the Romans and Galatians we see
him upholding the freedom of the Gospel against
those Jewish Christians who wished to bind men for
ever with the fetters of the old law. The Epistle to
the Romans is at the same time the fullest declara
tion of doctrine about the purposes of God which we
find anywhere in St. Paul's writings. The First
Epistle to the Corinthians deals with a number of
questions which were disturbing the Church, and
points out how far a spirit of charity, of seeking the
general good, would go towards showing a way out of
difficulties. In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians
more than any other Epistle we have a picture of
St. Paul himself, affectionately pleading with his
converts, and drawing out their attachment to him
by the depth and power of his own feelings. In
Philippians we have glad-hearted encouragements to
converts for whom he could only wish that they
might go on more and more as they had begun.
The Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians were
written later, when St. Paul was a prisoner at Rome.
In them he rises to loftier and more wonderful
heights than before, as he looks upon the plans of
God for the whole world fulfilled in Christ, the head
of men and the head of the world, the middle point
in which earth and heaven meet, the life of the
Church which is His body. Yet later still are what

128 THE EPISTLES
are called the Pastoral Epistles, the three to Timothy
and Titus, in which he teaches the true duties of the
bishop and ruler of a church. Then comes the short
letter to his friend Philemon about the runaway slave
Onesimus. Lastly, we have the Epistle to the
Hebrews, not actually written by St. Paul himself, but
the work of some disciple of his who was filled with
his spirit. It is addressed to Christians who were
tempted by persecution to give up their faith. Its
great subject is the manner in whiclt the Old Testa
ment prepares for the New, and then makes way for
it, pointing out how Christ Himself is the truth of
which all earlier forms of religion had only been the
shadow. It shows how faith had been the one
power which made the weak strong in every age,
and how much greater might it should have now for
those who believe in the Son of God.
When we pass from St. Paul to St. James, the
change is great. It is a striking lesson to us to see
how different language both use, because they looked
at truth from different sides, and yet how both alike
had their work to do for the Church, and served it
far more effectually than if one had been the mere
copy of the other. Nothing so rebukes our little
narrow ways of judging men, and our inclination to
cavil at all who do not run in our own groove, as
this Divine breadth of the New Testament and of
the Church of the New Testament. St. James, the
brother of our Lord according to the flesh, and bishop
of Jerusalem, lived and died a Jew almost as much as
a Christian. He does not dwell on our Lord's acts
or His death or His resurrection ; but he cherished

THE EPISTLES I29
deeply such words of our Lord as are preserved in
our first three Gospels, and his whole Epistle might
be called a sermon on the text, " Not every one that
saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the king
dom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my
Father which is in heaven."
In St. Peter we have a link between St. Paul and
St. James. He is unlike both : yet he echoes the
truth of both. The spirit of the whole gospel is in
him. He is ever dwelling on the sufferings of Christ
on the one side, and the glory of Christ on the other,
The second Epistle which bears his name may be
taken along with the Epistle of St. Jude. In both
there is a strong warning against false teachers of
a peculiarly dangerous kind, who, under the pretence
of religion, brought in corrupt morals and debased,
instead of raising, the characters of those who listened
to them.
St. John's second and third Epistles are short and
affectionate greetings and encouragements to two
personal friends. His longer Epistle is a most
solemn warning from the disciple whom Jesus loved
against indifference about sin, against making believe
to love God while we hate our brother men, and
against letting go our faith in the Son of God's
coming in the flesh. The warning to his flock is
almost lost in the fulness of the aged apostle's
own faith and love. He begins with eternal life,
he ends with eternal life ; he had found eternal
life through his knowledge of Jesus Christ. If
we would understand the work of the apostles
under the guidance of the Spirit in taking of the

I30 THE EPISTLES
things of Christ, and showing them to us, we cannot
do better than begin with listening to his own
account of the matter. " The life," he says, " was
manifested (or shown to men), and we have seen it,
and bear witness and show unto you that eternal life
which was with the Father, and was manifested (or
shown) unto us ; that which we have seen and heard
declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellow
ship with us ; and truly our fellowship is with the
Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these
things write we unto you that your joy may be full."

XII

THE APOCALYPSE
" I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the
churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and
morning star. — Revelation xxii. i6.
We come to-day to the last book of the New Testa
ment and of the Bible, the Revelation of St. John.
It is on the whole the most difficult book in the
Bible ; and this probably is the reason why so little
of it is appointed to be read in church, the epistle
for to-day being one of the most striking of the
passages which we are thus accustomed to hear.
There is good reason to hope that before long its
chapters will take their place in our service as second
lessons like the chapters of every other book of the
New Testament. But meanwhile every one can read
it for himself in his own Bible ; and the more he
reads it, the better will it be for him if he reads it
with an open heart and a desire to find in it light
from above to lighten the darkness of his own life.
No one who reads in that spirit will find the book
131

132

THE APOCALYPSE

of Revelation unprofitable reading merely because
there are hundreds of things there which he does not
understand, and can never hope to understand. The
power with which it lays bare the world above, and
the world beneath, and in a measure the world to
come, is not lost for us by any mere want of under
standing. Those words near the end of the book,
" Let him that is athirst come " may be applied to
our treatment of the book. Those who are athirst
for the water of life will find the water of life spring
ing bright and clear and plentiful there. Those who
have no thirst for the water of life, and only care to
amuse themselves with the sound of the words, had
better leave the book alone.
The book of Revelation is not only difficult, but
difficult for every one. Some of you may have
come across books written in the present day which
profess to explain it all. I cannot say that I think
the explanations are generally worth much ; nay,
they are, as a rule, not even on the right track, so
that there is very little to be learnt from them.
But neither do I feel competent to give you in
their place anything more than a few hints which
may enable you to approach the book in a right
spirit. We have hitherto been looking at the books
of the Bible chiefly as parts of one great book.
That is also the safest way of approaching the
Revelation of St. John. We have found the pith
of the whole Bible to be God making Himself
known to man ; and assuredly we shall find the
sarne character in this the last utterance of His
written word.

THE APOCALYPSE

133

First let us consider the place which the Revela
tion of St. John holds in the New Testament.
You will remember that what marks out the New
Testament from the Old is that in it God speaks
through His Son. You will remember also that in
the first four books of the New Testament — the
Gospels — we have the simple, naked message of God
conveyed to us by a four-fold picture of the Son
Himself, His birth. His life with its ministry of
word and deed, His sufferings and death, and His
glorious resurrection. There nothing comes be
tween us and Him ; we are not troubled with
doctrines or preachings about Him ; we are simply
bidden to look on Christ and learn of Him, and
believe that in so doing we are learning what it
most concerns us to know about the Lord Almighty,
since He Himself has said, " He that hath seen me
hath seen the Father." You will remember that in
the three other groups of books God is still teaching
us through His blessed Son, but not through His
Son alone ; rather through the impression which
His Son made upon His faithful followers in that
first age. You will remember that Christ's ascen
sion into heaven was followed by His sending of the
Holy Ghost, and that the coming of the Holy
Ghost was also the foundation of the Church, the
body of Christ, the outward and visible bearer of
His presence on earth. You will remember that
in the Acts of the Apostles we had a picture of
the steps by which the Church grew in numbers
and width and independence, receiving freely into
itself men of all nations, and showing by its acts

