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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

GIFT OF
Jroin the estate of
Rev. Orville A. Petty

GOD'S MESSAGE TO
THE HUMAN SOUL

THE COLE LECTURES
1907
God's Message to the
Human Soul
By John Watson (Ian Maclaren).
Tke Cole Lectures, ftreftared, but
not delivered. Cloth, - net 1.25.
1906
Christ and Science
Jesus Christ regarded as the Center
of Science. By Francis Henry
Smith, University of Virginia.
Cloth, - net 1.26.
1905
The Universal Elements
of the Christian Religion
An attempt fo Interpret Contempo
rary Religious Conditions. By
Charles Cuthbert Hall, President
Union Theological Seminary, New
York. Cloth, net 1.25.
1903
The Religion of the
Incarnation ":'
By Eugene Russell Hendrix. One
of the Bishops of the M. E. Church,
South. Cloth, net 1.00. «

The Cole Lectures of Vanderbilt
University for igof
God's Message to
the Human Soul

The Use of the Bible in the
Light of the New Knowledge

By
JOHN WATSON, D.D,
{Ian Maclaren)

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1907, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

THE COLE LECTURES
THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten
nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum
of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by
Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and con
ditions of which gift are stated as follows :
" The object of this fund is to establish a foundation
for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the Bib
lical Department of the University, to be restricted in its
scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re
ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter
vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the
Board of Trust; and the particular theme and lecturer
shall be determined by nomination of the Theological
Faculty and confirmation of the College of Bishops of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Said lecture
shall always be reduced to writing in full, and the man
uscript of the same shall be the property of the Univer
sity, to be published or disposed of by the Board of
Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising there-
firom to be added to the foundation fund, or otherwise
used for the benefit of the Biblical Department."

•ffn flDemoriam
Rev. John Watson, D. D., more popu
larly known throughout the world of letters
by his nom de plume of Ian Maclaren, was
born in Essex, England, November 3, 1850.
Having been educated in Scotland and Ger
many, he was licensed to preach by the Free
Church of Scotland in 1874, and after serving
as pastor in Edinburgh, Logie-almond, and
Glasgow, he became in 1880 pastor of the
Sefton Park Presbyterian Church of Liver
pool, England, which position he resigned in
1905, in order to devote his time more largely
to authorship and the lecture field. He is
the author of eighteen volumes, being best
known by those titled " Beside the Bonnie
Brier Bush," 1894 ; " The Days of Auld Lang
Syne," 1895; "The Upper Room," 1895;
" The Mind of the Master," 1896 ; " The Cure
of Souls " (Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale
University), 1896; "A Doctor of the Old
School," 1897; "The Doctrines of Grace,"
7

8 IN MEMORIAM
1900; "The Life of the Master," 1901 ; and
" The Inspiration of Faith," 1905. To these
must now be added " God's Message to the
Human Soul," 1907.
In the spring of 1907 Dr. Watson came to
America to deliver the Cole Lectures of Van
derbilt University, and to fill other engage
ments. On April 22d he was taken suddenly
and seriously ill, while at Mount Pleasant,
Iowa, and two weeks later, on May 6th, the
entire American nation, to whom the name
of Ian Maclaren had become a household
word, was stricken with unspeakable grief at
the announcement of his death.

Introduction
THIS volume contains Dr. Watson's
last message to the world. That it
should consist of his maturest
thoughts concerning the Bible, viewed as
God's message to the human soul, seems
strangely providential, now that his lips have
been silenced by death.
The contents of this volume were to have
been delivered as the Cole Lectures of
Vanderbilt University for 1907. The date
fixed for their delivery was the week extend
ing from April 28th to May 5th. On Mon
day, May 6th, Dr. Watson died without ever
having reached the seat of the University.
The lectures, however, had been carefully
prepared with a view to immediate publica
tion after their delivery, and the manuscript
was therefore practically ready for the printer
when the author died.
The fame of Dr. Watson as preacher,
9

IO INTRODUCTION
lecturer, and author, has gone wherever the
English language is known. Nor is it con
fined by any means to the English-speaking
world. Combining, as he did in his per
sonality, so much that was strongest and
best in the English and Scotch character, it
is not to be wondered at that he was a great
favourite in America. Of all the English
men and Scotchmen who have visited the
United States during recent years, no one
has spoken to larger audiences or received
more marked evidences of his personal
popularity than has the author of this vol
ume. The unexpected death of our distin
guished visitor, under conditions so pathetic,
thus far away from his home, brought grief
and tears to many thousands of Americans,
who, while perusing the pages of " Beside the
Bonnie Brier Bush," " A Doctor of the Old
School," and " Auld Lang Syne," had learned
for the first time what it was to read a book
with melted hearts and moistened eyes. But
would any other than a pathetic death have
been a fit ending to the life of one whose
greatest power was that of pathos, and

INTRODUCTION ii
whose pathos had been most powerful when
describing scenes of death, whether of the
lowly cottager among the heath-covered hills
of Scotland, or of the Great Sufferer who died
on the Cross of Calvary ?
It is rarely given to any man to be great in
more than one line of intellectual activity.
Dr. Watson, however, stood not only facile
princeps as a writer of stories of incomparable
tenderness and beauty, but he was also
great as a preacher and lecturer, and as a
scholar and author. He preached to crowded
houses in the Sefton Park Presbyterian
Church in Liverpool, of which he was pastor
from 1880 to 1905, and he was never more
popular than when he closed his ministry
there, at the end of twenty-five years of
uninterrupted service. As a lecturer in in
stitutions of learning and on the public plat
form, he had few equals. His gifts of con
versation and anecdote made him the admired
centre in every social circle which he adorned
with his presence. Some of his published
stories are among the immortelles of English
literature ; they are the creations of a genius

12 INTRODUCTION
that was rarely gifted in the power to turn
life's prose into poetry and to idealize and
immortalize places and characters and scenes
which to many were only homely and com
monplace things.
His contributions to religious and theolog
ical literature are of a high order. They
represent sound scholarship and the best
type of evangelical faith. Only when com
pared, and because compared, with his own
matchless stories and idealizations, can they
suffer any discount. They are volumes that
dispel doubt and minister to faith, while they
nourish at once both the intellectual and the
spiritual man. The paths that he travelled
were not the sidetracks and bypaths, but the
great highways of thought and study in the
realm of Biblical and theological literature.
The present volume, " God's Message to
the Human Soul — The Use of the Bible in
the Light of the New Knowledge," is one of
the best that ever came from his pen. The
different chapters were written especially with
a view to meeting the needs of young min
isters in our day. The author's thought is

INTRODUCTION 13
that the best result that comes from the new
study and new knowledge of the Bible is the
light it throws, and the emphasis it places,
upon the Holy Scriptures as God's message
to the human soul. Whatever interpretation
of the Bible will impart to it this highest ethical
value is the interpretation which the author ac
counts the truest and best, and this regardless
of whether it is called " traditional theology "
or " higher criticism." Into the discussion
of purely critical questions pertaining to the
Bible he does not enter, but some of the
results of the modem scholar's method of
studying the Bible he does assume as true
because they seem to him to furnish the best
foundation for interpreting the Bible as God's
message of moral truth to the human soul.
Theologians of all evangelical types of faith
and of all schools of thought can well afford
to allow to each other large liberty of opinion
in the many minor points of Biblical interpre
tation if they will all only endeavour so to in
terpret and teach and preach the Bible as to
give it the greatest possible power in leading
men to give up sin, to be pure in mind and

14 INTRODUCTION
holy in heart, and to find an altruistic service
and sacrifice for others the true ideal of the
Christian life. If the minister in his study so
interprets the Holy Scriptures, then these
scriptures will always be, as expounded by
him, a living message of God to the souls of
men. If the reader shall find some sentences in
this volume which he thinks open to criti
cism, it is well that he should remind himself
of the fact that these lectures are being pub
lished without having been delivered and
without the author having had an oppor
tunity to give the manuscript a careful and
final reading. In editing the lectures for
publication the writer has not felt that it was
proper for him to make any alterations in the
manuscript, even though he would have sug
gested that this be done in at least a few
instances had the author lived to deliver the
lectures and to personally supervise their
publication. The Cole Lectureship of Vanderbilt Uni
versity is to be congratulated in that it was
permitted to call forth from this gifted

INTRODUCTION 15
preacher and author before he died a mes
sage of such absorbing interest and lasting
value to the Christian world as that which is
contained in this volume. WILBUR F. TILLETT.
Dean's Office,
Biblical Department,
Vanderbilt University.
September 2, igoj.

