FOUR SERMONS 
 
 II 
 
 PREACHED IX THE 
 
 S\ 
 
 % CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST. PETER’S, 
 
 jl 
 
 % 
 
 MARITZBURG, 
 
 BY 
 
 ;H THE RICHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF NATAL. 
 
 4 
 
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 1 
 
 i 
 
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 SECOND SERIES: N 0 .? 11 TO 14. 
 
 \f PRICE ONE SHILLING AND SIXPENCE. 
 
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 6 1866 . 
 
 
 
[No. 11. — Second Series.] 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 Preacued in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter's, Maritzburo, 
 On Sunday Evening, April 15, 1866, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT REVEREND THE LORD BISHOP OF NATAL. 
 
 NuM.xxiii.10. — Let me die the death of the righteous , and let 
 my last end be like his. 
 
 It need hardly be said that there is much in this story of 
 Balaam, which is brought before us in the Lessons of to day 
 and in that of last Sunday Evening, which stamps the 
 whole narrative as unhistorical. The account of the ass 
 speaking with human voice — in excellent Hebrew — has 
 always been a great stumbling-block to many devout per- 
 sons, brought up to believe that every word of Scripture 
 must be regarded as infallibly true: and it has perplexed 
 many even of the most orthodox commentators. Not only 
 does the ass speak, while fallen under Balaam, but it 
 reasons with the prophet, and the prophet answers, without 
 expressing the slightest astonishment at so astounding an 
 occurrence. We are told that — 
 
 She said unto Balaam, ‘ What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten 
 me these three times ? ’ And Balaam said unto the ass, ‘ Because thou hast 
 mocked me : I would there were a sword in my hand, for now would I kill 
 thee.’ And the ass said unto Balaam, ‘ Am not I thine ass, upon which thou 
 hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day ? Was I ever wont to do so 
 unto thee? ’ And he said, ‘ Nay.’ 
 
 Accordingly one orthodox Divine (Tholuck) writes : — 
 
 What rider would sit quiet, if his beast should really utter such a complaint, 
 and would not leap off and cry for help, rather than stop to give an intelligent 
 answer ? 
 
 Another says (Hengstenberg) : — 
 
 The speaking of the ass, when transferred into the presence of external reality, 
 appears to disturb the eternal laws which are laid down in Gen. I., and which 
 establish the boundary between the human and the brute creation. 
 
 13 
 
0 
 
 And lie, too, adds : — 
 
 The advocates of the external view have always been greatly perplexed by 
 the fact, that Balaam expressed no astonisnment at the circumstance of an ass 
 speaking. 
 
 Accordingly both these eminent writers explain the whole 
 occurrence as something internal — something which passed 
 in Balaam’s own mind. As a third has written (Kurtz) : — 
 
 Nearly all the modern believing theologians have endeavoured to remove 
 the difficulties connected with the fact, that the ass should be said to have 
 spoken, by explaining the whole affair as something merely inward, — a vision, 
 in fact, and not an external objective occurrence. The ass, they say, did not 
 really speak : but Balaam was thrown into a state of ecstasy by the operation 
 of God; and in this state the same impression was produced upon his mind, as 
 if the words had really been spoken by the ass herself. 
 
 This last writer, however, opposes strenuously this view, 
 and says with reference to the language attributed to the 
 ass : — 
 
 Are these the words of God? Are they not much rather the simple utter- 
 ances of the feelings of an illused animal, complaints of unmerited chastise- 
 ment and illtreatment, such as every domestic animal is constantly uttering, in 
 similar situations, if not in the words of human speech, yet by perfectly 
 intelligible signs ? 
 
 Accordingly, he maintains that the ass merely “ gave 
 utterance to its emotions, to its terror aud pain, and to the 
 feeling of injustice, both by its actions and voice,” in the 
 usual manner, but that — 
 
 such modulations were given to the voice, that they fell upon Balaam's ears as 
 words of human speech, and this was the result of an immediate interposition on 
 the part of God — in other words, it was a miracle. 
 
 In this way the plain meaning of the Scripture story is 
 explained away by excellent men, determined to maintain in 
 some form or other the dogma of Scriptural Infallibility, 
 yet feeling their reason staggered with the statement as it 
 lies before them, if understood in its literal sense. Happily, 
 however, besides this, the narrative contains other con- 
 vincing signs that it is an artistic composition of a later 
 age — an attempt to reproduce an imaginary scene by some 
 devout poet of a later time — and not a record of actual 
 historical fact. For we find that throughout these chapters 
 both Balak the King of Moab, aud Balaam the Assyrian 
 prophet, who had been summoned from the banks of the 
 Euphrates to come aud curse Israel, make use familiarly 
 of the name Jehovah, which, we are told, had been first 
 revealed to Moses in Egypt, at the beginning of the Exodus, 
 and by him for the first time communicated to Israel. If it 
 
3 
 
 be said that, during the passage of Israel through the 
 wilderness, some knowledge of this name might have reached 
 the ears of Balak and Balaam, yet this would not account 
 for the heathen king and heathen prophet employing it, 
 just exactly as the Israelites themselves might have done, 
 as the name of God. Thus Balaam says to Balak’s mes- 
 sengers : — 
 
 “ Lodge ye here this night, and I will bring you word again, as Jehovah 
 shall speak unto me 
 
 “ Get you into your land, for Jehovah refuscth to give me leave to go with 
 you 
 
 “ Tarry you also here this night, that 1 may know what Jehovah will say 
 unto me more." 
 
 And he says to Balak himself: — 
 
 “ It' llalak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond 
 the commandment of Jehovah, to do either good or bad of mine own mind : 
 but, what Jehovah saith, that will I speak.” 
 
 Nay, he actually says in one place — 
 
 " 1 cannot go beyond the word of Jehovah my God, to do less or more.” 
 
 But what will probably be felt to be most decisive is this, 
 that the whole of Balaam’s prophecies are given in pure 
 Hebrew. He, an Assyrian prophet, addressing Balak, the 
 King of Moab, with “ the elders of Moab and the elders of 
 Midian,” delivers himself in a strain of magnificent poetry, 
 but all in excellent Hebrew, without the slightest sign of 
 an admixture of foreign idioms. Supposing even that the 
 Midianites and Moabites spoke languages akin to one 
 another and to that of the Hebrews, — which is very possible 
 and even probable, — supposing also that Balaam, coming 
 from Pethor in Mesopotamia, “ by the river of the land of 
 the children of his people.” spoke also a kindred dialect, — 
 yet neither Balak nor Balaam would have spoken pure 
 Hebrew ; in the addresses of the latter we should certainly 
 expect to find some strong indications of a dilfcrence of 
 dialects; and, in fact, it is certain that the language of 
 Aram or Mesopotamia, though akin to that of Canaan, 
 differed very materially from it (see G.xxxi.47). 
 
 But in any case the question would still remain, — How 
 did Moses become possessed of a copy of these prophecies, in 
 whatever language they may have been delivered, since they 
 were not spoken in his hearing or in the hearing of any of 
 the Israelites, but in the ears of the Moabites and Midi- 
 anites, his enemies — and were spoken, too, not by pre- 
 meditation, so as to have been written down beforehand, 
 
4 
 
 but, as we are plainly told, under the influence of the 
 moment, and in direct opposition to the wishes both of the 
 king and of the prophet himself? 
 
 There can be no doubt, then, that we have here a grand 
 poem, composed in a later day, — perhaps, in the age of 
 David, to which most of the references in the last chapter 
 seem distinctly to refer. We have there mention made of 
 Agag, the king of Amalek, whom Samuel put to death in 
 Saul’s time, shortly before the time of David ; and we have 
 David himself referred to in the full stream of his conquests, 
 when perhaps he had already gained some great victories 
 over Edom and Moab, and his final triumph over these 
 countries could be confidently predicted. For the poet 
 makes the Assyrian Prophet take his stand, as it were, in 
 the far-back Mosaic time, and say : — 
 
 “ I shall see him, but not now ; 
 
 I shall behold him, but not near ; 
 
 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 Sheth. 
 
 And Edom shall be a possession, 
 
 Seir also shall be a possession for his enemies ; 
 
 And Israel shall do valiantly.” 
 
 Of course, it is true that the writer has thrown himself as 
 far as possible into the circumstances of the older time which 
 he wished to describe — as any great poet would do, in 
 taking for his subject some long-past event. Dean Stanley’s 
 beautiful description, therefore, of the Seer looking down 
 upon the hosts of Israel is perfect^ correct and just — is 
 exactly what the Hebrew poet pictured to his own mind, 
 and intended to set before the mind’s eye of others. 
 
 From the ‘ high places ’ there dedicated to Baal, from the 1 bare hill ’ on 
 ‘ the top of the rocks,’ and lastly from the cultivated ‘ field’ of Zophim, on 
 ‘ the top of I’isgab,’ ‘ from the top of Peor, that looketh on the face of the 
 waste,’ the Assyrian Prophet, with the King of Moab by his side, looked over 
 the wide prospect : — 
 
 “ lie watched, till morning’s ray 
 On lake and meadow lay, 
 
 And willow-shaded streams that silent sweep 
 Amid their bannered lines, 
 
 Where, by their several signs, 
 
 The desert-wearied tribes in sight of Canaan sleep." 
 
 lie saw in that vast encampment, among the acacia-groves, 1 How goodly 
 are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel! ’ Like the watercourses 
 of the mountains, like gardens by the side of his own great River Euphrates, 
 with their aromatic shrubs and their wide-spreading cedars - the lines of the 
 camp were spread out before him. Ephraim was there with ‘ the strength of 
 
5 
 
 the wild bull of the north,' — Judah, ‘ couching like the lion’ of the south, — 
 ‘ a people dwelling alone,’ yet a mighty nation, — ‘ Who can count the dust of 
 Jacob, and the number of the fourth part of Israel ?’ lie looked round from 
 his high post over the table-lands of Moab, to the line of mountains stretching 
 away to Edom on the south — over the high platform of the Desert beyond the 
 Dead Sea, where dwelt the tribe of Amalek, then ‘ first of the nations,' — over 
 the Kenite, not yet removed from his clefts in the rocks of Engedi, full in 
 front of the Prophet’s view. And for each his dirge of lamentation went up ; 
 till at the thought of his own distant land of ‘ Asshur,’ of the land beyond the 
 Euphrates, of the dim vision of ships coming from the Western Sea, which lay 
 behind the hills of Palestine, ‘ to afflict Asshur and to afflict Eber,’ — he burst 
 into the bitter cry, ‘ Alas! who shall live when God doeth this ! ’ and he rose 
 up and returned to his place. — Sinai and Palestine, p.299. 
 
 All this is an exquisite description of the scene, which the 
 Hebrew writer imagined to be spread out before the Pro- 
 . phet’s view. But it does not therefore prove the story 
 itself to be historically true — any more than a vivid realisa- 
 tion, by some great modern poet or "prose writer, of the scene 
 and circumstances which he wished to describe, would be 
 any evidence that the story which he was telling was a real 
 history, or that he meant his readers to regard it as such. 
 