134

THE APOCALYPSE

and the acts of the apostles who ruled it the true
life of men who believe in a crucified and risen
Son of God. Lastly, you will remember that in
the Epistles we found the express teaching given
by the apostles sometimes to the whole Church
universal, sometimes to the churches of single places,
sometimes to the rulers of churches ; sometimes to
private Christians. This was the teaching which
they gave by letter when they were consulted about
difficult matters of doctrine or practice, or when
they saw for themselves that warnings or encourage
ments or instructions were greatly needed. Still
we found the same character in a new form. The
teaching of the Church of Christ by the apostles
of Christ, who were filled with the spirit of Christ,
is one of the instruments by which God helps us to
understand what Christ was and is, and to apply that
understanding to our own use.
We now come to a third way in which the Spirit
takes of the things of Christ and shows them to
us through the apostles and through the Church ;
and that is by way of prophecy. We do not hear
so much of prophecy in the New Testament as in
the Old, but still we do hear of it now and then.
Last Sunday we heard how, among the gifts which
Christ in that age gave his Church were prophets
as well as apostles and evangelists ; and there are
many signs that the power of prophecy wrought
mightily in the daily life of that generation. But
we have only one book of prophecy, and that is a
peculiar one. It contains within itself epistles or
letters to seven churches : so far it shows its con-

THE APOCALYPSE

I3S

nexion with the new time, and reminds us that it
was meant to serve just as practical purposes as the
letters of St. Paul or the other apostles. But the
rest of it is made up almost wholly of visions.
The teaching is clothed in bodily forms ; its motto
is " Come and fee!' In this respect the prophecies
of the Old Testament of which it chiefly reminds
us are those of Daniel, and then in a less degree of
Zechariah and Ezekiel. It is not merely a pro
phecy, but it belongs to the most prophetic of all
kinds of prophecy — it is a revelation, that is, an
unveiling. It draws aside the curtains which bound
our view in ordinary times. In each direction
where our sight is apt to be stopped short a new
world is opened before us — the heaven above us,
the bottomless pit beneath us, the future end to
which all things move. The strife between good
and evil, about which we are so miserably indifferent
both in our own hearts and in the world around us,
is seen to be no light, unimportant matter, since it
is part of a mighty warfare in the world of spirits.
The lesson of Christ's own life is shown to be
repeated in the life of His Church. As He passed
through suffering to glory, so must they who bear
His name. If the cruel world seems too strong
for them now, they are reminded that it seemed
too strong for Christ when His soul was poured out
on the Cross ; and so His return to life and glory
is the pledge of what God has prepared for them
who are faithful unto death. Every power of evil is
seen to be surely doomed at last, and so we are bidden
endure always and hope always, for the end is sure.

136 THE APOCALYPSE
And again, if the gospel is the setting forth of the
image of Christ, then the gospel is the very founda
tion of the Revelation of St. John. The very first
words are " The Revelation of Jesus Christ which
God gave unto him": the very first vision which
opened before the eyes of St. John was of the Son of
Man standing in the midst of the seven candlesticks
which represent the churches. In the fifth chapter
He alone prevails to open the sealed book. In the
fourteenth chapter He stands on Mount Sion with
the twelve times twelve thousand who have His
Father's name on their foreheads. In the nineteenth
chapter He rides forth to judge and niake war in
righteousness as King of kings and Lord of lords.
And in the last chapter He declares, " I Jesus have
sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in
the churches."
Once more this testimony of Jesus is conveyed
through the Spirit and the Church. The seven
different churches of Asia at the beginning together
stand for the one universal Church. The fortunes of
the Church, its seeming death, its deliverance and
final glory are the framework of the whole book.
And the life which holds the Church together is no
other than the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of prophecy,
who fills the heart of St. John himself. " He that
hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto
the churches " is the warning voice of the Epistles at
the beginning. "The Spirit and the bride, i.e. the
Church, say Come," is the invitation to drink of the
water of life which is heard among the last words.
Thus the Revelation of St. John winds up the

THE APOCALYPSE

137

whole New Testament. But it does much more than
this: it winds up the whole Bible, and in so doing
makes us feel that the Bible is indeed not only many
books but also one book, carrying out one purpose
and plan from first to last. To begin with, the
language is throughout for the most part borrowed
from the Old Testament and especially from the
books of the prophets. We cannot read a chapter
carefully without seeing how St. John's mind was
filled with the words spoken by the men of old time,
and how he used their lessons along with his own
knowledge of Jesus Christ to explain to himself the
ways of God in the events which were happening
around him. And so it comes to pass that the
attentive study of the Old Testament is to us one
most useful help towards the understanding of the
book of Revelation. If we wish to grasp the mean
ing of the pictures and images which crowd upon our
sight as we read, the first step should be to try
whether we cannot trace them back to some form
which rose before the eyes of the early prophets of
Israel. But again the book of Revelation keeps us con
stantly in the presence of the Jews, and compels us
to remember that God's covenant with His own
Original people is the foundation of all His plans of
Salvation for mankind. The holy Jewish numbers
7 and 12 run through the book and perpetually
recall our thoughts to the Sabbath of God and the
tribes of the people of God. Nay, the servants of
God who are sealed upon their foreheads before the
plagues are let loose upon the earth, are sealed by

138 THE APOCALYPSE
tribes, twelve thousand to each by name. Nay in the
last great vision the names of the same twelve tribes
are written on the gates of the new Jerusalem ; and
the foundations of the wall of the city have in them
the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, the
link between the Old time and the New, the friends
and followers of the crucified King of the Jews, who
became also bearers of the gospel to all peoples and
tongues. Nay, when Jesus speaks in His own name
in the concluding verses. He calls Himself the root
and the offspring of David, delighting to link His
name with that of the shepherd king who had first
by his righteous government moulded the children of
Israel into one people.
Once more the Revelation of St. John goes back
to the very beginnings of the Old Testament beyond
the limits of the Jews. The paradise or garden of
God appears once more, and in the midst of the new
Jerusalem the tree of life is seen growing. Christ
who describes Himself as the beginning and ending,
the first and the last, suffers nothing to perish, but
carries on all things to perfection. He does not
lead men back simply to their early childhood; He
guides them ever onwards, and encourages every
stage of their growth to full stature; but He does
not cast away the fresh charm of early innocence;
He brings it back ripened and ennobled in the
Heavenly Father's kingdom.
I have spoken now of the place which the book
of Revelation holds in the New Testament, and the
place which it holds in the whole Bible. It remains
to say a few words on its own character as a single

THE APOCALYPSE 135
book and the purpose with which it would seem to
have been written. We are told in the ninth verse
of the first chapter that John was a companion in
tribulation with the seven churches of Asia, and that
the visions which he wrote down for their instruction
had been seen by him as he was in the isle called
Patmos for the word of God and for the testimony of
Jesus Christ. The meaning of this is that, at a time
when the churches were suffering persecution for the
name of Christ, he too was suffering the same, and
had been banished away from home into a little
island in the midst of the sea. Twice in the lifetime
of St. John great persecutions are known to have
occurred, and either of these may have given rise to
his book. On the whole however, I believe that
various marks throughout the book point to the first
of these two persecutions as the true time.
And a terrible time it was. The greater part of
the civilized world was then subject to the emperor
or king of Rome, and the emperor of Rome was
Nero, a young man who, after a promising beginning,
had become such a monster of wickedness as struck
men with horror in the midst of an unusually wicked
time. It happened that the city of Rome was on
fire, and burned for six days. It was commonly
believed at the time that Nero had set it on fire for
his own amusement. Whether this was true or not,
he began to fear danger to himself from the common
belief, and therefore turned the fury against the
Christians instead of himself bj;- declaring that it was
they who had done it. He put forth all his skill
to invent cruel ways of punishment. Some of the