Contents
The Construction of the Book . 19
The Standpoint of the Book . 61
The Humanity of the Book . . 103
The Authority of the Book . . 145
The Style of the Book . . .189
The Use of the Book . . .229

17

LECTURE I
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK

LECTURE I
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
AS the Bible is the manual of the Chris
tian minister, the instrument with
which he is to do his work, it is in
the last degree desirable that he should have
an easy mastery of the Book. If it be his
sword for smiting sin, he must know how to
wield it, so that his strokes may not fall upon
empty air, but may be deadly in conviction.
If it be his vial of oil for healing sorrow, he
must have a deft hand for applying the
salve to the wound, so as to restore health.
Within the compass of this extended and
varied literature, there are resources of light
and love for all ages, and all conditions, but
the preacher must know how to find them,
and when to use them. He must know how
to make the correspondence between this
eternal Book and every age, between this
universal Book and every individual, and
21

22 THE construction OF THE BOOK
therefore the efficient minister has transferred
the book from his table into his mind and
into his heart. It is a benefit that he be
trained in literature and art, and that he be
acquainted with life and afiairs, but the para
mount qualification, after holiness of char
acter, is that the minister should know his
Bible. No accomplishments in Dogmatic
Theology or Church History can ever com
pensate for ignorance of Holy Scripture.
One might cheerfully sacrifice a multitude of
dates, and a wealth of theories to make St.
Luke's Gospel a part of his being; he has
indeed done poorly for his people if he feeds
them with the conclusions of Church Coun
cils, instead of the abiding truths of St. John's
Gospel. After all there is no theology so
satisfying as Biblical, and the Acts of the
Apostles are the seed-plot of all Church His
tory. The most perfectly equipped pastor is
he who knows the Bible from beginning to
end in its by-paths as well as its main roads,
in its underlying principles as well as its
majestic sayings — who has its books ar
ranged in their historical order and assigned

THE construction OF THE BOOK 23
to their various provinces of life, who can
distinguish between the temporary form
which is secondary, and the Eternal Gospel
which is the burden of its message, who can
detect the correspondence between the word
of the Lord in each period of Bible History
and the environment of life, and can recog
nize a similar correspondence in our own
day. He has fulfilled one of the chief con
ditions of successful preaching who can cor
relate a living book and a living age.
The Bible differs from every text-book of
religion in that it is not a book, but a litera
ture, and a preacher must understand its
construction — not merely how many volumes
there are in the canon, and such like ex
ternal details, but how this long literature
came into being, in short its organic growth.
It is at this point that criticism renders its
special service, and earns the just gratitude
of the preacher. No one can estimate too
highly for practical purposes the work of
those patient and reverent scholars, who take
up this apparently heterogeneous and con
fused material and set it in order of time.

24 THE construction OF THE BOOK
who assign it to the most likely authors, and
connect it with the most congenial periods,
who catch at each variation the governing
note, and at each change focus the vision.
An American scholar has said that " the price
which the world has to pay for a great book
is the labour of understanding it," and the
contribution of criticism to the pulpit is to edit
I the book for practical use. The relation of
\ the critic and the minister is very much that
I of the physiologist and the physician, and
they ought to be on good terms. If there
has been any misunderstanding it should be
cleared up without delay, and this is not a
hopeless task. The suspicion which fell on
criticism, and still shadows it in the minds of
pious people, is due, partly to the change it
works in preconceived ideas of the form of
the Bible, and partly to the standpoint of
certain critics. The first ground is surely
unreasonable, because so far as criticism con
vinces the readers of the Bible that its sub
stance passed through the minds of living
men and had a real meaning for its own
generation, the Book gains enormously, both

THE construction OF THE BOOK 25
in lucidity and authority. But the other
ground cannot be so lightly dismissed, for
the standpoint of the critic is a most serious
question. If he approaches the study of
Holy Scripture with this principle either
distinctly laid down, or working from the
background of his mind, that it does not and
cannot differ in any way from other literature
— ^that the books of Moses and of Herodotus,
that Plato and Isaiah, that Marcus Aurelius
and St. Paul, are to be explained in exactly
the same way ; in short that the Bible as a
matter of course has come into existence on
ordinary conditions, and that no extraordinary
influence may be admitted, then the critic
will labour under a blinding and fettering
disability. His eyes will be holden as he
goes along the way by which God has
travelled down the ages, so that he shall not
be able to realize His presence. The signs
of the divine he will deny by referring them
to some lower cause ; the impressions of the
divine he will resist, and call them delusions
because he starts with the dogma, that the
book, wherever it came from, cannot have

26 THE construction OF THE BOOK
come from God. And there is no dogmatist
so stiff and arrogant as an unbelieving critic.
He is enslaved by his principle of agnosti
cism, and will apply it remorselessly to the
interpretation of the Bible. Any unique
event will be incredible, any unparalleled
personage will be unhistorical ; the visions
will be translated into prose, and the mag
nificence of the book reduced to common
place, till the prophets become unknown Jews
with a genius for religious writing, and Jesus
a gifted but self-deluded peasant of Galilee.
There is a Spanish proverb : " If you desire to
find gold in the Indies, you must bring it
with you." If one comes to this book certain
that he will find no God, none will reveal
Himself ; if he lay it down that this book is
only one among many books created by the
religious instinct, that and nothing more will
it be to him. The influence of this school
upon the preacher is deadly ; it will penetrate
his soul like an atmosphere, it will paralyze
his energy like a subtle poison in his veins.
For him the Bible will now have no lift ; it
will open up no long distances. He will be

THE construction OF THE BOOK 27
daily hampered in the free use of the most
glorious promises, because he has learned to
believe that they are only of men and have
not come from God, and he will be perpet
ually explaining away the spiritual meaning
of Bible facts, in order to bring them into
line with uninspired history. In this low
temperature the preacher will sink into a
student of Jewish annals, and a lecturer on
comparative religion. When the unbelieving
critic captures the pulpit he devastates the
pew ; the imagination of the people will die
under this arid influence, and their faith be
filched away. The Eternal Hope itself will
wither in their hearts, and the Bible which
once was the garment of the risen Lord,
from whose very hem virtue went out, will be
only the grave clothes of a dead Christ.
Just because one has a profound sense of
the service which criticism has rendered to
truth, he has the less hesitation in protesting
against its tyranny and its abuse. If the
Church should not be afraid to use the critic
as a servant, neither should the Church allow
herself to be browbeaten by him as a master.

28 THE construction OF THE BOOK
The Church is a guardian of the Bible, the
critic is only its editor ; his province is the
letter, he may not meddle with the spirit of
the book. There is a danger that a swollen
and omniscient criticism should break bounds,
and become the dictator to faith. The temp
tation of all specialism is insubordination to
knowledge as a whole ; the weakness of all
specialism is complacent ignorance of other
departments. When one critic of our day
reduces the teaching of Jesus to a few say
ings, and another, full of new wine, denies
any Epistles to St. Paul, one learns the limits
of specialized scholarship, and the folly of
giving a blank check to critics of irresponsi
ble judgment. One waits for the critic who
shall boldly say, as some have been hinting,
that Jesus is only a lay figure on which a
beautiful tradition has been draped, and that
He never lived any more than He rose from
the dead. We shall then have the supreme
irony of a scholar sitting within his study, and
proving to his own satisfaction from a micro
scopic examination of manuscripts that there
never has been any Christ, while outside his

THE construction OF THE BOOK 29
airless study, if he had only ears to hear the
tramp of innumerable feet, he would know
that the risen and triumphant Christ had for
twenty centuries been marching along the
high road of history in the living Church
which is His Body and His instrument. His
evidence and His manifestation.
Criticism is not, however, monopolized by
the school of unbelief. Over against Kuenen
stands Robertson Smith, one of the great
scholars and true believers of modern times,
and believing criticism approaches the book
with another and more scientific mind. It
recognizes at the outset that this book, upon
the face of it, by virtue of the place it has held
in the judgment of religious people and the
work it has wrought in the world, will likely
move on another plane and present features
of a different kind from other books of re
ligion. This criticism, while applying as
rigidly the processes of scholarship to the
study of the book, and opening its windows
still more unreservedly to the light of history,
holds itself open to recognize and welcome
the hand of God behind events, and to catch

30 THE construction OF THE BOOK
His voice through the words of human
speech. If this criticism assumes God, it is a
reasonable assumption, and then its office is
to show how God has spoken, not by unrav
elling the mystery of inspiration, but by set
ting in order the circumstances of the mes
sage. As God has spoken in many portions
and in divers manners, and since a better un
derstanding of the form will help us to a
fuller acceptance of the spirit, it is the func
tion of the critic to write an introduction to
the books of Scripture. From him we learn
by whom they came — the authors of the book,
when they were written — the environment of
the book, their special burden — the gospel
of the book, their place in the order of revela
tion — their relation to Scripture history as a
whole, and also their prophecy — the anticipa
tion of Christ. Each book is orientated by
the critic : like a stone it is set in its place in
the arch, of which it forms a part, and of
which the key-stone is Christ. When the
critic has done his work with the resources of
his knowledge and under the guidance of
faith, he restores the book to the preacher

the construction of the BOOK 31
with the spirit untouched, but with the letter
illuminated, so that every portion of ancient
Scripture yields for the pulpit more vivid il
lustrations, more accurate parallels, more tell
ing lessons, more timely appeals. Will any
one deny that when Prof. George Adam
Smith has finished with the prophets, they
are ten times more serviceable for the pulpit,
or when Professor Ramsey has done his
unique service for the Acts of the Apostles,
the preacher approaches the beginning of
church history, with a more understanding
mind, and a more confident faith ?
While criticism has a duty to all literature,
it renders a special service to Holy Scripture,
because this book stands by itself not merely
in its inspiration, but also in its construction.
It comes upon one as a surprise, because it is
not what we would have expected if we were
to judge it by comparison with other manuals
of religion. Were one of us coming to the
Bible for the first time — and there are mo
ments when one desires this sensation, he
would expect to find it a glorified hand-book
of theology, with a chapter on the being of