 And this is the answer to be made at once to the grave 
 charge, which is often made against those who desire to look 
 at the Scripture narratives just exactly 3S they are, that to 
 speak of such a narrative as this as a work of the poetical 
 imagination is to brand it as an imposture and forgery. 
 Doubtless it would be so if the original writer meant it to 
 be understood that he was giving it to the world as a piece 
 of real history. But no one thinks of calling the great 
 works of imagination of our own days ‘ impostures ’ or 
 ‘ forgeries/ because the writer delivers the lessons which he 
 wishes to teach in the form of a fiction. No one calls the 
 writer of the Book of Job a forger, because he introduces 
 Satan discoursing with the Almighty in the courts of heaven 
 — and even using taunting language — but all in excellent 
 Hebrew. Nor is there the slightest excuse for applying 
 such a designation to the writer of these chapters of the 
 book of Numbers, supposing them to -be, as I have 6aid, an 
 imaginary composition, with what basis of real fact it is 
 impossible to say — unless we set out with the unwarrantable 
 assumption that he meant his work to be taken as a record 
 of real fact, — nay, a record divinely and infallibly true. 
 Why may not a work of Imagination, or rather the writer 
 of it, be inspired, and God, our Divine Teacher, convey thus, 
 by means of our brother man, a message of life to our souls 
 as well as by other agencies ? 
 
6 
 
 For what, let us ask ourselves, is the Imagination of 
 man? Is it not that marvellous faculty, possessed by the 
 human being, of setting before the mind’s eye, in dis- 
 tinct visible form — I mean, mentally visible — an image of 
 what is real and true, and making it sensibly present to the 
 thoughts? . And can that faculty be more nobly employed 
 than when thus dealing with eternal realities, seeking to 
 clothe them in forms by which the human mind may more 
 distinctly grasp them, and become thus more easily possessed 
 of the underlying truth? Our Lord, we know, constantly 
 made use of this faculty, when he addressed his disciples or 
 the multitude, not in plain discourse, but in parables. The 
 Book of Job again, as I have said, is a very strong instance 
 in point, since no intelligent reader, I suppose, believes in 
 this day that the book of Job is real history — that either 
 Satan and Jehovah reasoned together, or that the Almighty 
 answered Job 'out of the whirlwind’ in four noble chapters 
 of Hebrew poetry. And here, too, in this history of Balaam 
 we have undoubtedly another similar instance. Aud, in 
 truth, is not all history more or less a matter of the 
 Imagination? How little do we really know for certain of 
 the facts of the age in which even we live? What very 
 different accounts would different persons give of the same 
 transaction, in which they both took part, — because each 
 looks at it from his own point of view, sees but a portion of 
 it, and sees that through the coloured medium of his own 
 mind ! An historian, therefore^ however much he may wish 
 to be accurate, cannot possibly be absolutely so. He can 
 only do his duty faithfully by gathering together reports 
 from different persons ol different opinions and principles, 
 comparing and combining them according to the best of 
 his judgment, and filling up the blanks out of his own 
 Imagination. As one has written (Archd. Hare, Guesses at 
 Truth, p.337) — 
 
 It has been a matter of argument whether poetry or history is the truer. . . . 
 Very few histories tell us what has really happened. They tell us what some- 
 body or other once ronceivt’d to have happened, somebody liable to all the 
 infirmities, physical, intellectual, and moral, by which man’s judgment is dis- 
 torted. Even this seldom comes to us except at third or fourth, or, it may be, 
 at twentieth hand. . . . There is not half the falsehood in the world that the 
 falsehearted fancy, much as there may be, and greatly as the quantity is 
 increased by suspicion. . . . Three-fourths of the misstatements and misrepre- 
 sentations that we hear have a different origin. In a number — perhaps, a 
 majority — of instances, the feelings of the relator give a tinge to what he sees. 
 Manifold discrepancies will arise from differences in the perceptive powers of 
 the organs by which the object was observed, whether those differences be 
 
7 
 
 natural, or result front cultivation or front peculiar habits of thought. V ery 
 often people pannot help seeing diversely, because they are not looking from 
 the same point of view. The self-same action may to one man's eyes appear 
 patient and beneficent, to another man’s crafty and selfish. Nay, the same man 
 may often find his view of it alter, as he beholds it in a fainter or fuller light, 
 displaying less or more of its motives and character. 
 
 The historian, in short, cannot choose his characters. lie 
 must take them as they appear on the foreground of the 
 age which he describes : he must gather from all quarters 
 such facts as he can about them, often very defective or 
 strangely contradictory. And then he must try to imagine 
 to himself such a character as fits in best with these facts. 
 It is obvious that the view which even the best writer of 
 history will present to us is liable to be exceedingly dis- 
 torted, and very far indeed from being an accurate and true 
 representation. Whereas the great poet chooses for himself 
 the character whose actions he intends to describe. He can 
 remain true to his own ideal ; he can set before us some- 
 thing, which has certainly a real and true existence for his 
 own mind, and, as he is but a brother of our race, is true 
 also for ours. And, as the same eminent Divine has said, 
 p.347 — 
 
 The true knowledge to be learned, whether from poetry or from history, — 
 the knowledge of real importance to man for the study of his own nature, — the 
 knowledge which may give him an insight into the sources of his weakness and 
 his strength, and which may teach him how to act upon himself and upon 
 others, — is the knowledge of the principles and passions by which men in 
 various ages have been agitated and swayed, and by which events have been 
 brought about, or by which they might have been brought about, ij they have not. 
 
 Thus we shall find real instruction — Divine lessons of 
 truth — in the story of the Exodus generally, and in this 
 portion of it in particular — though we may feel compelled, 
 by the force of evidence, to regard it as a work of the 
 Imagination, and not an historical record of actual fact. 
 We shall have then not details of events, imperfectly reported 
 to us, but living thoughts which really did pass through the 
 minds of the writers, our fellowmen who lived 3000 years 
 ago, and show us how the same Divine Spirit, who is now 
 teaching us, was then teaching them — was helping them, 
 in that early age, to c feel after God and find Him.’ Doubt- 
 less, many passages of this grand poem, which we have had 
 brought before us to day as embodying the utterances of the 
 Assyrian Seer, would furnish us with interesting subjects 
 for closer consideration, — not only as giving us information, 
 of the most trustworthy and valuable kind, with reference 
 
8 
 
 to the age in which the writer lived, its ‘ manners, arts, 
 institutions, habits’ — but also as revealing to us ‘ its feel- 
 ings, its spirit, and its faith,’ — as helping to exhibit to us 
 more plainly the steps by which the Great Father of spirits 
 has led on the human race into the clearer, fuller, knowledge 
 of Himself. But I have selected one passage of this kind — 
 a very well known text — on which I will make a few 
 remarks this evening. 
 
 “ Let me die the death of the righteous, 
 
 And let my last end be like his.” 
 
 The context shows that ‘ the righteous,’ contemplated by 
 the Prophet, were “ the righteous people,” as they called 
 themselves, “ Jeshuruu,” the chosen nation : — 
 
 “ Who can count the dust of Jacob, 
 
 And the number of the fourth part of Israel ? 
 
 Let me die the death of the righteous, 
 
 And let my last end he like his ! ” 
 
 They were, indeed, a chosen people — highly favoured of 
 God to receive the revelations of His Spirit, and called to 
 be ‘ Jehovah’s Servant,’ for ministering the knowledge of 
 His Love and Truth to all the world. But even in the 
 mind of the writer of this story they must have been dis- 
 tinguished rather by the possession of u purer faith in their 
 midst, a greater knowledge — at least in some higher minds 
 — of what was pleasing to God both in worship and prac- 
 tice, than by their diligence in acting accordingly. This, 
 at least, was the righteousness on which they prided them- 
 selves in later days, as in the days of St. Paul — on their 
 supposed nearness to God, from His clearer revelation of 
 Himself to them. We may well doubt the justness of this 
 their own valuation of themselves, when we remember our 
 Lord’s declaration in the Gospel, that — 
 
 “ The servant, who knew not his Lord’s will, and did it not, shall he beaten 
 with few stripes; hut he, that knew it, and prepared not himself, neither did 
 according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. For, unto whom 
 much is given, of him shall much be required." 
 
 Is then, the knowledge of our God, of man’s relation to 
 Him, of H is Will concerning man, not to be desired by us 
 “above gold and precious stones”? Surely it is; but it 
 must be an inward revelation to the heart, not a mere 
 formula in the head, to be of any real value. One spark of 
 love to God, the perfectly good, though mixed up with the 
 smoke, as it were, of ignorance and superstition, approaches 
 nearer to real knowledge of Him, tlian a mere assent of the 
 
9 
 
 understanding to the most exact form of words, which all 
 the Doctors of all the Churches could ever draw up. We 
 are formed by our Creator to love Goodness when we see it, 
 to adore that Infinite Goodness which is Love, Allwise and 
 Almighty. But we must see it first, before we can do so; 
 aud we must see it in Him, we must recognise it as Ilis 
 attribute, before we can love Him. Theologians have dared 
 to say, building on certain texts of Scripture ill-understood, 
 that man uaturally hates God. \et they have not carried 
 out this notion by asserting that men habitually, bad as 
 they are, hate Goodness as such, and love Evil for its own 
 sake, and not for some adventitious good — or supposed good 
 — which is attached to it. No ! Goodness — the essential 
 excellency of the Divine character — is loved, adored, by all, 
 in their heart of hearts. But when man would attain to it 
 himself, — when he would add to his faith human goodness, 
 which is virtue — that, however lovely, is hard, is difficult : 
 the flesh shrinks back from the needful effort. Nay, the 
 flesh, the mere auimal selfish nature, knows nothing of 
 virtue, of goodness, but only of what is pleasant or perhaps 
 profitable. It has no faculty for goodness — anymore than 
 the beast of the field can appreciate beauty of form or 
 colour. Hence it shrinks back from the effort needful that 
 the man should become e righteous/ as his Father in Heaven 
 is righteous ; and the spirit, though it still loves righteous- 
 ness, and adores goodness, yet if it be not upheld by the 
 Spirit of God, will yield in the inevitable strife , — ‘ the flesh 
 lusting against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.’ 
 This explains, in some measure, the apparent aversion 
 of men from God and Goodness — in some measure, but 
 not wholly. For much of it — very much — arises from want 
 of a true knowledge of God and Goodness, — from their 
 forming first defective and erroneous views of the Divine 
 Character, and then applying these to corrupt their notions 
 of Goodness. As I have said, the value of knowledge — 
 however correct — even of the thiugs of God, would be nought 
 if it remained unfruitful in the heart and in the life, a mere 
 matter for speculation for the head and understanding. 
 And, indeed, the mere intellect is far too low a faculty to 
 take more than a very partial — almost a negative — view of 
 these sublime matters : it can see what God is not — it cannot 
 see what He is. Yet, if a man’s creed contain theories and 
 assertions concerning God, which are false and monstrous, 
 
 c 
 
10 
 
 which uot only fail to guide, hut which “ darken counsel by 
 words without knowledge,” his moral standard must neces- 
 sarily suffer. Amongst barbarous nations what a fearful 
 influence for evil has the worship of cruel and impure deities 
 had upon the minds of their worshippers ! But what is the 
 God whom many Christians worship? Is Tie One who is 
 Holy, Just, and Good? Nay, though in words they call 
 Him so, they not unfrequently ascribe such acts to Him as 
 are incompatible with any degree of such attributes. How 
 surely, for instance, does that notion of a Church, in which 
 the Almighty is interested ! — His party being one amidst 
 the many parties into which civilised society is split ! — 
 lower the thoughts of all who entertain it towards the 
 Great God our Father ! How does it also lower the charac- 
 ters of those who persuade themselves that they are His 
 partizans, — embitter their feelings towards all who oppose 
 them, tempt them to think that lying, evil speaking, and 
 slandering, suppression of the truth, distortion of fact, 
 watching for the stumbling of their enemy, “ laying a snare 
 for him that reproveth in the gate,” and making a man an 
 offender for a word, — that any baseness is sanctified by so 
 great and holy an end, as to entice or drive men into that 
 Church of theirs, out of which there is no salvation ! How 
 contrary is such a notion to the words of Jesus, “ My king- 
 dom is not of this world ! ” 
 
 There is a subtle falsehood, then, in those hackneyed lines — 
 
 For modes of faith let-graceless zealots fight ; 
 
 He can’t be wrong, whose life is in the right. 
 