140 THE .APOCALYPSE
wretched Christians were wrapped in the skins of wild
beasts, and then bitten to death by dogs. Others
were crucified. Others were sewn up in cloths
dipped in pitch, tied to stakes, and set on fire.
Either in this persecution, or in one which followed a
few months later, St. Peter and St. Paul were them
selves murdered. The rage of the heathen against
the Christians seems to have broken out in many
places, and a cruel death was the lot of many who
were not ashamed to confess that they believed in
Christ. The crimes of Nero, not against the Chris
tians, but against his own people, at last woke up a
rebellion, and he died by his own hand. His death
happened exactly eighteen hundred years ago within
a day or two. Then came a time of great confusion
and bloodshed, no less than three emperors being
killed within a year and a half. Meanwhile new
dangers had arisen for the Christians. The Jews
had rebelled against their Roman masters, and a
fierce war had sprung up. The Jews hated the
Christians as bitterly as when they had striven to
murder St. Paul at Jerusalem; the Romans who had
then protected him were now turned against his
disciples with equal fury. The whole world was
combined against the little flock who believed that
Jesus was Lord : it seemed as if they must be rooted
off the face of the earth.
That, brethren, was the time when the Revelation
of St. John was written. If you wish to understand
those marvellous visions, try to carry back your
minds to those days of anguish and blood, when to
do as we are doing to-day, to meet publicly for the

THE APOCALYPSE

141

worship of God as Christians, would have been likely
to bring upon us torture and death to-morrow, and
when every neighbouring land was given up to
violence and every kind of wickedness. Then you
may a little understand how the burning words came
from St. John's heart. But observe what was the
tone of his prophecy. He saw no immediate prospect
of a better order of things. Nay, each successive
chapter seems to carry us deeper' into a vision of
judgment. Many in that day believed that the
monster Nero, who called forth a kind of admiration
by the very greatness of his crimes, would before long
come back to life and trample upon all his enemies.
And there are signs that St. John himself looked for
some such fresh outburst of yet more devilish wicked
ness, the most complete opposite of the holy Jesus.
Yet he never wavers in his faith. He believes that
all power is given — to whom ? to Him whose name
is the Lamb, the gentlest and most helpless of
creatures, nay, to the Lamb that was slain. The
darkness that encompassed the earth only cleared
his eyesight to behold the heavenly light. In the
miseries and disorders around him he saw the begin
nings of Christ's judgment upon a wicked world, and
beyond the clouds he had a vision of the holy city of
peace. Many a generation has passed away since
that day: but the great decision for life or for death
remains the same for us as it did for his trembling
disciples. Let us be thankful that we are permitted
in these quiet times to look with his eyes upon the
awful forms which stand around our little life, and
to learn from his example what power the faith in

142 THE APOCALYPSE
Christ crucified and risen can give to defy every
assault of the enemy.
It seems a change from great things to small when
we pass from the wondrous visions of St. John to
¦the doings of a single English society, such as that
for which I have to speak to you to-day. But all
those grand visions will do us no good if they leave
us indifferent to the duties which lie before ourselves
as English Christians at the present time. We have
all work enough to do in striving by God's grace to
train our own hearts into the love and fear of His
name. But indifference to the spiritual wants of
others is a sure mark that the life within ourselves is
feeble and cold. It is our blessing here that for
several hundreds of years the house of God has stood
among us, ever reminding us whose name we bear,
and inviting us to worship together in that name.
But there are many other places less happy, places
where every year more and more people are crowded
together with no church to help them forward on the
upward road. The Church Building Society is willing
to give help to the best of its power to either the
building or the improvement of churches in all kinds
of places. For instance, it gave a liberal grant to
our own church when it was repaired some time ago,
and the number of sittings increased; and for this we
owe it a debt of gratitude which I hope will swell
our offerings to-day. But the main work of the
society is in places poorer and more crowded than
this ; and I do earnestly trust that we shall show
our sense of God's goodness to us by the help which
we give to His worship where it is sorely needed.

THE APOCALYPSE

143

For fifty years the society has been at work, and now
the need is greater than ever, for men are born into
the world faster than churches can be built. The
claim is always strong : it comes with special force
this year, which ought to be marked by unusual
efforts, so that the society may start afresh on its
second half-century with greatly increased powers.
Believe me, brethren, we do ourselves grievous injury
by coolness and niggardliness when appeals of this
kind come round. By giving freely, according as we
can spare, for the sake of Christ and His Church, we
enlarge our own hearts, we join ourselves in fresh
bonds to our brethren, we bring the kingdom of God
nearer to us.

Glasgow: printed at ihs: univebsitv press by robert maclehose and co

A Catalogue of
Theological Works
published by
Macmillan ^ Co., Ltd.
St. Martin's Street
London, W,C.

CONTENTS
The Bible — ''*'=^
History of the Bible . . . . . i
Biblical History ....... i
The Old Testament ...... 2
The New Testament ...... 5
History of the Christian Church . . . 11
The Church of England  12
Devotional Books  15
The Fathers  . . 17
Hymnology  17
Religious Teaching  18
Sermons, Lectures, Addresses, and Theological
Essays  18

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE
Zbc Bible
HISTORY OF THE BIBLE
THE BIBLE IN THE CHURCH. By Right Rev. Bishop West-
COTT. loth Edition. Pott 8vo. 4s. 6d.
BIBLICAL HISTORY
THE HOLY BIBLE. (Eversley Edition.) Arranged in Paragraphs,
with an Introduction. ByJ. W. Mackail, M.A. 8 vols. Globe
8vo. 5s. each.
Vol. I. Genesis — Numbers. II. Deuteronomy — 2 Samuel.
III. I Kings— Esther. IV. Job— Song of Solomon. V. Isaiah
. — Lamentations. VI. Ezekiel — Malachi. VII. Matthew — ^John.
VIII. Acts— Revelation.
THE MODERN READER'S BIBLE. A Series of Books from the
Sacred Scriptures presented in Modern Literary Form. The Text
is that of the Revised Version. It is used by special permission
of the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge. Edited by
R. G. Moulton, M.A. Pott 8vo. 2s. 6d. each volume.
THE PROVERBS. ECCLESIASTICUS. ECCLESIASTES—
WISDOM OF SOLOMON. THE BOOK OF JOB.
DEUTERONOMY. GENESIS. THE EXODUS. THE JUDGES.
BIBLICAL IDYLLS— SOLOMON'S SONG, RUTH, ESTHER,
TOBIT. THE KINGS. THE CHRONICLES.
ISAIAH. JEREMIAH. EZEKIEL. DANIEL.
SELECT MASTERPIECES OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE.
THE PSALMS AND LAMENTATIONS. 2 Vols.
ST. MATTHEW AND ST. MARK, AND THE GENERAL
EPISTLES.
ST. LUKE AND ST. PAUL. 2 Vols.
THE GOSPEL, EPISTLES, AND REVELATION OF ST. JOHN.
BIBLE STORIES (Old Testament).
BIBLE STORIES (New Testament).
ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE.—" While the sacred text has in no way been tampered
with, the books are presented in modern literary form and are furnished with an intro
duction and notes by Professor Richard G. Moulton. The notes are scholarly, and of
real help to the student."
BIBLE LESSONS. By Rev. E. A. Abbott, D.D. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d.
SIDE-LIGHTS UPON BIBLE HISTORY. By Mrs. Sydney Buxton.
Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 5s.
STORIES FROM THE BIBLE. By Rev. A. J. Church. Illus
trated. Two Series. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. each.
BIBLICAL QUOTATIONS IN OLD ENGLISH PROSE WRITERS.
By Albert S. Cook, Ph.D., Rutgers Professor of the English
Language and Literature in Yale University. 8vo. 17s. net.
B

