tibvavy of €he Cheolojiccd ^eromarp 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John B. V/iedinerer 
 BX 5133 .S54 C55 
 Sparrow-Simpson, W. J. 1859- 
 1952. 
 
 The church and the Bible 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE 
 
CHURCH AND THE BIB 
 
 W. J. SPARROW 'SIMPSON, M.A. 
 
 VICAR OF ST. MARK'S, REGENT'S PARK 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 
 1897 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
ARTHUR L. STRIDE, Esq., J.P. 
 
 THE FOLLOWING PAGES 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The six Sermons contained in the present 
 volume were preached in substance in the 
 church of St. Mark, Regent's Park, and 
 in the parish churches of Hatfield and 
 Chelmsford, during the Lent of 1897. 
 Sermon IV. was also preached in the 
 church of St. Vedast, Foster Lane, and 
 Sermon II. in the chapel of Lincoln's Inn. 
 
 They are now printed at the wish of a 
 member of the congregation at Hatfield, 
 to whose kindly interest their publication 
 is due. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 SERMON I. 
 THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 
 
 " He gave Israel a law, 
 Which He commanded our forefathers to teach 
 
 their children : 
 That their posterity might know it, 
 And the children which were yet unborn ; 
 To the intent that, when they came up, 
 They might show their children the same." 
 
 Psalm lxxviii. 5, 6 
 
 SEEMON II. 
 THE ORIGIN AND THE GATHERING 
 OP THE BOOKS. 
 " Unto them were committed the oracles of God." 
 —Romans iii. 2 
 
 SEEMON III. 
 THE CHURCH, THE INTERPRETER 
 OP THE BIBLE. 
 " Understandest thou what thou readest ? "— Acts 
 viii. 30 
 
viii 
 
 SEEMON IV. 
 THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 PACK 
 
 " All Scripture is given by inspiration of God."— 
 
 2 Tim. iii. 16 85 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN VALUE OF THE OLD 
 TESTAMENT. 
 
 •• Whatsoever things were written aforetime were 
 
 written for our learning." — Romass xv. 4 . . 113 
 
 SEEMON VI. 
 
 THE DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 "My study shall be iu Thy statutes."— Psalm 
 
 cxix. 48 138 
 
 Notes 161 
 
SERMON I. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 
 
 " He gave Israel a law, 
 "Which He commanded our forefathers to teach their 
 
 children ; 
 That their posterity might know it, 
 And the children which were yet unborn ; 
 To the intent that, when they came up, 
 They might show their children the same." 
 
 Psalm Ixxviii. 5, 6. 
 
 Man's first knowledge of God was derived 
 neither from a study of nature nor from a 
 study of himself. According to Scripture, 
 it came as a supernatural Revelation. 
 Man is not represented in the Bible as 
 struggling out of nature-worship into a 
 nobler adoration, nor as coming from the 
 acceptance of many and false divinities 
 to the acceptance of the One and the True. 
 On the contrary, man at the beginning is 
 
 B 
 
4 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 with the creations of their hopes and 
 fears. They worshipped everything. They 
 appealed to the stars. They worshipped 
 the beasts of the earth and the birds of 
 the air. They even sank so low as to 
 worship themselves. Strange and fantastic, 
 repulsive and cruel, arose the forms of in- 
 numerable divinities, behind which the 
 one true God further and further continually 
 retreated. 
 
 And yet, error and confusion notwith- 
 standing, the first Eevelation was maintained 
 in the chosen family, and handed on. We 
 are permitted to trace it in Noah, in 
 Abraham, in Isaac, in Israel ; renewed from 
 time to time to those who kept it faithfully, 
 and so transmitted through the successive 
 generations. They held it as their price- 
 less treasure, the noblest part of their in- 
 heritance. Thousands of years had elapsed 
 since the days when it was given, but the 
 first Revelation survived among all the 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 5 
 
 changes, until the time when, by a myste- 
 rious providence, Israel was led down into 
 Egypt, and there the period of the first 
 Revelation closes. 
 
 II. 
 
 We enter upon the period of the second 
 Revelation. The second was delivered from 
 Sinai. God's power, God's wisdom, God's 
 moral glory, God's unity of nature, these 
 truths were delivered with a clearness and an 
 appalling solemnity altogether unsurpassed. 
 
 But here, as previously, we are concerned, 
 not so much with the substance of the 
 Revelation, as with the method in which 
 that Revelation once given was transmitted. 
 
 1. Observe, then, that the second Revela- 
 tion was not thrown out into the world to 
 secure itself a home where best it might. 
 On the contrary, it was entrusted to the 
 keeping of a Society. There was created a 
 spiritual society in which the truth was 
 
6 THE CHURCH AND 'I HE BIBLE. 
 
 to be contained, and by which the truth 
 was to be transmitted. For that purpose 
 was Israel called out of Egypt. Israel, 
 now a slave population, was drawn out by 
 a mighty Hand and a stretched-out Ann. 
 " He led them through the deep as through 
 a wilderness." So He drew them onward 
 and upward until, in the solitude of Sinai, 
 the people stood alone to be confronted 
 with God. There they were to hear the 
 voice of the Almighty. 
 
 " Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord thy God is one 
 Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, 
 and with all thy might." a God's oneness — 
 that is the substance of the second Kevela- 
 tion. And to maintain it was Israel created 
 into a society. By their priesthood, by their 
 succession, by their sacrifices they were to 
 keep this truth, and hand it on to the ages 
 yet untold. 
 
 a Dent. vi. 4. 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 7 
 
 '• He gave Israel a law, 
 Which He commanded our forefathers to teach their 
 
 children ; 
 That their posterity might know it, 
 And the children which were yet unborn ; 
 To the intont that, when they came up, 
 They might show their children the same." 
 
 So for forty years He led them up and 
 down the wilderness, sternly secluded from 
 all contact with mankind, lest they should 
 be " mingled among the heathen and learn 
 their works." il And so another generation 
 arose, who saw not with their own eyes, yet 
 received the truth and maintained it. Then 
 on into the land of promise. Tribe after 
 tribe was driven out before them, for " the 
 people shall dwell alone, and shall not be 
 reckoued among the nations." b There we 
 behold them, now sinking under the burden 
 of a destiny almost too great for them, now 
 rising to the dignity of their mission, now 
 falling miserably beneath it, now passion- 
 ately clinging to their fathers' faith, now 
 " Ps. cvi. 35. b Numb, xxiii. 9. 
 
8 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 yielding to the heathen mythologies which 
 exercised over thein a strange and mournful 
 fascination. 2 It was Israel's mission to 
 maintain the second Eevelation unim- 
 paired. And it is this which gives such 
 indescribable significance to the fact that, 
 in the midst of Israel, even Israel, God's 
 beloved, God's chosen, should ever have 
 risen the pagan cry, " 0 Baal, hear us ! " 
 It is this which explains why they were 
 scourged and disciplined with such severity, 
 in order to force them into the faithful dis- 
 charge of their glorious mission. War and 
 plague, defeat, and even exilo, are for this 
 cause inflicted upon them. " By the waters 
 of Babylon we sat down and wept, when 
 we remembered thee, 0 Zion ! " They 
 learnt the lesson. Humbled and rendered 
 faithful, they returned to their homes, but 
 not to their unbelief. From that time 
 onward, for centuries, by their worship, 
 their priests, their altars, they maintained 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 9 
 
 among themselves, and yet in the behalf of 
 all mankind, that central truth of religious 
 faith : " Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord thy God is 
 one Lord." And to this day they have never 
 forgotten it. Thus the second Kevelation 
 was entrusted to a Society. 
 
 2. Entrusted to a Society — that is only a 
 portion of the truth. The second Revela- 
 tion was, at the same time, recorded in a 
 Boole. The religious story of man, from the 
 first to the second Revelation, was there 
 made permanent, in the Book of the Law. 
 And here begins the wonderful history of 
 the Holy Scriptures. The Book of the 
 Law, when completed, was, by the order of 
 the Lawgiver, to be enshrined in the very 
 midst of Israel's sanctities, in the side of 
 the Ark. 3 It was to be guarded there, not 
 ignored, not forgotten, but read and learnt. 
 The kings of Judah were to copy it when 
 called to ascend the throne. All the men 
 of Israel were to come up to the great feast, 
 
io THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 and to hear the reading of the Book of the 
 Law. 
 
 " The words which I command thoe this day 
 Shall be in thine heart ; 
 And thou shalt teach them to thy children, 
 And thalt talk of them 
 When thou sittest in thine house, 
 And when thou walkest by the way, 
 And when thou liest down, 
 And when thou risest up." 
 
 The whole mind of the Society was to be 
 saturated with the teachings of the sacred 
 Book. And in proportion as Israel was 
 familiar with its contents, did Israel dis- 
 charge its glorious mission. And wheu the 
 Book was iguored and forgotten, then did 
 Israel fail. It was a time of singular 
 apathy and neglect when Hilkiah the 
 priest found, so runs the narrative, found 
 the Book of the Law in the house of the 
 Lord, found it as something obsolete, 
 neglected. And the good king Hezekiah 
 called an assembly of all Israel. The king 
 stood by a pillar in the house of the Lord, 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. n 
 
 and read the pages of the Book in the 
 hearing of all the people. It came as a 
 voice from the past, a voice from the dead, 
 passage after passage sounding strangely in 
 contrast with the prevalent neglect. Deep 
 emotion ran through the whole assembly, 
 and to a man they vowed that henceforward 
 the Book and the Society should never be 
 parted, the one from the other. 
 
 Entrusted to a Society, recorded in a 
 Book ; these two, not merely the one, form 
 the Divine method by which the second 
 Revelation was to be rendered man's 
 permanent inheritance. 
 
 3. And here we ought to notice a third 
 characteristic of this second Revelation. 
 It was progressive.* How widely the work 
 of the Almighty differs from the work of 
 man ! Man works in a hurry; his time is 
 brief, and, if the work be not finished soon, 
 he cannot hope to gaze on its completion. 
 God is never in a hurry. Being eternal, 
 
12 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 He can afford to wait. His education of 
 the human race has been very deliberate. 
 Little by little, fragment by fragment, as 
 man was able to bear it and take it in, the 
 revelation of the truth has been imparted. 
 The second Revelation was not delivered 
 all at once. It was gradual. In many 
 fragments and in many ways, God spake 
 in time past unto the Fathers by the 
 prophets. It was progressive. Prophet 
 after prophet, each with his separate 
 message, was sent renewing the old but 
 increasing the sum-total of truth revealed, 
 so that Israel learns far more when the days 
 drew near the birth of Christ than it learns 
 in the days of Sinai. In the earlier time, 
 the whole force of revelation centred on 
 the one grand truth of Israel's God so 
 exclusively that even the doctrine of man's 
 immortality itself seems partially obscured. 5 
 Thus Israel grew from more to more. And 
 the Older Testament was not complete in a 
 century ; no, nor yet in a thousand years. 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 
 
 13 
 
 III. 
 
 We reach the third, which is the Chris- 
 tian Revelation. It is the Revelation that 
 God is love. 
 
 " God is love," said Christianity. The 
 love of God does not mean satisfaction with 
 Himself, nor does it mean an infinite 
 capacity never called forth into exercise 
 for lack of an adequate object whereon to 
 rest. Nor could the love of God be satis- 
 fied in contemplation of His creatures. A 
 million creations would be no adequate 
 object for a love which is infinite. Christi- 
 anity here explained that in the mystery 
 of the Divine nature there is more than one 
 Divine personality. The love of the Eternal 
 Father finds its adequate object in His 
 Eternal Son. This is the most profound 
 yet most intelligible conception of God ever 
 presented to the mind of thinking men. 6 
 
 But here, again, we are concerned not so 
 much with the substance of the Revelation, 
 
i 4 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 as with the method by which it was trans- 
 mitted from that age to this. 
 
 1. Observe, then, that the third Revela- 
 tion was not thrown out into the world, to 
 wander up and down as a stranger until 
 some should take it in. On the contrary, 
 it was entrusted to a Society. Just as to 
 maintain the doctrine that God is one, 
 there was created the Society of Israel ; so 
 to maintain the doctrine that God is love, 
 there was created the Christian Church. 
 In the heart of Israel, in the midst of 
 Jerusalem, a new Society was founded at 
 the first Whitsuntide. It was the work of 
 the Holy Ghost. It was created to embody 
 and to perpetuate, to contain and to teach, 
 the substance of the Christian Revelation. 
 " Go ye into all the world ; preach the 
 gospel to every creature," " teaching them 
 to observe all things whatsoever I have 
 commanded you : and, lo, I am with 
 you alway, even unto the end of the 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 15 
 
 world." a It is the Church's prophetic office, 
 to maintain this Eevelation and to teach it. 
 
 2. Entrusted to a Society — and also 
 recorded in a Booh. Just as the Eevelation 
 that God is one produced the Old Testa- 
 ment, so the Eevelation that God is love 
 produced the New. Here were rendered 
 permanent for all ages certain aspects of 
 His most holy life, and the great doctrines 
 involved therein, drawn out for our instruc- 
 tion by Apostles and Apostolic men. 
 
 3. And here observe the striking differ- 
 ence between the second and the third 
 Eevelation. The second Eevelation was 
 progressive : the third is not. The second 
 was given gradually : the third all at once. 
 We may say that Israel in our Lord's day 
 held a completer Eevelation than Israel 
 held in Moses' time. But we may not say 
 that the modern Church has received truths 
 unknown to or dimly guessed by the 
 
 ■ St. Mark xvi. 15, and St. Matt, xxviii. 20. 
 
16 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 Apostles. The Christian Revelation is 
 perfect, and therefore final. It is the faith 
 once for all delivered to the saints. 7 
 
 Thus there is a corresponding difference 
 between the Old Testament and the New. 
 The Old, as we have seen, was not com- 
 pleted in a century, nor in a thousand 
 years ; the New was finished in a single 
 generation. The lifetime of St. John saw 
 the first portion written; the lifetime of 
 St. John extended beyond its close. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The history of .Revelation has very im- 
 portant bearings on theories prevalent in 
 the age in which we live. We see that the 
 Divine method of perpetuating truth has 
 been to entrust it to a Society, and to record 
 it in a Book. These two— not only one, 
 but two ; not the Book without the Society, 
 nor the Society without the Book. 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 
 
 1. Not the Society alone. For the ten- 
 dency of a society is to be perpetually on 
 the move. Men come and go. Fresh 
 generations arise. New waves of thought 
 pass over it. And there is nothing more 
 difficult than for a society to maintain 
 identity with its own past. Is it said, that 
 the Church is by the Divine protection 
 secured against all change? Yes, but not 
 unconditionally. 8 The promise depends on 
 the use of the appropriate means. And 
 among the appointed means stands first 
 the Holy Scriptures. 
 
 May we not see the reason why ? For 
 while a Society can change, a Book cannot 
 change. There it is. Men may come and 
 go, but the Book remains. The Kevelation 
 is there photographed, stereotyped, rendered 
 permanent in certain aspects and certain 
 expressions. There it is, graven as in 
 the rock, and for ever ; practically per- 
 manent and indestructible. Accordingly, 
 c 
 
1 8 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 the function of the Book is to correct the 
 Society's tendency to change. It is there 
 for perpetual appeal. The different nature 
 of a Society and a Book providentially balance 
 each other. 
 
 The Bible is permanent : the Church 
 develops. In the Bible, Revelation is, so 
 to say, definitely fixed for ever, in certain 
 unalterable terms. But in the Church the 
 natural tendency is to compare truth with 
 truth, to draw inferences, expand ideas, 
 enlarge the boundaries. This is natural 
 and right. But such a process demands 
 the curbing corrective of a doctrinal state- 
 ment which cannot change. A sacred 
 Book is invaluable to a historic religion; 
 it encourages identity ; it secures constant 
 reversion to type ; it suggests a comparison 
 of the old with the new, the first century 
 with the last. The Church without the 
 Book would be the expansive without the 
 unchanging. 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 19 
 
 When, then, we are told by Koman 
 Catholics that it is the function of the 
 Church, and indeed its duty, to limit and 
 temporarily restrain the faithful in their 
 study of Holy Scripture, 9 we can but 
 reply, This is to deprive the Society of 
 the divinely appointed means whereby the 
 tendency to change would be corrected. 
 Many errors of the mediaeval Church 
 might have been altogether avoided if 
 the whole mind of the Society had been 
 thoroughly saturated with the teachings 
 of the Scriptures. 10 To us it seems that 
 the tendency of the Koman theory has 
 been to exalt tradition at the expense of 
 Scripture ; that is, the expansive without 
 the unchanging. And with the natural 
 result : a long gradual development apart 
 from any express explicit guidance of the 
 Book, culminating at last in the creation 
 of certain fresh dogmas, for which explicit 
 Scriptural warrant is not claimed. 
 
20 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 The Society ought never to be without 
 a full knowledge of the Bible, and one of 
 the greatest calamities which could befall 
 any portion of the Church is ignorance of 
 the Scriptures. " These words which I com- 
 mand thee this day shall be in thine heart, 
 and thou shalt teach them diligently unto 
 thy children." ■ They are able to make 
 thee " wise unto salvation, through faith 
 which is in Christ Jesus." b Error in 
 doctrine is distinctly traced by our Lord 
 to ignorance of the Bible. " Ye do err, 
 not knowing the Scriptures." 0 
 
 The Divine method of perpetuating the 
 revelation among mankind was not by a 
 Society alone. 
 
 2. Nor is it by the Book alone. 11 
 
 Suppose that, in our own day, a committee 
 of independent gentlemen met, placed the 
 Bible on the table, and, after deliberate 
 study of its contents, determined to form 
 " Deut. vi. (i, 7. b 2 Tim. iii. 15. c St. Matt. xxi. 29. 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 21 
 
 themselves into voluntary associations for 
 the purpose of mutual support and prayer. 
 How would such procedure appear in the 
 light of apostolic principles ? It would be 
 their exact reversal. It would be an entire 
 forgetfulness of the Christian order of 
 things. For the Christian order is not 
 first the Bible and then the Church, but 
 first the Church and then the Bible. It 
 is not true that the Church was formed 
 out of a careful study of the Bible. What 
 is true, in accordance with facts, is that first 
 the Holy Spirit created the Church, and 
 afterwards in that Church gave existence to 
 the New Testament. First the Church, and 
 then the New Testament Scriptures. 
 
 Not by the Book alone. The attempt to 
 perpetuate the Faith by the Book alone is 
 certainly very mistaken. Why ? For the 
 simple reason that it is a book, and a book 
 cannot possibly discharge the functions of 
 a society. A book cannot perpetuate itself, 
 
22 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 cannot translate itself, cannot adapt its 
 stereotyped expressions to the changing 
 needs of successive generations. It is 
 the advantage of a book that it cannot do 
 this. But in its strength is also its in- 
 evitable limitation. The book requires a 
 keeper, an interpreter. 
 
 It is difficult to see how the Old Testa- 
 ment could have survived the storms of 
 ages had it not been entrusted to the keep- 
 ing of Israel. It is difficult to see how 
 the New Testament could ever have been 
 gathered together, to say nothing about its 
 preservation, if it had not been entrusted 
 to the keeping of the Christian Church. 
 It might have survived, perhaps, amid the 
 dust of an old-world library, the study of a 
 few learned antiquaries, but it could scarcely 
 have been the living Book which it is, 
 unless protected and proclaimed by the 
 Society to which it was given. 
 
 Think, for instance, what the Church 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 23 
 
 has done for the Psalter in taking the 
 words of the Book and reiterating them, 
 making them its treasury of devotion these 
 three thousand years, translating them into 
 every language on the earth. It is the 
 Society which makes the Bible a living 
 Book. 
 
 Moreover, consider the three Kevelations. 
 The first was unwritten, the second and 
 third were recorded in a Book, but also 
 entrusted to a Society; but no revelation 
 has ever been recorded in a book without 
 being entrusted to a society. The lesson of 
 history is that Bevelation is not entrusted 
 to the keeping of a Book alone. May that 
 lesson not be written in vain ! 
 
 Through various circumstances of our 
 national experience, the Book is, to many 
 minds, more easily realized and regarded 
 and revered than the Society. The Divine 
 character of the Bible more easily im- 
 presses them than that of the Church. To 
 
24 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 them the Church seems vast, and vague, 
 and ill-defined, whereas the Bible has its 
 limits, is tangible. Here it is ; you have 
 it in your hands. Moreover, the human 
 element in the Church sometimes obscures 
 the Divine, whereas the human element in 
 the Bible is, at any rate, one which does 
 not change with changing years. All 
 which only amounts to saying that the 
 incidents to which a society and a book 
 are liable in the course of centuries are 
 not by any means one and the same. But 
 if the Church has a human element, and 
 the treasure is in earthen vessels, yet it 
 has no less a Divine element, and the 
 sufficiency is of God. And the failure to 
 realize the true character of the Society 
 is exceedingly injurious to the safety of 
 the Book. Nowhere on earth has the 
 existence of the Book been so fatally 
 imperilled as among those to whom the 
 authority and character of the Society have 
 
THE HISTORY OF REVELATION. 25 
 
 become obscured or unknown. In tbe 
 Society in which it originated and for 
 which it was destined, has the Book been 
 most secured from the disintegrating 
 influence of time. 
 
 The Society and the Book — these are 
 the two divinely appointed means of 
 maintaining unaltered God's Revelation to 
 man. " He gave Israel a Law." The Law is 
 recorded in a Book : but it is to Israel that 
 He gave it, commanding our forefathers to 
 teach their children. " Go ye into all the 
 world ; preach the gospel to every creature." 
 The gospel is embodied in the Book ; but it 
 is to the Church that He entrusted it. The 
 Book and the Society ; God has joined 
 them together, and "what God hath 
 joined together, let not man put asunder." 
 