 There is, no doubt, also, besides the falsehood, a truth which 
 has given these lines their currency. The offering of a 
 pure heart, issuing in a pure life, will surely not he less 
 acceptable to the ‘ God of the spirits of all flesh,’ who sees 
 the very thoughts and intents of the heart, because of any 
 mere intellectual defects in the knowledge of him who offers. 
 Yet assuredly, as I have said, there are mistakes, especially 
 concerning Him whom we adore, concerning Ilis Character 
 and His Will, which must affect the character and conduct 
 of the worshipper. Would any, who had heard the revela- 
 tions of God in the Gospel, be excusable for the wholesale 
 butcheries or the treacherous murders, by which even pious 
 persons among God’s ancient people thought to serve Him ? 
 ‘ Modes of faith,’ are of importance, but only as they affect 
 the heart and life of the believer. 
 
11 
 
 The writer, then, of this aucient story had, we must 
 suppose, a very vague notion of what it was to be ‘ right- 
 eous.’ IV/ is he thought, and thought rightly, that God’s 
 Favour belonged to the righteous man, and his words 
 amount to this — ‘ How well it must be for those who are 
 under the protection of the Mighty Jehovah! They are 
 safe and blessed even in death!’ Is not this a strain beyond 
 what we should have expected even from a believer in 
 Jehovah in those days? Does it not remind us of the more 
 fervent words of the Psalmist — 
 
 ‘ My flesh and my heart faileth ; but God is the strength of my heart and 
 my portion for ever ' i 
 
 As our Church Article says — 
 
 They are not to be heard who feign that the old Fathers did look only for 
 transitory promises. 
 
 Whatever theory they may have had about another life, 
 or if, as is likely, they had none, yet a real faith in the 
 Living Personal God, a cleaving of heart to Him, must 
 blossom into a hope full of immortality. ‘Precious,’ says 
 the Psalmist, ‘in the sight of Jehovah is the death of His 
 Saints !’ Could anyone expect extinction, annihilation, 
 who felt ‘ the Love of God, shed abroad in his heart,’ in 
 the midst of the failing of Nature ? But for us this prayer 
 is equally suitable and has a deeper meaning. The ‘ glorious 
 Gospel of the Blessed God ’ has shown us a Father in 
 Heaven. But, while we have thus learned that we are 
 sous, have we not, most of us, alas ! learned also that we 
 have been prodigal sons, disobedient, rebellious, forsaking 
 our Father’s house and slighting His Love ? Yes ! the 
 strong light, which the teachings of Jesus have thrown on 
 the Law of God, revealing its deep spiritual requirements, 
 — and not his words only, but bis life and his death, — have 
 given us a standard which must, if it is realised, introduce 
 penitence into our lives, not as a mere outward form or 
 occasional service, or as a kind of composition for our 
 offences, but as the spirit of our daily life— as the true 
 temper of those who see their own baseness, selfishness, and 
 coldness, in the light of God’s pardoning, paternal Love. 
 
 This repentance — a continual daily turning to God — will 
 make the last, the inevitably remorseful last, look at life, 
 from the dying pillow, less bitter, less intolerable, even for 
 those who will have much in themselves, in their own 
 course, to regret. But, if deferred till then, with what 
 
12 
 
 anguish will it come ? Yes ! penitence is needful — not to 
 propitiate our angry God — not as the attitude of a slave, 
 who crouches creeping to avert the uplifted lash, — but 
 because it is the right, the truly human, feeling for those 
 who see their own inward faults and the transgressions of 
 their lives. And but little indeed does anyone know of the 
 comfort aud relief of such repentance, who would dream of 
 putting it off till all opportunity was over of obeying the 
 gracious words — “ Go, and sin no more ! ” 
 
 Nor in any other respect can a godly ending be made to 
 a life which has been without God. Those who have 
 crushed out their higher aspirations, and lived a mere care- 
 less worldly life, without a thought of the Unseen Hand 
 which was guiding them, without a reference to the Will of 
 the Lord of their conscience, without any desire to be con- 
 formed to the image of His Son, — will have little power or 
 courage to grasp that Unseen Hand, and rest their souls 
 upon it, when the senses are failing. Faith, affiance, trust, 
 in the Unseen is not a single act: it is a habit of soul, 
 generated by many acts, by constant acting. The 1 life of 
 the righteous 5 is a life of faith. Without faith, without a 
 belief in, a trust in, God, how can the soul stand upright in 
 the midst of life’s storms, or stand firm against its ‘ manifold 
 temptations’? Even when explicit faith may have been 
 lost or overshadowed for a time, what is every act of virtuous 
 self-denial, but a homage to the L T nseen ? 
 
 The ‘ righteous ’ then — the faithful — are ‘ blessed in 
 their death,’ with the same blessedness which they enjoyed 
 in their lifetime. There is no other possible. Infinite as is 
 the Mercy of our God, and Great as is His Power, He 
 cannot wake the Past not to have keen : and, remember, we are 
 making it note that which it ivill be for ever ! 
 
 Some there are, who indulge their fancies in picturing 
 the other world, at least the entrance of it, — grouping then- 
 lost ones on the shore of the dark river, with companies of 
 angels, and many attending circumstances, which tempt 
 those, who are impatient of unrealities, to turn away from 
 the whole as a childish dream. Put let us bear with the 
 weakness to which these images afford a consolation. It is 
 at least true that the faithful soul is not alone. It is one of 
 a vast company, who are marching on at God’s command, 
 and following him, who has gone before, and entered in, as 
 we believe, within the vail, the Captain of our Salvation. 
 
[No. 12. — Secoud Series.] 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 Preached in TnE Cathedral Church of St. Peter’s, Maritzburo, 
 On Sunday Morning, April 22, 1866, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT REVEREND THE LORD BISHOP OF NATAL. 
 
 Ps.cvii.8. — 0 that men would praise Jehovah for Ilis Goodness, 
 and for His wonderful works to the children of men. 
 
 TnE text sets before us three subjects for consideration this 
 morning, — 
 
 (i) That God is Good, — 
 
 (ii) That His Goodness is active and flowing out in 
 ‘ wonderful works’ towards men, — 
 
 (iii) That it is our duty — the duty of all men — to praise 
 Him. 
 
 “ O that men would praise Jehovah for His Goodness, and for His wonderful 
 works to the children of men.” 
 
 These are the thoughts which filled the old Hebrew 
 Psalmist’s heart, between two and three thousand years ago, 
 when he wrote these words. Who he was we know not : 
 there is not even a superscription to the Psalm, ascribing it 
 to David, or Asaph, as in the case of so many others. And, 
 if there were, it would prove nothing ; for there is not the 
 slightest dependence to be placed on these superscriptions 
 or titles, which are only the guesses of men, who lived in a 
 later age, and made the collection of Psalms which we now 
 possess, as to the probable or possible authorship of them : 
 and in most cases their conjectures are now known to be 
 erroneous. Our Prayerbook indeed calls them all “ the 
 Psalms of David”: and this is another instance of the pre- 
 valence down even to our own times of traditionary views, 
 which have long been rejected as mistaken by all persons of 
 any learning, acquainted with the real facts of the case. 
 
14 
 
 Some, in. fact, of these Psalms, which are here called the 
 “ Psalms of David,” refer distinctly to the time of the 
 Babylonish Captivity, and were therefore written after this 
 event. Thus, for instance, the 74*th Psalm refers in v.2 to 
 “ Mount Zion,” in which “ Jehovah dwelt,” and therefore 
 could not have been composed before the time of David, 
 when Mount Zion was first captured from the Jebusites, 
 and made the site of David’s Tabernacle, 1 Jehovah’s dwel- 
 ling-place/ as it was afterwards of Solomon’s Temple. But 
 iu the verses following the Psalmist describes the destruction 
 of the Sanctuary : — 
 
 “ Lift up Thy feet unto the perpetual desolations, 
 
 Even all that the enemy hath done wickedly in the Sanctuary : 
 
 Thine enemies roar in the midst of Thy congregations; 
 
 They set up their ensigns for signs. 
 
 A man was famous according as he had lifted up 
 Axes upon the thick trees. 
 
 And now the carved work thereof at once 
 They break down with axes and hammers. 
 
 They have cast fire into Thy Sanctuary, 
 
 They have defiled the dwelling-place of Thy Name to the Ground." 
 And, in fact, it is certain that very many of the Psalms 
 were written after the Captivity, and that comparatively 
 but few of them were written by David himself. 
 
 But what matters it who wrote these words? They 
 express the thoughts of a living man like ourselves in that 
 far-off age, of one who had infirmities like ours, who had to 
 struggle, no doubt, with temptations and trials from within 
 and from without, just as we have, — of one who had the same 
 Divine helper supporting him all along in his conflict with 
 evil, as we have now, the same Divine Teacher lightening 
 his eyes and quickening his heart. 
 
 (i) And so our brother felt in his inmost soul that God 
 was Good — he would have ‘ men praise Jehovah for Ilis 
 Goodness.’ 
 
 To say that * God is Good’ seems to us, perhaps, the 
 merest truism. And many indeed suppose that our very 
 word for the Supreme Being — I mean the word * God ’ — 
 expresses ‘ the Good One’ — though this derivation of the 
 word is by no means certain, and is most probably not 
 correct. We know at all events that the earliest ideas of 
 God were not connected with thoughts of Ilis Goodness. 
 The name ‘ Elohim’ in the ancient Hebrew records — the 
 most ancient archives of the faith of living men — implies 
 the Strong or Mighty One — or rather, perhaps, the Being 
 
15 
 
 io be feared and dreaded; and the plural form of this 
 Hebrew word expresses tbe highest degree of this attribute. 
 Neither did the later name Jehovah — the ‘ Living One’ — 
 full as it is of awful meaning, express any moral attribute 
 whatever. 'With the Psalmists and Prophets of old, then, 
 it was no ordinary utterance — it was the expression in words 
 of a revelation from Heaven to their hearts — when they 
 said that c God is Good’ — f Jehovah is Gracious’ — 
 
 ‘ Jehovah is loving unto every man, and His tender mercies are over all His 
 works.’ 
 