32 THE construction OF THE BOOK
God, another on the person of Jesus Christ,
a third on the nature of man, and a fourth
on the scheme of salvation, with other
chapters on judgment and the future life, and
such like subjects. The reader would be
able to turn to a certain page and find in a
succinct proposition the particular truth he
was seeking and which he must believe.
The book from the first word to the last
would be of the same date in the same style,
upon the same level of revelation and every
where charged with the same authority. It
would be in all its parts of equal value, and
absolute perfection ; it would be removed
everywhere from the influence of human
feeling and human frailty. This is the ideal
of our books of authoritative religion,
whether the thirty-nine articles of the Angli
can Church or the confession of faith adopted
by the Scots Kirk. This is the principle of
the Koran and the sacred book of the Mor
mons. And although the Bible has been for
long centuries in the hands of Christian folk,
yet the idea still lurks in their mind, that if
you look closely enough into the book, and

THE construction OF THE BOOK 33
somehow or other get rid of certain miscel
laneous material, this is its plan and inten
tion. The fact that the Bible is not a divine
catechism may suggest to the minds of re
ligious preachers that they should not place
such implicit confidence in teaching religion ,
by propositions. There is a place for ordered
and digested knowledge in religion as in
science, and one pays a willing tribute to the
ability, both spiritual and theological, with
which the text-books of Christianity have
been compended, but it should not be for
gotten that the Bible which remains the first
and last book of our religion, proceeds upon
a different method. The Bible one sees in
an instant, is historical not theological ; it
proceeds on the lines of action, not specula
tion ; it teaches by illustration, not by prop
ositions. It is a book of life, laying its
scene in the market-place, not in the study,
and affects the soul, not by the presentation
of abstract doctrine, but by encompassing it
with an atmosphere of grace. Ought not
this method of instruction, so interesting, and

34 THE construction OF THE BOOK
winsome, so human and reasonable, to be the
ideal of the pulpit, and is it impossible to
make it the model of our Christian text-books,
in Sunday-schools, and Bible classes, while
reserving the study of theology for colleges,
and other places of sacred learning ?
One's next thought on this general survey
of the Bible, is, that if the Bible had been
given us, as people seem to imagine, from
heaven, like the stone tables handed to
Moses — an immediate, complete and final
revelation of everything we need to know
about God and man — it would have been a
wonderful, but futile Book ; something to be
kept and worshipped as an idol, but which
could never have been a light or a power
in human life. It would have been as use
less as if it had been written in a new lan
guage used in heaven, but unknown on
earth. It would have been foreign to the
human mind, and remained an exotic in
human life ; it would not have belonged to
us, and could never have become a part of
us ; it would have had as much affinity to
us as to the Martians or any other race of

THE construction OF THE BOOK 35
conscious beings. If our sacred Book was
to possess the soul and guide the feet of man,
it must be grown from heavenly seed in
human soil, and come to the full corn under
the showers and sunshine of human life.
Revelation must not be sudden, but gradual,
not foreign, but native ; its principle must
not be creation, but evolution; it must be
not a theurgy, but an education ; and it
must culminate, not in a visitation of God
but in an incarnation.
When it is suggested that the method of
revelation is based on the principle of evolu
tion, it is necessary at once to distinguish be
tween two ideas of evolution. There is that
idea, which supposes that man is the last re
sult of a long process, rising step by step
from the lowest form of life to his present
nature, and that this process has been car
ried on by some inherent, but blind energy,
and that his spiritual nature is a product of
the same process. This is an unbelieving
and unreasonable theory of evolution. There
is another idea which accepts the process,
but affirms a mind guiding and controlling

36 THE construction OF THE BOOK
it, and also insists that while a man's body
may have been developed from the lower
animals, his spiritual faculties have come
from another world This latter conception
is reasonable and spiritual, carrying with it
the belief in God, who uses the principle of
evolution, as He may use any other for His
high ends and also the immortality of the
soul, which has not sprung from the animals
but has come from God. In the same way
if we hold, as the facts seem to compel us,
that revelation has been an evolution, we
must distinguish between two readings of the
word, one of faith, and one of unbelief. The
critics of unbelief hold that there has been a
gradual development of religious truth, ris
ing from the primary, and rude ideas of the
Hebrews to the teaching of Jesus, but they
do not admit either the action of the divine
Spirit, or a guiding purpose of God. The
growth has been all natural in the sense that
it has not been divine. But, when writers of
this school try to discover the source of Bible
literature, and especially the origin of the
idea of God, they are at a loss and contra-

THE construction OF THE BOOK 37
diet one another — Renan, for example, insists
on the monotheism of a Semitic people, while
Kuenen rather lays stress on " Israel's peculiar
fortunes." If the Bible be a natural evolution,
then its spiritual energy and its spiritual goal
are both inexpUcable. The Book would then
have no indwelling of God and no unity.
But it does present an ever more convincing
presence of the divine, and it moves steadily
to the union of man and God in the Incarna
tion. ¦* Revelation then is to be considered a spir
itual evolution, by which the human soul is
educated by God through the experience of
God in life, till it rises to union with Him in
Christ, when as it were the soul comes to the
body of humanity. As we carry the whole
past history of our physical self in our body,
and science can trace in fleshy tablets the
stages of our development, so the history of
our spiritual self is written in the Bible, and
can be followed from barbarism to sainthood ;
as the race ascends from the sheiks of the
desert to the saints before the throne. Any
one can see who reads his Bible with ordi-

38 THE construction OF THE BOOK
nary intelligence, that there has been a con
tinual advance both in knowledge, and in
conduct, from the patriarchs to the prophets,
and from the prophets to the apostles, with
many stages between. Take for instance the
growth in the idea of God. There was first
of all the original conception of the Eternal,
as the " Lord " ; this changes in the days of
the patriarchs into the "Almighty," which
marks an advance from the vague belief in
a deity to the conception of a deity control
ling nature. When Israel is delivered from
Egypt, God receives a new name, " Jehovah,"
and people now think of God as coming
forth and declaring Himself. By and by as
the moral sense of the nation is developed,
alike by the mercies and by the judgments
of God, they learn to call Him, the " Holy
One of Israel." The Deity is now invested
with a spiritual character, and as time goes
on, as prophet after prophet realizes God,
and makes known his vision, this character
is charged like a golden vessel, with right
eousness, faithfulness, loving kindness and
tender mercy. The later prophets are ac-

THE construction OF THE BOOK 39
customed to refer to God under the
majestic title of "Jehovah of Hosts," a
name associated with the rise of the
monarchy, and which the prophets used
to assert their faith in the holiness and sov
ereignity, in the overwhelming glory, and
victorious might of God. '" Another instance
of growth can be found in the idea of sacri
fice. Abraham, anxious to show his devotion
to God and to give of his best, intends to
offer his only son, according to the fashion of
the day, and learns that while his devotion
was acceptable, his action would be a crime.
Instead of human sacrifice, beasts now be
come the symbol of penitence and consecra
tion, and with the smoke of many sacrifices
the prayers of men go up to God. Then the
prophets begin to denounce sacrifice with
scornful words, making the Eternal say, " To
what purpose is the multitude of your sacri
fices unto Me, saith the Lord ; I am full of the
burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed
beasts, and I deUght not in the blood of bul
locks or of lambs or of he goats." Those
offerings were formal and elementary, they

40 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
were not worthy of God to whom they
were offered, or of man who offered
them. There was a better gift to be laid
upon the altar and a more spiritual con
secration to be accomplished, and the
voice of an anonymous writer is heard,
" Sacrifice and offering Thou did'st not de
sire, my ears hast Thou opened ; burnt offer
ing and sin offering hast Thou not required.
Then said I, lo I come, in the volume of the
book it is written of me, I delight to do Thy
will, O God, yea Thy law is within my
heart." When the second Isaiah wrote, there
had arisen before the imagination of prophecy,
a holy and meek Victim, who is the Servant
of the Lord, and by His sufferings makes
atonement for the nation. And the idea of
sacrifice reaches its lonely and radiant height,
when in the great tragedy of history, Jesus
offers Himself a sacrifice of obedience to the
divine will, upon the cross of Calvary, and
opens up the new way unto God the Father.
"One other instance of progress from the
lower to the higher idea may be found " — I
am now quoting from lUingworth's admirable