SERMON II. 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND THE 
 GATHERING- OF THE BOOKS. 12 
 
 " Unto them were committed the oracles of God." — 
 Romans iii. 2. 
 
 One day there fell from the lips of the 
 Son of man the following statement : 
 " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but 
 My words shall not pass away." Famili- 
 arity may blunt our sense of its signifi- 
 cance, but the language is positively 
 tremendous. The Speaker can more readily 
 contemplate the dissolution of heaven and 
 earth than that His own words should pass 
 away. One can imagine a stranger, over- 
 hearing the statement as he passed alon j. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 27 
 
 the temple court, looking up and thinking, 
 "Who is this Galilfean, this utterer of 
 startling assertions ? We have had many 
 revivals in Israel. Probably in a century 
 He and all His sayings will be utterly 
 forgotten." To human probability so it 
 would have seemed. And what precautions 
 did the Son of man adopt to secure per- 
 manence for His assertions? Job, when 
 oppressed by a sense of human transit 
 toriness, exclaims — 
 
 " Oh that my words were written ! 
 Oh that they were printed in a book, 
 And graven in iron and lead in the rook for ever," 
 
 in order that they might thereby sur- 
 vive the storms of the ages. But Jesus 
 Christ? Once, indeed, He stooped and 
 wrote upon the ground. Beyond that He 
 wrote nothing. What precautions, then, 
 did He adopt to secure His words against 
 the laws of change ? 
 
28 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 L 
 
 He prepared the way for the founding 
 of a great Society in which His words 
 should be recorded. 
 
 Accordingly He selected twelve men. 13 
 These He would train. To these, when 
 able to bear it, He would entrust the 
 truth. To these He devoted Himself. 
 He did, indeed, pause to comfort the 
 sorrowing and relieve the suffering when 
 human trials appealed to Him : but this 
 was incidental, a necessity of His position 
 rather than the purpose of His life. He 
 did, indeed, give teaching to the crowd, but 
 it was in simple elementary pictures of 
 parable and allegory, that " truth, embodied 
 in a tale, might enter in at lowly doors." 
 But His heart was bent on the training of 
 the twelve. To the crowd the parable : to 
 the twelve the explanation. To the crowd 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 29 
 
 the simple elements : to the twelve the deep 
 mysteries of the Faith. 
 
 Christ could not entrust the truth to the 
 keeping of the crowds}* There was in the 
 crowd no coherence, no unity. To throw 
 the truth among them would be to let the 
 truth be torn to pieces, to be crucified as 
 they crucified Him. Shifty and variable, the 
 characteristic of human nature was its 
 lamentable untrustworthiness ; and the 
 Son of God could not build with material 
 such as this. His words, if left to the 
 crowd, would soon have passed away. 
 Our Lord never went about publicly pro- 
 claiming the fact of His Divinity. Rather 
 is there a reticence, a deeply significant 
 reserve in His declarations of the truth. 
 Thus He said to the Twelve, "Unto you 
 it is given to know the mysteries of the 
 kingdom of God, but to others in parables." 
 This is the reason why our Lord often with- 
 drew Himself and them from the crowds 
 
3o THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 and the cities, in order to devote Himself 
 more unreservedly to their instruction in the 
 quiet of country places ; as when He said, 
 " Come ye yourselves apart." 
 
 Thus He taught them by His utterances. 
 He taught them more still by His character, 
 His life. He permitted them the closest 
 intimacy. They saw Him under the most 
 varied circumstances : in failure and in 
 success, at a marriage and at a funeral, in 
 the crowds and when alone ; in order that 
 the Divine reality, who He was, might 
 gradually dawn upon them. Then, when the 
 appropriate time had come, He led them 
 away from the city, some hundred miles 
 up to -the north, under the snowy heights 
 of Hermon, and there, in the unbroken calm, 
 away from the world's distractions, asked 
 them the great, the central question, 15 
 " Whom do men say that I am?" And 
 they told Him the gossip of the day. But 
 brushing aside all that without discussion, 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 31 
 
 as totally inadequate to the facts of the 
 case, He asked theni again, " But whom say 
 ye that I am ? " Back came the answer from 
 one representing all, " Thou art the Christ, 
 the Son of the Living God." This was 
 what He wanted, this for which He had 
 waited, this the secret which all along 
 He had striven to teach them. " Blessed 
 art thou, Simon Bar-jona," He answered ; 
 " for flesh and blood hath not revealed it 
 unto thee, but My Father which is in 
 Heaven. And I say also unto thee, that thou 
 art Peter, and upon this rock [of faith in 
 Christ's Divinity] I will build My Church." 
 He is preparing the way for the foundation 
 of the great Society in which His words 
 shall be known, understood, and treasured 
 and taught. 
 
 2. And if our Lord chiefly devoted Him- 
 self to the training of the Twelve during 
 His ministry, still more is this the case 
 after His Resurrection. 16 Then He is 
 
32 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 theirs exclusively. He appeared to none 
 except disciples. And to these He not 
 only taught the fact that He was risen, but 
 gave them, in the light of His Resurrection, 
 the laws, the practices, the principles, of His 
 Church, the Kingdom of Heaven. And 
 then, at the time of His final departure 
 into Heaven, He bids them wait ; wait in 
 Jerusalem, for the coming of that Divine 
 Person, Who should complete the work for 
 which our Lord prepared. And so they 
 waited. Then down the Spirit came in 
 tongues as of flame, the light of knowledge 
 and the zeal of love, " to teach the Apostles 
 and to lead them into all truth."" And forth 
 they went to begin the work imposed upon 
 them, and stood in a body in the Jerusalem 
 street. 
 
 Let us attempt to realize what it was 
 that stood there in the Jerusalem street. 
 (1) It was a Society, a community of 
 a Communion Office. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 
 
 men. "They were all with one accord in 
 one place " ;> : an outward unity, an inward 
 oneness of idea. It was a Society. Its 
 limits were sharply defined : those that 
 are without, easily distinguishable from 
 those that are within. It had its form of 
 admission, its power to exclude. It had 
 its laws and practices imposed on all the 
 members. It had its officers already there ; 
 its principle of succession. Above all, it 
 possessed certain distinctive principles, ac- 
 cepted as a body by them all. There was 
 the Apostles' doctrine, there the Apostles' 
 fellowship, there the Apostles' worship. It 
 bore, in fact, all the characters by which 
 a society of men is commonly known and 
 distinguished. It seems difficult to read 
 the Acts and not recognize this. 
 
 (2) But further: This was not only a 
 Society, but a divine Society. 17 It differed 
 in character from every society which has 
 " Acta ii. 1. 
 
 D 
 
34 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 been founded since. For it was not created 
 by men. No summons went out, " At such a 
 time we will meet, and erect the Church." 
 On the contrary, they took no steps what- 
 ever. They simply waited. They made no 
 movement, wrought nothing, inaugurated 
 nothing. They waited for God's hour, 
 God's way, God's will. And thus the 
 Church was erected by the act of God from 
 Heaven. Thus the Church was in the 
 world, but not of the world. It was com- 
 posed of men, but erected by God. It was 
 a work of the Holy Ghost. Behold it ! for 
 this surely is a matter of very deep im- 
 portance. The Church is a Divine Society, 
 a community of human beings founded by 
 the Holy Ghost. 
 
 And for the next twenty years after the 
 Ascension, this Divine Society, the Church 
 of the living God, expanded with astonish- 
 ing rapidity. It rose up in city after city. 
 Its circle grew wider and wider. It passed 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 
 
 35 
 
 beyond the Holy Land, through the cities 
 of Asia, across the sea, still onward to the 
 West. It came over into Europe to help 
 us. And during all this time the Church 
 taught, the Church baptized, the Church 
 fed the faithful before any portion of the 
 New Testament had received its present 
 form. 
 
 II. 
 
 We have seen the origin of the Society. 
 
 Let us next consider the origin of the 
 books. 19 Converts flocked into the Church 
 on every side : men of the most widely 
 different temperaments, yet roughly to be 
 grouped in three principal types, corre- 
 sponding to the three languages which 
 appeared upon the Cross, the Hebrew, the 
 Latin, and the Greek. These three represent 
 widely different types of human genius. 
 And all alike, after their admission to 
 the Church, needed further and fuller in- 
 struction. Accordingly for each of these 
 
36 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 types a form of the Christian gospel was 
 provided. 
 
 1. There was the Hebrew convert to the 
 Church's Faith — the Israelite, God's chosen, 
 the man of religion, the believer in Reve- 
 lation, the man of faith. 
 
 For his instruction St. Matthew wrote. 
 He would show the Israelite that Jesus is 
 the Christ, Israel's expected king. Thus he 
 draws down the line of our Lord's ancestry 
 from Abraham, the founder of the family, 
 and David, the founder of the kingdom. 
 Jesus Christ is David's Son. ■ He told them 
 how Eastern chiefs paid tribute at the cradle 
 of the infant King. b " And Gentiles shall 
 come to thy light, and kings to the bright- 
 ness of thy rising." He shows in numerous 
 details how step by step our Lord's life 
 corresponds with the old predictions, " that 
 it might be fulfilled which was spoken 
 by the prophet." c He presents our Lord as 
 
 • St. Matt. i. u St. Matt. ii. 1 St. Matt. ii. 23 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 37 
 
 the lawgiver of the new Kingdom, in the 
 Sermon on the Mount." He gives the 
 parables of the New Kingdom b to show that 
 Christ, notwithstanding His humiliation, 
 is indeed a King over a Kingdom far more 
 glorious than Israel's ordinary nationalized 
 expectations, a spiritual and worldwide rule. 
 He told them that the Lord would come 
 in the glory of His Father, with His holy 
 angels, and say to the faithful, " Come, 
 ye blessed of My Father, receive the 
 kingdom prepared for you from the foun- 
 dation of the world." 0 He told them, not 
 without keenest irony, how the powers of 
 the world endeavoured to prevent the 
 King's resurrection, and how He appeared 
 with the triumphant language of kingly 
 majesty upon His lips : " All power is 
 given unto Me in heaven and in earth."' 1 
 Every detail of this kingly aspect would 
 
 ■ St. Matt, v.-vii. b St. Matt. xiii. 
 
 ■ St. Matt. xxv. 34. " St. Matt, xxviii. 18. 
 
38 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 be peculiarly interesting and of permanent 
 worth to the mind and the heart of an 
 Israelite. It is the gospel of the Kingdom, 
 the aspect of the Unchanging Gospel appro- 
 priate to the Hebrew. 
 
 2. Next follows the Koman convert to 
 the Church's Faith — a man of widely dif- 
 ferent type : not, as a rule, a great thinker, 
 but a man of action ; impatient of abstract 
 thought, but gifted with a perfect genius for 
 organization, a shrewd, active, energetic 
 business-like man. He, too, must have 
 an aspect of the gospel appropriate to 
 him. 
 
 For him St. Mark shall write. No 
 genealogies : he wouldn't appreciate them. 
 No lengthy discourses : he hadn't the 
 patience. No deep reflections : he wouldn't 
 understand them. Few parables : he was 
 too matter-of-fact and prosaic. Few refer- 
 ences to prophecy : his education had not 
 prepared him for these. But for him a 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 
 
 19 
 
 brief vivid realistic narrative of our Lord's 
 works of power : how He went about doing 
 good ; how He exhibited marvellous super- 
 natural power — power over nature, over 
 disease, over death, power, as when with 
 a mighty word He stilled the raging of 
 the storm at sea, power, as when He drove 
 out the devils into the swine, and the swine 
 rushed madly down to death in the cold 
 deep, symbolizing the extinction of evil 
 human passion ; how He cursed the barren 
 tree, and it instantly withered, because He 
 could not endure profession without prac- 
 tice ; how the facts forced from the Roman 
 soldier who watched Him die, the great 
 exclamation, " Truly this Man was the Son 
 of God." 
 
 We can almost imagine how the Roman 
 soldier on the march would sit down to 
 read, in this briefest of the Gospels, his 
 brother soldier's estimate of Jesus Christ. 
 It is the Gospel of action, the Gospel of 
 
40 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 Divine power, singularly adapted to the 
 men who worshipped power. 
 
 3. Then follows the Greek convert to the 
 Faith — again a widely different type: a 
 man of thought rather than a man of action, 
 keen intellectual founder of philosophies, 
 lover of the beautiful, the graceful, the 
 imaginative, the poetic, rejoicing in every- 
 thing human. 
 
 For him, St. Luke, the beloved physician, 
 the artist, as tradition calls him, will 
 describe another aspect of the Holy Life. 
 He gives the gospel of the infancy, the Holy 
 Childhood, the purely human interest, the 
 song of the aged priest, the virgin mother's 
 song, the song of a life's calm ending, the 
 song of the holy angels, — all these will 
 delight the child of nature, the imagina- 
 tive Greek. He, too, describes the pedigree; 
 but he traces it right back to Adam, " which 
 was the son of God" — emphasizing the 
 idea of our Lord's common humanity ; He 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 41 
 
 is not the exclusive possession of Israel, 
 He is the Son of man. So St. Luke told 
 them how He opened His public ministry 
 with gracious words of worldwide sympathy. 
 He was sent to heal the broken-hearted, to 
 preach deliverance to the captives, recovery 
 of sight to the blind. a He describes the 
 Lord's love of man as man ; going beyond 
 all national distinctions because He is the 
 Son of man. He gives the parables which 
 speak of pity for all human needs; the 
 parable of the Good Samaritan ; b the parable 
 of the Prodigal Son ; 0 the loving Father 
 devising a means to bring His banished 
 home, notwithstanding the elder brother's 
 jealousy ; the Lord's infinite compassion for 
 the dying thief ; (1 the Lord's own purely 
 human resignation to the Father's will on 
 Calvary, the last words recorded only by 
 St. Luke, " Father, into Thy hands I coni- 
 
 « St. Luke iv. IS. >' St. Luke x. 30-35. 
 
 c St. Luke xv. 11. 1 St. Luke xxiii. 30. 
 
42 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 inend My spirit." a He describes the lamen- 
 tations and the tears of the daughters of 
 Jerusalem, and how all the people who came 
 together to that sight, beholding the things 
 which were done, smote upon their breasts 
 and returned; how all nature appeared 
 dissolved in lamentation ; and then how the 
 tears of the women were exchanged for the 
 voices of the angels, and their shining 
 garments, as they exclaim, " Why seek ye 
 the Living among the dead ? He is not 
 here, but is risen." b 
 
 Can we not see how this Gospel of world- 
 wide sympathy, this Gospel of human 
 graciousness, would attract the heart of the 
 child of nature, the lover of the beautiful ? 
 
 Then comes St. Paul. He had the care 
 of all the Churches ; the scattered portions 
 of the one Divine Society. The Church is 
 now so vast he cannot visit as often as he 
 would. He must supply his presence, as 
 " St. Luke xxiii. 46. b St. Luke xxiv. 5. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 
 
 43 
 
 far as possible, by bis letters. So be writes : 
 writes severely rebuking tbe vacillating 
 Cburch in Galatia, writes rejoicing in tbe 
 steadfast faitb of the Church in Ephesus, 
 writes to answer the questions of the Church 
 at Corinth, writes to plead in behalf of the 
 runaway slave, writes letters of pastoral 
 counsel to a distant diocese, writes a more 
 systematic treatise on the faith for the 
 instruction of the Church at Eome, which 
 he has never yet been enabled to visit. 
 
 And all this time, be it remembered, for 
 it is of first importance, the Church taught, 
 the Church baptized, the Church ruled her 
 children, before the writings of the New 
 Testament were anything like completed. 
 
 Then time drew near the close of the 
 greatest century in human history, the 
 century of the Incarnation. 19 Fifty years had 
 passed since the Lord returned to heaven. 
 St. James was dead, St. Peter was dead, St. 
 Paul's labours were long since ended. Of all 
 
44 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 the Apostles, one alone remained. There, in 
 the Greek city, not far from the temple of 
 Diana and the theatre where, years hefore, 
 the mob thundered against St. Paul, " Great 
 is Diana of the Ephesians," — there he sat, 
 the aged, the disciple whom Jesus loved, 
 the last of the men of that group from 
 Galilee, the sole survivor, the only man 
 remaining who could say, " I heard ; I saw ; I 
 touched. I stood beside His Cross. I rested 
 on the very heart of the Son of God." 
 
 Can we not imagine something of the 
 awe and reverence with which his young 
 Greek converts hung upon his words, and 
 grouped around him to hear of " the days 
 of the Son of man " ? 
 
 Soon that would be possible no longer. 
 
 What if the beloved John were to go the 
 way of all the earth, and none remained 
 to say, " I heard, I saw " ! What know- 
 ledge of the mysteries of God would die 
 with him ! 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 45 
 
 They gathered round hirn in the close of 
 the century, and besought him to record 
 what his ears had heard and his eyes had 
 seen. 
 
 Had he not dwelt on it these fifty years, 
 living in that wondrous past? Jerusalem 
 had perished since those days, the Temple 
 was burnt to ruins ; but in the memory of 
 St. John they stand, detail and word and 
 look and gesture, in the home and in the 
 crowd ; they remain, and must remain for 
 him indelible, even for him whom Jesus 
 loved. 
 
 And hence he spoke, like one far off, 
 describing what he still can see and hear : 
 " In the beginning was the Word, and the 
 Word was with God, and the Word was 
 God. . . . And we beheld His glory, the 
 glory as of the only begotten of the Father, 
 full of grace and truth." 
 
 Thus from the thirty-three most sacred 
 years St. John selected some thirty days — 
 
46 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 the opening week of the ministry, the fort- 
 night at the close, and a few days scattered 
 between. Few, yes; but what glorious 
 days ! and teachings such as we might expect 
 from the intimate companion of the Lord ; 
 not simple parables as He taught the crowd, 
 but the deep spiritual lessons entrusted to 
 the chosen few. It is the Gospel of the 
 inner circle, the Gospel of God made man, 
 the Gospel of the Holy Incarnation. 
 
 III. 
 
 Consider next the gathering of the books 
 together. 20 
 
 It was said of St. Paul that his bodily 
 presence was weak and his speech con- 
 temptible, but " his letters," they said, " are 
 weighty and powerful." But, for all that, 
 no letters, not even those of an inspired 
 Apostle, are an adequate substitute for the 
 living voice and the bodily presence. So 
 long as it was possible to go to St. Paul or 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 47 
 
 St. John and say, "Tell us what is the 
 Christian doctrine of the Resurrection," or 
 "Tell us what the Lord said, how He 
 appeared that day" — so long as it was 
 possible to ask this, even the Gospels could 
 not be so highly valued. While those 
 we love are with us face to face, and we 
 can hear it all from their living lips, we 
 do not so highly value their written 
 communications. It is when death has 
 intervened, setting us so far apart that 
 we cannot hear each other speak, that we 
 cannot sufficiently value the letters which 
 they have left us. So it was with the 
 Church when the Apostles were all 
 departed. 
 
 Then the Church entered upon its im- 
 portant mission of the gathering of the 
 writings. There was a letter there in 
 Rome, there were two in Corinth, two 
 more in Thessalonica. Some were in 
 private hands. The elect lady had one; 
 
48 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 the owner of the runaway slave another. 
 The Bishop of Cyprus had two. One was 
 in possession of a Bishop in Crete. Copies, 
 also, must have been very few, their creation 
 laborious and slow. Thus the gathering 
 of the writings must have taken time. 
 Nor can we point to any definite moment 
 and say, here the Church assembled to 
 define with authority the limits of the 
 New Testament. What we can say is that 
 the Church, under the guidance of the 
 Holy Spirit, recognized, acknowledged, 
 received the apostolic books, sifting and 
 separating these out of the mass of early 
 Christian literature of which we know there 
 ■was a large accumulation. In this delicate 
 and difficult task God guided His Church 
 (" He shall guide you into all truth ") to 
 sever the writings which were inspired 
 from those which, however excellent, were 
 not inspired. 
 
 Meanwhile, during the whole of this 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 49 
 
 period, about one hundred years, the 
 Church had taught the Faith, taught, 
 baptized, confirmed, fed with the sacred 
 gift, developed her system, ordained, con- 
 secrated successors to the Apostles, obeyed 
 the instructions of her Lord, being guided 
 by the Holy Ghost, while yet the New 
 Testament was not gathered together. 
 
 IV. 
 
 We come next to the reception' 11 of the 
 books by the individual believer. 
 
 1. Upon what ground do we, in the first 
 instance, accept the Bible ? We accept it 
 upon the authority of the Church. 
 
 For it should be remembered that the 
 Bible nowhere determines the limits of its 
 own contents. The Bible does not tell us 
 of what books the Bible consists. We are 
 forced to go outside the Bible to ascertain 
 the limits of the Bible. The Old Testament 
 we accept from the Jewish Church on the 
 
 E 
 
So THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 authority of Jesus Christ. The New, on 
 the authority of the Christian Church. St. 
 Peter speaks of certain Epistles of St. Paul, 
 but he neither enumerates nor quotes them. 
 St. John solemnly warns against detraction 
 or addition to the contents of one of the 
 sacred books ; but his words apply to the 
 Book of the Eevelation. Scripture presumes 
 us otherwise taught the true limits of the 
 sacred books. And " by experience we all 
 know that the first outward motive, leading 
 men so to esteem of the Scriptures, is the 
 authority of God's Church." 
 
 2. Another reason has indeed been given 
 by Protestants for our reception of the 
 Bible. They say that it appeals to us in 
 a way that no other book can do. 
 
 It is indeed most true that the written 
 Word of God does appeal to the Christian 
 conscience and convey the sense of a Divine 
 authority. But to give this alone, as the 
 ground for receiving the Scriptures, would 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 51 
 
 make reception depend on our feelings, 
 which differ in different men, and are not 
 always the same in ourselves. Besides, 
 however convincing this may be to myself, 
 it is no argument whatever to the outer 
 world. The Mohammedan might say the 
 same of the Koran. 
 