 Not, perhaps, in some momentary flash of inspiration did 
 such thoughts come to them, but as the result of life-long 
 experience and observation — of deep meditation upon the 
 ways and works of God — even as we read at the end of the 
 Psalm before us — 
 
 1 Whoso is wise will ponder these things, and he shall understand the Loving 
 kinduess of Jehovah.’ 
 
 Yet still the)- were a revelation to their minds of the Divine 
 Character. They were the fruits — the rich reward — of 
 pious prayerful lives, during which they walked with God, 
 and gained from that blessed communion more clear views 
 of their relationship to the Father of spirits. And, what they 
 gained in this way, they have handed on to us, and we enter 
 from our very childhood upon the full enjoyment, not only 
 of these portions of our great inheritance, but of that still 
 clearer and fuller revelation of our Father’s Love which is 
 made to us in the Gospel of Christ, and of which our Lord 
 said — 
 
 ‘ Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see ; for I tell you that 
 many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and 
 have not seen them, and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not 
 heard them.’ 
 
 Let us enquire, however, a little more closely into the 
 meaning of our words when we speak of the Goodness of 
 God, of Him who created the Heavens and the Earth. 
 And here it must first be said that this is indeed a subject 
 on which we cannot arrive at certainty by means of Science. 
 Those Heavens and this Earth do not contain the answer to 
 our question, — What is the moral character of Him by 
 whose Will and Wisdom they exist, for whose ‘ pleasure they 
 are, and were created?’ How, then, shall we attain to a 
 clear idea as to what the Goodness of God is? W ill it be 
 said, We shall find it in ‘ the Book’? We thankfully 
 
10 
 
 acknowledge that It is even so. But who beheld the hand 
 out of the cloud, which wrote those mystic characters? Or 
 where is the Prophet that can interpret them ? In other 
 words, what warrant have we for taking those devout 
 irnaginiugs of pious men in the days of old for a message to 
 our souls from Him of whom they speak ? Are they not 
 mixed with manifest fables, with self-contradictory state- 
 ments? Do we not find, in the same page with the pure 
 gold of the sublimest moralities, actions asci’ibed to the 
 Supreme Being, which are unworthy of a wise and good 
 man ? Doubtless, we do, and it is far better to acknowledge 
 as fact what we see to be so, than to ascribe to God any- 
 thing unworthy of Him, — that so, as our Lord has taught 
 us to pray, our Father’s Name may indeed be hallowed, and 
 kept separate evermore from human weaknesses, imperfec- 
 tions, and pollutions. 
 
 But what, then, is Goodness ? Some there are who 
 reproach us for insisting on the Goodness of God, as if by 
 Goodness we meant only PHy , — an unwillingness to inflict 
 suffering, — a desire to make all sentient creatures happy 
 and comfortable, — as if we worshipped what men call 
 “ good-nature,” and had no higher, no deeper, conception 
 of God than of Good-Nature carried to its highest degree. 
 This is a reproach very commonly levelled against all those, 
 who refuse to ascribe ‘ vindictiveness ’ to the Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ ; and such a Deity as this notion implies 
 — one who cannot bear His creatures to suffer, who has not 
 the heart to punish, — we shall certainly look for in vain, 
 either in Nature, 01 in History, or in our own hearts. Nay 
 should we not despise such a Being? Do we not see the 
 spoiled and petted child, while it runs to the arms of its 
 doting mother or nurse at every pain or fear, treat her often 
 with anything but respect? Rather, is it not notorious 
 that children ever love those best, whose kindness to them 
 is wise and firm, whose will is unmovable by their caprices ? 
 We do not call a man good, who, from an unwillingness to 
 grieve or pain his children and dependants, allows all kinds 
 of waste and even vice to flourish within the borders of his 
 house, his estate, his kingdom. In men, pity and active 
 benevolence is limited by the sense of justice, as well as by 
 lack of power. But, while God is Infinite Pity, and His mer- 
 cies are over all His works, be sure, O sinner, that you arc 
 filling for yourself a bitter cup by every wilful transgression ! 
 
17 
 
 No ! let us think of the Divine Goodness as willing 1 that 
 which is really best for all aud each of His rational creatures 
 — as willing human virtue, not merely what men call hap- 
 piness, not merely ease, comfort, enjoyment — as willing 
 that they should be raised, perfected, ever more and more, 
 as spiritual, moral, intellectual beings, and have the blessed- 
 ness which belongs to them as such. Then we shall not 
 stumble at the sorrow's and pains of which the world is lull. 
 The dark pages of human history will have a light cast 
 upon them ; and, if we cannot yet read them all aright, we 
 shall rest in the conviction that they have a meaning con- 
 sistent with what our hearts bid us believe concerning the 
 Almighty Father. 
 
 For it is not Science — it is not even the Bible — it is the 
 oracle in our own breasts, to which we must ultimately put 
 the question. However helped it may be, and prompted, 
 by external teaching, it alone can give the answer. To 
 whom amongst men do we give the title of “ good”? Surely 
 to him who labours most, or who suffers most, to raise his 
 fellowereatures in the scale of being, — to w'hom mere selfish 
 aims are lost in the desire to help the oppressed, to succour 
 the weak, to teach the ignorant. The power, the wisdom, 
 to effect these things, may be more or less; and in these 
 subordinate respects the man may be more or less like the 
 All-Mighty and All-Wise. But the central point of 
 resemblance — that which makes him good, god-like, in our 
 estimation — is the will, the ardent desire, to be a saviour in 
 any sense to his fellowmen — a destroyer of all that tends to 
 destroy them. And is not this emphatically the brightest 
 feature in that Divine Image, which has been enshrined in 
 so many hearts for so many ages, — which wears the croum 
 of thorns and the marks of suffering, — which has been 
 reflected more or less brightly in the lives of so many saints 
 and martyrs ? Can we find a trace of se^'ishness, of self- 
 exalcation, in that? Was it not as servant of all, as one 
 who had come not to be ministered unto but to minister, 
 that Jesus especially showed forth “ the glory as of the 
 only-begotten of the Father ” ? 
 
 From early times it has been a human instinct to worship 
 the Saviours, the Deliverers, of the Nation. In the chivalry 
 of the Middle Ages, when the Knight girded on his armour, 
 not in any quarrel of his own, but in the cause of the help- 
 less, we see gleams of the same idea, which is surely now 
 
 D 
 
18 
 
 acknowledged in all Christian countries as the type of what 
 man should he — as the idea of ‘ Goodness.’ It is hard, 
 doubtless, to forbear to ask, Why does not He, who has the 
 power, set all things right? Why do the oppressed still 
 groan? Why above all are such masses of the human race 
 left in their degradation? — or to answer with courage and 
 cheerfulness, In God’s own time, which must be the best, 
 all shall be set right. But we must do so, or what is the 
 alternative? If we let go our trust iu the Goodness ot 
 God, we must disown or give the lie to our own spiritual 
 being, its most deep and living convictions, its plainest 
 utterances. We must shut our eyes to the whole spiritual 
 world. We must forget that we ever loved or reverenced 
 any one, that any character in history or fiction ever won 
 our admiration, that we ever said “ Well done !” to the 
 generous, the self-sacrificing, the patient, warrior. We 
 must set down man as only the most cunning auimal. And 
 how much in the history of the race and of the individual 
 will then remain unexplained and inexplicable! 
 
 (ii) For wonderful, says the Psalmist most truly, “ are 
 the works of Jehovah towards the children of men.” 
 
 The history of man is the history of those works — mixed 
 up, indeed, with the perverse workings of the human will. 
 Yet it has been all along a progress upwards on the whole, 
 — the path growing brighter and more bright, though 
 crossed at times with blackest^shadows even when the light 
 shines brightest, with hideous idolatries and superstitions, 
 hatreds and persecutions, within and without Christendom 
 — the most oppressive and arrogant of all despotisms, that 
 over the conscience of men, having its stronghold amongst 
 those who worship, and profess to lovo and follow, the meek 
 and lowly Jesus. Yet, throughout the whole course of 
 human history. Divine truths, we know, have again and 
 again been born of fierce conflict — light has come out of 
 darkness — the very wrath of man has praised the Lord. 
 
 And still is lie working wonderfully in the midst of us — 
 making known to us Ilis Might and M’isdom, revealing 
 His Goodness. And we must reverently heed the revela- 
 tions which lie makes to us in the present age as w 7 ell as in 
 the days gone by. Much as the Hebrew Psalmist may 
 ba\e marked of the signs of God’s Goodness in His dealings 
 with men, — much as he may have pondered these things, 
 till he came to understand the loving kindness of the Lord, 
 
10 
 
 — we know far m ire than he did — and the grand discoveries 
 of Science — of Astronomy, and Geology, and other branches 
 of study, — which are now made the common inheritance of 
 every educated Englishman, — furnish unceasing proofs of 
 the Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of our Great Creator 
 — which we must not neglect — which we are bound to con- 
 sider and lay to heart, as grounds for deeper thankfulness 
 and more confiding trust in II is Love. 
 
 " O that men would praise the Lord for llis Goodness, 
 
 And for His wonderful works to the children of men." 
 
 (iii) To praise the Creator is the glory and privilege of 
 man — to praise llim consciously, and with the lips to con- 
 fess the excellence of Him whom all creatures praise un- 
 consciously, by ‘ fulfilling His Word.’ What are we, indeed, 
 we might say, that we should praise Him ? — like children 
 looking at the work of some mighty artist of surpassing 
 genius, and prattling of what they see! Yet it is permitted 
 to us to see something, and by gazing to grow in insight. 
 We may fiud fuel for our praise, while we chiefly adore llis 
 Goodness, in studying our Father’s works. 
 
 “ All Thy works praise Thee, O Lord, and Thy Saints shall bless Thee ! ” 
 
 Whatever of goodness in any child of man moves our 
 reverence, draws forth our love towards him, we may refer 
 at once to the Father of spirits, and bless the glorious 
 Being who has given such grace unto men, and of whose 
 Divine Perfections these human forms of goodness are 
 witnessing. But also whatever of Power, of Intellect, of 
 Genius, awakens our admiration and commands our homage, 
 this too, let us remember, claims the same high parentage : 
 they are but rays from the Father of Lights, bright spark- 
 lings from the glory that surrounds His Throne. Some are 
 most moved to rapture by the discoveries of Science — some 
 by the genius of the Poet or of the Artist. But let ns 
 render praise for all to Him from whom alone these wondrous 
 powers proceed. In that great gathering, which is shortly 
 to be made in the French Capital, of the natural productions 
 of all parts of the earth, and of the use to which man’s 
 genius has turned them, what wonders of God’s works there 
 will be to stir the devout heart to thankfulness and adoration 
 — while considering the Wisdom und the Goodness, which 
 have fitted this world, with such innumerable appliances, 
 to be the dwelling-place of man — have supplied it with all 
 
20 
 
 things needed not only to minister to his bodily wants, his 
 comforts, his enjoyments, but to feed his eye, and refresh 
 his mind, with grace and beauty — have prepared for his use, 
 in the great primeval swamps of the ancient world, long 
 ages before he was placed upon this earth, those masses of 
 vegetable matter, from which he derives his coal and drives 
 his machinery — have laid down also the beds of lime and 
 clay and sand-stone, the minerals and the granites, which 
 man may take wherewith to build his dwellings — have 
 arranged all these things with express reference to such a 
 being as man, to be placed on the earth at some future 
 period — have tilted up the different strata, by shocks of 
 earthquakes, or mighty movements of slow upheaval or 
 depression, so that they no longer lie now, as many of them 
 were deposited at first, horizontally, buried altogether out 
 of sight one under another, but their original position is 
 changed, and they lie now inclined to the horizon, and slop- 
 ing upward, and come therefore to the surface at different 
 places, and so man can get at them, and supply his different 
 needs abundantly — ay, and above all, which have given to 
 man himself the power and skill to make use of these 
 treasures stored up for his use, to turn them to account for 
 his machinery and his buildings, and so to rise more and 
 more from the state of the savage to that of the highly 
 civilised and Christian Man. 
 