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 41
Bampton Lectures, " Personality, Human and
Divine" — "in the process by which man
has come to recognize what we call his per
sonality, all that is potentially or actually
contained within himself — in a word what it
means to be a man." When Jephthah de
votes his daughter to death or to the celibate
religious life, according as you interpret the
passage, or parents offer their own children
with hideous cruelty unto Moloch ; when
whole families or whole tribes are punished
together for the ill-doing of one, it is plain
that the individual was at the disposal of his
family or merged in his nation. The indi
vidual has no rights and no separate exist
ence. He has hardly the right to say I ; he
can hardly be said to have a separate exist
ence in those early days. The prophets
themselves dealt with Israel as a whole and
called the nation the servant of the Lord;
they make little of individuality and hardly
address themselves to the individual. It was
Christ who found the individual, because He
revealed the true and divine conception of
personality. In Christ men realized them-

42 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
selves, in Christ they understood themselves,
in Christ they became strong and free. And
so the Christian Apostle writes, " I live, yet
not I, but Christ liveth in me."
While revelation is steadily advancing, and
the idea of God, of religion, of man, is grow
ing deeper and clearer, the progress is towards
a fixed goal. From the beginning one can
see with the complete Bible in his hands, that
the book is moving towards Christ, as the
physical evolution has risen to man. While
the Fathers of the Church were certainly too
fond of allegorizing, and one's reason does
not welcome the doctrine of the Holy Trinity
in any casual combination of three persons in
Bible history, and while many pious Divines
of last century were too fond of spiritualizing
the incidents of Bible history, yet it is true
that, as from the furthest confine of the Roman
Empire there ran a road to Rome, so from the
end of Holy Scripture there is a way to
Christ. The two Testaments correspond,
and the New Testament is the climax and the
key of the Old. The types of the early dis
pensation which are not to be despised by the

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 43
preacher (and on which the best book still
remains that of Principal Fairbairne), all
shadow Christ. The promises of divine
mercy and help, which illuminate the toilsome
and tragic road of revelation, all travel
towards Christ. The great heroes of Hebrew
history become transfigured, and raised to
heroic size, like shapes in a luminous mist,
and are associated with the coming Messiah ;
the spiritual imagination of saints, praying
for the golden age and longing for a perfect
humanity, reach forward to Christ, whom not
having seen they love. Throughout the Old
Testament there is what may be called an
instinct of Christ, as when the sea bird makes
for the ocean. There is an unconscious
demand for Him, there is a growing expecta
tion of Him at last, there is an eager waiting
till He come. Without Christ the Bible had
been a dark riddle, and the education of the
race had missed its crown ; with Christ the
Bible is an open secret, and a long purpose of
grace has been fulfilled. Christ is the cul
mination of the spiritual evolution.
There have been certain high water marks

44 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
in the history of man, where a tidal wave has
left its visible traces upon the sands of time.
Possibly the human intellect has never risen
so high, or achieved such works, as in the fifth
century before Christ in Greece. No dramatist
has surpassed Sophocles, no philosopher can
be compared with Socrates, no statesman has
arisen more brilliant than Pericles, no artists
are to be compared with the men who
adorned the Acropolis. Like solitary Alps
those names, with others of the same period,
stand unapproachable. That golden age of
letters and of art shows the possibility of
humanity, to it the race is slowly and pain
fully rising, by it the mind of man is to
be estimated and judged. After the same
fashion the high water mark of spiritual life
was reached by Christ and the writers of the
New Testament Scriptures, who were es
pecially filled with His Spirit and afford the
most unshadowed reflection of His character.
In His life and work, and most of all in Him
self, His beautiful and perfect personality,
have been fulfilled all the anticipations of
saints and prophets, exceeding abundantly

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 45
above all that they asked or thought ; in Him
are realized all the hopes and imaginations,
the desires and ambitions of the human soul
when it stands upon its highest places, and
holds its most intimate communion with God.
Short of Him revelation could not stop,
beyond Him revelation cannot go. There is
nothing to be conceived and nothing to be
craved in the province of the soul above
Christ. As there is in the recesses of the
human mind an ideal of perfect physical
beauty, which one could not describe, but
which is satisfied when one looks upon the
Appolo Belvidere or the Hermes which was
found not long ago in Greece, so in the
recesses of the human soul there is an idea
of spiritual beauty, which the writers of the
Old Testament struggled to portray, but
which is realized with exceeding glory in
Jesus Christ. The presentation of Christ is
both the glorification and the vindication
of the Bible. When we look upon the pic
ture of that bright excellency, we forget the
fashion of the frame, and do not ask the name
of the painter ; the living Christ as He stands

46 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
out in relief from the gospel records is
independent of criticism. Were the Bible to
be destroyed as a unique picture might be
burned in some catastrophe, that face would
remain engraven upon the heart of every one
who had seen it, and be transmitted unto
those who came after. No prophet and no
poet could have created Christ ; He is the
anointed of God, whom the ages had seen afar
off, and stretched out their hands to embrace.
He is the visible shape of God, and it is not,
in the last issue, the Bible which proves
Christ, but Christ who proves the Bible.
This conception of the method of revela
tion — as a gradual and orderly evolution of
truth, under the guidance of the divine Spirit,
till it culminates in Christ — can be used by the
preacher for two practical ends. And the
first is the defense of Bible ethics. Every
minister, in what I may call large practice,
receives a certain number of letters a year,
from persons who cannot accept the Bible as
a revelation of God or a guide of conduct, for
some such reasons as the following : that
Jacob cheated Esau out of his birthright ; that

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 47
many of the inhabitants of Canaan were put
to the sword ; that David was the chosen of
the Lord, and lived licentiously ; that Samuel
hewed Agag to pieces to win the approval of
God. Popular writers of the unbelieving
school enlarge with indignant eloquence and
a strong appeal to the moral sense, upon the
low standard of morals in the Old Testament,
and upon the glaring crimes committed by
religious men. It is unjust to say that those
critics are captious and prejudiced ; we are
bound to believe that they are seeking for the
light, and that they have found certain inci
dents in Old Testament history a grave of
fense to their consciences. What then is the
advocate of faith to say, and how is he not
merely to meet objections by plausible an
swers, but, which is far better, to remove
stumbling-blocks from his brother's path?
With all respect for the teachers of the past,
it may be admitted that they did not always
take the most convincing or the most in
genuous line of argument. They were apt
to excuse the conduct of good men and to
cover up their faults ; they deeply resented

48 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
any reflection on the lives of the patriarchs,
or any criticism of what seemed to be done
by the command of God. They held as it
were a brief for Jacob and his kind and de
fended him like a low class criminal barrister
in a police court. They were also inclined to
take high and dangerous ground about the
rights of God, asserting that He could do as
He pleased with His creatures, and that if He
ordered any one to be put to death, this exe
cution was justified by the fact that His life
was at God's disposal. They had the cour
age indeed to credit the Eternal with deeds
which in justice they would have been
ashamed to commit themselves, and for
which they would have been brought before
the nearest magistrate. This line of apolo
getics was thoroughly bad, because it per
verted the reason and debauched the con
science, and it was only adopted because our
predecessors held the theory that the Bible
was on the same plane of revelation from be
ginning to end ; that what was done in Gene
sis was as absolutely right as what was done
in the Gospels, and that a text from Genesis

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 49
was as valuable for building doctrine as a
saying of Jesus. With our principle of evo
lution we are able to take up stronger ground,
and to repel attacks upon the Bible morality
with confidence, and to remove objections
from the minds of honest men. The Bible
contains the history of morality, as it rose
from level to level, for it has been as much a
growth as the knowledge of God. Indeed
the revelation of truth and the revelation of
conduct have kept step ; just as the idea of
God was imperfect, so was the standard of
character ; when the idea of God came to its
height, the perfection of character was re
vealed. Morality, crystallized in the Ten
Commandments, is spiritualized in the Sermon
on the Mount. When any one therefore de
nounces the ethics of the Bible, let us ask the
date of the incident. Upon the date rests the
defense. So many centuries before Christ ?
That g^ves a new complexion and demands
a different judgment. What one asks now
is not whether this thing would be done by
Christian men, but only whether it was ap
preciably more moral than the average moral-

50 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
ity of the day. A Christian government
would not put a nation to the sword as the
Hebrews put the Canaanites, but other nations
around in that day were doing the same thing,
with this difference, that while they did it
through sheer brutality, the Hebrews did it
in the interest of morality ; because the vices
of Canaan were so beastly they cleansed the
land by blood. From our standpoint it was
an atrocity, from their standpoint it was
an act of justice. The Hebrews of that time
had developed a conscience which hated im
purity even unto death, and therefore revela
tion at that date was vindicated. One must
also ask the censor of the Bible whether it is
fair to judge any process before it is com
plete. When the picture has received its last
touch, and the book has passed finally from
the printer's hands, and the building has been
roofed in, and the cloth is ready for the mar
ket, you are entitled to approve or condemn.
It is foolish and it is not fair to descend upon
the work in the course of making, for the
very faults you condemn may disappear be
fore its completion. What can any one say