 Moreover, while it would be possible to 
 say of the books of the Bible in general, 
 that they appeal convincingly to our con- 
 science, it would be impossible on this 
 ground to justify the position of certain 
 books in particular. For example, the 
 Epistle of St. James did not at all appeal 
 to the mind of Luther. And which of us, 
 on this ground of our feelings upon the 
 subject, could explain why the Canticles 
 or the Book of Esther is included in the 
 Old Testament, while the Book of Wisdom 
 is placed in the Apocrypha ? 
 
 Undoubtedly, there is a marked difference 
 which we cannot help feeling between the 
 
52 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 style of the apostolic Fathers, St. Clement, 
 St. Ignatius, and the style of St. John and 
 St. Paul. There is a difference very real, 
 but very difficult to define. But this dif- 
 ference could never by itself certify to us 
 the limits of inspiration. 
 
 The collection of the writings of the 
 Apostles was, we would maintain, the doing 
 of the Church. Instinctively, as guided 
 by the Holy Ghost, and thus assisted in 
 what it was doing, the Church, out of 
 the great multitude of early writings,- 1 
 selected unerringly those, and only those, 
 which bore the character of Inspiration. 
 The power of the Church to do this rests 
 upon the promise of Jesus Christ. The 
 writings gathered together are precisely 
 those in which the Eevelation of the 
 Christian truth is contained. But such 
 discrimination could not be possessed any- 
 where but in the Church. No power was 
 » Cf. St. Luke i. 1. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOKS. 53 
 
 promised nor possessed by the world to do 
 this thing. The insight necessary to deter- 
 mine the full agreement of a letter with 
 the substance of the Creed on which the 
 Church reposed, could belong to none but 
 to the Church itself. 
 
 Here, then, is the answer to the question, 
 " What precautions did our Lord take in 
 order that His words should not pass away ? " 
 The answer is, that the Holy Ghost created 
 a Society and a Book, committing the Book 
 to the keeping of the Society. To the 
 Church were committed the Oracles of God. 
 Hence, in the Divine providence, they 
 cannot pass away. 
 
SERMON III. 
 
 THE CHURCH, THE INTERPRETER 22 
 OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 " Understandest thou what thou readeet ? " — Acts 
 viii. 30. 
 
 Ouit previous subject was the writing 
 and the gathering of the Books. We saw 
 that they were written in the Church and 
 collected by the Church. Following upon 
 this, the important question arises, Who is 
 the Boole's interpreter ? 
 
 I. 
 
 A very popular answer is, Let each indi- 
 vidual interpret for himself. Now, against 
 the theory that every man is to be his own 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 55 
 
 interpreter, there are very serious objec- 
 tions. 
 
 1. For, in the first place, consider the 
 character of the Booh. The Bible is a 
 difficult Book. 23 Passages of marvellous 
 simplicity can indeed be quoted ; but if men 
 attempt to derive their faith and practice 
 from the Bible only, then it must surely 
 be acknowledged that the Book is difficult. 
 For, strictly speaking, the Bible is not one 
 Book, but many. It is an entire literature, 
 written in several languages, over a period 
 of two thousand years, by a number of 
 writers, in a number of different styles. It 
 contains law, and history, and poetry, and 
 biography, and letters, and visions, and pre- 
 dictions, and allegories, and proverbs. To 
 read it through once will take some time ; 
 to study it, years ; to derive from it, unaided, 
 one's faith and practice will be, to say the 
 least, a matter of considerable difficulty. 
 
 Moreover, the gift of Bevelation was, as 
 
56 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 we have already seen, very gradual. Three 
 periods at least may be distinguished. 
 There was a primitive Revelation, a pro- 
 gressive Revelation, and a perfect Revela- 
 tion. Some of the practices enjoined were 
 transitory, others permanent. It will not 
 be easy for each individual to determine 
 unaided which is which. 
 
 To this must be added that the Bible 
 is admittedly an unsystematic Book. 24 No 
 particular portion can be indicated where 
 the entire faith and practice is all at once 
 contained. This will not decrease the 
 difficulty. 
 
 And, further, the writings of the New 
 Testament are primarily intended for special 
 needs. The truths with which they deal are 
 not necessarily dealt with in proportion to 
 their intrinsic importance, but in proportion 
 to the needs of a particular place and time. 
 A subject, thus, may be expansively treated, 
 while another subject is dismissed in a single 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 57 
 
 line, yet in importance they may be equal, 
 or the less discussed even the superior. 
 This will not diminish the difficulty. 
 
 And if we turn from general considera- 
 tions to particular passages, we are still 
 impressed with a sense of difficulty. Is 
 the prelude to St. John's Gospel simplicity 
 to the average mind? Are the sharp 
 antitheses of St. Paul, the letter and the 
 spirit, the law and the gospel, grace and 
 works, works and faith — so often and so 
 grievously misunderstood, and yet the very 
 keynotes to his teaching, — are these in- 
 telligible at once to the simplest of readers ? 
 The argument of the Epistle to the Komans 
 has taxed many of the ablest minds ever 
 since it was written ; can it be described as 
 an easy book ? 
 
 It is only possible to call these simple, 
 by going completely over difficulties without 
 perceiving them. When we have read some 
 majestic passage in Isaiah or some passage 
 
58 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 in St. Paul, are we not conscious of our very 
 limited comprehension of it ? is there no 
 appropriateness in the question, " Under- 
 standest thou what thou readest ? " 
 
 That the Bible is difficult seems shown, 
 again, by the endless contradictions derived 
 from it. It has indeed been said that if 
 men sincerely desire to reach its truths they 
 will certainly discover them. 25 But it may 
 be questioned whether we have any right to 
 label all men as insincere merely because 
 their interpretations are not in harmony 
 with our own. Moreover, the greatest 
 interpreters have acknowledged the diffi- 
 culty. The difficulties of the Scriptures, 
 says St. Augustine, are intended partly to 
 excite our interest, partly to humble our 
 pride. Thus he attempts to explain why 
 the difficulties exist. He could not doubt 
 that they were there. 
 
 The difficulties in Scripture are in pro- 
 portion to its depth. Having to express 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 59 
 
 the deepest profoundest truths of the Divine 
 nature and the union between the uncreated 
 and the created, what wonder if language 
 seems scarcely able to express it, or con- 
 structions bend and break beneath the 
 burden ! 
 
 2. In the second place, consider the in- 
 competence of the reader. 
 
 There is a legend to the effect that 
 when the Scriptures were to be translated 
 into Greek, seventy men were shut in 
 seventy separate rooms, and, when their 
 work was finished, the translations, being 
 compared, were identical word for word. 
 You do not believe it ? but if any seventy 
 men in the street were bidden to derive 
 their religion from the Book alone, is it more 
 probable that they would arrive at the 
 same result ? These seventy Jews were at 
 least members of one and the same religious 
 communion. Think of the differences which 
 exist between ordinary men ; differences of 
 
6o THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 character, of temperament, of antecedents, 
 education or want of it; one with keen 
 spiritual insight, another with scarcely any ; 
 one open-minded and prepared to accept 
 the truth, another full of fierce prejudice, 
 narrow, unrelenting : is it to be expected 
 that these should all arrive unaided at the 
 same interpretation ? Still less can they be 
 expected to obtain a grasp of the truth iu 
 its completeness. For while the Christian 
 religion is deep and comprehensive, the 
 ordinary mind is weak and narrow. Is it not 
 a fact that men gather from independent 
 study of the Bible just those truths or aspects 
 of the truth which are congenial to their 
 temperament, antecedents, and spiritual 
 experience, often to the exclusion of other 
 truths no less certain and no less momeutous? 
 Men read the Bible to find in it pretty much 
 what they believed before. This may be 
 illustrated everywhere in modern literature. 
 One man reads the Bible to find in it the 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 61 
 
 unity of God, but not the trinity of Persons ; 
 another finds the Divinity of Jesus Christ, 
 but not the work of the Holy Ghost ; 
 another finds the work of the Holy Ghost 
 in the Bible, but not in the Church ; 
 another derives from it certain external 
 rites, but fails to see their inward reality ; 
 another finds a system of morality, but not 
 the doctrinal facts upon which the morality 
 is based. Thus independent reading of the 
 Bible does not lead to completeness. It 
 gives, as a fact of experience, fragments of 
 the truth. This is not the fault of the Book, 
 of course ; for the Scriptures are perfect. 
 It is the incompetence of the reader. 
 
 3. In the third place, consider the purpose 
 of the writers™ Were the books of the New 
 Testament written to convert the heathen, 
 or to instruct the believer ? Plainly they 
 must be very differently written according 
 as the one or the other object was held in 
 view. If you are writing to a friend on 
 
62 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 the affairs of a society of which you both 
 are members, you will not need to prefix 
 to your letter an account of its rules and 
 practices: he will know them as well as you. 
 A hint, a phrase, an allusion, a technical 
 word will be for him sufficient. He will 
 read between the lines. He will under- 
 stand your point of view. But if the letter 
 fall into the hands of a stranger, ignorant 
 of the society's practice and principles, he 
 will obviously be at a serious disadvantage. 
 He will run great risk of considerable 
 mistakes. He will often miss the point, 
 and put upon your sentences a construction 
 widely different from your meaning. Is it 
 not so when men read the Scripture apart 
 from the mind and practice of the Church ? 
 For consider : the purpose of the writers, 
 what was it ? Do they write to the world 
 or to the Church ? Plainly they write 
 to the Church, to members of the same 
 Society with themselves, to men generally 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 63 
 
 acquainted with the Christian practice and 
 the Christian Faith. St. John writes to 
 the seven Churches which are in Asia ; 
 St. Paul to the Church at Corinth, to the 
 Church at Ephesus. St. Luke's Gospel is 
 intended for those already within the fold. 
 " In order that thou mightest know the 
 certainty of those things wherein thou hast 
 been already instructed." 0 St. Luke pre- 
 supposes in Theophilus a knowledge of the 
 Christian Faith. St. Paul's first letter to 
 Corinth is a series of answers to a series 
 of questions. But the questions are not 
 asked by pagans or Jews ; they are asked 
 by the Church at Corinth : the writer and 
 the reader alike belong to the same spiritual 
 Society. He will, therefore, rightly take 
 much for granted. They will understand 
 his references, his use of phrases and words 
 already consecrated to special Christian 
 significance. The writer of the Epistle to 
 a St. Luke i. 4. 
 
64 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 the Hebrews assures his readers that by 
 this time they themselves " ought to be 
 teachers ; " that if they have need that one 
 teach them again which be " the first prin- 
 ciples of the oracles of God," it is certainly 
 not what might reasonably be expected, and 
 certainly by no means to their credit, and 
 only because they have been " dull of hear- 
 ing." 3 And he declines to dwell for the 
 future upon the " first principles of the 
 doctrine of Christ," he determines to go 
 on to the deeper mysteries of the Faith. 
 Now, all this shows that his object was 
 manifestly not to give first instruction to 
 men entirely ignorant of the Faith, but to 
 give higher teaching to those already 
 familiar with the Church's practices and 
 the Church's Faith. 
 
 Hence we conclude that, if men take the 
 Bible and, ignoring the faith and practices 
 of the Church, endeavour to derive their 
 • Heb. v. 12. 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 65 
 
 religion entirely from its pages, they are 
 putting the Book to a use for which it was 
 never intended. They misunderstand its 
 purpose, which was not to give primary 
 instruction to the ignorant, but secondary 
 instruction to the believer. To understand 
 the Bible, one must be in the Church. 
 Only there can the common standpoint 
 between the writer and the reader really 
 be found. Only there can the purpose of 
 the Apostles be really fulfilled. 
 
 II. 
 
 From these three points, then, from the 
 difficulty of the Book, the incompetence of 
 the reader, the purpose of the writers, we 
 conclude that the true interpreter of the 
 Bible is not the individual. Who, then, is 
 it ? All the drift of our inquiry is towards 
 the conclusion that the true interpreter of 
 the Word of God is the Church of God. 27 
 
 F 
 
66 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 1. See this in the first generation. The 
 Ethiopian officer, driving home in his 
 carriage after service at Jerusalem, is read- 
 ing the prophet Isaiah — the grand passage, 
 " He is led as a lamb to the slaughter, 
 and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, 
 so He openeth not His mouth." " Under- 
 standest thou what thou readest ? " asks 
 St. Philip. The answer : " How can I, ex- 
 cept some man should guide me ? " Then 
 St. Philip explains. But— and here is the 
 point — in what capacity ? Does he come as 
 a private individual to say, " I have studied 
 that passage for years, and this is what I 
 think it means " ? Far from that. St. Philip 
 was not there to propose his own views and 
 theories and opinions. Like any minister 
 of the gospel, he was the mouthpiece of the 
 Catholic Church, to deliver the Faith once 
 entrusted to the saints. And in the light 
 of the Church's Faith he explains the 
 Scriptures. Thus already the Church is 
 the interpreter of the Bible. 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 67 
 
 2. Is the objection raised : " That was all 
 very well while the Apostles lived, but 
 what when they were dead ? " Pass, then, 
 to the second generation. The Apostles are 
 dead, but their disciples live. If difficulties 
 arose about the meaning of scripture, what 
 more natural than to turn to the man whom 
 the Apostles trained and taught? "You, 
 there, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, upon 
 whose boyish head it was thought the Lord 
 Himself laid hands of benediction ; you, at 
 any rate, who knew intimately the Evan- 
 gelist, St. John ; you who may often have 
 heard St. Paul preach ; you who occupy 
 the very place where St. Peter sat but a 
 few years since ; you in whose ears their un- 
 written words must still be ringing ; you who 
 derived from them all your knowledge of the 
 Church's practice and the Church's Faith — 
 tell us what did St. John mean here. What 
 would St. Paul do in such a case as this ? " 
 
 It is no romance, but actual history. 
 
68 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE, 
 
 There is a Bishop in a town in France a in 
 the year 200 after Christ. He is old now, 
 and looks back to the days of his youth in 
 Asia. He writes, " I have a more vivid 
 recollection of what occurred at that time 
 than of recent events, ... so that I can 
 even describe the place where the blessed 
 Polycarp [a disciple of St. John] used to 
 sit and discourse — his going out, too, and 
 his coming in — his general mode of life, 
 and his personal appearance, together with 
 the discourses which he delivered to the 
 people; also how he would speak of his 
 familiar intercourse with John [the Evan- 
 gelist], and with the rest of those who had 
 seen the Lord ; aud how he would call their 
 words to remembrance." 
 
 Plainly, then, in the second generation 
 the Church interpreted the Bible. 
 
 3. Is it said, " This, too, was the privilege 
 of one generation " ? 
 
 • St. Irenseus, Bishop of Lyons. 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 69 
 
 Look again. It is the third generation. 
 Apostles are dead. Their disciples are 
 dead. But the Church is there. Churches 
 exist in every city. Through the Syrian 
 towns, the Greek provinces, along the 
 Mediterranean, far away into the extremity 
 of the West, Churches have risen. They 
 differ in language, in nationality. They 
 are parted by mountain, river, and sea. 
 But there is among them all a strong 
 resemblance, a striking family likeness. 
 They are sisters. Their convictions are the 
 same. Their practices are the same; sub- 
 stantially, they are identical. Their worship, 
 their face and features, are one and the 
 same. Already, their faith is summarized 
 into certain short Creeds. Now, what does 
 this identity, this agreement mean, between 
 Churches so widely separate ? They cannot 
 all have agreed to go astray. They cannot 
 all alike have departed from the truth. 
 Had they diverged from the Apostles they 
 
70 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 would also have differed from each other. 28 
 Thus their agreement is a striking witness 
 to their truth. They are what they are 
 because the Apostles made them so. They 
 teach what they teach, because this was 
 what the Apostles taught them. The 
 Apostles are gone, and their disciples are 
 gone ; but their work remains. 
 
 If, then, a question arose about the mean- 
 ing of the Apostles' words, what more 
 natural than to compare them with the 
 Apostles' work ? Here was the living 
 interpretation. It was the Church which 
 necessarily decided what the mind of the 
 Apostles really was. 
 
 4. Or consider the method pursued in 
 the early missions of the Church. The 
 Church did not begin by a distribution of 
 the Scriptures ; but first the Church taught 
 its Faith, a simple summary of Christian 
 truth : of God in His own nature, the Holy 
 Trinity ; of God in his relation to men, 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 71 
 
 the Holy Incarnation. Then the Church 
 taught its practices, and afterwards placed 
 in the convert's hands the Holy Scriptures, 
 " in order that thou niayest know the cer- 
 tainty of those things wherein thou hast 
 been already instructed." If, then, the 
 question, " Understandest thou what thou 
 readest ? " had to be answered, " How can 
 I, except some man should guide me?" 
 to whom should the convert turn for ex- 
 planation, unless to that Church which 
 gave him the Scriptures, that Church which 
 had given him the Faith, that Church in 
 which the Scriptures had originated, and 
 in which the Scriptures were gathered 
 together ? Thus, still, the Church was the 
 Interpreter of the Bible. 
 
 5. And clown the course of the Church's 
 history the principle, for centuries at least, 
 was always the same. True that the special 
 advantage of having instruction from the 
 Apostles was only the privilege of a passing 
 
72 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 generation, but the main principles of 
 the Incarnation were deeply rooted in 
 every portion of the Church of Christ. 
 The Church perpetually looked back. Its 
 attitude was continually, " I delivered unto 
 you that which I also received." The 
 function of the Church was to witness to 
 the faith once for all delivered, and to 
 transmit that faith unchanged to succeed- 
 ing generations. And when error arose, the 
 chief pastors of the Churches gathered in 
 council together, to witness to the Faith 
 inherited from the beginning, to declare, 
 " This is what our fathers taught us ; this is 
 what the doctrine of the Church has always 
 been : we will have no novelties, but the 
 unchanging Faith." And they recorded 
 their conviction in the language of the 
 Nicene Creed. Thus, three hundred years 
 after the Incarnation, the Church is the 
 interpreter of the Bible. 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 73 
 
 m. 
 
 In modern Christianity this aspect of the 
 truth is frequently forgotten, namely, that 
 the mind of Christ is represented in the 
 Faith and convictions of the Society, as 
 well as in the statements of the Book. 
 The Church and the Bible are both alike the 
 outcome of the Apostles' work, 29 under the 
 guidance of the Holy Ghost. The Word of 
 God does not only find its expression in 
 Scripture, it no less finds expression in the 
 principles and practices of the Church. 
 The Church and the Bible are both Divine 
 creations. If only this truth were really 
 grasped, innumerable controversies would 
 at once be ended. The Church was a living- 
 exposition of the mind of Christ. Its Faith 
 was derived, not from the Scriptures, but 
 from the Apostles themselves, and through 
 them, from the Lord Himself. Historically 
 existing before the New Testament, being, 
 
74 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 in fact, the original form which Christianity 
 assumed upon its first appearance in social 
 life, the relationship of the Church to the 
 Bible is that of one Divine work to another ; 
 and it can never be in the interests of truth 
 that one-half of the truth should be ignored. 
 
 Apply this principle to the nineteenth 
 century. Two modern readers approach the 
 Bible, as they think, in a perfectly indepen- 
 dent spirit, unbiassed by the prejudice and 
 superstitions of the past. They will dis- 
 cover for themselves, and possibly publish 
 to the world, the pure unadulterated gospel 
 in all its integrity. They study for years, 
 and finally rise to teach — contradictions. 
 What is to be done ? What are we to say ? 
 What can we say but this ? You are 
 learned, you are very gifted, but you con- 
 tradict each other, and therefore you can't 
 both be right. Shall we have a third 
 opinion ? But it would be no more than 
 opinion at the best. And why should you 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 75 
 
 regard his view as more decisive than your 
 own ? Have you not put the Book to a use 
 for which it was never intended ? You have 
 treated it as if it fell from another planet, 
 miraculously attested ; whereas it has had 
 a long history on the earth. Written in a 
 Society, gathered by a Society, entrusted to 
 the keeping of a Society, 30 why should we 
 not ask the Society what it has always 
 supposed the Book to mean ? 
 
 There is a venerable Communion, the 
 Church of the living God, white with the 
 snows of eighteen hundred winters; cer- 
 tainly it is older than you ; it is incom- 
 parably more experienced ; it has been the 
 mother of saints and the teacher of the 
 wisest ; it is gifted with many privileges, 
 endowed with many powers, and the promise 
 of perpetual guidance rests upon it from 
 above. Shall we not inquire what is its 
 mind upon the subject ? If it be said that 
 for eighteen centuries the Church has gone 
 
76 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 astray, what assurance have we that the 
 nineteenth century is not also in their com- 
 pany ? Can you expect us to believe that 
 a guidance not possessed by the world-wide 
 Church from first to last has somehow en- 
 lightened you ? If there be any certainty 
 on earth, surely it must be in the permanent 
 faith and practice of the world-wide Church. 
 The permanent faith and practice of the 
 world-wide Church— it is to this that the 
 English Communion makes its continual 
 appeal. 
 
 And here may be mentioned the common 
 objection, that to make the Church the 
 interpreter of the Bible is in effect to place 
 the Church above the Bible. May it not be 
 justly replied, that to make the individual 
 the interpreter of the Bible is to place the 
 individual above the Bible? 
 
 It is really a question between rival 
 interpreters of the Bible. AVe do not say 
 that the Church is above the Bible. But 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 77 
 
 we do say that the Church is above the 
 individual interpreter of the Bible, and that 
 when these two, the Church and the in- 
 dividual, disagree, it is the judgment of the 
 individual which must be corrected by that 
 of the world-wide Church. 
 