 Ah ! brethren, for what wilj all this progress in arts and 
 sciences — in outward civilisation — avail us, if we do not 
 inwardly advance also in that knowledge of God which is 
 Life Eternal — if we do not seek to praise Him for II is 
 Goodness not only with our lips, but by our lives — by 
 walking before Him as dear children, receiving at our 
 Father’s hands day by day the gifts of His Love, and 
 rendering back to Him the offering, which lie desires of 
 us, of childlike, pure, and loving hearts, obedient to Ilis 
 Will, and growing moro and more into conformity with it? 
 
 “ l beseech you, therefore, by the Mercies of God, that ye present your 
 bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable 
 service. And be not conformed to this world” — to its selfish maxims and 
 principles, its unworthy practices, its sensual pleasures. “ Hut be ye trans- 
 formed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good 
 and acceptable and perfect Will of God.” 
 
[No. 13. — Second Series.] 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 1’UEACIIEDIN THE CATHEDRAL ClIURCU OF ST. PETER’S, MARITZBURU, 
 
 On Sunday Evenings, April 22, and April 29, 18GC, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 RIGHT REVEREND THE LORD BISHOP OF NATAL. 
 
 2 Peter I. 20,21. — Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the 
 Scripture is of any private interpretation. For prophecy 
 came not of old time by the will of man : but holy men of 
 God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Let me first remind you of a fact, which I mentioned on a 
 former occasion, that this “ Second Epistle of Peter ” is 
 one of the most disputed books of the whole New Testament. 
 It is not mentioned by any writer earlier than Origen, who 
 flourished about the year 250 a.d. And, indeed, even this 
 evidence is doubtful, since in the original Greek text of his 
 writings , — “ and it is on these only that absolute reliance 
 can be placed,” JFestcoft , p. J 07, — 
 
 “ he nowhere either quotes or mentions the second Epistle of St. Peter; on the 
 contrary, he quotes the ‘ epistle of Peter ’ in such a manner as to show, at 
 least, that the other epistle was not familiarly known.” p.40rf. 
 
 Not one of the eminent Fathers of the Church, who lived 
 before the time of Origen, as Justin Martyr, Iremeus, 
 Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, gives any sign of being 
 acquainted with it — nor does Cyprian his contemporary. 
 It is not named in the earliest catalogue of canonical books 
 (the Muratorian Canon, 170 a.d.). Eusebius, who died in 
 the year 310, expressly says, Westcott , p.J76 : — - 
 
 Of Peter, then, one Epistle, which is called his former Epistle, is generally 
 acknowledged : of this also the ancient presbyters have made frequent use in 
 their writings as indisputably genuine. But that which is circulated as his 
 Second Epistle we have received to be not canonical Still, as it appeared 
 useful to many, it has been diligently read with the other Scriptures. The 
 Book of the ‘ Acts ' of Peter, and the 1 Gospel ' which bears his name, and the 
 Book entitled, his ‘ Teaching,' and the so-called. 1 Apocalypse,’ or Book of 
 
1 Revelations,’ we know to have been in nowise included in the Catholic Scrip- 
 tures by antiquity ; because no ecclesiastical writer in ancient times or in our 
 own has made general use of the testimonies to be drawn from them. ... So 
 many are the works of Peter, of which I have recognised one epistle only as 
 genuine and acknowledged by the ancient presbyters. 
 
 And so he places this Second Epistle among the ‘ disputed ’ 
 books, ranking also as ‘ disputed/ or as decidedly ‘ spurious/ 
 a number of other books which he names, the “ Acts ” of 
 Paul, the book called the “ Shepherd/’ the “ Revelation” 
 of Peter just named, the “ Epistle of Barnabas,” the book 
 called the “ Teaching of the Apostles,” the “ Gospel accord- 
 ing to the Hebrews ” — 
 
 and moreover, as I said, the Apocalypse of John, [that is, our present Book 
 of the Revelations,] if such an opinion seem correct, which some, as I said, 
 reject, while others reckon it among the books generally received. Westcott, 
 p.482. 
 
 This Epistle was first admitted into the Canon by an African 
 Council at the very end of the fourth century. Yet even 
 then it was not universally received ; since Jerome, who died 
 420 a.d., writes in one place, Be Vir. III. c.I — ■ 
 
 Peter wrote two epistles, which are called Catholick : of which, however, the 
 second is denied by many to be his, because of the difference between its style 
 and that of the first epistle. 
 
 This is information, which as Christians, in these days 
 especially, you should possess, in order that you may be able 
 to form something like a reasonable judgment upon the 
 nature of the great controversies of our times. You cannot, 
 indeed, be expected to have mastered all the details of 
 Modern Criticism, or to he able to decide upon the accuracy, 
 or otherwise, of all the various results — some of them, no 
 doubt, of the greatest importance — which are the fruits of 
 that Criticism. But you can at least judge fairly upon 
 some points concerned. You can see plainly how little 
 ground there is for the popular notion, on which some are 
 still insisting so violently, of the absolute in fallibility of 
 Scripture — of its being placed by its very origin and history 
 above the reach of all criticism. You can decide for your- 
 selves whether the truth is most likely to be found upon 
 the side of those who either blindly shut their eyes, and 
 would shut your eyes too, to the facts of the case, or, if they 
 know them, refuse to acknowledge them before men, and in 
 practice utterly ignore them, — or those who desire to look 
 the facts in the face, to strip away the more accretions 
 of ignorance and superstition which have so long disfigured 
 
23 
 
 the true beauty, and hidden from us the true excellence, of 
 the Scripture, and to draw from these records of past ages 
 those precious lessons of Eternal Truth, which shall endure 
 lor all times, by whomsoever they were first spoken or 
 written, because they are living words, — words which go at 
 once to the heart and conscience, — c uot words which man’s 
 wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth/ — 
 and, as such, are unaffected, and cannot indeed be touched, 
 by the most deep and searching criticism. 
 
 Before I pass on, however, I will lay before you another 
 extract from one who must be considered a very cautions 
 and orthodox writer, since he has been selected to be the 
 chief editor of the New Commentary on the Bible, which is 
 being prepared under the authority of the present Arch- 
 bishop of York. This writer, then, as might be expected, 
 maintains himself, though somewhat doubtfully, the genu- 
 ineness of this epistle; but he makes the following observ- 
 ations upon it: Did. of the Bible, ii.p.808: — 
 
 The Second Epistle of St. Peter presents questions of far greater difficulty 
 than the former. There can be no doubt that, whether we consider the 
 external or the internal evidence, it is by no means easy to demonstrate its 
 genuineness. We have few references, and none of a very positive character, 
 in the writings of the early Fathers. The style differs materially from that of 
 the First Epistle: and the resemblance, amounting to a studied imitation, 
 between this Epistle and that of St. Jude, seems scarcely reconcilable with the 
 position of St. Peter. Doubts as to its genuineness were entertained by the 
 greatest critics of the early Church. In the time of Eusebius it was reckoned 
 among the disputed books, and was not formally admitted into the Canon 
 until the year 393 a.d., at the Council of Hippo. . . . 
 
 That the two Epistles could not have been composed and written by the 
 same person, is a point scarcely open to doubt. . . If, however, we admit that 
 some time intervened between the composition of the two works, — that in writ- 
 ing the first the Apostle was aided by Silvanus, and in the second by another, 
 perhaps St. Maik, — that the circumstances of the Churches addressed by him 
 were considerably changed, — and that the second was written in greater haste, 
 not to speak of a possible decay of faculties, — the differences may be regarded 
 as insufficient to justify more than hesitation in admitting its genuineness. 
 
 ‘ Greater haste’! ‘ decay of faculties’! in an apostle writing, 
 under the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost, infallible 
 words of absolute eternal Truth ! Surely you are well able, 
 all of you, to see for yourselves how the matter really stands 
 in respect of this question. And you will now understand 
 why I do not quote the words of my text this morning as 
 the words of an Apostle — still less, as direct utterances of 
 the Spirit of God ; while yet I do say that this and many 
 other passages of this epistle, expressing, as they do, the 
 deepest thoughts of a devout brother-man of those days. 
 
21 
 
 enlightened and taught, as all true Christians are, by the 
 Spirit of God, contain Divine Teaching for us, — revelations 
 made to his own mind of the things of God, the eternal 
 truths by which our spirits live, — and which he has done 
 his best to communicate to us. 
 
 For, as I said last Sunday, it is idle for us, living in a 
 diiFerent age, and under totally different circumstances, to 
 speak of such a writing as this as a piece of imposture and 
 forgery. Thus, for instance, the writer just quoted says, 
 p.809, — 
 
 This Epistle must either be dismissed as a deliberate forgery, or accepted as 
 the last production of the first among the Apostles of Christ. The Church, 
 which for more than fourteen centuries has received it, has either been imposed 
 upon by what must in that case be regarded as a Satanic device, or derived 
 from it spiritual instruction of the highest importance. 
 
 No doubt, this epistle bears distinctly on its face the 
 apostle’s name — ‘ Simon Peter,’ a servant and an apostle of 
 Jesus Christ,’ i.l. It professes to be a sequel, as it were, of 
 the former epistle — ‘ This second epistle, beloved, I now 
 write unto you,’ iii.l. It speaks of the writer as having 
 been an ‘ eyewitness of the majesty of Christ,’ i.lG, — as 
 having — 
 
 ‘ heard the voice which came to him from heaven, when we were witli him in 
 the holy mount.’ 
 
 It personates the apostle speaking throughout: — 
 
 Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of 
 these things. . . . Yea, 1 think it meet, ‘as long as 1 am in this tabernacle, to 
 stir you up by putting you in remembrance ; knowing that shortly 1 must put 
 off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shew ed me. More- 
 over, I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to have these 
 things always in remembrance.’ i. 12-15. 
 
 ‘ That ye may be mindful of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour,’ iii.2, 
 
 1 Even as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given unto 
 him, hath written unto you ; as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of 
 these things ; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that 
 are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their 
 own destruction.’ iii.15,16. 
 
 And yet, in spite of all this, you have heard that some of 
 the most eminent Fathers of the Church, as Eusebius and 
 Jerome, who actually knew of the existence of the epistle, — 
 knew therefore of its containing all these words, — express 
 no such horror, while they mention the doubts which in 
 their days existed as to its genuineness, and the former, 
 indeed, distinctly declares his own conviction that it was 
 not canonical and therefore not apostolic. There were many 
 devout men, then, in the first four centuries, who, though 
 
25 
 
 they wore fulh aware it professed in the strongest manner 
 to have been written by St. Peter; yet they doubted or dis- 
 believed the fact; but, for all this, they never thought, as 
 our in irlern theologians hasten to do, of applying to such a 
 writing the reproachful term, ‘imposture’ or ‘ forgery.’ 
 And why was this? Doubtless, because they recognised in 
 this writing a vein of pure and holy thought, worthy even 
 of an apostle, which runs through the whole ol it — as when 
 it speaks to us of that ‘ divine power,’ — 
 
 • which has given unto ns all things that pertain unto life anil godliness, through 
 the knowledge of him that lias called us to glory and virtue ; whereby are 
 given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, that by these we might 
 he partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the 
 world through lust ; ’ — 
 
 or when it bids us — ■ 
 
 * add to our faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temper- 
 ance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness 
 brotherly-kindness, and to brotherly-kindness charity. - 
 
 Besides which, they knew that such practices — which we 
 in our days should utterly condemn — were very common in 
 the early Church ; and many of the apocryphal books of the 
 New Testament were put forward in the names of apostles 
 or apostolic men, evidently with devout intentions, for the 
 purpose of gaining greater authority for the matters con- 
 tained in them. There were, doubtless, some ‘ impostures,’ 
 Gospels and other writings, falsified for the very purpose of 
 maintaining and propagating certain doctrines. And Jerome 
 himself can hardly escape the imputation of having disgrace- 
 fully lent the honour of his name to support and spread such 
 incredible falsehoods, as those which I once quoted to you 
 from his Life of St. Anthony. 
 
