which sometimes dwindles into a rock-bound rivulet, and sometimes broadens into a shoreless sea. But it is a stream whose fountains lie deep in the everlasting hills. Its sources are hidden in the depths of a past eternity, and its issues in the abysm of an illimitable future. It begins with the chaos of Genesis, 'vast and void;' it ends with a book which has been called 'the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.'

Hence the Bible is inextricably mingled with all that is greatest in human history, national literature, and individual life. Its influence on literature has been invaluable and supreme. Dante and Milton are wholly based on the words and truths of Scripture; Shakespeare is full of them, and Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning. George Eliot and Victor Hugo borrowed from them their best ideals; Carlyle, Newman, and Ruskin were saturated with them from childhood. The laws of Alfred and Charlemagne were inspired by them. Judas Maccabæus caught from them the fire of his patriotism; Gustavus Adolphus pored over them before he charged at Lützen; Cromwell was found absorbed in them on the eve of Naseby. They have been on the lips of warriors and statesmen and martyrs at the sublimest moments of their lives, and so entirely have they decided the destinies of nations that but for them the civilisation of Europe might still have been as cruel as that of Egypt and as corrupt as that of Rome.

Yet the essential unity of the writings is hardly less remarkable than their infinite variety, and in spite of its manifold elements the Bible may be regarded, under certain limitations, as an organic whole.

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It has the unity of the nationality from the bosom of which it mainly sprang. It has the unity of Monotheism. It has the unity which rises from the fact that it deals exclusively with religious ends, or with ends which were regarded as bearing upon religion. It has, lastly, the unity which rises from its being the history of the dealings of God with one chosen nation; with all other nations; with individual men; and with the whole race of mankind. It describes the gradual education of the Hebrews, of the heathen, and of many separate souls, in the knowledge of the Will of the Supreme. The deepest principle of spiritual life, which consists in the sense of man's communion with the living God, runs through all its diversities, and elevates even its rudimentary morality. Above all it finds its unifying element in Christ. This was pointed out by the Lord Himself. 'Ye search the Scriptures,' He said to the Jews, 'because ye think that in them ye have eternal life, and these are they which bear witness of Me.' 'If ye believed Moses,' He said, 'ye would believe Me, for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?' 'Your father Abraham,' He said, 'rejoiced to see My day; and he saw it and was glad.'2

In these words Christ seems to point out, as in one illuminating flash, that the centre of all that was best, greatest, and truest in the Old Dispensation was that hope of the Divine coming Deliverer, which was revealed to man after he had first lost the Eden of Innocence, and which shone like a pillar of fire on his horizon during his long wanderings through the wilderness of time. It was this hope which sustained Israel in many an hour of darkness and led him forward to the dawn of that great day 1 John v. 39, 46, 47. 2 John viii. 56.

when the Sun of Righteousness should rise upon the world with healing on His wings.

The fact that, from the age of Origen onwards, allegory and typology have been exaggerated to a most artificial extent, and that many events and allusions and customs have been made prophetic of Christ in which nothing of prophecy was intended, must not blind us to the fact that the Old Testament is full of Christ; for the very heart and essence of the Old Dispensation, as its features are exhibited in the writings of historians, lawgivers, and prophets, was the great and unquenchable Messianic hope. In the Old Testament Christ is prefigured; in the New Testament He is revealed. In His teaching we see in all their fulness those constant elements which all religion strives more and more clearly to express-the holiness and love of God, the dignity and brotherhood of man. And so He stands at the centre of all history as the fulfilment of all the yearnings of the past, the justification of all the hopes of the future. 'He lifted the gate of the centuries off its hinges with His bleeding hand.' Apart from Him all the deepest elements of the Old Testament become unintelligible. The Law is but the slave which leads us to His school. He is the bruiser of the serpent's head in Genesis, and the Lamb as it had been slain in the midst of the throne in Revelation. He is the Paschal Lamb of Moses; the true star and sceptre of Balaam's vision; the

1 This is rightly insisted on in our 7th Article, and will not be in the least impugned by anything here brought forward. 'The Old Testament,' we are there told, 'is not contrary to the New, for both in the Old and New Testaments everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ.' As against heretics like Marcion and some of the ancient Gnostics and modern fanatics, who treated the Old Testament as coming from an evil or imperfect demon, the retention of this Article was both necessary and instructive.

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promised Son of David; Isaiah's rod of the stem of Jesse. The testimony to Him is the spirit of prophecy, and of Him bear all the prophets witness, as many as have spoken from Samuel and those that follow after. The due comprehension of this vast hope, and the power of unfolding it, will be one of the highest results which can reward the study of the preacher who desires to fulfil the duty of a wise scribe by drawing from his treasures things old as well as new.

CHAPTER IV

THE ALLEGORICAL METHOD' OF EXEGESIS UNTENABLE.

'Hæreticis mos est simplicia quæque torquere.'-TERT. c. Hermog. xix.

'Eat in peace the bread of Scripture, without troubling thyself about the particles of sand which may have been mixed with it by the millstone. -BENGEL.

BUT while the Old Testament is not contrary to the New, since alike in the Old and New Testaments 'everlasting life is offered to mankind through Christ,' yet the Old Testament does not stand on the same level with the New. The treatment which attaches equal importance, equal value, equal validity to all the books of the Bible-the teaching which represents all their statements as equally authoritative, and which binds us to accept them without reference to the ages or circumstances in which they originated-is unnatural, dangerous, and false.

The Bible contains an ever-advancing revelation, and there can be no final rule for Christians which is not in accordance with the Gospel of Christ.

The great fact which the Jewish and Christian Churches failed for ages to understand was that God revealed Himself slowly and gradually. There were times of ignorance which God winked at in the Jewish as well as in the