 Holy Scripture most assuredly " con- 
 taineth all things necessary to Salvation." 31 
 That this is precisely what the early Chris- 
 tian writers say, can be amply attested. 
 " The Scripture is perfect, and most abun- 
 dantly of itself sufficient for all things," so 
 says St. Vincent, and his language would 
 certainly be endorsed by the early Church. 
 But it is no less certain that, while believ- 
 ing Holy Scripture to contain all things 
 necessary to salvation, they did not believe 
 the Scripture so to contain them as that 
 any individual would be capable of his own 
 unguided effort of unfailingly eliciting the 
 entire Christian Faith and practice from its 
 pages. They assert, in the plainest terms, 
 
78 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 that the incompetence of the individual 
 renders this impossible. They teach that 
 the Church enlightens where the individual 
 fails ; in short, that " the Church has 
 authority in controversies of the Faith." 32 
 
 IV. 
 
 Let us try to make of this general prin- 
 ciple some particular applications. Our 
 appeal is to the jaermanent Faith and prac- 
 tice of the world-wide Church. 
 
 1. The .Scripture represents our Lord as 
 saying, " I and My Father are one." Did 
 He mean to assert His own Divinity ? 
 " Yes," says one ; " No," says another. 
 " He could not possibly, being human, 
 have intended to assert His equality with 
 the Uncreated," says a third. Interpreters 
 differ. We appeal, then, to the permanent 
 faith of the world-wide Church. While St. 
 John was still alive there was a Roman 
 
7 HE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 79 
 
 magistrate" who made inquiries as to 
 the Church's Faith. He discovered that 
 they met together early in the morning, 
 bound themselves by a Sacrament to do no 
 harm, and sang hymns to Christ, as God. 
 There it is, the Gospel of St. John was not 
 yet written, but the Church already taught 
 that our Lord could and did claim equality 
 with the Father. And we know what the 
 Church has taught ever since. The best 
 interpreter of the Scriptures is the per- 
 manent Faith of the world-wide Church. 
 
 2. Or again, our Lord says in the Scrip- 
 ture, " This is My Body." Did He assert 
 the Real Presence ? "Yes," says one ; " No," 
 says another. Interpreters differ. Let us 
 appeal, then, to the interpretation of the 
 Church. Within ten years of the death of 
 St. John the Evangelist, one of his disciples b 
 wrote the following sentence in reference to 
 the Holy Eucharist : " It is the medicine of 
 " Pliny's letter to Trajan. |J St. Ignatius. 
 
8o THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 immortality, the preventive against spiritual 
 death." He also says that some refused to 
 receive the Sacrament because, not believ- 
 ing that the Son of God became man, they 
 could not believe that His human nature 
 was really there. Here is the Real Presence 
 taught within ten years of St. John. And 
 we know that the Church has taught it ever 
 since. We take, then, the permanent Faith 
 of the world-wide Church. 
 
 3. Or again, it is written, " Then laid 
 they their hands upon them, and they re- 
 ceived the Holy Ghost." Does this mean 
 that all Christians ought to be confirmed ? 
 " Certainly not," say many in London to- 
 day. " Yes," say others. Which of these 
 are right ? We ask the world-wide Church ? 
 Since the days of the Apostles, down to 
 this hour, one of the common practices of 
 Christendom has been the laying on of 
 hands. There is the practical interpreta- 
 tion which the Church has put upon the 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 81 
 
 Bible words. He will be a bold man who 
 thinks he can find a better interpreta- 
 tion of Scripture than that given in the 
 permanent practice of the world - wide 
 Church. 
 
 4. Or again, " When thou art converted 
 strengthen thy brethren." " I will give unto 
 thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven." 
 Do these words mean the official infallibility 
 of the occupant of the Roman See ? " Yes," 
 say some ; " No," say others. Once more we 
 appeal to the world-wide Church. Up to the 
 year 1870, no part of the world-wide Church 
 maintained that the official infallibility of 
 any one Bishop was of faith. For that 
 very reason, then, we reject it. It fails to 
 comply with the test of permanence. It is 
 not part of the permanent Faith of the 
 world-wide Church. 
 
 G 
 
8z THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 V. 
 
 Hence we are led to see which of these 
 two ways will most encourage unity. In- 
 dependent interpretation has never been 
 productive of unity, and in its very nature 
 never can. Witness the mournful discords 
 of English Christianity. The tendency of 
 the theory is to result in so many heads, 
 so many opinions. 33 
 
 Moreover, high among Christian graces 
 stands distrust of self. When men begin to 
 cultivate it, they will be drawn away from 
 the theory of independent interpretation. 
 When men learn enough to know their 
 ignorance ; when there dawns upon them 
 a wholesome if humiliating sense of their 
 own incompetence to derive their faith and 
 practice unaided from the pages of a Book 
 expressly written with another aim in view ; 
 when they feel unable to measure the 
 
THE INTERPRETER OF THE BIBLE. 83 
 
 vastness of the Faith, when they reflect 
 upon the narrowness, the onesidedness from 
 which but few escape, the power of tempera- 
 ment, the bias of antecedents, the influence 
 of conceptions imposed upon their most 
 impressionable years, then they will begin 
 to meet the question, " Understandest thou 
 what thou readest?" with the answer, "How 
 can I, except the world-wide Church should 
 guide me ? " And upon that distrust of self 
 will follow a distrust of that which is merely 
 local, a distrust of their sect in its pecu- 
 liarities and in its differences from the 
 world-wide Church. There will come over- 
 whelmingly the conviction that what is 
 locally popular will vary from age to age 
 and place to place, while that which is true 
 must be the same yesterday, to-day, and for 
 ever. 
 
 And then, and thus, will rise before the 
 mind that glorious inspiring conception of 
 a world-wide communion, founded eighteen 
 
84 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 centuries ago by the Holy Ghost, braving 
 the storms of the ages, and with us at tins 
 day ; the Church with an unchanged 
 tradition, a Church which has summarized 
 its Faith in the permanence of the Creeds, 
 a Church which has practised the same 
 sacred rites and transmitted them from 
 generation to generation; and then the 
 believer will say, If truth be discoverable 
 upon the earth, surely the truth is here, in 
 the permanent faith and practice of the 
 world-wide Church. 
 
SERMON IV. 
 
 THE INSPIRATION 34 OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God." — 
 2 Tim. iii. 16. 
 
 I. 
 
 The subject of inspiration is naturally re- 
 garded in two main aspects. There is a 
 Divine element, and there is a human 
 element in it. God is the Giver, man the 
 recipient. And in proportion as men con- 
 template more or less exclusively the one 
 or the other of these two aspects, there 
 follow two widely contrasted theories on 
 the nature of inspiration. 
 
 1. At the Reformation period many re- 
 garded, almost exclusively, the Divine side 
 of inspiration. Then the thought of God's 
 
86 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 share in the work overwhelmed them. 
 There seemed no room for the agency of 
 man. Just as the musician, presiding at 
 the keyboard of the organ, commands and 
 controls the instrument, producing what 
 combinations, what chords, what melodies 
 he will ; so God was supposed to preside at 
 the keyboard of the sacred writer's faculties. 
 They became mere instruments. They lost 
 their individuality. A purely mechanical 
 theory resulted. Inspiration became the dic- 
 tation of an Almighty Intelligence ; every 
 passage, every word was delivered from 
 above. God was everything, man nothing. 
 
 This mechanical theory of inspiration 
 undoubtedly did great service to its in- 
 ventors ; 35 for having recently discarded the 
 authority of the Church, they badly needed 
 some authority to take its place. Hence 
 there was a practical advantage in the 
 theory of verbal inspiration. 
 
 Further reflection, however, showed that, 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 87 
 
 if the theory was useful, it was none the 
 less inherently impossible. The necessity 
 of reducing man to a machine before He 
 could entrust him to deliver a message, was 
 virtually a reflection upon the Almighty. 
 
 Moreover, the different style of the sacred 
 writers, their individuality and independ- 
 ence, the different aspects given by them 
 of Jesus Christ, all attested the inadequacy 
 of this mechanical theory to do justice to 
 the facts of Scripture. 
 
 It was a well-meaning view, a pious 
 view. It contained a considerable element 
 of the truth. But it was all upon one side. 
 It had an eye for God's work, but none for 
 man's. Now, all one-sided statements of the 
 truth are certain to avenge themselves : 
 and the mechanical theory is to-day almost 
 universally abandoned. But in the reaction 
 many have gone to the opposite extreme, 
 and they see in the Bible almost exclu- 
 sively the human side. 
 
88 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 2. The second theory, regarding things 
 almost exclusively upon their human side, 
 reminds us that the writers were men, and 
 asserts that they were subject to every 
 human limitation. 
 
 If we ask, Were they inspired? the 
 answer given is, Certainly ; for all genius 
 is inspired. Thus the inspiration of Scrip- 
 ture is regarded as identical in kind with 
 the inspiration of genius, and John Milton 
 supposed to share the same gift as Isaiah. 
 
 Now what is meant by the inspiration of 
 genius ? 86 
 
 Our attitude towards the men of genius 
 is the best reply. You tell your inspired 
 poet, through the pages of a review, that 
 he has selected an unfortunate subject, un- 
 suited to his bent, and which will not add 
 to his reputation. You inform him that 
 he can do better than that. You readily 
 admit that your inspired writer mixes the 
 false with the true. He denies God's 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 89 
 
 existence altogether, with Shelley ; or with 
 Milton compromises the doctrine of our 
 Lord's divinity. Did God inspire the poet 
 to deny that God exists ? If " no man can 
 say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy 
 Ghost," did God inspire a man to deny 
 our Lord's divinity ? You feel yourself at 
 perfect liberty to criticise all that your 
 man of genius says ; you regard his state- 
 ments as liable to revision and correction 
 at the bar of an abler mind, in the light 
 of a clearer day. You accept his teachings 
 just so far as they commend themselves 
 to your own convictions, or as they appear 
 to possess a reasonable probability. You 
 say that this or that line is beautifully 
 expressed but fallaciously conceived. You 
 know that such inspired writers are the 
 creatures of a clay, that they often go 
 entirely out of fashion, line the shelves of 
 dusty libraries until, resuscitated in course 
 of time by some enterprising antiquary, 
 
go THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 they are shown to the world with a smile 
 of superiority and wonder, as works which 
 once were read by thousands. 
 
 And what does all this show but that 
 inspiration of genius is only a phrase to 
 express that God is the author of human 
 gifts. That vivid power, that force of 
 expression, that passion, that pathos, that 
 insight into nature is a glorious gift of 
 the Almighty. The inspiration of genius 
 only means a brilliant exercise of natural 
 endowments. 
 
 In the sense that every good gift and 
 every perfect gift is from above, it is 
 legitimate to say that the poet is inspired. 
 "The inspiration of the Almighty giveth 
 understanding." ■ 
 
 Does the inspiration of Scripture mean 
 no more than this ? Has it only a human 
 side ? When St. Peter said that holy men 
 of old spake as they were moved by the 
 
 ■ Job xxxii. 8, 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 91 
 
 Holy Ghost, did he only intend to observe 
 that certain individuals made a brilliant 
 use of their natural gifts ? 
 
 At any rate this is most certainly not 
 what the prophets claim. They claim 
 deliberately to speak God's thought, not 
 their own ; thought declared to them from 
 Heaven ; not the mere outcome of their 
 own reflections. The word of the Lord 
 came to them. They are the messengers, 
 often reluctant and shrinking messengers, 
 overwhelmed in contrasting their own 
 personal insignificance with the magnitude 
 of their message. Their word is, " Thus 
 saith the Lord." The inspiration of Scrip- 
 ture has a Divine as well as a human 
 side. 
 
 Such are the two theories, the mechanical 
 and the literary. And it is instructive to 
 notice that historically the one follows the 
 other. 
 
 Different generations of men look upon 
 
92 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 a subject from widely different points of 
 view. Formerly they regarded it from 
 God's side : recently on man's side. They 
 used to see chiefly God's work in it, now 
 they see chiefly man's. Both theories were 
 extremes. Both contained an element of 
 truth. But the first, with all its errors, 
 was spiritually preferable to the second. 
 For while the second reduced the Bible to 
 the level of other literature, the first did 
 strongly enforce the fact that the Bible was 
 a message from God. 
 
 II. 
 
 The subject of inspiration has come to 
 the front in our day probably more than 
 in any previous century. The recent theories 
 are innumerable. 
 
 We are told that some books of the Bible 
 arc more inspired, others less, others not 
 at all. But when we ask which fall under 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 93 
 
 which division, there is considerable dis- 
 agreement. And if we inquire why an un- 
 inspired book ever got in among a collection 
 which is inspired, the answer has been given: 
 " Just as a dark background to a picture — to 
 present a stronger contrast to the genuine 
 thing." One writer informs us that St. 
 Paul's Epistles to Timothy are not inspired. 
 His reason — because they chiefly deal with 
 external organization of the Churches ; and, 
 since the writer does not regard external 
 organization of much importance, he thinks 
 that St. Paul must have been of the same 
 opinion. We are irresistibly reminded here 
 how Martin Luther said that the Epistle of 
 St. James was a right strawy, that is, rub- 
 bishy letter. His dislike was based on the 
 fact that his favourite doctrine was not to 
 be found there. But if, as Churchmen are 
 sometimes informed, " the Bible only is the 
 religion of Protestants," it ought to have 
 occurred to Luther as more becoming tt> 
 
c 4 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 bring his own ideas into obedience to the 
 Scriptures, than to make himself the judge 
 of what an inspired book ought to contain. 
 A book is not necessarily uninspired be- 
 cause it contains a doctrine which I dis- 
 like, or omits a doctrine which I love. It 
 is, at least, conceivable that it is myself, 
 and not the book, which is at fault. 
 
 Against such treatment of the Bible, two 
 objections will occur to us. 
 
 1. It sets the individual above the Bible. 
 It makes him the judge of the proper subject 
 which an inspired book ought to contain. 
 It enables the narrowest-minded of men to 
 ignore unpalatable truths, by challenging 
 the book's inspiration, instead of profiting 
 by its largeness. 
 
 2. And, in the next place, this treatment 
 of the Bible reduces the whole subject of 
 inspiration to a question of individual taste. 
 
 Differences of temperament and early 
 training will lead men to entirely different 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 95 
 
 opinions on the relative importance of 
 different truths ; men will therefore make 
 different selections among the sacred 
 writings. This appeals to me, therefore it 
 is very much inspired : this doesn't, there- 
 fore it has no inspiration. The practical 
 outcome is, that while the printed contents 
 of the Bible are everywhere the same, the 
 contents really acknowledged differ con- 
 siderably. For men will in this way pass 
 by in severe silence such portions of Scrip- 
 ture as fail to harmonize with their theory 
 of inspiration. Thus the asserted bond of 
 union among Christians — the Holy Scrip- 
 tures — is shown to be virtually a different 
 thing in different cases. The result of this 
 theory of Inspiration is practically to create 
 a number of different Bibles in which the 
 accepted contents are by no means really 
 the same. And if it comes to a question 
 of individual taste, who will say that he 
 would have made, if left to himself, precisely 
 
96 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 the same selection of documents as that 
 contained in the Canon of the Scriptures ? 
 
 But the common characteristic of all 
 these theories of inspiration is, that they 
 are theories and nothing more. They are 
 opinions of individuals or schools of 
 thought. They vary with place and age. 
 They cannot be required of any man as 
 essential portions of the Faith. There is, 
 in fact, no finality about them. They 
 have chased each other across the stage of 
 history. What was uppermost a century 
 ago is neglected to-day. What is popular 
 to-day may be ignored or vastly modified 
 in less than a hundred years. 
 
 But our concern, as Christians, is not 
 with the changeful opinions of the day, but 
 with the permanent Faith of the world-wide 
 Ghwtch, 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 97 
 
 III. 
 
 We have, then, to consider what the 
 Church has to say on the subject of in- 
 spiration. 
 
 The Church gathered these Books, acknow- 
 ledged them, is their keeper and their 
 witness, has given to us the main lines of 
 their interpretation. lias the Church any 
 guidance to give us on the subject of their in- 
 sjriration ? 
 
 This is, for us, the main question. For 
 us the permanent Faith of the world-wide 
 Church will be decisive upon this as upon 
 all other questions related to Christianity. 
 Anything beyond what the Church has 
 taught will be opinion, but nothing more. 
 We Christians must remember this. No 
 theory of inspiration must be imposed if 
 the Church has not imposed it. From 
 whatever side the theory comes there is no 
 
 H 
 
98 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 obligation to accept what the Church has 
 not defined. What mnst be taught from 
 the pulpits of the Church is nothing else 
 than the Church's Faith. 
 
 Now, the Church teaches us to sing in 
 the Creed that the Holy Ghost spake by 
 the Prophets, but has never defined the 
 precise nature of inspiration. Perhaps this 
 is explained by the fact that controversy 
 does not largely appear upon the subject 
 in the early centuries. Even at the Reforma- 
 tion period both parties alike asserted the 
 inspiration of the Books. 
 
 But although the Church has never 
 precisely defined, yet it has, no less certainly, 
 not left us without guidance as to what it 
 understands by " inspired." The world- 
 wide Church has persistently down the ages 
 treated the Books in a very definite way, 
 adopting towards them an attitude which 
 involves a very definite idea of their in- 
 spiration, an attitude which can only be 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. gg 
 
 justified and explained on the ground that 
 the mind of the Church has from the first 
 been perfectly clear upon the subject. 
 
 1. In the first place, then, the Church 
 has ever ascribed to these Sacred Books an 
 authority ascribed to no others. Men who, 
 as far as genius is concerned, are probably 
 not inferior to the Apostles and four 
 Evangelists, very learned and brilliant 
 men, very saintly men have written books 
 upon the same subjects as the writers of 
 Scripture, and have often stated the very 
 same truths as they. But the Church 
 has never regarded them for a moment 
 as possessing the same authority. They 
 have been open to criticism, and, if necessary, 
 to correction. The Church has fearlessly 
 differed from her greatest and most learned 
 sons, but she has ever asserted that she 
 cannot differ from the Oracles of God. 
 The doctrine of a Prophet, a Psalmist, 
 an Evangelist, an Apostle, is to her at 
 
ioo THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 once and for ever decisive. This is the 
 attitude which the Church has professed 
 down the ages. 
 
 2. This unique authority, ascribed by the 
 Church to the Bible, is based upon the 
 conviction of its unique inspiration. In- 
 spiration, according to the mind of the 
 Church, would seem to mean — 
 
 (1) A supernatural gift. There is the 
 Divine element in it. Inspiration is not 
 the brilliant exercise of natural gifts. It 
 is not ordinary genius. It belongs to a 
 higher than the natural order of things. 
 Thus it separates the literature of the Bible 
 from all other literature in the world. The 
 rest are works of human genius. This is 
 uniquely inspired. A supernatural gift — 
 
 (2) But yet entrusted to certain men. 
 This is the human side. The writers of 
 Scripture do not appear to be regarded by 
 the Church as losing their individuality 
 under the process of inspiration. They 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 101 
 
 were not overwhelmed. They were left to 
 the independent exercise of their gifts, to 
 clothe the truth in human language, to ex- 
 press themselves in their own individual 
 way. Entrusted to certain men — 
 
 (3) And for what purpose ? Enabling them 
 clearly to understand — broadening out their 
 minds, lifting them above their ordinary 
 level, enabling them to see what others 
 could not see, enabling them clearly to 
 understand it. And also faithfully to record 
 it. For the gift was not meant for then- 
 personal gain alone. It was granted for 
 the service and advantage of the whole 
 Church of God. They were enabled faith- 
 fully to record it for the ages yet untold. 
 
 (4) And what was the theme of inspira- 
 tion ? It was religious truth. The purpose 
 of inspiration was not to teach science. 
 Inspiration did not place the recipients in 
 advance of the material knowledge of their 
 time. Its object was not to anticipate the 
 
102 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 mechanical discoveries of a later day. It 
 w as concerned with religious truth. Truths 
 of the spiritual order, of God and man, and 
 the Divine work in man's redemption and 
 perfecting. Inspiration was certainly con- 
 cerned with history, for God incarnate 
 enters human history. And no less certainly 
 inspiration is concerned in giving us the 
 truth. There can be no such thing as the 
 inspiration of inveracity. Inspiration must 
 give us truth. 
 
 We gather, then, that the mind of the 
 Church upon the subject seems to be that 
 inspiration is a supernatural gift entrusted 
 to certain men, enabling them clearly to 
 understand, and faithfully to record religious 
 truth. 
 
 But, of course, where no precise definition 
 is given us, we must necessarily move with 
 the greatest caution and fear. This, as all 
 else, the preacher submits to the judgment 
 of the Church of God. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 103 
 
 IV. 
 
 According to the Church's mind inspira- 
 tion seems to be the character of all the 
 Books without exception. Certainly the 
 Church never taught men that there was 
 an uninspired book among the number. 
 Inspiration assumes many forms, but it is 
 invariably the cause which produced them 
 all. They are all a work of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 There is the Inspiration of the Prophet. 
 
 Balaam stands upon the mountain, 
 beneath him lie the tents of Israel, before 
 him are the seven altars, beside him the 
 elders of Moab. It is the moment of his 
 departure. But the future bursts upon 
 him. He sees it with appalling distinct- 
 ness, as if it had already come. He sees 
 it, and he alone can see. And he must 
 declare it : — 
 
 " And now, behold, I go unto my people : 
 Come, therefore, and I will advertise thee what this 
 people shall do to thy people in the latter days. 
 
104 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 And be took up bis parable and said, 
 
 Balaam the son of Beor hath said, 
 
 And the man whose eyes are open hath said : 
 
 He hath said, which beard the words of God, 
 
 And knew the knowledge of the most High, 
 
 Which saw the vision of the Almighty, 
 
 Falling into a trance, but having bis eyes open : 
 
 I shall see him, but not now : 
 
 I shall behold him, but not nigh : 
 
 There shall come a star out of Jacob, 
 
 And a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, 
 
 And shall smite the corners of Moab, 
 
 And destroy all the children of Sbetb." a 
 
 There is the inspiration of the prophet 
 in its most obvious form — power to see and 
 record the future, clearly to understand it, 
 faithfully to record it. 
 