 But in this epistle we have probably the work of an earnest 
 true-hearted man, writing near the end of the first century, 
 when ‘ the fathers,’ not only of the Jewish Church, but of 
 the Christian also — the apostles and eye-witnesses of Christ 
 — had ‘ fallen asleep,’ and the expectation, which had been 
 so fervently cherished — even by the apostles themselves — of 
 the speedy coming of Christ, had been all along disappointed, 
 and was now fast dying out. There were many, he tells us, 
 saying in his days — 
 
 “ Where is the promise of his coming ? for, since the fathers fell asleep, all 
 things continue as they were from the beginning of the Creation. . . . But the 
 day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall 
 pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent 
 
 heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall he burned up 
 
 E 
 
26 
 
 Nevertheless, we according to his promise look for new heavens, and a new 
 earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look 
 for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without 
 spot, and blameless.” 
 
 Desiring, then, to arouse his fellow-Christians from the 
 deep slumber, the sensuality, into which he saw they were 
 prone to fall, while waiting thus in vain for that speedy 
 coming of Christ, which they had learned from apostolic 
 lips to look for, — believing probably that his own authority 
 — words written in his own name — would have little 
 influence upon the men of his age, little etfect in quicken- 
 ing and reviving that faith in the nearness of the event, 
 which he himself still cherished, — he appears to have written 
 this epistle in the name of St. Peter, and with close imita- 
 tion of that of St. Jude — another epistle whose apostolic 
 authority is also liable to very great doubt. 
 
 We need not then ‘ dismiss this epistle as a deliberate 
 forgery/ though we do not receive it as the work of the 
 apostle. We need not regard it as a ‘ Satanic device/ by 
 which the Church has been ‘ imposed upon/ while ‘ deriving 
 from it spiritual instruction of the highest importance.’ 
 That ‘instruction’ may be — rather, it is, no doubt — 
 unsound, so far as it professes to inform us about the earth 
 ‘ standing out of the water and in the water/ a notion 
 irreconeileable with our modern knowledge of the earth as 
 a globe, or to tell us that ‘ the world that then was, 
 being overflowed with water, 'perished/ a statement which 
 contradicts at once the views of those, who attempt to 
 reconcile the differences between Scripture and Science by 
 speaking only of a partial Deluge, which overflowed only a 
 portion of the ancient world, but which is itself contradicted 
 by the fact which we now know, that no Universal Flood 
 has ever swept over the globe since ages before the Scrip- 
 ture date of the Deluge. It may also be questioned whether 
 the assertion that — 
 
 ‘ the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word, are kept in store, 
 reserved unto fire’ — that ‘ the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the 
 elements shall melt with fervent heat ’ — 
 
 rests on any authoritative basis, or, indeed, is in all points 
 of the description consistent with scientific truth. We 
 must dismiss the idea, which the writer evidently enter- 
 tained, of the speedy coming of Christ in visible form to 
 judge the world, and to set up, under ‘ new heavens’ and 
 upon ‘ a uew earth,’ a glorious kingdom, into which his saints 
 
27 
 
 should ‘ have au abundant entrance. 1 But there are other 
 words in the epistle — Divine words — which, as l have said, 
 go to the heart at once, and as living words, are felt to be 
 true, whoever wrote, whoever spoke them. It is true that a 
 day, ‘ the day of the Lord,’ is coming, which shall try the 
 secrets of all hearts and lives — that — 
 
 ‘ The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slack- 
 ness, but is longsu tiding to-us- ward, not willing that any should perish, but 
 that all should come to repentance.’ 
 
 It is true that — 
 
 ‘ one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one 
 day ' : — 
 
 and further, that, in order to help us in preparing for that 
 day, that we may not ‘fall from our own steadfastness,’ but 
 daily ‘ grow in grace,’ He has given us a sure word of 
 * prophecy ’ — 
 
 ‘ Whereunto ye do well to lake heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark 
 place, until the day dawn and the day-star arise in your hearts — knowing this 
 first that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation ; for pro- 
 phecy came not in old time — [rather, as the margin says, ‘ at any time’] — hy 
 the will of man ; but holy men of God spake as they were moved — [impelled, 
 urged on] — by the Holy Ghost.’ 
 
 There have been two orders of men, who have figured in 
 the religious history of the world — the prophet and the 
 priest. The priest is supposed to mediate between the wor- 
 shipper and his God, as being more holy than the former, 
 not on account of any real moral or spiritual superiority 
 being possessed by the individual priest, but in virtue of a 
 formal separation from the business of the world, and con- 
 secration to the service of the sanctuary. For the weakness 
 of human nature aids have from time to time arisen, to keep 
 alive in men the sense of the invisible, the faith in God. 
 An order of men — so great has been the need — has appeared 
 in every land, and from remotest times, who have been the 
 priests. The savage or untutored heart, swayed by fear or 
 hope towards the invisible world, seeks some sacred man — 
 some one nearer God than he — to mediate for him, as the 
 Romanist seeks the Virgin or the Saints. God only knows, 
 who has suffered it, how black a page in human history the 
 history of the priesthood has been, from the isanusi of the 
 Zulu to the Jesuit of Christendom, — how ‘ the fine gold 
 has become dim,’ the finest and brightest specimens of man 
 have been corrupted and distorted, by the false and poisonous 
 notion that one man, or, rather, that one order of men, is 
 
2S 
 
 nearer to God than others — that an order of men can he 
 made the channel of Divine grace aud communication in 
 some magical manner. Mysterious, doubtless, are all Divine 
 communications — but not more or otherwise mysterious than 
 human nature and its Divinely-appointed relationships. 
 But the notion of a priesthood is specially antagonistic to 
 human relationships, and tends ever to interfere with them 
 in the most ungodly, because inhuman, manner. 
 
 This notion of a separate priesthood is altogether alien to 
 the spirit of Christianity, of which the leading features are 
 the Fatherhood of God, and the Brotherhood of Man. 
 ‘ Ye are/ says the first epistle of St. Peter, ‘ a royal priest- 
 hood : ’ — 
 
 ‘ Ye are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual 
 sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.’ 
 
 The idea expressed in these words — the true Christian idea 
 — is that all Christians as such are brought into the imme- 
 diate Presence of God, and have access to Iiis Throne, to 
 present there their prayers, the offering of their hearts, the 
 ‘ fruit of their lips, giving thanks to His Named The 
 Priest in the older time was the guardian of all that was 
 external in the worship of God, the agent in offering burnt 
 sacrifices, the person to burn the incense. But now that 
 the Father is to be worshipped in spirit, and that no one 
 outward form of worship is^ obligatory,' — now that the 
 sacrifices and the incense have been translated into their 
 spiritual meanings of self-devotion and of prayer, — the 
 priest disappears in the presbyter or cider, the president or 
 officer, the minister or servant, of the congregation, to serve 
 the higher nature in their brethren, to represent their unity, 
 to be the mouthpiece of their united prayers. Any notion 
 of priesthood which goes beyond this is a return to idolatry, 
 that idolatry by which spiritual Christianity was overlaid at 
 the Reformation, and which is now again stealing in amongst 
 us, covertly indeed, but with rapid strides. 
 
 But the Prophet remains still what he has ever been, from 
 flic time when the Deuteronomist, a prophet himself, living 
 most probably in Josiah’s reign, but writing in the character 
 of Moses, promised in God’s Name to Israel that the race of 
 Prophets should never be extinct among them — 
 
 ‘ A Prophet will 1 raise up from among tbeir brethren, like unto thee, and 
 I will put tn\ words in bis mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I 
 shall command him ' — 
 
20 
 
 yes, ami before that age, from the very first, when men 
 began to ‘ feel after tied, and find Him.’ The Prophet was 
 not, like the Priest, set apart for his ofliee by any human 
 choice or ceremony of initiation. lie was not chosen, like 
 ‘ the Priests t he Levites/ from any one particular tribe. 
 ‘ Would God/ said Moses, ‘ that all the Lord’s people were 
 prophets ! ’ Not in Israel only, but amongst all peoples — 
 in their infancy as well as in their more advanced time — 
 have there been prophets, — men in whom the Divine gift 
 of genius formed, as it were, the lamp, all ready-trimmed 
 and furnished with oil for the llame of heavenly teaching, 
 to be kindled by the breath of Divine inspiration. 
 
 For the word ‘prophet’ means literally in the Greek 
 ‘ one who speaks forth ’ — who utters the deep thoughts 
 which lie hid in other men’s breasts as in his own, — who 
 expresses in plain words the Divine communications, which 
 are made secretly to his own mind It is not everyone who 
 has this gift — who is enabled by Divine help, not only to 
 have a clear vision of spiritual things, a fervid apprehension 
 of them, a power of seeing, beneath the surface of events, 
 their real causes and probable consequences, and from the 
 hidden spring to foretell the future course of the stream of 
 time, but also to utter these things in those impressive 
 powerful words, which fasten them for ever, as Divine 
 Eternal Truth, upon the hearts of men. 
 
 Ah ! brethren, that wondrous gift of articulate speech, 
 how little do we think of it, as the bond of union for the 
 race in all ages — as the means whereby is maintained and 
 kept alive in us the knowledge of Jehovah, the Living God 
 — who has been and is the ‘ God of our fathers/ — for ‘ all 
 live unto Him’ — who now is ours, and will be our children’s. 
 It has been, indeed, a much vexed question how man came 
 to speak at all. Those who think of the first man as in a 
 state of paradisaical perfection, and of his first hour as one 
 full of adult life and vigour, ascribe to him of course the 
 powers of speech full blown, as all his other powers. But 
 the more completely such an idea fades before the light of 
 Modern Science, and the Adam of Genesis becomes not his- 
 torically, but only ideally and mythically, true, — so true, 
 indeed, that his story, as that of humanity, is inwoven and 
 ingrained in the literature of the world, — the more the 
 question is opened before us, What was the origin of lan- 
 guage? Some there are who shrink from ascribing it to the 
 
30 
 
 natural and normal development of the human creature, as 
 if in that way it passed from being a glorious divine gift 
 into a mere kind of property, won for us by our own arm, 
 our own cunning. Our own ! What is ours, which we have 
 not received? Can we ascribe our origin to a Divine Power, 
 a Creative Spirit, and then ascribe to ourselves all those 
 perfections, which time and growth and exercise bestow 
 upon the accomplished human being? Must the first simple 
 utterances, expressing the first and simplest wants, have 
 been syllabled in the ears of the first man aud woman by a 
 voice from the clouds or out of the voiceless air, while the 
 wonderfully complicated instrument, which speech has now 
 become for expressing every thought and feeling, is not the 
 gift of God? No! let us believe that, according to His 
 own laws, the Great Creator has wrought out for man, by 
 means of those faculties which He has Himself bestowed, 
 the whole of that varied and wonderful world of words. No 
 mere caprice on the part of this man or that has ordained 
 that certain words shall express and convey certain thoughts : 
 but, whether we can discover it not, there is a law, there is 
 a reason, for all. 
 