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 5 1
against the ethic of the Bible when it has
come to its full height, and that is not in the
book of J udges but in the four Gospels ? Has
any one the heart, and has any one the cour
age to complain of the ideal laid down by
Christ, and exemplified in His life ? It is not
by Jacob but by St. Paul, not by Jael but by
the Madonna, it is not by the rude soldiers
of early days, but by Jesus of Nazareth that
the Bible stands or falls. The Bible comes
to its flower in the Sermon on the Mount.
Our age is inclined to offer another and
subtler objection to the ethic of the Bible, and
that is not that it is too low, but that it is too
high. The stress is laid now, not on the con
duct of people centuries before Christ — talk
which may be treated charitably and which
indeed is not much worse than can be ex
pected of the average man to-day — but upon
the model set up by Jesus in His teaching,
and illustrated in His own life. The Chris
tian life, say those apostles of the common
place and eulogists of pedestrian morality, is
in the clouds and not upon the earth, a life
unpractical, impossible, futile, although most

52 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
beautiful. They kneel to Christ in order to
renounce allegiance ; they applaud Christ in
order to remove Him from practical politics ;
they bow to Him as they show Him to the
door. If you press them for reasons, they
give the example of His poverty. His de
mands for service, the spirituality of His com
mandments, and the meekness of temper
which He makes a characteristic of His
kingdom. If any one, they say, were to act
as Christ directs, he would have to go out of
this world, and become a monk, and the law
of Christ could hardly be kept even then ; for
the man who has to toil and spin to get daily
bread for himself and for other people, to
manage his affairs and also the affairs of a
nation, the ideals of Christ are not only vain
but destructive. It may be suggested in
passing that this objector had not distin
guished between the call which Christ gave
to His apostles, and which He gives to cer
tain in every age, to leave all because they
are called to special service, and the call
which comes to ordinary folk who serve their
Lord within their homes, and within the

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 53
province of daily duty. Perhaps Catholic
theology has been wiser than Protestant and
more in touch with facts, in allowing two
orders of service and two degrees of saint
hood. When the young ruler declined the
call of Christ, he did not refuse to be a Chris
tian, or else no man can be a Christian unless
he deprives himself of property and enters on
the life of poverty ; he refused to join the litde
band of men who had broken every worldly
tie in order to found the kingdom of God.
Without, however, pressing that point,
the preacher can find two answers to this ob
jection of hopeless perfection. Surely for one
thing it is a tribute to the splendour of the
Bible ethics and the lonely supremacy of
Christ. Is it not an honour to Christianity
that it has set so lofty a standard and made
so exacting a demand ? If Christianity should
fail, because it has dared so much, it will be
high failure ; if Christianity should succeed,
because it asked little, it would be poor suc
cess. Suppose Christ made a primrose path
for our tender feet, instead of the hard way
of the cross; suppose He brought His re-

54 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
ligion nearly down to the level of a decent
life, and made no difference between being a
Christian and living the worldly life ; suppose
He coaxed and compromised and levelled
down, and yielded, would He have com
manded our honour, and would He have ob
tained our loyalty? One may refuse to pay
a high price for a picture because he cannot
afford it ; he may also refuse to pay a low
price, because the picture is not worth any
thing. One would not care to join even a
club which received every applicant, and
where your companions would be disreputa
ble people, or an insurance company which
had a large body of policy holders, because
it took every worthless life. We are not
really heartened when the ideal set before us
is paltry ; we do our best when the ideal is
the most sublime. It were better to die try
ing to be a Christian, than to live having suc
ceeded in being a Pharisee. Christianity is
a splendid endeavour, even though it may
sometimes be a hopeless despair ; in its very
difficulty and elevation lie its greatness and
its success.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 55
" That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it j
This high man, with a great thing to pvirsue,
Dies e'er he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundreds soon hit ;
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses a unit."
But there is another answer to this charge
of disheartening perfection, and it is full of
hope. We must take Christ's teaching as a
whole, and we must take Christ as He is.
It is a mistake to pick and choose among
His words, or to divide up His character.
If He gave stringent commandments. He
accompanied them by most gracious promises,
and if He presented Himself as a model, He
also offered Himself as a Saviour. The ideal
which he held out to His disciple in His life.
He died in order to make real. He is not,
according to the Bible idea, an unapproach
able and unique figure, but the type of
humanity ; not a height which can never be
climbed by any other feet, but the true stature
of Christianity. No doubt He is raised high
above His most spiritual and heavenly dis-

56 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
ciples, but after Him they strive and pant
and Him they also suggest, and illustrate.
This great thing cannot be done in a day.
It was a long time before Christ came, and a
very arduous progress ; it may be a long
time before humanity is like Christ, and a
severe discipline ; but the Bible is not a flat
surface, it has a large atmosphere and a far
perspective; it is not confined to time, it
moves in the regfion of eternity. St. Paul
was not a fool when he described even
Corinthian Christians as saints ; he imagined
what they were going to be ; he was not rav
ing when he wrote about all spiritual bless
ings in heavenly places, he was prophesying.
Christ is not the condemnation but the salva
tion of humanity.
We ought also to apply this principle of
the evolution of revelation to the development
of truth. As Christ showed us in His life
what we ought to be. He taught us in His
words what we need to know ; but just as it
may be long before we have attained to the
character of Christ, it may be as long before
we have assimilated the knowledge of Christ.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 57
During His earthly ministry He gave the
substance of truth, but only in the sense in
which the acorn includes the oak. Since
that day the truth has been growing in the
consciousness of His disciples, and under the
teaching of His spirit. In one sense the
Bible is complete, and no book can be added,
because no one can pass Christ. In another
sense the Bible is still being written and
many books being added, because the teach
ing of Christ is bearing new harvests every
age. The Acts of the Apostles break off
abruptly, but they have not been concluded.
They are indeed the fifth Gospel, the Gospel
of the Holy Ghost, and it is still being written.
It will not be complete till the end of the age
and the coming of the Lord, when His work
has been completed and a perfect humanity
presented to the Father. There is a corre
spondence between the teaching of Jesus and
the circumstances of periods, and the Spirit
of Christ leads His disciples into truth in a
progressive and orderly fashion. For it does
not follow that because Christ gave many
truths they can all be developed contempo-

58 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
raneously. They are together in the gospels,
but they will flower one after the other, ac
cording to their proper season in human
history. When you arrange your window
box at the beginning of winter, you place in
the hospitable soil snowdrops, crocuses,
tulips, and hyacinths. They lie together in
the kindly earth, receiving the same showers
and the same sunshine; then appear first
the snowdrops, harbingers of spring, followed
by the richness of the crocuses ; after them
come the tulip, and last of all the fragrant
and graceful hyacinths. Their planting was
contemporaneous, their flowering was pro
gressive. One recognizes that while Christ
told His diciples all things, the Spirit brings
them after a wise order to the disciples' re
membrance. There is no doubt that Christ
laid down the principle of human brother
hood, but if the Apostles had gone up and
down the world preaching the emancipation
of the slaves, society would have been shaken
to its foundations, and government would
have sunk into anarchy. It was in a later
day that this application of the principle

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK 59
could be safely made, and it can never be
appUed rashly. Jesus taught the Father
hood of God, but when in the first centuries
of the Christian era, civilization was falling
to pieces under the corruption of vice, and
the decay of reverence, men needed to learn
the sovereignty and the righteousness of
God. Within our own memory we have
seen the sterner conception of the Almighty
as a judge, yield to the more beautiful idea
of Him as a Father, and have recognized
that the spirit of Jesus has been guiding the
Church. Christian men of last century had
a very imperfect sense of the responsibility
of wealth, and their duty as stewards of the
gift of God. To-day, the words of Jesus
are coming out before men's eyes, like secret
writing brought beneath the heat of the sun,
and society is already studying with friendly
interest and unfeigned admiration, the most
altruistic sayings of Jesus. What a hundred
years ago would have been judged hope
lessly ideal in His teaching, is now becoming
real. Millionaires write upon the gospel of
wealth and give earnest thought how they

6o THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BOOK
can denude themselves of their possessions,
in order to help their fellow men. With every
century some truth which Christ taught shall
come into season, and bear its fruit, and
therefore while other literatures lose their
hold and perish, while systems of theology
and philosophy rise and fall, the Bible re
mains through all the generations and all the
changes. This Book has once been written,
but is ever being fulfilled ; it is contempora
neous with all the centuries, and in touch at
every point with human life, because it is the
revelation of the living God. Because God
lives, the Bible lives ; because God works, the
Bible works. There is in it the breath of
God : " The grass withereth, the flower fadeth,
but the word of our God shall stand forever."