 There is the Inspiration of the Evangelist. 
 
 It is the power to present with perfect 
 fidelity some aspect of the peerless Life, to 
 recall His words, summarize His discourses, 
 describe His actions, relate His parables; 
 determine, for insertion or omission, what 
 might be without irreparable loss forgotten 
 and what remembered, what passages of 
 
 8 Numb. xxiv. 14. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 105 
 
 His experience or teaching would best 
 bring home His character and present Hint 
 most faithfully to the men who never 
 beheld Him in the flesh. Surely no easy 
 office ! Surely requiring no less inspiring 
 aid than the work of the prophet, power 
 to describe the present, to seize His spirit, 
 and to speak as He would have them speak. 
 
 There is the Inspiration of the Apostle. 
 
 It is the power to draw out in his letters 
 the consequences which flow from the fact 
 of the Incarnation, power to draw out these 
 results with certainty and with truth, 
 neither swerving to the right hand nor to 
 the left : power to teach us the Christian 
 Faith in all its fulness and its due pro- 
 portion. So that while we may challenge 
 or doubt any individual's opinions of the 
 Faith, we may not doubt or challenge the 
 doctrines of an Apostle. There is a 
 supernatural guidance here. The works of 
 the individual are subject to revision, the 
 writings of the Apostles are not. 
 
io6 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 V. 
 
 But here it is necessary to bear carefully 
 in mind that Inspiration has its limits. 
 
 1. The Inspiration of a book does not 
 imply a Divine sanction for every act recorded. 
 
 Sometimes the character of some of the 
 Old Testament narratives is urged as an 
 objection 37 against their Inspiration. But 
 the fact is that they profess to be history, 
 and not romance. They describe man as 
 he is, not as he ought to be. They give 
 the actual, not the ideal. Thus they record 
 the sublime moments of unworthy men and 
 the degraded moments of saints. 
 
 Man, half angel, half brute ; man as we 
 know him, capable of splendid loftiness, no 
 less capable of unutterable meanness ; man 
 with his pathetic contradictions, so high, 
 so low, so abject, so august, is described in 
 Scripture with a merciless fidelity to facts. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 107 
 
 And if Scripture did not describe hirn so, 
 it would not be fact, but fiction. But as 
 St. Augustine said long ago, such actions 
 are "recorded but not approved." And 
 certainly no one trained in the teachings of 
 Jesus Christ can have much difficulty in 
 determining whether an act of the older 
 patriarchs and kings is written for his 
 example or recorded for his admonition. 
 
 2. And, secondly, Inspiration does not 
 involve the equal value of every text. 38 For 
 example, consider the Book Ecclesiastes. 
 
 Ecclesiastes is the story of a young man's 
 attempt to discover for himself what is the 
 secret of a happy life. He sought it first 
 in the gratification of the senses. He built 
 himself an earthly paradise. a He devoted 
 himself to pleasure. He surrounded himself 
 with everything which could minister to 
 his amusement and delight — " men singers 
 and women singers, and the delights of the 
 ■ ii. 1-10. 
 
io8 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 sons of men." a He " gave his heart to know 
 madness and folly." b For a time it satis- 
 fied. Then came the inevitable reaction. 
 The absorbing search for selfish pleasure 
 defeated its own object. All was vanity and 
 vexation of spirit." There was nothing 
 better than to eat and drink.' 1 Man had the 
 same birth as the beast, and in death they 
 were both alike. 6 
 
 Then he sought the secret of a happy 
 life in the gratification of the mind. He 
 was gifted with great abilities, and he knew 
 it. Ambition seized him. He would seek 
 for wisdom. He would search into the 
 height and the depth. Nothing escaped his 
 keen and restless intellect, from the cedars 
 of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall. He 
 wrote three thousand proverbs ; his songs 
 were a thousand and five. He determined 
 that men should own his intellectual supe- 
 riority. And he had his reward. They 
 
 • ii. 8. b i. 17. 0 ii. 1L 
 
 d ii. 24. 0 iii. 19. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 109 
 
 came from all parts of the earth to hear the 
 wisdom of Solomon. But in the midst of 
 all this incense of adulation, what of the 
 man himself ? was he satisfied ? What 
 were the things he knew compared with 
 the things he knew not ? What lay before 
 him but the inevitable coming of the days 
 which would weaken the memory and 
 deprive him of the things he loves ? How 
 dieth the wise man ? — as the fool ! And 
 was that the end ? " Vanity of vanities," 
 said the preacher, " all is vanity." 
 
 And the awful sense of human transitori- 
 ness came upon him with a power wellnigh 
 overwhelming : " One generation passeth 
 away, and another generation conieth : but 
 the earth abideth for ever." a And looking 
 on to the time when " the evil days " would 
 come, and " the years draw nigh " when he 
 should be forced to say, " I have no pleasure 
 in them," when the clouds of sorrow 
 » i. 4. 
 
no THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 should return after the rain of tears, 
 when the limhs, " the keepers of the 
 house," the human body, should " tremble," 
 and " the strong men bow themselves, and 
 those that look out of the window (the 
 power of sight) should be darkened ; " when 
 he should "rise up at the voice of the bird," 
 for the least sound would disturb his rest- 
 ing ; when he should "be afraid of that which 
 is high," capable no more of laborious effort, 
 no more vigorous as in the days of youth ; 
 when " fears should be in the way, and the 
 almond-tree," the emblem of sleeplessness, 
 " should nourish," and the merest trifle, the 
 light " grasshopper, become a burden," and 
 listlessness should enter and " desire should 
 fail," and " man goeth to his long home, and 
 the mourners go about the streets,"" — 
 crushed by the pathos of human transitori- 
 ness, he uttered his piteous cry, " Vanity of 
 vanities, saith the preacher ; all is vanity." b 
 
 " sii. 5. b sii. 8. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. Ill 
 
 But the preacher did not stop here. 
 Baffled in the selfish search for pleasure, 
 whether in the gratification of the senses 
 or the gratification of the intellect, the 
 seeker after a happy life came back, as 
 many a man has done since, to the belief 
 in God, and the true secret of human peace. 
 At last he struggles up into the conclusion 
 of the whole matter — the utterance of 
 triumphant faith : " Fear God, and keep 
 His Commandments, for this is the whole 
 duty of man." a 
 
 Now the cynical phrases, crude half- 
 truths, and proverbial philosophy of a 
 worldly shrewdness which escape the 
 lips of Ecclesiastes repeatedly through 
 the course of his changeful moods, while 
 God disciplines his selfwill by bitter failure 
 and defeat, are warnings and admonitions. 
 They do not stand on the same spiritual 
 level with his great conclusion when at last 
 
 ■ xii. 13, 
 
112 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 he issues victoriously into faith. They are 
 partly like the words of Satan in the 
 temptation of Christ, they are partly the 
 outcome of the struggle and the trial of a 
 human character. But the Inspiration of 
 the Book lies in the entire drift of its 
 marvellous pages, presenting man every- 
 where unsatisfied, until he finds the per- 
 manent satisfaction of his immortal needs 
 in the God who gave him existence. 
 
 Finally, as St. Paul insists," " All scripture 
 is given by Inspiration of God, and is 
 profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for, 
 correction, for instruction in righteousness, 
 that the man of God may be perfect, 
 throughly furnished unto all good works." 
 This is the purpose for which Inspiration 
 was given. May we by our reverence for 
 its pages, our constant and prayerful study 
 of its contents so employ it ; to the disci- 
 pline of our character and the enlighten- 
 ing and guidance of the soul. 
 
 • 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17. 
 
SERMON V. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN VALUE OF THE 
 OLD TESTAMENT. 89 
 
 "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were 
 written for our learning." — Romans xv. 4. 
 
 Certain opponents of the Church in the 
 fifth century regarded the Old Testament 
 as of very small importance. The ground 
 given was that the Old was imperfect while 
 the New was perfect, and they were the 
 fortunate possessors of the New. Some of 
 the wisest of our teachers think that the 
 same tendency to disparage the Old Testa- 
 ment exists in certain quarters in the 
 English Church to-day. There is, we are 
 told, a marked difference between the value 
 frequently assigned to it among ourselves 
 
114 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 and that assigned to it by St. Chrysostom, 
 or St. Augustine, or St. Ambrose, or St. 
 Jerome. Our subject, then, is the Chris- 
 tian value of the Old Testament. We 
 are to see some of the grounds upon 
 which it shoidd be among all Christians 
 very highly regarded. 
 
 L 
 
 In the first place, then, the Old Testa- 
 ment is very valuable to the Christian 
 because of its doctrine of God. 
 
 We do not find fully declared in its pages 
 the truth that God is Love. We never 
 realized that God is Love until we knew 
 that God possessed a Son. Naturally so. 
 For until then, God's love could only seem 
 an unexercised capacity, never called forth 
 into exercise for lack of an adequate object 
 whereon to rest ; but when we knew that 
 within the Divine nature there was more 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 115 
 
 than one Divine personality, then we under- 
 stood that God is Love. Thus, the doctrine 
 that God is Love is based upon the doc- 
 trine of the Holy Trinity. Unknown 
 before the Christian era, unknown to-day 
 outside Christendom except through Chris- 
 tian influence, the doctrine that God 
 is Love is one of the gifts of Christianity 
 to the world. But although the Old Testa- 
 ment does not properly declare that God is 
 Love, yet still it speaks of Him in terms 
 of singular beauty and graciousness. 
 
 Take, for instance, the Vision of Moses, 
 when " the Lord passed by before him, and 
 proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merci- 
 ful and gracious, longsuffering, and abun- 
 dant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy 
 for thousands, forgiving iniquity and trans- 
 gression and sin." a 
 
 Or again, the familiar language of the 
 Psalm — 
 
 " Exod. xxxiv 6. 
 
n6 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 " Like as a father pitieth his own children, 
 Even so is the Lord merciful to them that fear Him." * 
 
 But the Divine majesty, glory, wisdom, 
 
 power are described in the Old Testament 
 
 in terms unsurpassed even in the New : — 
 
 " Great is our Lord and great is His power : 
 Yea, and His wisdom is infinite." b 
 
 " Clouds and darkness are round about Him, 
 Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of 
 His seat." 0 
 
 " Before the mountains were brought forth, 
 Or ever the earth and world were made, 
 Thou art God from everlasting, and world without 
 end." d 
 
 Or recall the wonderful description of 
 the searching presence of the Almighty. 
 
 " Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me ; 
 I cannot attain unto it. 
 Whither shall I go then from Thy Spirit ? 
 Or whither shall I go then from Thy presence ? 
 If I climb up into heaven, Thou art there : 
 If I go down to hell, Thou art there also. 
 If I take the wings of the morning, 
 
 4 Ps. ciii. 13. h Ps. cxlvii. 7. 
 c Ps. xevii. 2. d Ps. xc. 2. 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 117 
 
 And remain in the uttermost parts of the sea ; 
 Even there also shall Thy hand lead me, 
 And Thy right hand shall hold me." a 
 
 But nothing can better attest the value 
 of the Old Testament teaching about God 
 than the use of the Psalms. For well-nigh 
 three thousand years that marvellous col- 
 lection of 150 hymns has been the world's 
 treasury of devotion. Not even the Apostles 
 have given us much else as the Church's 
 Book of Praise. They have been on the 
 lips and in the heart of Christendom. 
 Untold thousands of the truest followers 
 of Jesus Christ have found in the Psalms, 
 interpreted no doubt in the full light of 
 the Christian Revelation, the adequate ex- 
 pression of their highest aspirations, and 
 hopes, and praise. 
 
 First of all, then, the Old Testament is 
 of very high value to the Christian for 
 the sublimity of its doctrine about God. 
 
 " Ps. cxxxix. 6-10. 
 
u8 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 And on this ground we may say that 
 " whatsoever things were written aforetime, 
 were written for our learning." 
 
 IL 
 
 Secondly, the Old Testament is very 
 important to the Christian for its doctrine 
 of evil. 
 
 Corresponding to the height of its 
 glorious teaching about God, is the depth 
 of its conception of sin. It tells us that 
 God made man upright, that He is not 
 the author of evil, that everything which 
 He made was good. Evil is not a defect 
 of nature, nor inherent in the flesh, nor a 
 necessity of development, much less is it 
 eternal : it is an act of the creature's will. 
 But it is no mere transitory action which 
 passes away, and leaves man practically 
 as it found him. On the contrary, it 
 involves permanent results : a spiritual 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 119 
 
 loss, a moral change : death in all its 
 forms, death of the body, and death of 
 the soul. For human death is, according 
 to the Scriptures, a consequence of sin. 
 And gazing on the marble features of our 
 dead, what else is possible than to feel the 
 truth of it, and exclaim, An enemy hath 
 done this ! And since the human race 
 does not consist of isolated units like the 
 angels, but members of a body and children 
 of a house, the loss of one is the loss of all. 
 The first man had lost his original crown 
 of grace. He could not transmit what he 
 no more possessed. Hence the drama of 
 human history unfolded on the lower plat- 
 form of sorrow and sin. Piteous tendencies 
 to wrong, the weakness of the will towards 
 good, " the imagination of man's heart 
 evil from his youth " a — these became its 
 universal characteristics. 
 
 And hence man is burdened with a deep 
 
 * Gen. viii. 21. 
 
120 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 sense of alienation from God. And this 
 alienation is most keenly felt by the 
 devoutest and best in Israel. How can 
 man, being what he is, draw near to God, 
 and be reconciled ? 
 
 " Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, 
 And bow myself before the high God ? . . . 
 Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, 
 The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? " a 
 
 This profound Old Testament teaching 
 of the nature of evil is to Christianity of 
 supreme importance, for upon that reali- 
 zation of sin's nature, the doctrine of 
 Kedemption is based. So long as men 
 possess no adequate conception of the 
 seriousness of evil, so long Eedemption by 
 the Blood and Agony of an Incarnate God 
 must appear simple extravagance. They 
 will regard our Lord as the great Moralist, 
 or the great Example, but they will not 
 regard Him as the Lamb of God taking 
 
 " Micah vi. 6, 7. 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 121 
 
 away the sin of the world. They will not 
 see the necessity. Redemption makes its 
 true appeal to us in proportion as we realize 
 the nature of evil, and in proportion as we 
 yearn for permanent deliverance. Hence 
 the need of deepening our sense of sin. 
 We must take upon our lips the passionate 
 penitence of psalmist and prophet, makiug 
 them our own as best we may, being con- 
 scious that the more we realize their truth, 
 the better we shall understand our own 
 Redemption. 
 
 It is, then, in the second place, for its 
 profound teaching about evil, that the Old 
 Testament is very valuable to the Christian. 
 And on this ground, no less than on the 
 former, " whatsoever things were written 
 aforetime were written for our learning." 
 
122 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 III. 
 
 A third value of the Old Testament to 
 the Christian lies in its doctrine of the 
 Deliverer. That wonderful people Israel 
 never put their golden age in the past, but 
 in the future. They believed persistently 
 in the coming of a great Deliverer. They 
 called Him " the desire of all nations." 
 They pictured a time when the eyes of the 
 blind should be opened and the ears of the 
 deaf unstopped, when the lame man should 
 leap as an hart and the tongue of the dumb 
 sing. They never lost this expectation. 
 Prosperity never made them cease to long 
 for it, nor adversity despair of it. Still 
 onward into the future they gazed, and 
 hoped and believed. Prophet after prophet 
 arose from every class of the social order — 
 they were shepherds or they were kings, 
 they were statesmen or gatherers of syca- 
 more fruit, they were highly cultured or 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 123 
 
 comparatively ignorant ; but with a marvel- 
 lous unity, each described some feature of 
 the coming Deliverer, and this over a course 
 of fifteen hundred years. 
 
 There is no more marvellous instance of 
 this anticipation of the Deliverer than that 
 given in the twenty-second Psalm — 
 
 "My God, my God, look upon me; why bast Thou 
 forsaken me : 
 
 And art so far from my health, and from the words of 
 
 my complaint? . . . 
 All they that see me laugh me to scorn : 
 They shoot out their lips, and shake their heads, saying, 
 He trusted in God that He would deliver him : 
 Let Him deliver him, if He will have him. . . . 
 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out 
 
 of joint : 
 
 My heart also in the midst of my body is even like 
 melting wax. 
 
 My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue 
 
 cleaveth to my gums : 
 And Thou shalt bring me into the dust of death. 
 For many dogs are come about me : 
 And the council of the wicked laycth siege against me. 
 They pierced my hands and my feet ; I may tell all 
 
 my bones : 
 
 They stand staring and looking upon me. 
 They part my garments among thorn : 
 And cast lots upon my vesture." 
 
I2 4 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 Now we know, but it can never cease to 
 be amazing, that this description, this 
 " poetical gospel," as St. Augustine calls it, 
 was not written by a reporter at Calvary, 
 but was the vision of a seer centuries before. 
 
 Moreover, the Old Testament is not only 
 prophetic in detail here and there, but the 
 entire sacrificial system was prophetic. The 
 whole drift of Israel's religious life was as 
 one perpetual prediction corresponding to 
 the greatness of the Person whose Advent 
 was foretold. 40 
 
 It is for its anticipations of the Christ, 
 for its hope of the great Deliverer, that the 
 Old Testament is of such great value to 
 the Christian, and for this reason also 
 " whatsoever things were written aforetime 
 were written for our learning." 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 125 
 
 IV. 
 
 A fourth reason for the Christian value 
 of the Old Testament is because it shows 
 God's plan in history. It shows how the 
 way was prepared for the Incarnation of 
 Jesus Christ. We are permitted to see in 
 the Old Testament just that side of history 
 which, as a rule, becomes obscured in the 
 strife of tongues. Everywhere we see man 
 in evidence. There we are bidden to see 
 God. We see confusion, indeed, in the Old 
 Testament, as everywhere else ; but, through 
 the confusion, a plan. God is there revealed 
 as selecting a nation : His people Israel. 
 That one people in a peculiar sense He 
 disciplines, He teaches, He trains. Human 
 nature in Israel exhibits its special cha- 
 racteristics : many unlovely, some distinctly 
 mean ; but, at any rate, intense devotion, 
 high aspirations, thirst for God, a glorious 
 faith. He teaches them His glory. He 
 
126 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 reveals Himself to them as to none other 
 beside. He creates the thirst for Himself, 
 which He proceeds to satisfy. He teaches 
 them how to worship. He bids them sing 
 His praises. For century after century He 
 cultivates in them the faculty of faith. 
 The rest of mankind is for the period on 
 a lower level, not really neglected if appa- 
 rently cared for less. But it is in Israel 
 in particular that human nature is dis- 
 ciplined into faith. 
 
 And so we come to the days when a 
 certain maiden lived in Galilee. She was 
 poor, but the blood of kings was in her 
 veins. She was quite unknown beyond 
 the limits of her village, but now known 
 through Christendom and well known in 
 the courts of heaven. She was highly 
 favoured among women, and all generations 
 shall call her blessed. She had caught the 
 purest spirit of Hebrew psalmists, and what 
 her devotion was may be seen in her 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 127 
 
 beautiful hymn, now the central praise in 
 the evensong of the world-wide Church. 
 She was gifted with many graces, and she 
 was ordained to be the mother of our King. 
 And a voice is heard which says — 
 
 " A body hast Thou prepared me ; 
 Then said I, Lo, I come 
 To do Thy will, O my God." 
 
 And of her the Son of God took flesh our 
 flesh to be. And what He took, in taking, 
 He cleansed and purified. 
 
 And further still, for we may venture to 
 say that the selection of Israel was intended 
 to create an enclosure of reverence, an 
 atmosphere of faith, for the training of the 
 Holy Childhood. Jesus Christ was very God, 
 yet He passed as man through a purely 
 human development. And while we can 
 understand that in Mary's home He grew 
 in wisdom as in stature, and in favour with 
 God and man, we cannot understand, nay, 
 it seems humanly impossible, that He 
 
128 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 should have been bom anywhere else 
 except in Israel. We cannot conceive the 
 Holy Childhood in a pagan home. We 
 cannot imagine Him in any heathen resi- 
 dence of the imperial city, among the 
 sceptics of Athens, or in pleasure-loving 
 Corinth. But we may say that all Israel 
 exists for the sake of Jesus Christ. The 
 Law was written to furnish Him with the 
 answers to the tempter in the wilderness ; 
 the Prophets were written in order that He 
 might read them to the people in Caper- 
 naum, the Psalms to provide the language 
 of His dying cry ; the temple was builded 
 that He might delight in His Father's 
 House upon the earth ; all Israel exists for 
 Him as a sacred enclosure wherein should 
 be trained and matured the Saviour of all 
 the world. 
 
 It is, then, as showing the plan of God 
 in human history, that the Old Testa- 
 ment is of unique importance, and that 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 129 
 
 " whatsoever things were written aforetime 
 were written for our learning." 
 
 V. 
 
 And, finally, the Old Testament is very 
 valuable to the Christian for its teaching 
 on the principles of worship. 41 
 
 The worship of Israel clothed itself in 
 outward forms. Page after page of the 
 Mosaic Law is devoted to details of cere- 
 monial worship. We read of altars and 
 sacrifices, priests and vestments, incense 
 and vessels and hangings, and the round 
 of fast and festival. 
 