 But, if this be so, how much more shall we ascribe to 
 Him those words — those living words — embodying those 
 thoughts of power, which have lit up in one mind and in 
 another the spiritual consciousness of humanity, and been 
 reflected from one to another, till the Church of the Living 
 God in all ages has been formed by the aggregate of their 
 lights, — that Church in which He is confessed and adored, — 
 where He is Present also by His Spirit, in the Temple which 
 thus His Word has formed. For that Living Word, which is 
 the Light and Life of men, is speaking in all those words of 
 our fellowmen, which have brought us the clearer knowledge 
 of Him ‘ whom no man hath seen or can see.’ Such words 
 as these may truly be called His Word, the Word of God, 
 and be received and reverenced by us as such, even as says 
 the apostle : — 
 
 “ Ye received it not as the word of men, hut as it is in truth the word of God, 
 which effectually worketh also in you that believe.” 
 
 Let the young, then, the ignorant, the unlearned, listen 
 reverently to the voice of their teachers as Prophets of God 
 to them. Let those also who have the privileges and respon- 
 sibilities of adult age, and sufficient culture, listen reverently 
 to those who profess to have a message from God to them. 
 
31 
 
 lint let them not lay aside the right and the duty, which is 
 theirs, to “ try the spirits whether they lie ot (lod, because 
 many false prophets are in the world.” And let them he 
 sure that, as it is tied who teaches them by means of their 
 fellowmen, they may expect that He will speak to them so 
 that they can hear and understand, — that He will speak to 
 their hearts, and carry inward demonstration to their spirits, 
 — that He will speak to them of those things which concern 
 their own spiritual life, and, when lie speaks, L l is words 
 will come home to them, and will be their own evidence. 
 
 [No. 14. — Second Series.] 
 
 2 Peter 1.20,21 . — Knowing /his first, /hut no prophecy of the 
 Scripture is of tin// private inter p relation. For prophecy 
 
 came not of old time by the will of man : but holy men of 
 God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. 
 
 I explained last Sunday that the word ‘ prophet’ means 
 literally one who ‘utters forth’ the Word of God to his 
 brethren. In the epistles of St. Paul it is frequently used 
 in the sense of preaching — not merely publishing or pro- 
 claiming the Gospel to those not yet acquainted with it — 
 but explaining its principles, enforcing its precepts, deliver- 
 ing its admonitions, in words of power, which go home to 
 the heart and conscience of the hearer. Thus St. Paul says 
 in one place, 1 Cor.xiv.l : — 
 
 ‘ Follow after charity and desire spiritual gifts, hut rather that ye may pro- 
 phesy. For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, 
 but unto God ; for no man understandeth him ; howbeit in the spirit he 
 speaketh mysteries. But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification 
 and exhortation and comfort. He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth 
 himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the Church. ... If therefore the 
 whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and 
 there come in those that are unlearned or unbelievers, will they not say that ye 
 are mad ? But, if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or 
 one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all. And thus are all 
 the secrets of his heart made manifest ; and so, falling down on his face, he 
 will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth.’ 
 
 I need hardly say that this definition of a prophet, as one 
 who speaks forth living words of truth in God’s Name to 
 
his fellowmen, words which carry with them their own 
 evidence, is very different from the common notion which 
 thinks of a prophet as a mere soothsayer, a prognosticator 
 of future events — as one in whom we observe a mere 
 mechanical exercise of the tongue or pen under the guidance 
 of a force, extraneous to, and foreign from, the prophet’s 
 own soul, by which the knowledge of future events is dic- 
 tated to him. It is difficult to say what portions of the 
 Old Testament contain distinct predictions of future events, 
 uttered long before the time of those events, and with 
 direct reference to them. One, indeed, of the most able 
 writers of the day, the Prebendary of St. Paul’s, from whom 
 I have before now quoted, — one who writes without any 
 leanings towards (what is ealled) Modern Rationalism or 
 Scepticism, and lays great stress on the authority of the 
 Church for clearing away all Scripture difficulties, expresses 
 himself on this point as follows, (Dr. Irons, The Bible anil 
 its Interpreters, p. 125) : — 
 
 It has been doubted, and it becomes a fair matter of enquiry, whether there is 
 in al lthe Hebrew Scripture one such distinct prediction of the remote Future 
 which concerns us, as the natural mind would ask. As to the carnal, and fre- 
 quently immoral, idea of mere prognostic, that, at all events, is not the Christian 
 idea. If we notice, for instance, a few references to the word of prophecy, met 
 with at the beginning of the New Testament, — what do we see? Isaiah, 
 Jeremiah, Hosea, Micah, Zechariah, Malachi, and ‘ the prophets’ as a body, 
 are all quoted as fulfilled in the Gospel story : but in each instance, this ‘ ful- 
 filling ’ is discovered to us by a mysterious method, through a kind of pervading 
 comment. The birth of ‘ Immanuel’ of a Virgin Mother, the ‘ Weeping in 
 Rama,’ the ‘Flight’ and ‘Return from Egypt,’ the Deliverer ‘born in 
 Bethlehem- Ephrata,’ the ‘ Entry into Jerusalem,’ the ‘ Coming suddenly to 
 the Temple,’ and the title of ‘ Nazarene,’ arc not so written of in these Pro- 
 phecies, as naturally to convince us. The meaning found is not, in any one of 
 these prominent instances, the meaning which our natural criticism would have 
 supposed. We find that we must ‘ spiritualize’ the Mother in Isaiah's vision, 
 ‘spiritualize’ the lament in Rama, ‘spiritualize’ even the musing of Hosea, 
 as to Egypt and God’s love to His people there: and more, we must ‘ spiritu- 
 alize’ the very prophecy of Micah against Assyria as to the Bethlehem- 
 Deliverer, and Zechariah’s exultation of Triumph, and Malachi’s sudden 
 Epiphany, and take the unwritten testimony of the prophets as a whole, as to 
 the Messiah’s connexion with ‘ Nazareth,’ of which no now-existing prophet 
 appears to have said one word. Reading these quotations, or any of them, in 
 the mere letter, (to speak plainly), we are disappointed. And these examples 
 are by no means exceptional. 
 
 It appears, in fact, distinctly, by the results of Modern 
 Investigation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that many passages, 
 which were formerly supposed to have been written before 
 the events referred to, were really written after them — that 
 Bala am’s prophecy, for instance, with its mention of Agag 
 and its reference to David, which were once believed to 
 
33 
 
 have been written by Moses 500 years before the time of 
 l)avi«l, was actually composed in David’s time or after it — 
 that the last chapters of Isaiah, which contain the name of 
 Cyrus, and were believed to have been written by the pro- 
 phet Isaiah, who lived in Hezekiah’s days, a century and a 
 half before the time of Cyrus, were actually written bv a 
 much later prophet, towards the end of the Babylonish 
 Captivity, and when the forces of Cyrus, after many great 
 victories, were marching in triumph against Babylon itself. 
 
 But not only in this way are many passages of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures, which were once regarded as clear predictions of 
 events yet future, shown now to refer beyond all doubt to 
 events already past, — but we find a number of quotations 
 from the ancient prophets applied in the New Testament, by 
 a sort of accommodation very common among the devout 
 Jews of that age, to the case of the Messiah, which never 
 could have been originally intended to be referred to him, 
 though the language used admitted of being adapted to 
 some portion of our Saviour’s history. This is notoriously 
 the case very frequently in the Gospel of St. Matthew, to 
 which the Divine, whom I have just quoted, expressly refers. 
 Hosea, for instance, says in one place — 
 
 ‘ When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of 
 
 Egypt’— 
 
 where the words ‘ mv son ’ refer plainly — like “ the servant 
 of Jehovah” in the later Isaiah — to Israel. But this is 
 quoted in St. Matthew’s Gospel as follows, with reference 
 to the descent of Joseph and Mary, with the Infant Jesus, 
 into Egypt : — 
 
 ‘ Then he arose, and took the young child and his mother by night, and 
 departed into Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod, that it might he 
 fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, ‘ Out of Egypt 
 have I called my son.’ ’ 
 
 Jeremiah, again, describes the devastation of the land of 
 Israel at the time of the Babylonish Captivity ; he tells us 
 how — 
 
 * A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping — Rachel 
 weeping for her children — [the mother, as it were, weeping for her children, 
 Ephraim, and Manasseh, and the prophet’s own beloved tribe of Benjamin, 
 who had all been cut off by the sword, or carried away into captivity] — Rachel 
 weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children bceause they 
 were not.’ 
 
 And the Evangelist, as before, applies these words to a 
 totally different subject — to the account which he gives of 
 
 F 
 
3 1 
 
 the slaughter of the babes at Bethlehem — and applies them 
 most forcibly, it we regard them merely as expressing- in 
 very striking language — not as actually predicting — the 
 circumstances of that event. And, perhaps, this is all which 
 the writer himself meant by saying ‘ Thus it was fulfilled’ 
 — just as we in our day should say, ‘ Then might you have 
 seen a complete illustration of that which the prophet of old 
 described, when speaking of events which happened in his 
 own time.’ And, as the learned Prebendary has said, ‘ these 
 examples are by no means exceptional.’ There are a num- 
 ber of other instances, where the prophetical passage from 
 the Old Testament is connected with the event referred to 
 it in the New, only by some apparent suitableness in the 
 language, which is used in the one case, to express the fact 
 recorded in the other. 
 
 But, however this may be, whatever direct predictions of 
 future events may be found in the Scriptures of the Old 
 and New Testament, there is one sense, and a most, important 
 one, in which they do contain very largely prognostications 
 of the future, by announcing in plain terms the general prin- 
 ciples by which the Divine Government of man is guided. 
 This was what the Deuteronomist meant when he makes 
 Moses speak of Jehovah raising up a ‘ prophet from among 
 their brethren like unto himself',’ after his death, — by which 
 he meant a series of prophets in different ages to carry 
 on the work which he had begun. For in the words ascribed 
 to Moses there is very little of direct prediction of future 
 events. Moses appears as a lawgiver and teacher in God’s 
 Name, and but little as a prognosticator of the future, except 
 indeed in this very Book of Deuteronomy, written after the 
 captivity of Israel, and when that of Judah was near at 
 hand, and is announced beforehand as the just punishment 
 of their offences. But the work of Moses generally, as a 
 Prophet, was that of speaking God’s words to them, of 
 instructing, admonishing, exhorting, or comforting. And 
 such will be the great work of the true prophet of God in 
 every age — not to meddle with the details of the future for 
 the gratification of an idle curiosity — not merely to prog- 
 nosticate, but to teach — to tell God’s people their sins, and 
 the consequences which those sins will entail, — to tell them 
 of God’s Love, and the blessedness of living as II is dear 
 obedient children, — to reprove, rebuke, exhort, and comfort, 
 from the experience of the past, and the deep conviction 
 
35 
 
 wrought into his own being by the power of the Divine 
 Teacher. It was for this principally that Clod sent His 
 prophets ot old, and that He sends them still. Still by the 
 lips of our fellowmen, — chiefly, perhaps, in these days, by 
 their writings, — does the Great Educator of mankind carry 
 on His work. The eternal principles of truth and right are 
 fixed; and the prophets have the power and the duty com- 
 mitted to them, on behalf of their brethren, to bring out 
 into clear light those principles, and apply them to the 
 passing circumstances of the present day. 
 