Biblical History — continued.
BIBLE READINGS SELECTED FROM THE PENTATEUCH
AND THE BOOK OF JOSHUA. By Rev. J. A. Cross.
2nd Edition. Globe 8vo. 2s. 6d.
CHILDREN'S TREASURY OF BIBLE STORIES. By Mrs.
H. Gaskoin. Pott 8vo. IS. each. Part I. Old Testament ; II.
New Testament ; III. Three Apostles.
THE NATIONS AROUND ISRAEL. By A. Keary. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d.
VILLAGE SERMONS. By Rev. F. J. A. Hort, D.D. 8vo. 6s.
This Volume contains a Series of Sermons dealing in a popular
way with the successive Books of which the Bible is made up.
They form an admirable introduction to the subject.
HISTORY, PROPHECY, AND THE MONUMENTS, OR, ISRAEL
AND THE NATIONS. By Prof. J. F. M'Curdy. 8vo. 14s.
net each. Vol. I. To the Downfall of Samaria. Vol. II. To the
Fall of Nineveh. [ Vol. III. in the Press.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW. — "TXs method is to interweave the
histories of the connected peoples in each period, to point out the historical presuppos
itions and moral principles in the prophetic^ writings, and to treat the social constitution
in separate sections. This method has obvious advantages in the hands of a competent
scholar and good writer, and is emiiloyed _by,Mr. M'Curdy with excellent effect. His
presentation of the material is admirable in arrangement ; his style, though somewhat
formal and Gibbonesque, is clear and picturesque."
TIMES. — "A learned treatise on the ancient history of the Semitic peoples as
interpreted by the new light obtained from the modern study of their monuments."
EXPOSITORY r/MSi'.—" The work is very able and very welcome. . . . It will
take the place of all existing histories of these nations."
A CLASS-BOOK OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. By Rev.
Canon Maclear. With Four Maps. Pott 8vo. 4s. 6d.
A CLASS-BOOK OF NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. Includ
ing the connection of the Old and New Testament. By the same.
Pott 8vo. 5s. 6d.
A SHILLING BOOK OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. By
the same. Pott 8vo. is.
A SHILLING BOOK OF NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. By
the same. Pott 8vo. is.
THE BIBLE FOR HOME READING. Edited, with Comments and
Reflections for the use of Jewish Parents and Children, by C. G.
Montefiore. Part I. To the Second Visit of Nehemiah to
Jerusalem. 2nd Edition. Extra Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
Part II. Containing Selections from the Wisdom Literature, the
Prophets, and the Psalter, together with extracts from the
Apocrypha. Extra Crown 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.
JEWISH CHRONICLE.— "By ih\s remarkable work Mr. Claude Montefiore has
put the seal on his reputatioii. He has placed himself securely in the front rank of con
temporary teachers of religion. He_ has produced at once a most original, a most
instructive, and almost spiritual treatise, which will long leave its ennoUing mark on
Jewish religious thought in England. . . . Though the term 'epoch-making' is often
misapplied, we do not hesitate to apply it on this occasion. We cannot but believe that
a new era may dawn in the interest shown by Jews in the Bible."
THE OLD TESTAMENT
SCRIPTURE READINGS FOR SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES.
By C. M. Yonge. Globe 8vo. is. 6d. each ; also with comments,

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 3
The Old Testament — continued.
3s. 6d. each. — First Series : Genesis to Deuteronomy. — Second
Series : Joshua to Solomon. — Third Series: Kings and the
Prophets. — Fourth Series : The Gospel Times. — Fifth Series :
Apostolic Times.
THE DIVINE LIBRARY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. Its
Origin, Preservation, Inspiration, and Permanent Value. By Rev.
A. F. KiRKPATRiCK, B.D. Crown 8vo. 3s. net.
TIMES. — "An eloquent and temperate plea for the critical study of the Scriptures."
MANCHESTER GWARDIAN.—" AaexceUeat introduction to the modern view
of the Old Testament. . . . The learned author is a genuine critic. . . . He expounds
clearly what has been recently called the ' Analytic ' treatment of the books of the Old
Testament, and generally adopts its results. . . . The volume is admirably suited to
fulfil its purpose of familiarising the minds of earnest Bible readers with the work which
Biblical criticism is now doing. '
THE DOCTRINE OF THE PROPHETS. Warburtonian Lectures
1886-1890. By Rev. A. F. Kirkpatrick, B.D. 2nd Edition.
Crown 8vo. 6s.
SCOTSMAN. — "This volume gives us the result of ripe scholarship and competent
learning in a very attractive form. It is written simply, clearly, and eloquently ; and it
invests the subject of which it treats with a vivid and vital interest which will commend
it to the reader of general intelligence, as well as to those who are more especially
occupied with such studies."
GLASGOW HERALD.—" Professor Kirkpatrick's book will be found of great value
for purposes of study."
BOOKMAN. — "As a summary of the main results of recent investigation, and as a
thoughtful appreciation of both the human and divine sides of the prophets' work and
message, it is worth the attention of all Bible students."
THE PATRIARCHS AND LAWGIVERS OF THE OLD
TESTAMENT. By Frederick Denison Maurice. New
Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
THE PROPHETS AND KINGS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
By the same. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. An Essay on the
Growth and Formation of the Hebrew Canon of Scripture. By
Rev. Prof. H. E. Ryle. 2nd Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
This edition has been carefiiUy revised throughout, but only two sub
stantial changes have been found necessary. An Appendix has been added
to Chapter IV., dealing with the subject of the Samaritan version of the
Pentateuch ; and Excursus C (dealing with the Hebrew Scriptures) has been
completely re- written on the strength of valuable material kindly supplied
to the author by Dr. Ginsburg.
EXPOSITOR. — " Scholars are indebted to Professor Ryle for having given them for
the first time a complete and trustworthy history of the Old Testament Canon."
EXPOSITORY TIMES. — "He rightly claims that his book possesses that most
English of virtues — it may be read throughout. - . . An extensive and minute research
lies concealed under a most fresh and flexible English style."
GUARDIAN. — " A valuable contribution to an important and perplexing question.
It will serve as a good starting-point for further investigation, and those who are interested
in Old Testament studies cannot afford to neglect it."
THE MYTHS OF ISRAEL. THE ANCIENT BOOK OF GENESIS.
WITH ANALYSIS AND EXPLANATION OF ITS COM
POSITION. By Amos Kidder Fiske, Author of " The Jewish
Scriptures," etc. Crown 8vo. 6s.