 Now, all this, some will tell us, was very 
 unspiritual. It is, however, difficult to see 
 how that can be said consistently with 
 reverence. For this simple reason— it was 
 ordained by the Almighty : " See thou make 
 all things after the pattern shown thee on 
 the Mount." Here is the unquestionable 
 
 E 
 
1 30 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 fact — the divinely ordered worship intended 
 for the spiritual training of the chosen 
 people was an elaborate ritual. In that 
 elaborate system, and for it, the Psalms were 
 written ; that is to say, the most spiritually- 
 minded treasury of praise. In that solemn 
 ritual were trained and developed the 
 characters of a Samuel, a Hezekiah ; in fact, 
 all that was spiritually best in Israel. In 
 this the twelve Apostles were trained, in 
 this our Lord's own mother, in this our 
 Lord Himself from the age of twelve to His 
 latest hours found the adequate presentation 
 of reverent worship. Our Lord ever rebuked 
 unreality, but never rebuked the worship of 
 Jerusalem. To do so would have placed 
 His disciples in the following dilemma. 
 Can Jesus Christ denounce what God 
 ordained ? Nor was this only till the 
 Church was founded. The Apostles still 
 worshipped in the temple, and did not 
 leave it until compelled. All these facts 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 131 
 
 forbid us to label the ritual of Jerusalem 
 as uuspiritual. No ! we cannot doubt that 
 most fervent faith, most living worship, 
 most earnest penitence were to be found 
 among that prostrate crowd when the 
 daily incense arose, and that the worshippers 
 of Jerusalem went homeward comforted. 
 Undoubtedly the prophets of Israel in- 
 sisted with earnest reiteration that the 
 ritual of Jerusalem was utterly worthless 
 if divorced from inward reality. They 
 exclaimed, in words which have been seri- 
 ously misunderstood, " Incense is an abomi- 
 nation unto Me." a They ask, " To what 
 purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices 
 unto Me ? . . . Bring no more vain oblations." 
 But they explain their purpose when they 
 plead fervently, passionately for inward 
 reality. " Wash you, make you clean ; put 
 away the evil of your doings from before 
 Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do 
 " Isa. i. 
 
132 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 well." The prophet never dreamed that 
 to suppress the externals of worship was to 
 make men spiritual. The lawgiver was 
 the ritualist of the period, the prophet the 
 evangelical. But there was no opposition 
 between them. The one insisted on the 
 outward reverence, the other on the inward 
 reality. No passage shows this more clearly 
 than the fifty-first Psalm : — 
 
 " Thou desirest not sacrifice ; else would I give it Thee : 
 But Thou delightest not iu burnt offerings." 
 
 Here the Tsalmist seems to repudiate 
 the externals of worship, while he adds, 
 " The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit." 
 Thus he insists on the inward reality. But 
 then he returns to the very externals which 
 a moment before in his zeal for righteous- 
 ness he might appear to disparage. " Then 
 shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifice of 
 righteousness, with the burnt offerings and 
 oblations : then shall they offer young 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 133 
 
 bullocks upon Thine altar." Modem 
 worship must always present the same two 
 aspects — the outward expression and the 
 inward reality. What is essential is to 
 remember that these two are not contra- 
 dictory, but supplemental. The so-called 
 ritualist and the so-called evangelical 
 ought never to be opponents, but friends. 
 They are insisting on two aspects of the 
 selfsame truth ; but, alas for our narrowness ! 
 one aspect is often almost too much for the 
 human mind. It is most true that outward 
 ritual is absolutely worthless except it be 
 accompanied by the devotion of the inner 
 man. But it is no less true that human 
 beings must ever express their social 
 worship in outward forms. Human language 
 itself is an outward form. The barest 
 worship on earth is not necessarily spiritual. 
 The most elaborate worship on earth is not 
 necessarily unspiritual. Do what you will, 
 you cannot possibly get rid of outward 
 
134 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 forms. They may vary in elaborateness, but 
 they cannot be dispensed with altogether. 
 God is a Spirit, and must be worshipped in 
 spirit and in truth ; but this has nothing 
 whatever to do with the particular form m 
 which human worship may find its outward 
 expression. Nor can we consistently sing, 
 " 0 come, let us worship and fall down, and 
 kneel before the Lord our Maker," and then 
 go out and say that outward ritual is a 
 matter of complete indifference. The only 
 question is in the selection of outward 
 forms — whether, by an exaggerated in- 
 dividualism, we shall be guided by private 
 taste, or whether we shall pay regard to 
 the immemorial practices of the world-wide 
 Church. 
 
 Thus the lesson of the Old Testament 
 would take the form of a reminder that 
 human worship must ever continue an 
 inward reality with an outward expres- 
 sion. 
 
VALUE Of THE OLD TESTAMENT. 135 
 
 Moreover, the whole principle of Old 
 Testament worship was from first to last 
 sacrificial. The one idea of an Israelite, 
 when drawing near to worship the Almighty, 
 was to offer Him a sacrifice. This was the 
 principle of the Law. But it did not 
 originate with Moses. The very earliest 
 recorded human worship outside Eden took 
 the form of a sacrifice. Moreover, our Lord 
 Himself declared that He came, not to 
 destroy the Law and the Prophets, but to 
 fulfil them. If, then, the details are altered, 
 the principles remain. The details naturally 
 change. Those of Israel pointed forward 
 to Christ, those of the Church point back 
 to Him. Naturally, therefore, the details 
 altered, but the principles remain. The 
 worship of the Christian Church is, like 
 that of Israel, essentially sacrificial. 
 
 When, on the night before He died, our 
 Lord, in the presence of His Apostles in 
 the Jerusalem Chamber, after the sacrifice 
 
136 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 of the Passover was completed, said, " This 
 Cup is the New covenant in My Blood," 
 they could scarcely avoid, considering their 
 antecedents, their lifelong training in sacri- 
 ficial principles, understanding Him to 
 mean that by this act He was, in the place 
 of the older sacrifice, instituting a new. 
 
 Hence it was that the idea of sacrifice 
 in worship was so strong in the early 
 Church. Already, long before St. John's 
 death, St. Clement of Rome could describe 
 the clergy as those who offer the Oblation ; 
 and only ten years after St. John's depar- 
 ture St. Ignatius speaks of sacrifice as the 
 familiar title for the worship of the Chris- 
 tian Church. 
 
 Thus a fifth value of the Old Testament 
 is its teaching on the unchanging principles 
 of human worship. 
 
 From all these considerations, far as they 
 are from exhausting the subject, we learn the 
 great value of the Old Testament to the 
 
VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 137 
 
 Christian reader. It was the Old Testament 
 of which St. Paul said that it was able to 
 make them wise unto salvation through 
 faith which is in Christ Jesus. 
 
 A real grasp of the different aspects of 
 the New Testament is impossible without 
 a knowledge of the Old. The Sermon on 
 the Mount presupposes it. St. Paul's 
 teaching constantly does the same. The 
 whole drift of the sacrificial and priestly 
 argument in the Epistle to the Hebrews is 
 more or less unintelligible without some 
 knowledge of the Old Testament. Hence 
 we must not cut our Bible in half. The 
 New Testament is hidden in the Old, the 
 Old is revealed in the New. And both are 
 " written for our learning." 
 
SERMON VI. 
 
 THE DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE 
 BIBLE. 
 
 " My study shall be in Thy statutes."— Psa. csix. 48. 
 
 Our purpose throughout has been to con- 
 sider the relationship between the Book 
 and the Society, the Bible and the Church. 
 
 We saw that God's Revelation of Himself 
 to man was entrusted to a Society and 
 recorded in a Book. a We saw that the 
 parts of the New Testament originated in 
 the Church, and that by the Church they 
 were gathered together. 15 We saw that 
 the Church had laid down the general lines 
 for the Book's Interpretation/ We asked 
 of the Church for its idea of what is meant 
 
 ' Serai, i. '' Serai, ii. ' Serin, iii. 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 139 
 
 by the Inspiration of Holy Scripture." 
 We considered the Christian use of the 
 older Testament." And consistently with 
 the principle adopted throughout, which 
 was to ask the Church about the Canon, 
 about their interpretation, about their 
 Inspiration, we come now to ask, what has 
 the Church to teach us about their 
 devotional use ? 
 
 I. 
 
 In the first place, then, the Church reads 
 the Bible every day. Where there is a daily 
 Mattins and Evensong, four chapters of the 
 Holy Scriptures are publicly repeated. 
 Where there is also a daily Eucharist, 
 six passages are daily read. The result is 
 that a very large portion of the entire Bible 
 is read aloud in the services every year. 
 Attendance at the services is not every- 
 where and always possible, but the Church 
 0 Serm. iv. b Serm. v. 
 
140 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 would seem to point as our ideal the 
 reading of the Bible every day. 
 
 " Lord, what love have I unto Thy Law ! 
 All the day long is my study in it," 
 
 said the Psalmist," when he reflected upon 
 the possession of the Law of Moses ; what 
 would he have said had he possessed the four 
 Gospels ? " Able to make thee wise unto 
 salvation through faith in Christ Jesus," 
 said St. Paul b of the Old Testament : in 
 what terms shall the Christian describe the 
 value of the New ? " These things are 
 written that ye might believe that Jesus is 
 the Christ, the Son of C4od," says a writer of 
 a Gospel ; c but to have this effect they 
 must be read. Possession of a Bible is no 
 guarantee for a knowledge of its contents. 
 We draw a favourable contrast between 
 ourselves and another Communion on the 
 ground that we possess the open Book, but 
 we must beware of resting contented with 
 
 n Ps. cxix. " 2 Tim. iii. 15. c St. John xx. 31. 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 141 
 
 its possession without adequate realization 
 of what it contains. The multiplicity of 
 modern literature has a tendency to dis- 
 place the Bible. It is sometimes said, 
 They formerly read the Scriptures, but 
 then they had no daily newspapers. We 
 must also beware of reading books about the 
 Bible in place of reading the Bible itself. 
 No devotional books ever written by the 
 saintliest servant of Jesus Christ can ever 
 be an adequate substitute for the devotional 
 use of the Books which holy men of old 
 wrote as they were moved by the Holy 
 Ghost. The Bible should be read every 
 day. In one of the noblest lives of the 
 nineteenth century, that of Coleridge Pat- 
 teson, we are told how as a schoolboy at 
 Eton he read his Bible every day. It is 
 true that he kept a Shakespeare on the 
 table under which to conceal his Bible 
 should any unwelcome visitor burst into 
 the room : praying at the corners of the 
 
142 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 streets being no temptation to our English 
 reserve. But at any rate he read it, and 
 laid the foundation for that knowledge of 
 Scripture which distinguished him when 
 he became a man. And in the last week 
 of his life we find him reading the Acts 
 of the Apostles daily to the crew on 
 board his vessel in the South Pacific ; 
 until with St. Stephen's dying prayer 
 almost upon his lips he went out himself 
 to meet a martyr's death. I would say 
 to any schoolboy, read your Bible every 
 day. You will be very glad you did so 
 when you become a man. May it then be 
 said of you, as it was said of another, 
 " From a child thou hast known the Holy 
 Scriptures." 
 
 II. 
 
 In the second place, the Church reads 
 the Bible in all its main divisions. 
 
 These main divisions are three — the Old 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 143 
 
 Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New. 
 The Christian value of the Old Testament, 
 as we have already seen, consists chiefly 
 in its doctrine of God, its doctrine of evil, 
 its doctrine of the Deliverer, its description 
 of the paving the way for the Incarnation, 
 its principles of worship. The value of 
 the New Testament will not be challenged 
 by any believer in Jesus Christ. But 
 the value of the Apocrypha has been in 
 practice seriously called in question. 
 
 The omission of the Apocrypha 12 from 
 our copies of the Bible rests on no authority 
 of the Church. It seems, moreover, quite 
 inconsistent with the words of our own Com- 
 munion, that the Church reads them for 
 example of life and instruction of manners. 
 And since the Apocrypha is read in the 
 daily lessons in Church for a month out 
 of every twelve, unless your copy of the 
 Bible contained it you would not be able 
 to follow the Scripture reading of your 
 
144 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 own Communion. Moreover, the omission 
 of the Apocrypha is a serious loss from 
 another point of view, for it is the connect- 
 ing link between the Old Testament and 
 the New. Not to read it is to have our 
 minds a perfect blank on the period 
 between the last of the Prophets and the 
 first of the Evangelists. And for its own 
 sake should the Apocrypha be highly 
 valued. No doubt it contains moral 
 statements which fall far short of the 
 teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 but so does the Old Testament, and this 
 was inevitable in a progressive revelation. 
 But, on the other hand, there is the lesson 
 for St. Luke's Day, " Honour a physician ; " 
 the lesson for All Saints, "Let us now praise 
 famous men;" the Offertory Sentence, "Be 
 merciful after thy power ; " the Benedicite, 
 that hymn of praise for all creation ; — there 
 are passages of proverbial wisdom, like the 
 following rebuke of a shallow character — 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 145 
 
 " The heart of fools is in their mouth, 
 But the mouth of the wise is in their heart ; " a — 
 
 there are the words on the origin of 
 death — 
 
 " God created man to bo immortal, 
 And made him to bo an imago of His own eternity. 
 Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death 
 
 into the world : 
 And they that do hold of his side do find it ; " '' — 
 
 there is the soul-stirring faith of the 
 Maccabees, observed as a festival in the 
 early Church, and upon which many of 
 the saintly writers of Christendom have 
 preached, — 
 
 "They that put their trust in Him shall understand the 
 truth : 
 
 And such as be faithful in love shall abide in Him : 
 For grace and mercy is to His saints, 
 And He hath care for His elect ; " c — 
 
 b Wisd. ii. 23, 24. 
 Wisd. iii. 9. 
 
146 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 or there is the glorious passage on the souls 
 of the righteous — 
 
 " The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, 
 And there shall no torment touch them. 
 In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die : 
 And their departure is taken for misery, 
 And their going from us to be utter destruction : 
 But they are in peace. 
 
 For though they be punished in the sight of men, 
 
 Yet is their hope full of immortality. 
 
 And having been a little chastised, 
 
 They shall be greatly rewarded : 
 
 For God proved them, 
 
 And found them worthy for Himself ; " * 
 
 or there is the following passage from the 
 Book Baruch — 
 
 " Be of good cheer, O my children, cry unto the Lord, 
 And He shall deliver you from the power and hand 
 
 of the enemies. 
 For my hope is in the Everlasting, that He will save 
 
 you; 
 
 And joy is come unto me from the Holy One, 
 Because of the mercy which shall soon come unto 
 
 you from the Everlasting, our Saviour. 
 For I sent you out with wailing and weeping : 
 But God will give you to me again with joy and 
 
 gladness for ever." h 
 
 a Wisd. iii. 1-5. 
 
 " Baruch iv. 21-23. 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 147 
 
 To recall such passages to our memories, 
 is to remind ourselves of the value of the 
 most neglected portion of the Bible. And 
 the Church, by its practice of reading the 
 Apocrypha, as well as the Old Testament 
 and the New, would teach us, as individual 
 believers, to do the same. 
 
 III. 
 
 In the third place, the Church reads all 
 the different writers of the Bible. 
 
 Most individuals have their favourite 
 Apostle or their favourite Evangelist. And 
 this is natural and right ; 43 for, as we saw 
 upon a previous occasion, the Gospels were 
 written for different classes of men, and 
 intended to present different aspects of the 
 peerless Life. There is the Gospel of the 
 promised King; the Gospel of Divine power 
 and activity ; the Gospel of human sym- 
 pathy ; the Gospel of the deepest inner 
 
148 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 truths : and these will naturally appeal 
 differently to different men, according to 
 their temperament or their education. The 
 question, Which is your favourite Gospel? 
 is always an interesting one, and the reply 
 is, to some extent, a revelation of our cha- 
 racter and tendencies. 
 
 But while it is natural to have our 
 favourite authors in the Bible as well as 
 in ordinary literature, yet the exclusive 
 reading of favourite scriptures is unadvis- 
 able ; 44 for, the fact is, that most men are 
 more or less distinctly one-sided. Men 
 often complain of their memory, seldom 
 of their judgment ; yet their memory, of 
 which they complain, is sufficient for prac- 
 tical purposes, while their judgment, of 
 which they do not complain, is exceedingly 
 imperfect — a right judgment in all things 
 being one of the rarest of gifts. Thus, men 
 fail in power of discrimination, and in a 
 sense of proportion. There are truths men 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 149 
 
 like and truths they dislike, truths which 
 appeal to them aud truths that repel, ac- 
 cording to temperament, antecedents, edu- 
 cation, and their own religious experience. 
 Some truths have been brought home to 
 them by their personal needs, for other 
 truths they cannot see the necessity. Hence 
 it is that men read those scriptures in which 
 their favourite truths are contained, while 
 they ignore those scriptures which contain 
 other truths no less important, but to their 
 minds unattractive or even repulsive. It 
 is perfectly amazing how much of the Bible 
 has been, both by individual men and entire 
 schools of thought, passed over in severe 
 silence, just as completely ignored as if it 
 did not exist. 45 
 
 Plainly the remedy for all this one-sided- 
 ness, is to read those scriptures which least 
 appeal to us. 
 
 The Lutheran, familiarized with the doc- 
 trine of justification by faith, ought to put 
 
150 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 himself to school in the Epistle of St. 
 James, there to read the correlative doctrine 
 of justification by works. Only he must 
 not read it as Luther did, with expressions 
 of impatience and contempt, but with a 
 submissive and teachable mind, prepared to 
 broaden out his ideas to the fulness of 
 the Scriptures, rather than to reduce the 
 Scriptures to the limits of his ideas. 
 
 The Nonconformist, clearly seeing the 
 individual aspect of Christianity, that re- 
 ligion consists in personal relationship with 
 our Lord, ought to study carefully the pas- 
 toral epistles, to grasp the social aspect of 
 the faith. Only he must not read them, as 
 has recently been done, to say that, since 
 they deal with organization, they are un- 
 inspired ; rather he must strive to grasp 
 both aspects of the truth, and to see that, 
 while union with God is the purpose of 
 religion, yet religion is advanced through 
 the ministration of our fellow-men. 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 151 
 
 Similarly the Puritan ought to study- 
 reverently the details of the ceremonial 
 law, to learn thoroughly the importance of 
 the outward expression of our worship : 
 while the Ritualist ought to read the 
 evangelical prophets in order to realize 
 more profoundly the utter worthlessness of 
 external accuracy if parted from the offering 
 of the inner self. 
 
 And, in fact, all men require instruction 
 in uncongenial truths. " If I knew an un- 
 popular truth, I should proclaim it," says a 
 French writer. That is easily done. The 
 difficulty is to get people to read uncon- 
 genial truths for themselves. We are, then, 
 to correct the onesided tendencies of our 
 imperfect nature hy reading the Scripture 
 truths we care for less, rather than those we 
 love. 
 
 Is your favourite Gospel St. Luke ? 
 Read St. John. Is it St. John's Epistle 
 which attracts you most? Read St. Paul. 
 
152 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 In this way we broaden out beyond our 
 narrow limitations. 
 
 We have been sometimes told that the 
 history of Christianity falls into three ages : 
 the age of St. Peter, that of authority, 
 extending from the first to the Reforma- 
 tion; the age of St. Paul, that of justification 
 by faith, extending from the Reformation 
 down to now ; the age of St. John, that 
 of love, which is to be the characteristic of 
 the Church of the future. Now, this theory 
 is a crucial instance of that lamentable 
 onesidedness which it is the purpose of the 
 Church to correct. Authority, and faith, 
 and love are simultaneous, not successive, 
 truths. They are not heirs, but partners ; 
 they must not follow the one upon the 
 other's decease, rather must they co-exist. 
 The Church must present them all together 
 blended in their due proportion, and nothing 
 else than this would be Christianity. And 
 the example of the Church is here our 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 153 
 
 correction. For the Church has no favourite 
 Apostle, no favourite Evangelist. She reads 
 impartially St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In the fourth place, the Church reads the 
 Books consecutively. 
 
 The Church takes a Gospel and reads it 
 through, chapter after chapter, day by day, 
 from beginning to end. 
 
 And this, surely, was the purpose for 
 which they were originally written. The 
 comparison of Gospel with Gospel, and the 
 harmonizing different passages has great 
 value ; but a Gospel was originally intended 
 to be read for its own sake, by itself. And, 
 certainly, only when read consecutively can 
 its special aspect be understood. 
 
 In perfect keeping with this, we find 
 that many of the greatest teachers in 
 Christendom would preach systematically 
 
154 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 on entire books of the Bible. Many of the 
 sermons of St. John Chrysostom consist of 
 expository lectures on the Gospels, Acts, 
 and Epistles of St. Paul. And we can well 
 understand that under such a system the 
 contents of the Scriptures would be widely 
 known among the people. 
 
 The systematic study of the Scriptures 
 is the lesson which the Church would here 
 impress upon us. 
 
 V. 
 
 Fifthly, the Church reads selected passages 
 of the Bible. 
 
 It takes a few verses for the Epistle and 
 Gospel for the day, and it repeats those 
 passages at the daily Eucharist for a week, 
 thereby suggesting to us another most im- 
 portant use of the Holy Scriptures, which 
 is repeated reflection upon its words. 
 
 Careful reflection upon the sacred words 
 is most essential ; for the truth which they 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 155 
 
 contain is great, and cannot readily, all at 
 once, in its fulness, without an effort be 
 made our own. Consider, for instance, the 
 following: "The Son of God, Who loved 
 me, and gave Himself for me." These 
 words will probably mean widely different 
 things to different individuals in any as- 
 sembly of human beings. To some they 
 will sound only as the far-off utterance 
 of another man's fervid faith, to others 
 as rather suggesting what we ought to feel 
 than what actually represents our state of 
 mind ; to others they will be as deep an- 
 swering to deep — the deep of the Word of 
 God to the deep of human need. Why the 
 difference? Surely because some are con- 
 tent with a conventional hearing, while 
 others take the words into solemn and 
 earnest reflection. 
 
