Whatever may be the

nutriment which do many. danger of losing the simplicity of our love for it, and coming to set that love upon other grounds than those on which the love of the humblest and simplest of our brethren reposes, and so of separating ourselves in spirit from him; this, like any other danger of our spiritual life, must not be shrunk from, by shrinking from the duty to which, like its dark shadow, it cleaves; but in other and more manful ways must be met and overcome. We all of us have need, if not all from our peculiar functions, yet all from our position as the highest educated of our age and nation, as therefore the appointed leaders of its thoughts and feelings, not merely to prize and honour this Book, but to justify the price and honour, in which we hold it ourselves, in which we bid others to hold it.

May some of us be led by what shall be here spoken to a fuller recognition of those treasures of wisdom and knowledge which are or may be, day by day, in our hands. May we be reminded of the high privilege which it is to have a book which is also, as its name declares, the Book; which stands up in the midst of its brethren, the kingly sheaf, to which all the others do obeisance (Gen. xxxvii. 7) ;— not casting a slight upon them, but lending to them a portion of its own dignity and honour. May we in a troubled time be helped to feel something of the grandeur of the Scripture, and so of the manifold wisdom of that Eternal Spirit by whom it came; and then petty objections and isolated difficulties, though they were multiplied as the sands of

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

LECTURE II.

THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.

EPHESIANS I. 9, 10.

Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in himself; that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; even in him.

IT is the necessary condition of a book which shall exert any great and effectual influence, which shall stamp itself with a deep impression upon the minds and hearts of men, that it must have a unity of purpose; one great idea must run through it all. There must be some single point in which all its different rays converge and meet. The common eye may fail to detect the unity, even while it unconsciously owns its power and yet this unity is needful still; all must grow out of a single root; all the parts must be subordinated to a single aim; the end must return upon the beginning. We feel this in a lower sphere; nothing pleases much or long, nothing takes a firm and lasting hold, no work of human genius or art abides, which is not at one with itself, which has

not form, in the highest sense of that word; which does not exclude and include. And it is hardly necessary to add, that, if the effects are to be deep and strong, this idea must be a great one: it must not be one which shall play lightly upon the surface of their minds that apprehend it, but rather one which shall reach far down to the dark foundations out of sight upon which reposes this awful being of ours.

Now what I should desire to make the subject of my lecture to-day is exactly this, that there is one idea in Holy Scripture, and this idea the very highest; that all in it is referable to this; that it has the unity of which I spake; that a guiding hand and spirit is traceable throughout, including in it all which bears upon one mighty purpose, excluding all which has no connexion with that,-however, from faulty or insufficient views, we might have expected it there; however certainly it would have intruded itself there, had this been a work of no higher than human skill. I would desire to show that it fulfils this, the necessary condition of a book which shall be mighty in operation; that it is this organic whole, informed by this one idea;-I shall ask you to acknowledge that we have here an explanation of what it has, and what it has not; much in its form, and yet more in its substance; why it should be brief here, and large there; why it omits wholly this, and only touches slightly upon that; why vast gaps, as at first sight might seem to us, occur in some portions of it; infinite minuteness of detail in how things which at first we looked to find

others;

in it, we do not find, and others, which we were not prepared for, are there.

And if this unity can be shown to exist, none can reply that it was involved and implied in the external accidents of the Book, and that we have mistaken the outward aggregation of things similar for the inward coherence of an organic body: since these accidents, if the word may be permitted, are all such as would have created a sense of diversity; and it is only by penetrating through them, and not suffering them to mislead us, that we do attain to the deeper and pervading unity of Scripture. Its unity is not, for instance, that apparent one which might be produced by a language common to all its parts. For it is scarcely possible, I suppose, for a deeper gulf to divide any two of the nobler languages of men than divides the two in which severally the Old and the New Testament are written. Nor can it be likeness of form which has deceived us into believing that unity of spirit exists; for the forms are various and diverse as can be conceived; it is now song, now history; now dialogue, now narration; now familiar letter, now prophetic vision. There is scarcely a form of composition in which men have clothed their thoughts and embodied their emotions which does not find its archetype here. Nor yet is the unity of this volume brought about through the parts of it being all the upgrowth of a single age, and so all breathing alike the spirit of that age; for no single age beheld the birth of this Book, which was well-nigh two thousand years ere it was fully formed and had reached its final completion. Nor