4 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
The Old Testament — continued.
THE EARLY NARRATIVES OF GENESIS. By Rev. Prof. H. E.
Ryle. Cr. 8vo. 3s. net.
PHILO AND HOLY SCRIPTURE, OR THE QUOTATIONS OF
PHILO FROM THE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
With Introd. and Notes by Prof. H. E. Ryle. Cr. 8vo. los. net.
In the present work the attempt has been made to collect, arrange in
order, and for the first time print in full all the actual quotations from the
books of the Old Testament to be found in Philo's writings, and a few of
his paraphrases. For the purpose of giving general assistance to students
Dr. Ryle has added footnotes, dealing principally with the text of Philo's
quotations compared with that of the Septuagint ; and in the introduction
he has endeavoured to explain Philo's attitude towards Holy Scripture,
and the character of the variations of his text firom that of the Septuagint.
TIMES. — " This book will be found by students to be a very useful supplement and
companion to the learned Dr. Drummond's important work, Phito Judants."
The Pentateuch —
AN HISTORICO-CRITICAL INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN
AND COMPOSITION OF THE HEXATEUCH (PENTA
TEUCH AND BOOK OF JOSHUA). By Prof. A. Kuenen.
Translated by Philip H. Wicksteed, M.A. 8vo. 14s.
The Psabns—
THE PSALMS CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. An
Amended Version, with Historical Introductions and Explanatory
Notes. By Four Friends. New Edition. Crown 8vo. Ss. net.
SPECTA TOR.—" One of the most instructive and valuable books that has been
published for many years. It gives the Psalms a perfectly fresh setting, adds a new
power of vision to the grandest poetry of nature, ever produced, a new depth of lyrical
pathos to the poetry of national joy, sorrow^ and hope, and a new intensity of spiritual
light to the divine subject of every ejaculation of praise and every invocation of want.
We have given but imperfect illustrations of the new beauty and li^ht which the trans
lators pour upon the most perfect devotional poetry of any day or nation, and which they
pour on it in almost every page, by the scholarship and perfect taste with which they have
executed their work. We can only say that their version deserves to live long and to
pass through many editions."
GOLDEN TREASURY PSALTER. The Student's Edition.
Being an Edition with briefer Notes of "The Psalms Chrono
logically Arranged by Four Friends." Pott 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
THE PSALMS. With Introductions and Critical Notes. By A. C.
Jennings, M.A., and W. H. Lowe, M.A. In 2 vols. 2nd
Edition. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. each.
Isaiah —
ISAIAH XL.— LXVI. With the Shorter Prophecies allied to it.
By Matthew Arnold. With Notes. Crown 8vo. 5s.
A BIBLE -READING FOR SCHOOLS. The Great Prophecy of
Israel's Restoration (Isaiah xl.-lxvi.) Arranged and Edited for
Young Learners. By the same. 4th Edition. Pott 8vo. is.
Zechariah —
THE HEBREW STUDENT'S COMMENTARY ON ZECH
ARIAH, Hebrew and LXX. ByW. H.Lowe, M. A. 8vo. los. 6d.

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE S
THE NEW TESTAMENT
THE AKHMIM FRAGMENT OF THE APOCRYPHAL
GOSPEL OF ST. PETER. By H. B. Swete, D.D. 8vo. 5s. net.
THE PROGRESS OF DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTA
MENT : The Bampton Lectures, 1864. By Thomas Dehany
Bernard, M.A. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
THE RISE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By David Saville
MuzzEY, B.D. Fcap. 8vo. 5s.
Immanuel Kant.—" The Rise of the Bible as the people's book is the greatest
blessing that the human race has ever experienced."
THE SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By W.
P. Du Boss, M.A. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.
THE MESSAGES OF THE BOOKS. Being Discourses and Notes
on the Books of the New Testament. By Dean Farrar. 8vo. 14s.
ON A FRESH REVISION OF THE ENGLISH NEW TESTA
MENT. With an Appendix on the last Petition of the Lord's
Prayer. By Bishop Lightfoot. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.
DISSERTATIONS ON THE APOSTOLIC AGE. By Bishop
Lightfoot. 8vo. 14s.
BIBLICAL ESSAYS. By Bishop Lightfoot. 8vo. 12s.
THE UNITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By F. D. Maurice.
2nd Edition. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 12s.
A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE CANON
OF THE NEW TESTAMENT DURING THE FIRST FOUR
CENTURIES. By Right Rev. Bishop Westcott. 7th Edition.
Crown 8vo. IDs. 6d.
THE STUDENT'S LIFE OF JESUS. By G. H. Gilbert, Ph.D.
Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
THE STUDENT'S LIFE OF PAUL. By G. H. Gilbert, Ph.D.
Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
THE REVELATION OF JESUS : A Study of the Primary Sources
of Christianity. By G. H. Gilbert, Ph.D. Crown 8vo. 5s.net.
NEW TESTAMENT HANDBOOKS. Edited by Shailer
Mathews, Professor of New Testament History at the Univer
sity of Chicago.
A HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES IN PALES
TINE {17s B.C.-70 A.D.). By Shailer Mathews, A.M.
Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
A HISTORY OF THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE
NEW TESTAMENT. By Marvin R. Vincent, D.D.
Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
THE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTA
MENT. By Ezra P. Gould, D.D. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
THE NEW TESTAMENT IN THE ORIGINAL GREEK. The
Text revised by Bishop Westcott, D.D., and Prof. F. J. A.
Hort, D.D. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. each. — Vol. I.
Text ; II. Introduction and Appendix.
Library Edition. 8vo. los. net. \_Text in Macmillan Greek Type.
School Edition. l2mo, cloth, 4s. 6d. ; roan, 5s. 6d. ; morocco,
6s. 6d. ; India Paper Edition, limp calf, 7s. 6d. net.