 No great truth was ever appropriated 
 by a human being without a very definite 
 effort of the will. Truths of the material 
 
156 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 order need to be realized before they are 
 made our own. The vastness of the starry 
 spheres is certainly not grasped without 
 concentration and effort. And if that be 
 the case with truths of nature, much more 
 is it so with truths of the spiritual and 
 celestial order. We must fix our minds 
 upon them ; we must give ourselves up 
 to them. And in no other way can they 
 be really appropriated and made our own. 
 
 We read in the lives of the saints how 
 some of the best disciples of the faith woidd 
 take some brief sentence of the Holy Writ- 
 ings, and go out into the fields or into the 
 woods, and there, hour after hour, reflect 
 upon the mystery of their meaning ; and at 
 the close did not dream for a moment that 
 they had seen into half the depth which the 
 wondrous words of inspiration contained. 46 
 
 Your own experience will endorse it, that 
 careful and prayerful meditation upon the 
 Holy Scriptures marvellously clears the 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 157 
 
 depth of meaning. The conditions of our 
 modern life render such quiet reflection 
 difficult. Yet we, too, can sometimes take 
 the sacred sentences into our companion- 
 ship when we walk by the way. 
 
 And although the Scriptures have a 
 marvellous power, even for the worldly- 
 minded, yet their special force is reserved 
 for those who most reflect upon them. 
 When we have read the Bible at the bed- 
 side of the dying, we know that this power 
 for comfort and support is in proportion 
 to the use which has been made of them 
 in the habits of the previous life. "To 
 him that hath shall be given," and it is 
 nowhere more verified than in the reverent 
 habitual reader of the Oracles of God. 
 
 VI. 
 
 And, finally, the Church repeats the Bible 
 as an act of praise. 
 
158 THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 Chiefly in the Psalms. It is wonderful 
 how the Psalms provide for the changeful 
 moods of human life. There are psalms of 
 youth : — 
 
 "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? 
 Even by ruling himself after Thy word." 
 
 There are psalms of age : — 
 
 " I have been young, and now am old ; 
 Yet saw I never the righteous forsaken." 
 
 There are psalms of marriage, psalms of 
 childhood, psalms of sickness, psalms of 
 recovery, psalms of penitence and psalms 
 of praise, psalms of despondency and psalms 
 of joy, psalms of lamentation, psalms for 
 the burial of the dead. 
 
 Every phase of human life may find in 
 the Psalms its appropriate, its adequate 
 expression. Holy Scripture is suitable to 
 each phase of human life : it is no less 
 suitable to every class of human character. 
 It may be said that the great and the small 
 are there, and the Lord is the maker of 
 
DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE. 159 
 
 them both. Learned and simple alike 
 hear voices from the Psalms, and under- 
 stand them. 
 
 " All beasts of the field drink thereof : 
 And the wild asses quench their thirst." 
 
 Nor is it less marvellous to note the 
 spiritual appeal to the varying needs of 
 the individual soul in the psalms for the 
 day. Certainly the psalms come home to 
 us with penetrating power. More especially 
 is this the case when approached with a 
 ready mind, when we say, " Speak ! for Thy 
 servant heareth," or, " I will hear what 
 the Lord God will say concerning me." 
 To the religious mind which trains itself 
 to a spiritual use of these psalms, they 
 will constantly come home with a living 
 reality, with searching question, with soul- 
 piercing cry, with pathetic entreaty, with 
 solemn denunciation, with earuest warning, 
 with language of counsel, rebuke, or sym- 
 pathy. Some thrilling sentence finds us 
 
i6o THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 out, invades and disturbs our miserable 
 self-content, or brings us the sweet promise 
 of future peace. Sometimes they seem to 
 say, " Come up hither," as in some mag- 
 nificent outburst of praise the psalm ascends 
 to the very throne of the uncreated God, 
 and we falteringly attempt to echo the 
 words and creep after the eagle flight as 
 best we may, while it shames one's earth- 
 liness and gives the ideal of what human 
 adoration, by the grace of God, might be. 
 
 These are a few of the devotional uses 
 which the Church has made of the Bible. 
 And in following the guidance of the world- 
 wide Church, we are liberated from our 
 natural onesidedness and partialities. In 
 accordance with the Church's mind we 
 know that we must be right. Upon these 
 lines, then, we take the practical outcome 
 of our subject — " My study shall be in Thy 
 statutes." 
 
NOTES. 
 
 NOTES TO SERMON I. 
 
 1, page 3. Cf. Auberlen, "The Divine Revelation," 
 p. 147. 
 
 2, p. 8. Cf. an able description in Quinet, " Le Ge'nie 
 des Religions." 
 
 3, p. 9. Cf. Sanday's Bampton Lectures ; Wordsworth, 
 " Inspiration of Holy Scripture." 
 
 4, p. 11. Progressive Revelation : cf. Mozley, " Ruling 
 Ideas." 
 
 5, p. 12. Perowne, " Hulsean Lectures on Immortality." 
 
 6, p. 13. Cf. Hutton's " Theological Essays." 
 
 7, p. 16. On the finality of the Christian Revelation, 
 cf. St. Vincent of Lerins. 
 
 " What is meant by ' Keep that which is entrusted to 
 thy charge 1 ' Keep it (quoth lie) for fear of thieves, 
 for danger of enemies, lest when men be asleep, they 
 oversow tares among that good seed of wheat, which 
 the Son of man hath sowed in his field. ' Keep ' (quoth 
 he) ' that which is entrusted to thy charge.' What is 
 meant by this 'Keep that which is entrusted to thy 
 charge ' ? that is, that which is committed to thee, not 
 that which is invented of thee : that which thou hast 
 received, not that which thou hast devised ; a thing not 
 of wit, but of learning; not of private assumption, but 
 of public tradition ; a thing brought to thee, not brought 
 U 
 
[62 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 forth of thee ; wherein thou must not be an author, but 
 a keeper ; not a beginner, but a follower ; not a leader, 
 but an observer. ' Keep that which is entrusted to thy 
 charge.' Preserve the talent of the Catholic faith safe 
 and undiminished ; that which is committed to thee, let 
 that remain with thee, and that deliver. Thou hast 
 received gold, render then gold ; I will not have one 
 thing for another ; do not for gold render either impu- 
 dently lead, or craftily brass ; I will not the show, but 
 the very nature of gold itself. O Timothy, O Priest, 
 O Teacher, O Doctor, if God's gift hath made thee meet 
 and sufficient for thy wit, exercise, and learning, be the 
 Besaleel of the spiritual tabernacle, engrave the precious 
 stones of God's doctrine, faithfully set them, wisely adorn 
 them, give them brightness, give them grace, give them 
 beauty. That which men before believed obscurely, let 
 them by thy exposition understand more clearly. Let 
 posterity rejoice for coming to the understanding of that 
 by thy means, which antiquity without that under- 
 standing had in veneration. Yet for all this, in such 
 sort deliver the same things which thou hast learned, 
 that albeit thou teachest after a new manner, yet thou 
 never teach new things. 
 
 " But peradveuture some will say, ' Shall we then have 
 no advancement of religion in the Church of Christ?' 
 Surely let us have the greatest that may be. For who 
 is either so envious cf men, or hateful of God, which 
 would labour to hinder that ? but yet in such sort that 
 it may be truly an increase in faith, and not a change : 
 since this is the nature of an increase, that in themselves 
 severally things grow greater; but of a change, that 
 something be turned, from one thing which it was. to 
 
NOTES. 
 
 163 
 
 another which it was not. Pitting it is, therefore, that 
 the understanding, knowledge, and wisdom, as well of 
 every man in particular, as of all in common, as well 
 of one alone, as of the whole Church in general, should 
 by the advance of ages abundantly increase and go 
 forward, but yet for all that, only iu its own kind and 
 nature ; that is, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, 
 in the same j adgment " (St. Vincent of Lerins, pp. 62-64). 
 
 8, p. 17. Promises to the Church are conditional : cf. 
 Gore, "Mission of the Church." 
 
 9, p. 19. For Roman teaching on the subject of restrict- 
 ing the faithful from reading the Scriptures, cf. Hurter's 
 " Compendium." 
 
 10, p. 19. Cf. Gore, "Lux Mundi," and "Mission of 
 the Church." 
 
 11, p. 20. On the result of separating the work of the 
 Holy Spirit in Scripture from His work in the Church, 
 see "Lux Mundi," p. 340; Coleridge, " Remains," iii. 
 93, iv. 118; Hare, "Mission of the Comforter," ii. 468. 
 
 "God will not lead and instruct men by the 
 Scriptures alone ; He employs also His Spirit and the 
 Church: therefore He has given His word in a form 
 which can be sufficient to lead into all truth only in 
 connection with the other guides. 
 
 " The Scriptures alone, without the Spirit, would not 
 be a sufficient guide ; but, again, the Spirit and His 
 inward illumination, without the Scriptures, would be 
 insufficient to preserve from error " (quoted in Auberlen, 
 " The Divine Revelation," p. 247). 
 
 Historically the Church precedes the Bible. Pflei- 
 derer represents Lessing as saying — 
 
 "Die Bibel ist nicht das Cliristenthum, denn das 
 
i6 4 NOTES. 
 
 Christenthum bestand schon lange, ehe es eine Bibel 
 gab; es wurde Jahrhunderte hindurch nicht durch 
 Schrift, sondern durch miindliche Mittheilung verbreitet, 
 und fiir die ganze alte Kirche gait nicht die Bibel, 
 sondern die sogenannte ' Glaubensregel.' dieser sum- 
 marische Inbegriff der kirchlichen TraditioD, als die 
 hochste dogmatische Autorit'at und Instanz bei Glau- 
 bensstreitigkeiten " (Otto Pfleiderer, " Religionsphilo- 
 sophie," pp. 5, 6). 
 
 Historically the Church precedes the New Testament : 
 "We are not arguing for this, and saying that this 
 ought to have been ; but that it actually was, and is. 
 In point of fact, Christianity in no sense first sprang from 
 the documents of the New Testament, but they from it, 
 just as the Law of Moses had been 430 years later than 
 the Religion of Abraham (Gal. iii. 1 7). The Baptising, 
 the Liturgy, the different Orders, the Laying on of Hands 
 in several ways, the Doctrine, the Discipline, the Ex- 
 communications, the Lord's Day, the Membership of 
 Infants, Exomologesis, Prayer, the entire Christianity 
 came into being quite apart from St. Matthew's Gospel, 
 or St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, or the Revelation 
 of St. John " (William J. Irons, D.D., " The Bible and 
 its Interpreters," p. 151). 
 
 NOTES TO SERMON H. 
 
 12, p. 26. Cf. Bishop Westcott on the Canon. 
 
 13, p. 28. On our Lord's preparing for the founding 
 of His Church, see Scott-Holland, "Creed and Cha- 
 racter; " Gore, "Church and Ministry." 
 
NOTES. 
 
 14, p. 28. Cf. Scott-Holland, " Creed and Character ; " 
 Gore, " Mission of the Church;" Bruce, "Training of 
 the Twelve." 
 
 15, p. 30. Cf. Dr. Liddon's " Bampton Lectures." 
 
 16, p. 31. Cf. Moberly, " The Great Forty Days." 
 
 17, p. 33. On the Divine character of the visible 
 Church, cf. Gore, "Mission of the Church." 
 
 18, p. 35. The origin of the Books has been admirably 
 described by Bougaud, " Le Christianisme et les Temps 
 Presents," torn. ii. ; see also Bishop Westcott, " Introduc- 
 tion to the Gospels." 
 
 19, p. 43. Cf. Browning, " A Death in the Desert ; " 
 Scott-Holland, " Creed and Character," serm. i. 
 
 20, p. 46. On the value of the Books as enhanced by 
 Apostles' departure, cf. Bishop Lightfoot on Revision. 
 
 21, p. 49. On the reception of the Books on the Church's 
 authority, see Archbishop Laud, "Conference with 
 Fisher;" Hooker; Lee on Inspiration. 
 
 " There must be therefore some former knowledgo 
 presupposed which doth herein assure the hearts of 
 all believers. 
 
 " Scripture teacheth us that saving truth which God 
 hath discovered unto the world by revelation, and it 
 presumeth us taught othericise that itself is Divine and 
 tacred. . . . And by experience wo all know that the 
 first outward motive leading men so to esteem of the 
 Scriptures is the authority of God's Church " (Hooker, 
 III. viii. 13, 14). 
 
 "We all believe that the Scriptures of God are 
 sacred, and that they have proceeded from God ; . . . 
 But it is not the word of God which doth or possibly can 
 aisure us, that ice do well to think it His word. For if 
 
i66 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 any one book of Scripture did give testimony to all, yet 
 still that Scripture which giveth credit to the rest 
 would require another Scripture to give credit unto it, 
 neither could we ever come unto auy pause whereon to 
 rest our assurance this way ; so that unlets betide 
 Scripture there were something which might assure us 
 that we do well, we could not think we do well, no, not 
 in being assured that Scripture is a sacred and holy 
 rule of well-doing " (Hooker, EL iv. 2). 
 
 " For my part I should not believe the Gospel except 
 as moved by the authority of the Church." 
 
 "It was on the testimony of the Catholics that I 
 believed the Gospel " (" St. Augustine's reply to Mani- 
 chffius," ch. v.). 
 
 NOTES TO SERMON HI. 
 
 22, p. 54. On the general subject of the Church as 
 Interpreter of the Bible, cf. St. Vincent of Lerins, 
 " Against Heresy ; " Tertullian. 
 
 " Indeed with regard to both Testaments, I consider 
 oral and catechismal instruction as the preparative 
 provided by Christ Himself in the establishment of a 
 visible Church'' (Coleridge, "Confession of an Inquir- 
 ing Spirit," p. 67). 
 
 23, p. 55. On the difficulty of the Bible, cf. Newman, 
 "Lectures on Justification," p. 131. 
 
 24, p. 56. Unsystematic character of the New Tesfa- 
 ment : " And this supposition [the value of the Church] 
 is further borne out by the very structure of the sacred 
 writings themselves, especially of the Epistles, which 
 
NOTES. 
 
 l6 7 
 
 were actually addressed, and bear the mark of being 
 adapted to those who had already been instructed iu 
 the principles of the Christian faith. They are com- 
 posed in an unsystematic manner, especially ill-suited 
 to minds unacquainted with the outlines of that doctrine 
 which they treat of; fundamental tenets and inferences 
 are mixed together, and many portions of them are 
 designed to supplement, or correct, or limit what had 
 been before communicated. Nor were the sacred writings 
 intended to supersede, even afterwards, other concurrent 
 and authoi itutive teaching ; since, at a later period, when 
 the apostolic Epistles were nearly all composed, and 
 were probably iu circulation, a succession of ministers 
 was still provided for the very purpose of teaching " 
 (Grant, " Bampton Lectures on Missions " [1843], p. 90). 
 
 " Thus, in fact, the Apostolic writings were written, 
 as occasion required, within the Church, and for the 
 Church. They presuppose membership in, and famili- 
 arity with its tradition. They are secondary, not primary 
 instructors ; for edification, not for initiation " (Gore, in 
 " Lux Mundi," p. 339). 
 
 Occasional character of Scripture : " The several 
 books of Scripture having had each some several 
 occasion and particular purpose which caused them 
 to bo written, the contents thereof are according to tho 
 exigence of that special end whereunto they are 
 intended " (Hooker, I. xiv. 3). 
 
 25, p. 58. This is Chillingworth's statement. 
 
 26, p. 61. On the purpose of the Writers, cf. Gore, in 
 " Lux Mundi." 
 
 27, p. 65. The Scriptures themselves refer the believer 
 to the preaching already received by the Church ; cf. — 
 
i68 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 Kom. xvi. 17. "Contrary to the doctrine which ye 
 
 have learned." 
 1 Cor. vii. 17. " And bo ordain I in all Churches." 
 „ xi. 23. "That which also I delivered unto you." 
 
 1 Cor. xv. 1. " The Gospel which I preached unto 
 
 you, which also ye have received, 
 and wherein ye stand." 
 Phil. iv. 9. "Those things which ye have both 
 learned and received and heard 
 and seen in me, do." 
 Col. ii. 7. " Established in the Faith as ye hare 
 been taught." 
 
 1 Thess. iv. 2. " For ye know what charge we gave 
 you through the Lord Jesus." 
 2 Thess. ii. 15. " Stand fast and hold the traditions 
 which ye have been taught, 
 whether by word or our Epistle." 
 
 2 Tim. ii. 2. " And the things which thou hast 
 
 heard from me among many wit- 
 nesses, the same commit thou to 
 faithful men, who shall be able 
 to teach others also." 
 28, p. 70. This argument was employed as far back as 
 the third century by the African writer Tertullian. 
 
 " But I shall not regret to subjoin to my interpreta- 
 tions, also, for your benefit, whatsoever I have at any 
 time accurately ascertained and treasured up in my 
 memory, as I have received it from the elders, and have 
 recorded it in order to give additional confirmation to 
 the truth, by my testimony. For I have never, like 
 many, delighted to hear those that tell many things, 
 but those that teach the truth ; neither those that record 
 
NOTES 
 
 169 
 
 foreign precepts, but those that are given from the 
 Lord, to our faith, and that came from the truth itself. 
 But if I met with any one who had been a follower of 
 the elders anywhere, I made it a point to inquire what 
 were the declarations of the elders. What was said by 
 Andrew, Peter, or Philip ? What by Thomas, James, 
 John, Matthew, or any other of the disciples of our 
 Lord ? What was said by Aristion, and the presbyter 
 John, disciples of the Lord ? For I do not think that I 
 derived so much benefit from books as from the living 
 voice of those that are still surviving" (Papias, quoted 
 in Eusebius, Eccles. Hist., iii. 39). 
 
 29, p. 73. Internal State of the Church in the third 
 century: "Instead of enthusiastic independent Chris- 
 tians, we find a new literature of revelation, the New 
 Testament and Christian priests. When did these 
 formations begin ? How and by what influence was the 
 living faith transformed into the creed to be believed, 
 the surrender to Christ into a philosophic Christianity, 
 the Holy Church into the Corpus permixtum, the glow- 
 ing hope of the Kingdom of Heaven into a doctrine 
 of immortality and deification, prophecy into a learned 
 exegesis and theological science . . . the formal prayers 
 into a solemn ritual . . . ? 
 
 There can be no doubt about the answer : these for- 
 mations are as old in their origin as the detachment of 
 the Gospel from the Jewish Church. A religious faith 
 which seeks to establish a communion of its own in 
 opposition to another, is compelled to borrow from that 
 other what it needs. Even the holiest must clothe 
 itself in the same existing earthly forms as the profane, 
 if it wishes to found on earth a confederacy which is to 
 
170 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 take the place of another " (Hamack, " Hifltory of 
 Dogma," i. 45, 46). 
 
 30, p. 75. " The Scriptures are given, not to the indi- 
 vidual but to the community of the faithful, the Body of 
 Christ, of which the individual is only one member" 
 (Auberlen, "The Divine Revelation," p. 397). 
 
 "... Tu in eos Libros, qui quoque modo se habeant, 
 sancti tamen divinarumque rerum pleni, prope totius 
 generis humani confessione diffamantur,«'ne duce irruis, 
 et de his sine prxceptore audes ferre senientiam ; nec si 
 tibi aliqua occurrunt qu* videantur absurda, tarditatem 
 tuam et putrefactum tabe hujus mundi animum, qualia 
 omnium stultorum est, accusas potius, quam eos qui 
 fortasse a talibus intelligi nequeunt ! " (St. Augustine, 
 *' De Utilitate Credendi," vol. viii. 112). 
 
 Interpretation : " The Bible, directly we become 
 acquainted with it, strikes us as a book different from all 
 others. It challenges and fixes attention. We feel it, and 
 can understand it but imperfectly. Something more than 
 itself seems actually needed, and always to have been 
 had for its interpretation. The Bible is a fact hard to 
 explain, both as to its origin and its contents. The 
 Tradition companyiDg the Bible is no less a fact, and 
 we all, in various degrees, use it. It is a life and a 
 light, the possession or enjoyment of which in no way 
 depends on our analysis of it. The light is reflected 
 from a thousand objects all around : it softens off into 
 twilight here, and it brightens there ; it is mysterious 
 everywhere ; the cross-lights may sometimes seem con- 
 fusing, and the colours many. To ask, however, for a 
 philosophy of it, or an exact history of it, or a record that 
 mijjht be tested, is to ask for a literature in lieu of a 
 
NOTES. 
 
 171 
 
 vital agency. That this Life and Light are in the 
 Church, is but a further statement of the same fact. 
 
 " Nor may we here omit to reassert, that all Christians 
 have, or try to practice, a way of reading the Sacred 
 Scriptures with other light thrown on them. Apostles 
 and Apostolic men, saints, martyrs, doctors, and fathers 
 accept naturally this method. Barnabas, the two 
 Clements, Origen, Jerome, the Gregories, Augustine, 
 Basil — why continue the list? — we should have to 
 enumerate all, even to the present day. It is every- 
 where still. ... It is even painfully copied by the 
 Puritans themselves, when near enough to the Church 
 to be so far influenced. None, we find at length, are 
 really going on in Religion by the letter of Scripture " 
 (Irons, "The Bible and its Interpreters," pp. 128, 129). 
 
 31, p. 77. See Bishop Beveridge on Article XX.,Works, 
 vii. p. 379, and the following passages from Hooker, 
 Dr. Pusey's " Letter to Bishop of Oxford," aud Gibson 
 on the Thirty-nine Articles. 
 
