by a narrow mind, and whose undue heat often marks the point at which their power of reasoning or understanding ceases, just as the galvanic wire grows hot where it is finest and therefore weakest. But, when all due allowance is made, the sad fact remains—our speculations about Holy Scripture are marked by too little love. Were love more abundantly present, we should be much less ready to assert hastily what would pain our brother, or to meet hasty assertion with equally hasty contradiction. We should treat with much more tenderness every form of religious thought which experience shews us to be compatible with devotion and goodness. We should look with a deeper sympathy on the creeds, and forms, and worship of all the churches; knowing that Christ is in the midst of any two or three who are gathered together in His name, and that words which are quite imperfect as statements of speculative. truth, may yet, when they fall from pure and clean lips, be genuine outpourings of love to Him. Difficult questions, which simple folk cannot entertain, and which the learned en

tertain but cannot agree in answering, we should feel to be quite subordinate to the duty of Christian charity. The eye of love, if it wandered from time to time over the whole field of Christian truth, would find its way back habitually to Christ the centre, and rest there. Knowledge might scrutinise anxiously the forms that move in the distant and imperfect twilight; but love would find her home and her happiness in turning to the Light itself.

Does any one read his Bible with a real love to Christ and his brethren, and a deep sense of his own unworthiness and ignorance? Does he say from his heart, "I would embrace all truth, and deny none; I have no faith in the riddles of psychology; I am perplexed with evidence and counter-evidence, and have no clue of my own with which to combine the broken and scattered facts of history: but I learn from the Bible to love Christ, and put my trust in Him; and He alone is my Master"? If such there be, whether he speak in love, or in love hold silence, let him not trouble himself curiously in this

matter, and let not others trouble him. He bears in his soul, if not in his body, the marks of the Lord Jesus. "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but a new creature. And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God1."

1 Galatians ad fin.

C. S.

11

NOTES.

SERMON I.

NOTE I. p. 4.

In all probability, the proper rendering of the text is, "Every Scripture, being inspired by God, is also profitable, &c." If so, St Paul still pronounces the whole of the Old Testament Scriptures to be inspired. The epithet loses none of its force by being shifted from the predicate to the subject. It is true that many versions omit ka in v. 16; but this negative evidence cannot stand against the positive authority of the MSS. There is no real ground for supposing that St Paul meant to say "every writing, so far as it is inspired by God, is profitable," &c.

NOTE II. p. 7.

The conversion of St Paul cannot well be placed later than seven years from the ascension. I am not aware that any competent critic claims so early a date for the Gospels. The most received opinion seems to be, that St Matthew's Gospel is the earliest, and that this was not