/

6 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
The New Testament — continued.
GREEK-ENGLISH LEXICON TO THE NEW TESTAMENT.
By W. J. HiCKiB, M.A. Pott 8vo. 3s.
ACADEMY. — " We can cordially recommend this as a very handy little volume
compiled on sound principles."
GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK. By Prof. F.
Blass, University of Halle. Authorised English Translation. 8vo.
14s. net.
TIMES.— ""VIWX probably become the standard book of reference for those students
who enter upon minute grammatical study of the language of the New Testament."
THE GOSPELS-
PHILOLOGY OF THE GOSPELS. By Prof. F. Blass. Crown
8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
GUARDIAN. — " On the whole. Professor Blass's new book seerns to us an im-
{)ortant contribution to criticism. ... It will stimulate inquiry, and will open up fresh
lines of thought to any serious student."
THE SYRO-LATIN TEXT OF THE GOSPELS. By the Rev.
Frederic Henry Chase, D.D. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
The sequel of an essay by Dr. Chase on the old Syriac element in the
text of Codex Bezae.
TIMES. — "An important and scholarly contribution to New Testament criticism."
THE COMMON TRADITION OF THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS,
in the Text of the Revised Version. By Rev. E. A. Abbott and
W. G. Rushbrooke. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
SYNOPTICON : An Exposition of the Common Matter of the Synop
tic Gospels. By W. G. Rushbrooke. Printed in Colours. 410.
3Ss. net. Indispensable to a Theological Student.
A SYNOPSIS OF THE GOSPELS IN GREEK AFTER THE
WESTCOTT AND HORT TEXT. By Rev. Arthur Wright,
M.A. Demy 4to. 6s. net.
" Every such effort calls attention to facts which must not be overlooked, but yet to
the scholar they are but as dust in the balance when weighed against such solid con
tributions as Rushbrooke's Synopticon or Wright's Synopsis, which provide instruments
for investigation apart from theories." — Professor Armitage Robinson at Church Congress,
Bradford, 1898.
THE COMPOSITION OF THE FOUR GOSPELS. By Rev.
Arthur Wright. Crown 8vo. 5s.
CAMBRIDGE REyiEW.—"T\ie wonderful force and freshness which we find on
every page of the book. There is no sign of hastiness. All seems to be the outcome of
years of reverent thought, now brought to light in the clearest, most telling way. . . .
The book will hardly go unchallenged by the-different schools of thought, but all will
agree in gratitude at least for its vigour and reality."
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE FOUR GOSPELS.
By Right Rev. Bishop Westcott. 8th Ed. Cr. 8vo. los. 6d.
FOUR LECTURES ON THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE
GOSPELS. By the Rev. J. PL Wilkinson, M.A., Rector of
Stock Gaylard, Dorset. Crown 8vo. 3s. net.
THE LEADING IDEAS OF THE GOSPELS. By W. Alex
ander, D.D. Oxon., LL.D. Dublin, D.C.L. Oxon., Archbishop of
Arma|;h, and Lord Primate of All Ireland . New Edition, Revised
and Enlarged. Crown 8vo. 6s.
GUARDIAN. — "The originality of the general conception, the ingenious and
poetical manner in which it^is worked out, and the smallness of its size, give this volume
special claims on the attention of non-theological readers."

THEOLOGICAL C\TALOGUE 7
The Gospels — continued.
BRITISH WEEKLY.— " Really a new book. It sets before the reader with
delicacy of thought and felicity of language the distinguishing characteristics of the
several gospels. It is delightful reading. . . . Religious literature does not often
furnish a book which may so confidently be recommended."
Gospel of St. Matthew —
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. Greek Text
as Revised by Bishop WESTCOTT and Dr. HoRT. With Intro
duction and Notes by Rev. A. Sloman, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.
_ MANCHESTER GUARDIAN.—" It is sound and helpful, and the brief introduc
tion on Hellenistic Greek is particularly good."
Gospel of St. Mark—
THE GREEK TEXT. With Introduction, Notes, and Indices.
By Rev. H. B. Swete, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity
in the University of Cambridge. 8vo. 1 5s.
TIMES. — "A learned and scholarly performance, up to date with the most recent
advances in New Testament criticism."
SCHOOL READINGS IN THE GREEK TESTAMENT.
Being the Outlines of the Life of our Lord as given by St. Mark, with
additions from the Text of the other Evangelists. Edited, with Notes
and Vocabulary, by Rev. A. Calvert, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.
Gospel of St. Luke —
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. LUKE. The Greek Text
as Revised by Bishop Westcott and Dr. HORT. With Introduction
and Notes by Rev. J. Bond, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.
GLASGOW HERALD.— "The notes are short and crisp— suggestive rather than
exhaustive." THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. A Course
of Lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke. By F. D. Maurice.
Crown 8vo. 3s. fid.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. LUKE IN GREEK,
AFTER THE WESTCOTT AND HORT TEXT. Edited,
with Parallels, Illustrations, Various Readings, and Notes, by the
Rev. Arthur Wright, M.A. Demy 4to. 7s. fid. net.
Gospel of St. John —
THE CENTRAL TEACHING OF CHRIST. Being a Study and
Exposition of St. John, Chapters XIII. to XVII. By Rev. Canon
Bernard, M.A. Crown 8vo. 7s. fid.
EXPOSITOR Y TIMES. — " Quite recently we have had an exposition by him whom
many call the greatest expositor living. But Canon Kernard's work is still the work that
will help the preacher most."
THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. ByF. D.Maurice. Cr.8vo. 3s. fid.
THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.
ADDRESSES ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. By
the late Archbishop Benson. 8vo. [In the Press.
THE OLD SYRIAC ELEMENT IN THE TEXT OF THE
CODEX BEZAE. By F. H. Chase, B.D. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES IN GREEK AND ENGLISH.
With Notes by Rev. F. Rendall, M.A. Cr. 8vo. 9s.

8 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
The Acts of the Apostles — continued.
SATURDAY REVIEW.— "Mx. Rendall has given us a very useful as well as a
very scholarly book."
BRITISH WEEKLY.— "On the whole the book is a valuable addition toNew
Testament literature, being thoroughly up-to-date both in its scholarship and in its
general information and critical judgment."
MANCHESTER GUARDIAN.—" Mr. Rendall is a careful scholar and a thought
ful writer, and the student may learn a good deal from his commentary."
THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. By F. D. Maurice. Cr.
8vo. 3s. 6d.
THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. Being the Greek Text as
Revised by Bishop Westcott and Dr. Hort. With Explanatory
Notes by T. E. Page, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d.
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. The Authorised Version, with Intro
duction and Notes, by T. E. Page, M.A., and Rev. A. S.
Walpole, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d.
BRITISH WEEKLY.—" Mr. Page's Notes on the Greek Text of the Acts are very
well known, and are decidedly scholarly and individual. . . . Mr. Page has written an
introduction which is brief, scholarly, and suggestive."
SCOTSMAN — " It is a much more scholarly edition than is usually found prepared
for use in schools, and yet keeps its learning well within the limits of the needs and the
capacities of young students of the Bible."
THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS. The Church of
Jerusalem. The Church of the Gentiles. The Church
of the World. Lectures on the Acts of the Apostles. By
Very Rev. C. J. Vaughan. Crown 8vo. ids. 6d.
THE EPISTLES of St. Paul—
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. The Greek Text,
with English Notes. By Very Rev. C. J. Vaughan. 7th Edition.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. A New Transla
tion by Rev. W. G. Rutherford. 8vo. 3s. fid. net.
PILOT. — " Small as the volume is, it has very much to .=:ay, not only to professed
students of the New Testament, but also to the ordinary reader of the Bible. . . . The
layman who buys the book will be grateful to one who helps him to realise that this per
plexing Epistle ' was once a plain letter concerned with a theme which plain men might
understand.' "
PROLEGOMENA TO ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES TO THE
ROMANS AND THE EPHESIANS. By Rev. F. J. A. Hort.
Crown 8vo. fis.
Dr. Marcus Dods in the BookmaTi. — "Anything from the pen of Dr. Hort is sure to
be informative and suggestive, and the present publication bears his mark. . . . There
is an air of originality about the whole discussion ; the difhculties are candidly faced, and
the explanations offered appeal to our sense of what is reasonable."
TIMES. — " Will be welcomed by all theologians as ' an invaluable contribution to the
study of those Epistles * as the editor of the volume justly calls it."
DAILY CHRONICLE. — " The lectures are an important contribution to the study
of the famous Epistles of which they treat."
,_ THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. An Essay on its
Destination and Date. By E. H. Askwith, M.A. Crown 8vo.
3s. fid. net.
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. A Revised
Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. By Bishop
Lightfoot. loth Edition. 8vo. 12s.