LECTURE II
THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK

LECTURE II
THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
IF one would catch the likeness in a por
trait, he must stand at the proper angle
of light ; if one would gather the secret
treasure of a book, he must enter into its
intention. Every department of thought has
its own province, and every book has its own
motive. With science it is the study of the
facts of nature ; with literature it is the
criticism of life ; with philosophy it is the
principle of things ; with art it is the appre
ciation of beauty. One book may no doubt
travel in various spheres — Huxley, who had
a profound respect for the Bible, expounded
science in the most lucid English, and
Ruskin, who was richly fed upon the Bible,
was as much distinguished by his brilliant
style, as by his artistic insight. There have
been authors who seem to embrace the uni
verse of knowledge, and to be cosmopolitan
in their writing, but it remains that every
63

64 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
book has its inherent bias, and its visible
direction. It is fair that a book be judged
by its execution ; it is imperative that it be
judged by its intention. If one knows not
for what end the book was conceived and
created, then he will be as a stranger,
wandering round some ancient cathedral,
and guessing at the scenes upon the painted
glass. If one has the key then he enters in
at the door, and possesses the interior at his
pleasure, while the light streams in upon him
through the rich and mellow glory of the
ancient glass.
Beyond all books, the Bible is an en
gaging but hopeless mystery to the out
sider, while it yields its secret to the man
who is within. Because people have not
always tried to find the standpoint of the
Bible, but have been content with confused
notions about it, they have not been able to
use it with confidence, but have fumbled
over its meaning. No book has been so un
justly attacked, no book has been so foolishly
defended, and for this the blame must be
divided between its foes and its friends,

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 65
neither of whom have in many cases taken
the trouble to search out and firmly grasp
its controlling purpose.
It may be urged in the excuse of both that
on the surface the Bible does not seem to be
a unity, in the same sense as a catechism is,
or a drama. What one looks out upon is
not a study of any side of humanity, but
humanity in its vastness ; not the survey of
a province of life, but life in its variety ; not
botanical specimens, dried and pressed, pre
sented in the cases of a museum, but the hill
side in summer time, where the flowers are
growing in reckless profusion and every con
trast of colour. The reader is plunged into an
ocean of human details. The love affairs of
a man and a maid and contracts of mar
riage ; the quarrels between brothers with
their treachery and their revenge ; the bar
gains in business, wherein land is bought
and sold, and covenants are made with wit
nesses ; the feuds between rival tribes, en
livened by raids and captures ; the choice of
kings and their anointing amid the rejoicing
of the people ; the evil doing of kings and

66 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
their assassination amid a people's hatred ;
the orations of statesmen as they warn their
nation against offending God, or comfort
them in days of tribulation ; adroit arrange
ments of ecclesiastics, and the inner history of
church councils ; the collision of parties in
the Christian Church, and the bitter rivalries
which distract congregations ; the radiant
record of deeds of chivalry, and the black
story of acts of treachery — the romance of
unselfish friendship, and the blind enmity of
religious bigotry ; the career of a successful
man, and the unmerited suffering of a martyr ;
the devotion of a mother to her child, and
the jealousy of women fighting for the same
man's love ; the idyll of childhood ; the
strength of young manhood, the mellow wis
dom of old age — nomads of the desert,
dwellers in the city ; prophets and sages,
ploughmen and vine-dressers, soldiers and
traders, rich men and beggars, holy matrons
and women who are sinners ; patriarchs
driving huge herds before them, and apostles
going forth with nothing in their hands ;
priests offering sacrifice in the holy place.

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 67
and publicans collecting their gains in the
receipt of custom ; scholars busy in their
studies, and carpenters toiling in their shop —
all pass across this stage in unarranged and
natural procession. Nothing could be more
artless, nothing more fascinating. This is a
larger and more vivid Shakespeare; but
wherefore? Is there any more connection
between all the volumes that make this lit
erature than between thirty novels selected
from different periods and nations ? It is a
gorgeous kaleidoscope, but does it leave one
definite impression?
Upon a second and more careful reading
of the literature one is conscious of a certain
spirit which is informing and harmonizing
every part, like a system of nerves, and
making all the members of the body one.
The story of the patriarchs is not recorded in
Genesis because they were successful stock
farmers, but because they were the pioneers
in the quest of the soul for God. There is
this difference between the life of Joseph,
who rose from being a slave to be prime
minister, and the triumphant biography of

68 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
self-made men, with which material ambition
is somewhat coarsely fed, that the crisis in
• Joseph's life was his victory over temptation,
and the glory of his life was not his success,
^ but his character. From first to last the
career of Moses was a romance, but his ster
ling point is his preference of the unseen
above the seen, and his identification with
the suffering people of God, whereby, ac
cording to a felicitous stroke of Bible genius,
he esteemed " the reproach of Christ greater
riches than the treasures of Egypt." Joshua
was a resolute soldier, but the victory which
crowned his arms was due to his unshaken
and single-hearted faith in God. The proph
ets were in many cases able statesmen, and
they were always forceful writers, but they
have owed their immortality to their spiritual
vision and their fellowship with the Eternal.
The psalmists were poets of the grand order,
but they seized the heart of humanity because
they have sung the epic of the soul. The
line of David is continued because he feared
God, but the line of Jeroboam, the son of
Nebat, came to an end because he made

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 69
Israel to sin. As you travel down Old Testa
ment history you may find yourself in strange
byways, but sooner or later you are brought
face to face with God. The writers are intent
upon one thing, and that is righteousness ; ^
they are ever seeking for one person, and
that is God. There is not only a progress,
but it is a progpress upwards ; from the valley
the path climbs the hillside, till it reaches the
finer and rarer air of the gospels, where we
are living in the outer court of eternity, and
at the gate of heaven. The innumerable de
tails of the Book are only its body ; the living
soul of the Book is religion, the fellowship of
man with God. We lay aside the history
which is but the stalk and the leaf of the
plant; we garner the grain, which is the
revelation of God. One purpose governs
and illuminates, invigorates and glorifies the
Bible, and that is spiritual. It is the supreme
Book of religion.
The religious spirit of the Book is proved
by the way in which the historical incidents
have lent themselves to spiritual experience
so that through the screen of ordinary life

70 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
the eternal light has been shining. The
journey of the children of Israel from Egypt
..J Canaan has been the ever fresh and un
failing illustration of the chief pilgrimage of
man, when he escapes from the bondage of
sin and the tyranny of his senses, and takes
his toilsome way through the heat and weari
ness of the desert, fed by the bread which
came down from heaven, and the water that
has flowed from a stricken Christ till he
passes through the dark waters of death and
enters into his land of promise. The king
dom of Israel, with its anointed king, and its
chosen capitol of Jerusalem, with its tragic
sufferings and exile, with its amazing deliv
erances and triumphs, is the figure of the
Church of God, with her head at the right
hand of the Father, and her home in the
heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, as she sins
and suffers, believes and attains through the
checkered annals of the centuries. It is a
true and profound instinct which finds in the
Seventy-second Psalm, whoever wrote it and
to whomsoever it first referred, the prophecy
of the Prince whose kingdom would be

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 7 1
righteousness, peace, and joy, in whom the
victims of life would find their deliverer, and
the needy their helper, which identifies in
the sufferings of exiled Israel the servant of
the Lord, the forerunner of Him who was
"despised and rejected of men"; who was
" wounded for our transgressions, bruised for
our iniquities." St. Paul also has in the
judgement of all men, pierced to the heart of
things when he lifts the life and death of
Christ from the level of simple martyrdom,
and the common circumstances of Nazareth
and Calvary, to the height of a spiritual
drama, wherein His disciples after a mystical
fashion suffer and die with Him, rise and are
glorified with Him.
This august Book is forever before the
minds of men — it is as inevitable as Christ ; it
*is ever being judged by men, it is as arresting
as Christ. For indeed it is the Christ within
the Book which is its soul, and the Christ
presented in the Book who is judge. No
minister of the word should complain because
the Bible is ever in debate, for this only proves
its vitality and its supremacy. If no book has

72 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
ever been so loved, none has ever been more
hated ; if no book has ever been so valued,
none has ever been so depreciated. It was
in the beginning of its history that Lucian
declared Christianity to be " the latest folly in
the world's madhouse," and late in its history
that Voltaire allowed himself to describe the
Bible as "A tissue of fables fit only for
cobblers and tailors." But the Bible has
pursued its triumphant way and to-day is
translated into more dialects, and read by
more people than any other book. It deals
generously both with its foes and with its
friends. As the arch of triumph in Paris
preserves the name of obscure villages
because the French won victories there, so
writers on whose volumes the dust is lying
thick, have obtained a dubious immortality,
because they attacked the Bible ; and if any
one theologian or preacher has grace enough
to absorb its spirit, its life will pass into his
words, and at the least its words will adorn
his writings as with a thread of gold upon his
hodden gray. This literature makes only
one volume, but it beyond all other literatures