 The sense in which " Scripture contains all things 
 necessary to salvation:" "Although the Scripture 
 of God therefore be stored with infinite variety of 
 matter in all kinds, although it abound with all 
 sorts of laws, yet the principal intent of Scripture 
 is to deliver the laws of duties supernatural. Often- 
 times it hath been in very solemn manner disputed, 
 whether all things necessary unto salvation be neces- 
 sarily set down in the Holy Scriptures or no. If we 
 define that necessary unto salvation, whereby the way 
 to salvation is in any sort made more plain, apparent, and 
 easy to be known ; then is th( re no part of true philo- 
 sophy, no art of account, no kind of science rightly so 
 
I 7 2 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 called but the Scripture must contain it. If only those 
 things be necessary, as surely none else are, without the 
 knowledge and practice whereof it is not the will and 
 pleasure of God to make any ordinary grant of salvation ; 
 it may be, notwithstanding and oftentimes hath been 
 demanded, how the books of Holy Scripture contain in 
 them all necessary things, when of things necessary the 
 very chiefest is to know what books we are bound to 
 esteem holy ; which point is confessed impossible for the 
 Scripture itself to teach. Whereunto we may answer 
 with truth, that there is not in the world any art or 
 science, which, proposing unto itself an end (as every one 
 doth some end or other), hath been therefore thought 
 defective, if it have not delivered simply whatsoever is 
 needful to the same end; but all kinds of knowledge 
 have their certain bounds and limits ; each of them pre- 
 supposeth many necessary things learned in other 
 sciences and known beforehand. He that should take 
 upon him to teach men how to be eloquent in pleading 
 causes, must needs deliver unto them whatsoever 
 precepts are requisite unto that end ; otherwise he doth 
 not the thing which he taketh upon him. Seeing then 
 no man can plead eloquently unless he be- able first to 
 speak ; it followeth that ability of speech is in this case 
 a thing most necessary. Notwithstanding every man 
 would think it ridiculous, that he which undertaketh by 
 writing to instruct an orator should therefore deliver 
 all the precepts of grammar ; because his profession is 
 to deliver precepts necessary unto eloquent speech, yet 
 so that they which are to receive them be taught before- 
 hand so much of that which is thereunto necessary, as 
 comprehendeth the skill of speaking. In like sort, 
 
NOTES. 
 
 albeit Scripture do profess to contain in it all things 
 that are necessary unto salvation; yet the meaning 
 cannot be simply of all things which are necessary, but 
 all things that are necessary in some certain kind or 
 form ; as all things which are necessary, and either 
 could not at all, or could not easily be known by the 
 light of natural discourse ; all things which are necessary 
 to be known that we maybe saved, but known with pre- 
 supposal of knowledge concerning certain principles 
 whereof it receiveth us already persuaded, and then 
 instructeth us in all the residue that are necessary. In 
 the number of these principles one is the sacred authority 
 of Scripture. Being therefore persuaded by other means 
 that these Scriptures are the oracles of God, themselves 
 do then teach us the rest, and lay before us all the 
 duties whioh God requireth at our hands as necessary 
 unto salvation " (Hooker, L xiv.). 
 
 " ' The Church has authority in controversies of Faith.' 
 The Church is subject to Holy Scripture, but set over 
 individuals ; she may not (1) ' expound one place of 
 Holy Scripture that it be repugnant to another,' nor 
 may she (2) ' decree anything against Holy Writ,' nor 
 may she (3) 'besides the same, enforce anything to be 
 believed for necessity of salvation ; ' but then the very 
 fixing of these limits of her power shows that she has 
 power within these limits ; that she is the ' expositor of 
 Holy Writ,' provided she do 'not expound one place 
 that it be repugnant to another ; ' she may ' decree 
 things ' provided they be not ' against Holy Writ ; ' 
 she may 'enforce things to be believed,' even 'for 
 necessity of salvation,' provided they be neither 
 ' against, nor besides, Holy Scripture.' But the power 
 
74 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 of 'expounding,' 'decreeing,' 'ordaining,' implies 
 that her children are to receive her expositions, and 
 ohey her decrees, and accept her authority in con- 
 troversies of faitb, and the appeal lies not to their 
 ' private judgment ; ' they are not the arbiters, whether 
 she pronounce rightly or no ; for what sort of decree or 
 authority were that, of which every one were first to 
 judge, and then if his judgment coincided with the law, 
 to obey? who would not see the absurdity of this in 
 matters of human judgment ? ' If thou judge the law, 
 thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge.' 
 
 " But our Church in this article further and accurately 
 defines the nature of her authority ; the Church is a 
 1 keeper and witness of Holy Writ ; ' she is its guardian , 
 it is from her that we know of what books the Canon of 
 Scripture consists: she is the 'witness' to the truths 
 which it contains ; not a ' judge ' over it, not having to 
 determine new truth, or erect new articles of faith; but 
 a witness to the doctrine which she herself received in 
 continued succession from the primitive Church, as being 
 contained in Holy Scripture" (Pusey, "Letter to the 
 Bishop of Oxford "). 
 
 The Church is the ordained teacher of truth : " To 
 make Scripture, in the first instance, the teacher, is 
 entirely to mistake its true office and function. The 
 Gospels were written, not to convert unbelievers, but 
 that those who had been already orally instructed (i.e. 
 who had received the teaching of the Church) might 
 know the certainty of those things which they had been 
 taught. 1 So, also, the Epistles were addressed to 
 
 See Luke i. 1-4. 
 
75 
 
 regularly organized Churches, and were written to con- 
 firm those who had previously received apostolic teach- 
 ing. Indeed, it is everywhere the case that ' the Bible 
 assumes the existence of a living instructor in the truth, 
 who will indoctrinate us into the rudiments of it, and 
 refer us to the Scriptures themselves for the proof of 
 what he teaches. If the instructor is dispensed with, 
 and the disciple thrown back merely on the Bible and 
 his natural faculties, he will be very liable to stumble, 
 and almost certain to do so as regards those more recon- 
 dite definitions of doctrine which the Church's ex- 
 perience of heresies has shown her to be necessary, 
 and has taught her to make.' 1 These offices of ' the 
 Church to teach, the Bible to prove,' may be illustrated 
 from the incident recorded in Acts viii. 26-40. The 
 Ethiopian eunuch was ' sitting in his chariot, and was 
 reading the prophet Isaiah.' He was, then, in posses- 
 sion of the Scriptures, and, according to the rather 
 foolish saying, ' The Bible, and the Bible only, is the 
 religion of Protestants,' these ought to have been 
 sufficient for him. But plainly they were not ; for, in 
 answer to Philip's question, ' Understandebt thou what 
 thou readest ? ' the answer is returned, ' How can I, 
 except some man should guide me ? ' and this is fol- 
 lowed by the further question, ' Of whom speaketh the 
 prophet this? Of himself, or of some other?' Some- 
 thing more was needed than the possession of the 
 Scriptures, and that something was supplied by Philip, 
 the representative of the ecclesia docens, who ' opened 
 his mouth, and, beginning from the Scripture, preached 
 
 Goulburn, " Holy Catholic Church," p. 294. 
 
i 7 6 
 
 unto him Jesus.' Here we see the Church at work, and 
 the right method to he followed, as it is seen through- 
 out the Acts of the Apostles, where we everywhere find 
 them stating the facts, and teaching with authority, 
 while they prove their statements from the Scriptures, 
 and refer their hearers to these as confirming them. 1 
 And if this method was employed when only the Old 
 Testament was in existence, it seems natural to suppose 
 that much more should it be followed now, when the 
 fuller revelation is also committed to writing " 1 (E. C. S. 
 Gibson, " The Thirty-nine Articles," vol. ii. pp. 527, 528). 
 
 32, p. 78. " Here some men perhaps may ask, seeing the 
 Canon of the Scripture is perfect, and most abundantly 
 of itself sufficient for all things, what need we join 
 unto it the authority of the Church's understanding 
 and interpretation ? The reason is this ; because the 
 Scripture being of itself so deep and profound, all men 
 do not understand it in one and the same sense, but 
 diverse men diversely, this man and that man, this 
 way and that way, expound and interpret the sayings 
 thereof, so that, to one's thinking, so many men, so 
 many opinions almost may be gathered out of them " 
 (St. Vincent of Lerins, " Against Heresy," ch. ii.). 
 
 33, p. 82. Mentioning the assertion that " the Bible 
 is the only religious bond of union and ground of unity 
 among Protestants, and the like," Coleridge replies: "For 
 the confutation of this .whole reasoning, it might be 
 sufficient to ask : Has it produced these effects ? Would 
 
 1 See Acts ii. 14-36; iii. 12-26; xiii. 16-42; xvii. 2, 
 3, 11 ; xviii. 28. 
 
 4 See on this subject, Gore's " Koman Catholic Claims," 
 chs. iii. and iv. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 177 
 
 not the contrary statement be nearer to the fact ? What 
 did the Churches of the first four centuries hold on this 
 point 1 To what did they attribute the rise and multi- 
 plication of heresies? Can any learned and candid 
 Protestant affirm that there existed and exists no 
 ground for the charges of Bossuet and other eminent 
 Romish divines ? . . . 
 
 " The Bible is the appointed conservatory, an indis- 
 pensable criterion, and a continual source and support 
 of true Belief. But that the Bible is the solo source ; 
 that it not only contains, but constitutes, the Christian 
 Religion ; that it is, in short, a Creed, consisting wholly 
 of articles of Faith : that consequently we need no rule, 
 help, or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what 
 parts are and what are not articles of Faith— all being 
 such, — and the difference between the Bible and the 
 Creed being this, that the clauses of the latter are all 
 unconditionally necessary to salvation, but those of the 
 former conditionally so (that is, as soon as the words are 
 known to exist in any one of the canonical books), and 
 that, under this limitation, the belief is of the same 
 necessity in both, and not at all affected by the greater 
 or lesser importance of the matter to be believed ; — this 
 scheme differs widely from the preceding, though its 
 adherents often make use of the same words in ex- 
 pressing their belief. And this latter scheme, I assert, 
 was brought into currency by and in favour of those by 
 whom the operation of grace, the aids of the Spirit, the 
 necessity of regeneration, the corruption of our nature, 
 in short, all the peculiar and spiritual mysteries of tho 
 Gospel were explained and diluted away " (S. T. Cole- 
 ridge, " Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit," pp. 52-55)- 
 N 
 
178 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 NOTES TO SERMON IV. 
 
 34, p. 85. On the general subject of Inspiration, see 
 Bishop Westcott on the Canon ; Lee on Inspiration of 
 Holy Scripture ; Giffard on the Prophets ; Auberlen, 
 " The Divine Revelation." 
 
 Individual feeling no test of Scripture : " There 
 is, however, one more resort of the popular theorist 
 whose course we are now following to the end. 
 Baffled in the pretence of ' free thought,' and detected 
 in the evasions on ' common ground,' he has recourse to 
 his feelings. ' Say what you will about difficulties,' he 
 now alleges, ' I find this blessed Bible to be a 6acred 
 guide to me. Am I to doubt that Truth which it 
 conveys and certifies to my soul and conscience ? ' 
 Again, however, our inquirer is wrong. Who has asked 
 him to dispute such felt truth 1 Our investigation has 
 been of a different kind, viz. concerning his proving for 
 himself the correctness of the text of Scripture. If he 
 does not want to know that, let him say so. His feelings 
 about any truth will not establish the accuracy of any 
 page or line of the Pentateuch, or Isaiah, or Daniel. To 
 say that Revelation is thus made to the individual, is to 
 appeal to the ' verifying faculty ' without reserve, and 
 give up the Bible. If his consciousness of a Truth 
 proves to him that a book which contains it is inspired, 
 will he adhere to that view whenever any book tells him 
 what he believes to be true ? And will he deny the 
 inspiration of any part of a sacred book that he does not 
 thus feel ? If he does (as some do not) feel the deep 
 truth of the Book of Esther, or Canticles, or Ecclesiastes, 
 or Daniel ; or the instructiveness of the story of Bel, or 
 
NOTES. 
 
 179 
 
 Suaauua ; or the certainty of the angel's descent at the 
 Pool of Bethesda, has he a right to give them up ? It 
 is clear enough, indeed, that the popular theology, not- 
 withstanding its pretence to regard the Bible and Revela- 
 tion as identical and co-extensive, does, by neglect, give 
 up a very considerable part of the Sacred Volume ; but 
 it scarcely as yet avows that it does so, on the principle 
 of following its own sense of truth. In any case, the 
 appeal to individual feeding as the test of religious 
 doctrine and practice is an abandonment, pro tanto, of 
 the ground that the Hebrew and Greek Scripture, the 
 ' Written Word ' is God's infallible voice to mankind, 
 His one and complete Revelation. Such an appeal is a 
 taking refuge in the subjective, and even casting aside 
 the objective " (Irons, " The Bible and its Interpreters," 
 pp. 44, 45). 
 
 35, p. 86. Cf. Auberlen, "The Divine Revelation," 
 p. 234. 
 
 The literary theory : " We do but harm ourselves, 
 hardening our own hearts in self-conceit, when we 
 roughly assume that multitudes of inquirers into Scrip- 
 ture are right in taking to the plan of individual 
 interpretation, and yet wilfully wrong in their conclu- 
 sions " (Irons, " The Bible and its Interpreters," p. 73). 
 
 36, p. 88. Inspiration of genius : " In order to leave 
 room for such profitable discussions of difficult questions, 
 there is a distinct boundary line separating all produc- 
 tions subsequent to apostolic times from the authoritative 
 canonical boohs of the Old and New Testaments. The 
 authority of these books has come down to us from 
 the Apostles through the successions of bishops and the 
 exteusion of the Church, and from a position of lofty 
 
NOTES. 
 
 supremacy, claims the submission of every faithful and 
 pious mind. 
 
 " If we arc perplexed by an apparent contradiction in 
 Scripture, it is not allowable to say, ' The author of 
 this book is mistaken ; ' but either the manuscript 
 is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you hare not 
 understood. 
 
 "In the innumerable boohs that have been written 
 latterly, we may sometimes find the same truth as in 
 Scripture, but there is not the same authority. Scripture 
 has a sacredness peculiar to itself. In other books the 
 reader may follow his own opinion. ... In such cases 
 a man is at liberty to withhold his belief, unless there 
 is some clear demonstration or some canonical authority 
 to show that the doctrine or statement either must or 
 may be true. But in consequence of the distinctive 
 peculiarity of the sacred writings, we are bound to receive 
 as true whatever the Canon shows to have been said by 
 even one prophet or apostle or evangelist. Otherwise, 
 not a single page will be left for the guidance of human 
 fallibility, if contempt for the wholesome authority of 
 the canonical books either puts an end to that authority 
 altogether, or involves it in hopeless confusion" (St. 
 Augustine's "Keply to Faustus," bk. xi. p. 197, tr.). 
 
 37, p. 106. On objections to the Old Testament, see St. 
 Augustine's "Reply to Faustus;" Moseley, "Ruling 
 Ideas ; " Hessey's " Boyle Lectures ; " Driver's 
 " Sermons." 
 
 Actions in Old Testament " related not commended." 
 See " St. Aug. c. Faustus," bk. xxii. 45 ; trans, p. 437. 
 See, also, p. 452: "The mistake of Faustus and 
 of Manichseans generally is in supposing that these 
 
NOTES 
 
 objections prove anything against us, as if our reverence 
 for Scripture, and our profession of regard for its 
 authority, bound us to approve of all the evil actions 
 mentioned in it ; whereas the greater our homage for 
 the Scriptures, the more decided must be our condemna- 
 tion of what the truth of Scripture itself teaches us to 
 condemn." 
 
 " The sacred record, like a faithful mirror, has no 
 flattery in its portraits, and either itself passes sentence 
 upon human actions as worthy of approval or disap- 
 proval, or leaves the reader to do so " (St. Augustine's 
 " Reply to Faustus," bk. xxii. p. 65 ; trans, p. 454). 
 
 38, p. 107. Many modem objections to the Scripture 
 are based on theories of Inspiration which the Church 
 has never sanctioned, cf. e.g. Coleridge. 
 
 NOTES TO SERMON V. 
 
 39, p. 113. The Christian value of the Old Testament : 
 cf. Dean Church, " Gifts of Civilization ; " Kirkpatrick, 
 "Divine Library of the Old Testament;" Driver's 
 " Sermons on Old Testament ; " and Fillion, " LTde'e 
 Centrale de la Bible." 
 
 Old and New Testaments : " The general end both 
 of the Old and the New is one ; the difference between 
 them consisting in this, that the Old did make wise by 
 teaching salvation through Christ that should come, the 
 New . . . that Christ the Saviour is come " (Hooker, I. 
 xiv. 4 ; cf. V. xx. 6). 
 
 40, p. 124. From St. Augustine's reply to Faustus. 
 
 41, p. 129. Principles of worship. Cf. Freeman, " Prin- 
 ciples of Divine Worship ; " Willis on Sacrifice. 
 
182 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 NOTES TO SERMON VI. 
 
 42, p. 143. On the omission of the Apocrypha, cf 
 Wordsworth on Inspiration. 
 
 43, p. 147. See Sermon II. 
 
 44, p. 148. For this thought the writer is indebted 
 to Canon Gore, " Mission of the Church." 
 
 45, p. 149. " Because many expressions did not seem 
 to agree with the adopted views, yet could not be over- 
 looked, they had either to question their authority as 
 Luther did with the Epistle of St. James, or, by doing 
 violence to them, reduce them to harmony with their 
 creed. This was how it fared in Calvin's hands with 
 the passages which declare the universality of grace, 
 and the expressions in regard to the eating and drinking 
 of the Blood of Christ, St. John vi." (Auberlen, " The 
 Divine Revelation," p. 232.) 
 
 46, p. 156. Scripture only partially understood as to its 
 contents. " For let us not think that as long as the world 
 doth endure, the wit of man shall be able to sound 
 the depths of that which may be concluded out of the 
 Scripture " (Hooker, I. xiv. 2 ; cf. Butler, and Sanday's 
 " Bampton Lectures "). 
 
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 College, and Vicar of Cuddesdon, Oxford ; and the Rev. Robert 
 J. WILSON, D.D., Warden of Keble College. With Portraits and 
 Illustrations. Four Vols. Svo. Vols. I. and II., 36s. Vol. III., 18s. 
 Vol. IV. ready shortly. 
 
 [continued. 
 
IO 
 
 A SELECTION OE WORKS 
 
 Liddon.— Works by Henry Parry Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., 
 LL.D., late Canon Residentiary and Chancellor of St. 
 Paul's. — continued. 
 SERMONS PREACHED ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS, 1860-1889. 
 
 EXPLANATORY ANALYSIS OF ST. PAUL'S FIRST EPISTLE 
 
 TO TIMOTHY. Svo. 
 CLERICAL LIFE AND WORK : Sermons. Crown Svo. 5*, 
 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES : Lectures on Buddhism— Lectures on the 
 
 Life of St. Paul— Papers on Dante. Crown Svo. 5J. 
 EXPLANATORY ANALYSIS OF ST. PAUL'S FIRST EPISTLE 
 
 TO TIMOTHY. Svo. [In the press. 
 
 EXPLANATORY ANALYSIS OF PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE 
 
 ROMANS. Svo. 14J. 
 SERMONS ON OLD TESTAMENT SUBJECTS. CrownSvo. y. 
 SERMONS ON SOME WORDS OF CHRIST. Crown Svo. 5s. 
 THE DIVINITY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. 
 
 ^ Being the Bampton Lectures for 1866. Crown Svo. y. 
 
 ADVENT IN ST. PAUL'S. Sermons bearing chiefly on the Two 
 
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 PASSIONTIDE SERMONS. Crown Svo. 5:. 
 
 EASTER IN ST. PAUL'S. Sermon* bearing chiefly on the Resurrec- 
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 SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF 
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 THE MAGNIFICAT. Sermons in St. Paul's. Crown Svo. zs. 6d. 
 
 SOME ELEMENTS OF RELIGION. Lent Lectures. Small Svo. 
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 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF H. P. LIDDON, D.D. 
 
 Crown Svo. y. 6d. 
 MAXIMS AND GLEANINGS FROM THE WRITINGS OF H. P. 
 
 LIDDON, D.D. Selected and arranged by C. M. S. Crown i6mo. ts. 
 
 Luckock.— Works by Herbert Mortimer Luckock, D.D., 
 Dean of Lichfield. 
 THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE, JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN, IN 
 RELATION TO DIVORCE AND CERTAIN FORBIDDEN 
 DEGREES. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 AFTER DEATH. An Examination of the Testimony of Primitive 
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 THE INTERMEDIATE STATE BETWEEN DEATH AND 
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 [continued. 
 
IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. it 
 
 Luckock— Works by Herbert Mortimer Luckock, D.D., 
 Dean of Lichfield. — continued. 
 FOOTPRINTS OF THE APOSTLES, as traced by St. Luke in the 
 
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 Church. A Sequel to ' Footprints of the Son of Man, as traced by St. 
 
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 THE BISHOPS IN THE TOWER. A Record of Stirring Events 
 
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 LYRA GERMANICA. Hymns translated from the German by 
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 CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO SCIENCE AND MORALS. 
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 LIFE HERE AND HEREAFTER : Sermons. Crown 8vo. 7 s. 6d. 
 Mason.— Works by A.J. Mason, D.D., Lady Margaret Professor 
 
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 THE CONDITIONS OF OUR LORD'S LIFE UPON EARTH. 
 
 Being Lectures delivered on the Bishop Paddock Foundation in the 
 
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 THE PRINCIPLES OF ECCLESIASTICAL UNITY. Four Lectures 
 
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 SOME PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF THE SPIRITUAL 
 
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 PRACTICAL STUDIES ON THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 
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12 
 
 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Mortimer.— Works by the Rev. A. G. Mortimer, D.D., Rector 
 
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 TICE: A Manual of Theological 
 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
 13 
 
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 {continued. 
 
A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Oxenden. — Works by the Right Rev. Ashton Oxenden, 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
 '5 
 
 Pusey. — LIFE OF EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, D.D. 
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1 6 A SELECTION OF THEOLOGICAL WORKS. 
 
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