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 9
The Epistles of St. Paul — continued.
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS. Greek Text,
with Introduction and Notes. By Canon J. Armitage Robinson.
Svo. [/» the Press.
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. A Revised
Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. By Bishop
Lightfoot. 9th Edition. 8vo. 12s.
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. With transla
tion, Paraphrase, and Notes for English Readers. By Very Rev.
C. J. Vaughan. Crown 8vo. 5s.
ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES TO THE COLOSSIANS AND TO
PHILEMON. A Revised Text, with Introductions, etc. By
Bishop Lightfoot. 9th Edition. 8vo. 12s.
THE EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. Analysis and Ex
amination Notes. By Rev. G. W. Garrod. Crown 8vo. 3s. net.
THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS. With
Analysis and Notes by the Rev. G. W. Garrod, B.A. Crown
8vo. 2s. fid. net.
THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL TO THE EPHESIANS, THE
COLOSSIANS, AND PHILEMON. With Introductions and
Notes. By Rev. J. Ll. Davies. 2nd Edition. 8vo. 7s. fid.
THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. For English Readers. Part I. con
taining the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. By Very Rev. C.
J. Vaughan. 2nd Edition. 8vo. Sewed, is. 6d.
NOTES ON EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL FROM UNPUBLISHED
COMMENTARIES. By the late J. B. Lightfoot, D.D.,
D.C.L., LL.D., Lord Bishop of Durham. 8vo. 12s.
The Epistles of St. Peter —
THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. PETER, I. i to IL 17. The Greek
Text, with Introductory Lecture, Commentary, and additional
Notes. By the late F. J. A. Hort, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D.
8vo. 6s.
THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. PETER (Greek Text). By
J. Howard B. Masterman, Principal of the Midland Clergy
College, Edgbaston, Birmingham. \In the Press.
The Epistle of St. James —
THE EPISTLE OF ST. JAMES. The Greek Text, with Intro
duction and Notes. By Rev. Joseph B. Mayor, M.A. 2nd
Edition. Svo. 14s. net.
EXPOSITORY TIMES.—" The most complete edition of St. James in the English
language, and the most serviceable for the student of Greek."
BOOKMAN. — "Professor Mayor's volume in every part of it gives proof that no time
or labour has been grudged in mastering this mass of literature, and that in appraising it
he has exercised the sound judgment of a thoroughly trained scholar and critic. . . .
"The notes are uniformly characterised by thorough scholarship and unfailing sense. The
notes resemble rather those of Lightfoot than those^ of Ellicott._ ... It is a pleasure to
welcome a book which does credit to English learning, and which will take, and keep, a
foremost place in Biblical literature."

/
/

10 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
The Epistles of St. John--
SCOTSMAN". — " It is a work which sums up many others, and to any one who wishes
to make a thorough study of the Epistle of St. James, it will prove indispensable."
EXPOSITOR (Dr. Marcus Dods).—" Will longremainthecommentary on St. James,
a storehouse to which all subsequent students of the epistle must be indebted."
THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. By F. D. Maurice. Crown
Svo. 3s. 6d.
THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. The Greek Text, with Notes.
By Right Rev. Bishop Westcott. 3rd Edition. Svo. 12s. 6d.
GUARDIA N. — " It contains a new or rather revised text, with careful critical remarks
and helps ; very copious footnotes on the text ; and after each of the chapters,
longer and more elaborate notes in treatment of leading or difficult questions, whether in
respect of reading or theology. . . . Dr. Westcott has accumulated round them so much
matter that, if not new, was forgotten, or generally unobserved, and has thrown so much
light upon their language, theology, and characteristics. . . . The notes, critical,
illustrative, and exegetical, which are given beneath the text, are extraordinarily full and
careful. . . . They exhibit the same minute analysis of every phrase and word, the same
scrupulous weighing of every inflection and variation that characterised Dr. Westcott's
commentary on the Gospel. . . . There is scarcely a syllable throughout the Epistles
which is dismissed without having undergone the most anxious interrogation."
SATURDAY REVIEW. — "The more we examine this precious volume the more
its exceeding richness in spiritual as well as in literary material grows upon the mind."
The Epistle to the Hebrews —
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS IN GREEK AND
ENGLISH. With Notes. By Rev. F. Rendall. Cr. Svo. 6s.
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. English Text, with Com
mentary. By the same. Crown Svo. 7s» 6d.
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. With Notes. By Very
Rev. C. J. Vaughan. Crown Svo, 7s. 6d.
TIMES. — "The name and reputation of the Dean of Llandaff are a better recom
mendation than we can give of the Epistle to the Hebreivs^ the Greek text, with notes ;
an edition which represents the results of more than thirty years' experience in the training
of students for ordination."
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. The Greek Text, with
Notes and Essays. By Right Rev. Bishop Westcott. Svo. 14s.
GUARDIAN. — " In form this is a companion volume to that upon the Epistles of St.
John. The type is excellent, the printing careful, the index thorough ; and the volume
contains a full introduction, followed by the Greek text, with a running commentary, and
a number of additional notes on verbal and doctrinal points which needed fuller discus
sion. . . . His conception of inspiration is further illustrated by the treatment of the Old
Testament in the Epistle, and the additional notes that bear on this point deserve very
careful study. The spirit in which the student should approach the perplexing questions
of Old Testament criticism could not be better described than it is in the last essay."
The Book of Revelations —
THE APOCALYPSE. A Study. By the late Archbishop Ben
son. Svo. Ss. 6d. net.
LECTURES ON THE APOCALYPSE. By Rev. Prof. W.
MlLLiGAN. Crown Svo. 5s.
DISCUSSIONS ON THE APOCALYPSE. By the same. Cr. Svo. 53.
SCOTSMAN. — "These discussions give an interesting and valuable account and
criticism of the present state of theological opinion and research in connection with their
subject." SCOTTISH GUARDIAN.—" The great merit of the book is the patient and .skilful
way in which it has brought the whole discussion down to the present day. . . . The
result is a volume which many will value highly, and which will not, we think^ soon be
superseded."

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE n
LECTURES ON THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN. By Very
Rev. C. J. Vaughan. 5th Edition. Crown Svo. los. 6d.
THE CHRISTIAN PROPHETS AND THE PROPHETIC
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 [/« the Press.
THE BIBLE WORD-BOOK. By W. Aldis Wright, Litt.D.,
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A HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH DURING THE
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THE CHRISTIAN ECCLESIA. A Course of Lectures on the
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Simpson (W.)— AN EPITOME OF THE HISTORY OF THE
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Sohm (Prof.) — OUTLINES OF CHURCH HISTORY.
Translated by Miss May Sinclair. With a Preface by Prof. H.
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MANCHESTER GUARDIAN.—" It fully deserves the praise given to it by Pro
fessor Gwatkin (who contributes a preface to this translation) of being ' neither a meagre
sketch nor a confused mass of facts, but a masterly outline,' and it really ' supplies a
want,' as affording to the intelligent reader who has no time or interest in details, a con
nected general view of the whole vast field of ecclesiastical history."