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 73
combined, of ancient and of modern times,
has inspired poets, artists, scholars, patriots,
besides creating the doctors and heralds of
the gospel. It is an easy task therefore to
defend the Bible, and to beat back every
assault, but the highest line of apology is not
its invincible position, or its magnificent
circulation, not its graphic style, nor its
overflowing humanity. The Bible must
stand or fall as a book of religion. It is
important to show that the Bible has illu
minated men's minds, and made them lovers
of knowledge, that it has strengthened men's
hearts and given them a passion for freedom ;
that it has renewed their morals, and filled
them with respect for righteousness ; that it
has touched their emotions, and set up an
altar to pity in every place where it has
come. But if with all this service, it has not
revealed God, so that He may be known to
men, and has not invested Him with grace,
so that He may be loved ; if it has not
brought the soul by a new and living way
into the Holy Place of the Eternal, then the
Bible has failed of its chief end. But if this

74 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
Book has lifted the veil from the face of God
so that men can call Him their friend, their
strength, their portion, their Saviour, their
Father, then the Bible has succeeded in its
high mission. For the God which is in us is
placed in communication with the God
which is in the Book, and through the revela
tion contained in Holy Scripture, the soul has
intimate commerce with its Maker.
" Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and spirit with
spirit can meet ;
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands
and feet."
Because it unveils God, and releases the
soul, because through its ministry God and
man are brought near ; the Book is not only
justified but glorified. " I have found in it,"
said a great thinker in the " Confessions of
an Inquiring Spirit," " words for my inmost
thoughts, songs for my joy, utterance for my
hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame
and feebleness. In short whatsoever finds
me, bears witness for itself that it has
proceeded from the Holy Spirit."

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 75
The preacher therefore in his use of the
Bible should disentangle its chief purpose
which is that of grace, from other ends which
it may more or less imperfectly serve. For
instance it was never intended to be a hand
book of history. With the exception of St.
Luke, there is hardly any writer who under
stands historical technique, and there is
hardly an attempt to present a consistent and
orderly narrative from the days of the
patriarchs to the coming of Christ. Different
narratives of the same event are included
without explanation or harmony. Various
authors are allowed to describe periods or
characters from different standpoints. There
are traces of many documents and many
minds, of conflicts between schools and
interests. No one should rest the authority of the
Bible upon its dates, or upon its figures. He
is not really dealing with a compact and cor
rect little primer of ancient history, but
with an independent and dramatic literature.
Surely the day is past when -devout people
will treat the fall as a literal transaction, and

76 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
base upon it, as Dutch theologians used to
do, a vast and cumbrous system of Covenant
theology with conditions and seals and what
not, as in a document drawn up by an attor
ney. If ever there was a profound and
searching, as well as beautiful and convinc
ing spiritual poem, it is the story of the Gar
den of Eden. We know that the chapters of
innocence, temptation, sin, and sorrow are
true, because they happen in every one's life,
as through selfwill we also lose our Eden and
go out upon our wander-year. It is not with
incredible history, but with spiritual experi
ence, the Book opens. Why should the
preacher therefore be troubled, if errors in
arithmetic, or contradictions in accounts be
discovered in the Bible, and brought as a
charge against its reliability ? The question
is not its accuracy in statistics, but its reality
in religion. Does it matter that the Garden
of Eden cannot be identified by a traveller,
if it can be found in a man's life? Why
then should the preacher weary his people
with maps of Jewish battle-fields, and cata
logues of Jewish kings? Why should he

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 77
toil to the torture of his mind and the with
ering of his soul, trying to spiritualize geog
raphy and genealogy ? Is it not a waste to
spend so much time and trouble upon the
chronicles and customs of the Jews, beyond
what is necessary for the understanding of
the prophetical writings, and the allusions of
the New Testament? It does seem a futility
that excellent men of old should have occu
pied years of preaching in explaining the
minutia of Jewish sacrifices and that chil
dren's memories should have been laden with
the names of the kings of Israel, when the
gospels were an inexhaustible deep, and the
romantic story of the Christian Church lay
ready for the telling. It struck one that cer
tain ministers seemed more at home in the
book of Numbers than in the Sermon on the
Mount, and had more interest in showing
how the tabernacle was constructed than ex
pounding the principles of the Kingdom of
God. The spirit was smothered by the let
ter, and the ritual of the Jewish Temple which
surely is only of very secondary importance
incroached upon the teaching of Jesus, which

78 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
ought to be the commanding theme of the
Christian ministry. History is only the
rough casket which conceals the jewel, only
the temporary scaffolding within which the
building is erected.
Ought not the preacher also to fix in the
minds of his people that the Bible was never
intended to be a book of science, and to save
his people from those absurd panics about
the conflict between science and faith, which
have made the Church ridiculous. One does
not know whether it is more absurd, for
blundering apologists to twist the language
of Holy Scripture so as to show that its
references to nature are really in keeping
with the last discoveries of science, and that
in fact they have been a cryptogram, or to
insist that science in the result of its investi
gations has contradicted the literal state
ments of Holy Scripture, and therefore has
wantonly and blasphemously attacked the
revelation of God. It is pitiable to remem
ber the catalogue of conflicts wherein the
^hurch has left her own ground and, invad
ing a foreign province, has invariably been

THE. STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 79
defeated and put to shame. When Coper
nicus made his great discovery that the
earth went round the sun, and not the sun
round the earth, the Church raged furiously,
and scientists under threat of death had to
deny the fact. But the solar system is in
different to criticism and the earth went on
her course in spite of the resolutions of
theologians, and to-day the most timid Chris
tian is not dismayed, when he reads in his
Bible that the sun arose or set any more than
he feels obliged to apologize when he uses
the same popular language himself. The re
ligious world was thrown into confusion last
century by the celebrated " Vestiges of Crea
tion " which was published anonymously,
but is now understood to have been written
by Robert Chambers, because " the action of
general laws was traced throughout the uni
verse as a system of growth and develop
ment, and it was argued that the various
species of animals and plants had been pro
duced in orderly succession from each other
by the action of unknown laws of develop
ment aided by the action of external condi-

8o THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
tions." This was regarded as a direct as
sault upon the Mosaic account of the crea
tion, and an insidious denial of the Creator.
Hugh Miller, the geologist, came to the aid
of the theologian, and it may be urged in
excuse of the attitude taken up by the
Church, that geologists, like Sir Charles
Lyall, and naturalists like Professor Agassiz
repudiated the conclusions of Mr. Chambers.
It was not discreditable in that pre-Dar-
winian age that theologians should have re
fused to accept the new theory, since they
were only keeping step with some of the
most distinguished scientists ; it was simply
unfortunate that they rushed into the con
troversy with which they had nothing to do,
and bound up the authority of revelation
with a theory of the creation. Later in the
same century Darwin brought out his " Origin
of Species," and just as Newton by his dem
onstration of the law of gravitation laid a
sure foundation for all future study of the
starry heavens, so Darwin by his discovery
of the law of natural selection established a
firm foundation for all future study of nature.

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 8 1
As this discovery, however, replaced the idea
of a special creation, and as Christian teach
ers had still fettered themselves to the posi
tion that Moses was an inspired writer of
natural history, Darwin was denounced by
the pulpit from the rising to the setting sun.
Perhaps the height of foolishness was touched
when at a meeting of the British Association,
Bishop Wilberforce condemned Darwin, who
could have taught that ambitious prelate a
lesson in unworldliness, and Darwin's views
which he did not understand, with " inimi
table spirit, emptiness and unfairness." The
Bishop who had provoked Huxley that day
beyond endurance was soundly trounced by
that uncompromising speaker, and one may
safely say that no accredited and intelligent
defender of the Bible would repeat the
Bishop's mistake. We have come to under
stand that it is not for us to dictate to the
Eternal, how He should have brought His yr
world into being, whether by acts of separate '
creation or by a process of evolution, and
that if we desire information upon His ways
in nature, we must turn not toJhe pages of^

82 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
Moses, but to the laboratories of the scientist.
We have, it is to be hoped, thrown off that
conception of the Old Testament, which is
illustrated in the Jewish Kabbala, and which
makes the Book an inspired encyclopedia
wherein you can inquire on science, philos
ophy, and every department of human
knowledge. May we also hope that we
are escaping from the uncalled-for task of
reconciling science and religion, which is very
much the same as reconciling physiology
and astronomy, and that in future the
preacher of the gospel will confine himself
to the concerns of the soul and leave the
student of nature freedom in his own
province. The evangelist and the scientist
move along parallel lines, and neither has
any right to deny the other. As knowledge
grows the lines may approximate, and one
day meet, as God and man have been united
in the Incarnation, wherein a perfect soul
from heaven and a perfect body from earth
have formed the one Person of the Lord.
It may be useful for the preacher to guard
himself against that interesting view of the

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 83
Bible, which regards it as simply a strenuous
and beautiful literature. Certainly it is a
literature and in our English translation has
done more than any other book to sustain the
standard of style, and to feed the springs of
inspiration. But the good is often the enemy
of the best, and just as the elements in the
sacrament of Holy Communion have in the
speculation of theology overshadowed the
presence of the Lord, and just as the
beauty of public worship in ancient buildings,
and by elaborate ritual, have been apt to
diminish its spirituality, so if the mind be too
much occupied with the literary form of the
Bible it may become less susceptible to its
inward grace. It is of course absurd that
young people should be trained in the classics
of Greece and Rome, and not introduced to
the magnificence of Holy Scripture, as a
discipline of culture, and a standard of
imagination. It would also correct some of
the more pedantic vagaries of the Higher
Criticism if the canons of literature were
brought to bear upon their work, and they
were induced to treat the book as a human