 Thus the idea, which is commonly entertained, that the 
 main office of prophecy was to foretell the future, and that 
 this is one of the great guarantees of the truth of revelation, 
 has au underlying stratum of fact, which has been distorted 
 into a superstitious falsehood. It is true, as one says, that — 
 Old experience doth attain 
 To something of prophetic strain — 
 
 that the death-beds of sages and saints, when the mind has 
 been clear to the last, have been often oracular, — not only 
 that the lips of the departing have been overflowing with 
 heavenly wisdom, but that the raised state of the faculties, 
 which is sometimes granted, gives such an insight into the 
 hearts and characters of those around, as amounts almost to 
 a foretelling of their destiny. And so, too, in the divinely- 
 ordained teachers of a nation, since “ that, which has been, 
 shall be,” the deep love of their country, by which such as 
 these have been distinguished, has given them a feeling from 
 afar of the evils hangingover their land, the necessary fruits, 
 the natural consequences, of the sins of their countrymen : 
 while their strong faith in the ‘ God of their fathers/ in His 
 Patience with all, in His Love to the remnant who obeyed and 
 trusted in Him, has made clear to them, even through the 
 overhanging clouds, the light of a future deliverance, when 
 the Lord should have purged out the sins of His people, by a 
 spirit of judgment, a spirit of burning. It was thus that 
 the Prophet, in the last chapter of the Book of Isaiah, sees 
 at one time ‘ Jehovah’s servant/ Israel, — 
 
 ‘ despised and rejected,’ ‘ wounded and bruised,’ ‘ plague-stricken and smitten 
 of God,’ * a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,’ — 
 
 or in the next chapter changes the metaphor, and speaks of 
 Jehovah as the ‘ Husband/ not the ‘ Master/ of Israel, and 
 of Israel as a wife ‘ barren and desolate ’ — 
 
 ‘ as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou 
 wast refused, saitli thy God.’ 
 
36 
 
 But he can see in faith the future hope of Israel — its 
 coming brightness aud glory, when the present affliction 
 shall have done its work upon it. He can predict that the 
 ‘ righteous servant’ of Jehovah — 
 
 ‘ shall see his seed, shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of Jehovah shall 
 prosper in his hand ; ’ — 
 
 that the afflicted wife, * tossed with tempest and not com- 
 forted/ has been * forsaken for a small moment/ but * with 
 great mercies shall be gathered ’ : he can soothe her by 
 saying,— 
 
 ‘ In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with ever- 
 lasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.' 
 
 But, as I said on Good Friday, such words as these apply 
 not only to Israel, with reference to whom they were first 
 spoken, but to us also, to all Jehovah’s servants in every 
 age, and above all to him, the Son of Man, who is the type 
 and example of all. So “ the Prophet,” promised in Deuter- 
 onomy, may be regarded as a prediction of Christ. It is in 
 this way that the whole Bible is full of predictions of Cluist, 
 that the Scriptures everywhere testify of him, as the great 
 exemplar of the true and faithful — the true sons of God — in 
 every age, struggling with the sins, suffering with the 
 sorrows, bearing the burdens, of their time. 
 
 And this may be the meaning of the expression in 
 the text that ‘ no prophecy of Scripture is of any private 
 interpretation.’ They are not to be confined to particular 
 events and individual cases — but are applicable generally, — 
 if not in the letter, at least in the spirit, — to all times and 
 to all circumstances, where men — created to be God’s ser- 
 vants, rather, His children — are, like Israel of old, living 
 so as either to please or to grieve His Holy Spirit. We 
 know, indeed, how the Divine character of the Scriptures 
 has been distorted into superstitions notions concerning 
 them. It argues, of course, a want of capacity for appre- 
 hending and appreciating w hat is truly Divine, when its 
 presence is made a pretence for worshipping the human or 
 earthly shrine in which it dwells. The many languages of 
 the Earth are, indeed, one providential antidote to this ten- 
 dency towards worshipping the mere letter of the Bible. Yet 
 they have not hindered that letter from being used by many, 
 at least in our land, magically, as charms and amulets are 
 used, as means of divining or foretelling the details of events 
 in the histories of nations or the lives of individuals. 
 
37 
 
 Hut. ns I have said, not only in Scripture do we find the 
 language of prophecy — but out of Scripture also, and in 
 the utterances of living men in all times. The great poets 
 of an age have often been its prophets — were always meant 
 to he so; and St. Paul calls the Cretan poet, who spoke the 
 truth about his countrymen, ‘ a prophet of their own/ for 
 so it reads in the original Greek, where the English version 
 translates ‘ one of their own poeh.' And great preachers 
 also are the prophets of God, and statesm m, and orators, 
 who hold their fello'.v-men in rapt admiration of their 
 eloquence and power of speech The gifts of deep feeling 
 and clear strong utterance mostly go together : though in 
 some, who possess the former, the latter is comparatively 
 wanting; the prophet’s lips must he touched with sacred 
 fire. How miraculous his words then appear to the hearer ! 
 How wonderful is that gift of eloquence, which has carried 
 whole crowds and masses of men on the hreath of one ! 
 While God has made, and can make, even ‘ babes and 
 sucklings’ to show forth llis praise, shall we not give Him 
 glory, when He uses more powerful instruments, whose 
 power and perfection are equally His work? 
 
 The historian, too, who teaches us the results of experience 
 in the history of the past, and from the past foresees the 
 future — the man of science, who unfolds to us the mysteries 
 of Nature’s Laws — these too are God’s prophets, and we 
 must hear their voice. The knowledge, indeed, of God’s 
 works and laws in Nature is the fruit of patient enquiry, of 
 diligent observation and comparison ; we do not speak of it 
 as given by inspiration ; it may seem as if their utterance 
 came ‘ by the will of man.’ And yet the leaders of the nosv 
 vast army of the students of Nature have received from 
 time to time, as it were, in flashes of Divine illumination 
 from the “ Father of Lights,” the knowledge of those laws 
 which have made of a mass of detached incoherent facts an 
 orderly universe of knowledge. 
 
 But the knowledge of God’s laws in nature, which is 
 given in our age, was not vouchsafed to the prophets of old. 
 They had another and a yet higher and more needful office 
 • — to speak in the ears of men those holy laws of conduct, 
 of feeling towards both God and Man, to which the heart 
 answers when they reach the ear, — to throw the light of 
 another mind upon the writing of the conscience, — to clothe 
 in burning w r ords the devout aspirations of the soul towards 
 
38 
 
 the Fountain of its life — those aspirations and desires, which 
 are the promise and pledge of their own fulfilment, as He is 
 True, from whom they came, to whom they tend. These are 
 the ‘ holy men/ who spake of old, and speak at all times, 
 
 * as men moved by the Holy Ghost.' The Divine Spirit 
 uses them as His instruments for enlightening and quicken- 
 ing the hearts of their fellowmen ; and the very imperfection 
 of His instruments serves only to show the Great Instruc- 
 tor’s skill. How often by the simple tale or homely sermon 
 has a truth or, better still, has the Love of God been carried 
 home to the heart of the still simpler reader ! How often 
 even will a pious soul find food for holy thought in the 
 barest common-places ! Even by such as these ‘ hath the 
 Lord spoken.’ But when the great poet or thinker com- 
 mands the hearts and minds of his age, clothing old doc- 
 trines in new and liviug forms, tracking truth into some of 
 her innermost and most sacred recesses, who would dare to 
 ascribe such truly divine powers to any but the ‘ Father of 
 Lights, the Giver of every good and perfect gift’ ? Who 
 would not take courage in the assurance, that the Voice of 
 God is still to be heard in His Great Universal Church, and 
 say with filial reverence, 1 Speak, Lord, for Thy servant 
 heareth ’ ? 
 
 No ! brethren — not by the ‘ will of man ’ in olden times 
 did prophecy come, nor does it come thus in the days in 
 which we live. A man writes or speaks from many motives 
 — perhaps, from the best, or from a pressure of the subject 
 on his spirit, which seems more like compulsion than motive. 
 But whether freely, or on compulsion, whether with or with- 
 out motive, the work must be done. * A dispensation of the 
 Spirit is committed unto him.’ And the same Divine Power 
 takes home the words uttered to the heart of the receiver, 
 and they become light and life and strength and wisdom to 
 his soul — sometimes alas ! while the utterer himself remains 
 dark and cold and dead, because of unfaithfulness to his 
 own gifts. 
 
 Ah ! yes, there may be unfaithful prophets, speaking like 
 Balaam, of whom we heard last Sunday, words of truth iti 
 God’s Name, yet themselves loving all the while the works 
 of darkness — as the writer of this epistle himself describes 
 them — 
 
 ‘ wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest, to whom the mist 
 of darkness is reserved for ever.’ 
 
3U 
 
 In those days, doubtless, there were persons well known, 
 to whom such words as these were specially applicable — of 
 whom he says— 
 
 " When they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the 
 lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped 
 from them who live in error. While they promise them liberty, they them- 
 selves are the servants of corruption.” 
 
 But in every age experience tells us there will be those who, 
 while preaching to others, will be in danger themselves of 
 being cast-away — who may be made the messengers of God’s 
 Mercy to others, may have been the means of saving them, 
 and yet may have lost themselves the way of life. There 
 may be men of genius richly-endowed — poets, philosophers, 
 statesmen, men of science — ay, and preachers of righteous- 
 ness also, gifted with a prophet’s eloquence, — who, having 
 ministered their choice gifts to others, have fallen short 
 themselves of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 May God in His Mercy preserve us from any such misery, 
 proportioned to the gifts which we ourselves possess, as 
 stewards of the manifold Grace of God! For let us not 
 forget that we are all bound to minister one to another. 
 ‘Are all apostles? are all prophets?’ No! not in the 
 higher sense of these words. It is not within the power of 
 any one to fill at his pleasure the chair of the teacher of men 
 — to speak as the ‘ oracles of God ’ to his brethren. It is a 
 gift, to be used humbly, indeed, reverently, conscientiously; 
 but it is not conferred in a high degree on all — in a high 
 degree, so as to make all prophets. But to bear witness for 
 the truth is imperative on all who know the truth, — at 
 least not by silence, when occasion offers, to acquiesce in a 
 lie, to leave to it that strength which our contradiction would 
 have withdrawn from it. In a lower sense, each in our 
 measure, we are to be ‘ apostles,’ that is, messengers, and 
 ‘ prophets,’ that is, utterers, of God’s Will one to another. 
 We are to “ consider one another daily, to provoke unto 
 love and good works”; we are to comfort and support one 
 another ; we are to speak to one another the truth in love. 
 The gift of light and life, w’hich one has received, he must 
 impart to his brother, and share his brother’s gift in return. 
 For ‘ the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man 
 to profit withal ’ : — 
 
 ‘ And there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit ; and there are 
 differences of administrations, hut the same Lord ; and there are diversities of 
 operations ; hut it is the same God, which worketh ail in all.’