12 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
Vaughan (Very Rev. C. J., Dean of Llandaflf).— THE CHURCH
OF THE FIRST DAYS. The Church of Jerusalem. The
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^be Cburcb of jenGlan&
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THE ORDER OF CONFIRMATION, with Prayers and Devo
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Vol. II. THE ENGLISH CHURCH FROM THE NOR
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TEENTH CENTURY. By the Dean of Winchester. [Shortly.
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TEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES (1372-1486).
By the Rev. Canon Capes, sometime Reader of Ancient
History in the University of Oxford. 7s. 6d. [Ready.
Other Volumes to follow.

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 13
History of — continued.
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. By the Hon. Arthur
Elliot. New Edition. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d.
DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF ENGLISH CHURCH
HISTORY. Compiled from Original Sources by Henry Gee,
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ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW.—" Will be welcomed alike by students and
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For the benefit of the latter all the Latin pieces have been translated into English. . . .
It fully deserves the hearty imprimatur of the Bishop of Oxford prefixed to it.'
DAILY CHRONICLE.—" Students of the English Constitution as well as students
of Church History will find this volume a valuable aid to their researches."
SCOTTISH GUARDIAN.— "There is no book in existence that contains so much
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historical questions affecting the English Church."
Holy Communion —
THE COMMUNION SERVICE FROM THE BOOK OF
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of the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Edited by Bishop Colenso. 6th
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FIRST COMMUNION, with Prayers and Devotions for the newly
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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE CREEDS. By Rev. Canon
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CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.— "Mr. Maclear's text-books of Bible history
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Introduction to the Creeds, which we do not hesitate to call admirable. The_ book
consists, first, of an historical introduction, occupying 53 pages,_ then an exposition of
the twelve articles of the Creed extending to page 299, an appendix containing the texts
of a considerable number of Creeds, and lastly, three indices which, as far as we have
tested them, we must pronounce very good. . . . We may add that we know already
that the book has been used with great advantage in ordinary parochial work."
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ARTICLES OF THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND. By Rev. G. F. Maclear, D.D.,
and Rev. W. W. Williams. Crown Svo. los. 6d.
The Bishop of Salisbury at the Church Congress, spoke of this as " a book which
will doubtless have, as it deserves, large circulation."
ST. yAME.S'S GAZETTE.— "Thea\o%vszK students and others will find this com
prehensive yet concise volume most valuable." . , ™
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logical Manuals published by Messrs. Macmillan."
CHURCH TIMES. — "Those who are in any way responsible for the training of
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with the assistance of his colleague, Mr. Williams, has just published."
A HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. By
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CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.— "Vie are glad to see that Mr. Procter's
History oJ the Book of Comnum Prayer still retains its hold on public favour, and more
especially we may presume on that of candidates for theological examinations. That it

14 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
Liturgy — continued.
too has been carefully revised and added to by its venerable and highly respected author,
may be inferred from the fact that the present edition numbers 483 pages (exclusive of
the Appendix), as against the 453 pages of the 13th edition (1876)."
NEW HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.
With a rationale of its Offices on the basis of the former Work by
Francis Procter, M.A. Revised and re-written by Walter
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AN ELEMENTARY INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF
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TWELVE DISCOURSES ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH
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Fcap. Svo. 6s.
Historical and Biographical —
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THE GROWTH OF THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION.
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The author's preface says : ' ' The one object of these lectures — delivered
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England which seems happily characteristic of the present time. "
DA IL Y NEWS. — " These lectures are particularly interesting as containing the case
for the Christian missions at a time when there is a disposition to attack them in some
quarters." LIVES OF THE ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY. From
St. Augustine to Juxon. By the Very Rev. Walter Farquhar
Hook, D.D., Dean of Chichester. Demy Svo. The volumes sold
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15s. ; Vol. XI., 15s. ; Vol. XII., iss.
ATHENjEUM. — "The most impartial, the most instructive, and the most interest*
ing of histories."
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF THE VERY REV. WALTER
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tion. With Portrait. 6s.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF ARCHBISHOP BENSON. By his
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Abridged Edition. In one Vol. [In the Press.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF AMBROSE PHILLIPPS DE LISLE.
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THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. Twelve Years, 1S33-4S. %
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THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF R. W. CHURCH, late Dean
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JAMES FRASER, Second Bishop of Manchester. A Memoir.
iSiS-iSSs. By Thomas Hughes, Q.C. 2nd Ed. Crown Svo. 6s.

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE IS
Historical and Biographical — continued,
LIFE AND LETTERS OF FENTON JOHN ANTHONY
HORT, D.D., D,C.L., LL.D., sometime Hulsean Professor and
Lady Margaret's Reader in Divinity in the University of Cambridge.
By his Son, Arthur Fenton Hort, late Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge. In two Vols. "With Portrait. Ex. Cr. Svo. 17s, net.
EXPOSITOR. — "ll isonly just to publish the life of a scholar at once so well known
and so little known as Dr. Hort. . . . But all who appreciate his work wish to know more,
and the two fascinating volumes edited by his son give us the information we seek. They
reveal to us a man the very antipodes of a dry-as-dust pedant, a man with many interests
and enthusiasms, alover of thearts and of nature, an athlete and one of the founders of the
Alpine Club, a man of restless mind but always at leisure for the demands of friendship,
and finding his truest joy in his own home and family."
THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. Chiefly
told in his own letters. Edited by his Son, Frederick Maurice.
With Portraits. Two Vols. Crown Svo. 1 6s.
MEMORIALS (PART I.) FAMILY AND PERSONAL, 1766-
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the passage selected."

1 6 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
SATURDAY REVIEW.— "ThQ studied simpilicity of Mr. Cornish's verse is al
together opposed to what most hymn -writers consider to be poetry. Nor is this the
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 17

^be ifatbers

INDEX OF NOTEWORTHY WORDS AND PHRASES FOUND
IN THE CLEMENTINE WRITINGS, COMMONLY
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author. ... In its main outlines full of dramatic insight and force, and in its details full
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 19
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 21
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 23
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 25
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 27
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Medley (Rev. W.)— CHRIST THE TRUTH. Being the
Angus Lectures for the year 1900. Crown Svo. 6s.

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 29
Milligan (Rev. Prof. W.)— THE RESURRECTION OF OUR
LORD. Fourth Edition. Crown Svo. 5s.
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30 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
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The discourses included in this volume were delivered in 1S93 in the
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and the preachers :— The Supremacy of Christ in all Realms : by the Very

THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 31
Rev. Charles Stubbs, D.D., Dean of Ely.— Christ in the Realm of History :
by the Very Rev. G. W. Kitchin, D.D., Dean of Durham.— Christ in the
Realm of Philosophy: by the Rev. R. E. Bartlett, M.A., Bampton
Lecturer in 1888.— Christ in the Realm of Law : by the Rev. J. B.
Heard, M.A., Plulsean Lecturer in 1893.— Christ in the Realm of Art :
by the Rev. Canon Rawnsley, M.A., Vicar of Crosthwaite. — Christ in the
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32 MACMILLAN AND CO.'S
Vaughan (C. J., Dean of Llandaff) — continued.
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THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 33
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LITERATURE.— " A sermon of the national day of rest, and some attractive per
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DAILY NEWS.—" Through every page . . . runs the same enlightened sympathy
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the Churchman in the Christian."

34 MACMILLAN & CO.'S THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE
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Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. c.s.g.oo.

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