84 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
document, and the good taste of religious
people would be raised, and preaching as
well as prayer would be delivered from many
vulgarities and stupidities if the minds of
ministers were saturated with the literary
spirit of the Bible, and their speech was
based upon its grand style. More attention
should be given to the literary study of the
Bible, and I will take this opportunity of
recommending an excellent book upon the
subject by Professor Moulton of Chicago.
One ought, however, to guard himself in a
day when the spiritual has to fight hard for
its place, against being so much fascinated
by the form of speech as to neglect the con
tents of the message. This is to study the
chasing of the golden cup, with its wreaths
of passion flowers, and to forget the sacred
essence which its holds ; this is to be so taken
by the binding of the book, with its fine
tooUng, as to leave its pages uncut. The
literary appreciation of the Bible does not al
ways imply its spiritual apprehension, but the
Bible only yields its guerdon of blessing to
the man who has heard therein the voice of

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 85
God, and obeyed the divine call. Artists
scouring the coastiine for a bit of fetehingl
scenery, may be much taken by a fishing vii-"*
lage nestiing in the gorge between the cliffs,
and fondly transfer to canvas the red roofs of
the houses, and the security of the littie har
bour where the fishing boats are sheltered from
the tumbling billows of the outer ocean. But
it is only the fisherman who has made for that
haven of refuge on a winter night when the
storm was raging furiously and hungering for
his life, and has heard the last angry wave
beat helplessly upon the protecting rocks, as
within his wife and children gave him wel
come with thankful hearts, who can value at
its full price the harbour which has been to
him a hiding place from the wind and a
covert from the tempest. Surely there is no
person who can hear the promises of God's
loving-kindness declared by the prophets
without being vastly impressed by their
majesty and beauty, but it is only the broken
hearted and conscience-stricken man laying
hold of them in his despair, and casting him
self as a last resource upon the pity and faith-

86 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
fulness of the Eternal, who understands their
exceeding preciousness.
There is another theory regarding the pur
pose of the Bible which is very specious, and
which has a great vogue in our own day.
It was introduced by Spinoza the father of
modern Pantheism in his " Tractatus theolog-
ico-politicus," in which he states the result of
his investigation into Holy Scripture, and
which has been popularized by that graceful
man of letters Mr. Matthew Arnold in his
" Literature and Dogma " and his " God and
the Bible." Mr. Arnold wrote those two per
fectly sincere and very interesting books to
show that for long centuries people have mis
understood the object of the Bible. They
have supposed in a quite pardonable igno
rance that its chief aim was to teach men
about God, but in fact it was intended to
teach them about duty. Its substance is not
dogma, it is ethics. The Bible is in short a
handbook of conduct which differs from
Aristotie's ethics or Plato's Republic or
Seneca's Maxims, in being more strenuous in
discipline and more gracious in spirit. Under

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 87
Mr. Arnold's superfine treatment, so compli
mentary to the Jewish writers, and so pitiful
of common prejudices, God, who on first sight
does seem very prominent and very real in
the Bible, fades away and dissolves into " a
power not ourselves, making for righteous
ness," and the miraculous is Hghtiy dismissed
as quite incredible and indeed too ridiculous.
The Bible is presented to the modern mind,
not as a book of religion but of practice,
where the emphasis is laid, not on creed, but
on conduct. Conduct is the motive of this
literature, and therefore moderns who are sick
of theology and who have no belief in the
supernatural, but who cannot shake off their
respect for the Bible, and who are quite con
vinced that, if it is to be well with a nation,
the children must be trained in morals, pro
pose to reduce it to a hand-book of good con
duct, and hope that on this understanding it
may be used by every person, those who be
lieve in God, and those who do not. Mr.
Arnold had an urbane style which is very
pleasing, and he rendered service in calling
attention to the ethical element in Holy

88 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
Scripture, and for that we should be grateful,
but one cannot resist the conviction that in his
appreciation of the Bible he had not quite
risen to the occasion, and that he has failed to
account for another element, and that is the
spiritual. The Bible is very strong in teach
ing duty, but in this function it only exceeds
by comparison, other books on morals ; the
Bible is most original when it is speaking of
God, and here it is supreme and solitary.
Its finest passages, say in the Psalms and in
St. John's Gospel, are descriptions of what
God is to man, and what man is to God ;
how He has sought for men, and how they
have found Him. We should like to have
those spiritual facts, and those personal ex
periences, this story of the inner life and these
visions of the unseen explained. This is not
conduct, though it is the spring of character ;
this is communion, the intercourse of the
spirit of man with the spirit of God ; man's
soul returning to its birth. When I read
the Twenty-third Psalm or the seventeenth
chapter of St. John's Gospel, and I am told that
the Bible was written in order to teach me to

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 89
live decentiy and to pay my debts, I am not
satisfied. Those sublime passages are not
accounted for, they still wait another exposi
tion. If one visits an observatory, he is not
satisfied until he has reached that lofty room
open to the heavens, wherein the astronomers
are studying the stars, and if he be told that
this is only a rather more handsome and
dignified dwelling-house, he has the suspicion
of being played with. If the Bible be a mere
guide to conduct, why was it built so high,
why has it such an outlook ?
We ought to distinguish between a book
which is a spring of morality, and a book
which is a guide to morals, and on this point
the preacher should be very clear, and very
careful. If he proposes to use the Bible as a
companion of rules, he will both miss the in
tention of the Book, and lead his hearers
astray. The principles of righteousness are
certainly the same in all ages, and the Bible
has been their most powerful exponent, lay
ing them down with unequalled lucidity and
authority, but the application of those princi
ples to the circumstances of life changes in

90 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
every age, and the understanding of those
principles grows with the ages. Moses in
the Ten Commandments, which is the sum
mary of Old Testament ethics, and Jesus in
the Sermon on the Mount, which is the
enunciation of New Testament ethics, laid
down principles, not rules, and for the most
part it is the function of the preacher to lodge
broad and clear conceptions of duty in the
minds of his people, and to leave them to
adjust those ideas to their particular environ
ment. Was it not the chief mistake and also
the hopeless futility of Pharisaism to meddle
with the minute affairs of life, and to lay
down what a man should do at every turn ?
It was not therefore an education for con
science, but a bondage of conscience ; it did
not bring men to their full stature by teach
ing them to face their own problems of duty
and to settle them, it kept them in a state of
childhood, by forbidding and commanding
in every particular of daily life. Pharisaism,
therefore, whether Jewish or Gentile, ancient
or modern, which replaces the moral law by
casuistry, and the enlightened judgment of

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 9 1
the individual by the confessional, creates a
narrow character and mechanical morals.
Freedom is the birthright of the soul, and it
is by the discipline of life the soul finds itself.
It were a poor business to be towed across
the pathless ocean from this world to the
next ; by the will of God and for our good
we must sail the ship ourselves, and steer
our own course. It is the work of the Bible
to show us the stars and instruct us how to
take our reckoning.
One is tempted at this point to pause and
to refer to a certain direction for living, which
is often heard from the pulpit and a little
while ago obtained the popular ear. Do you
ask what ought I to do ? And there seems
no more clamant need ; ask another question.
What would Jesus do ? And you have an
infallible answer. Would Jesus visit that
place, read that book, associate with that
person, undertake that work ? If He would
I may, if He would not I may not. It is
such a simple solution of the practical per
plexities of life, that one wonders why it was
not discovered long ago, and why there

92 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
should ever be any dividing of the roads. It
ought to lift the shadow from the path of
righteousness, it ought to bring all disciples
of Christ to instant agreement on every point
of duty. But as we all know this brief maxim
of simple piety has not been an infallible or
even applicable guide. And that for two
reasons. The first is, that Jesus had a differ
ent work to do from us ; He came to fulfill
His high commission as the Redeemer of
mankind and in its execution He discharged
functions which are not ours, and endured
sacrifices to which we are not called. He
also had authority which is not given to us,
and resources of grace which were His alone.
Surely there is some difference between the
action of the Captain of Salvation achieving
the deliverance of the world upon the cross
of Calvary, and that of a humble soldier car
rying his cross amid the lowly affairs of life.
The other reason is that the circumstances of
Christ's life were different. What was be
coming in the East, might not be in the
West, what Jesus as a member of the Old
Testament Church did, we may not be called

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 93
upon to do in the new dispensation. The
life of Jesus in Galilee both as a village work
man, and as an itinerant prophet is not quite
the same as that of a merchant or a barrister
or a manufacturer or a clergyman of our day.
What Jesus possessed He seems to have dis
tributed among the poor, but if a rich man of
to-day were to reduce his wealth to liquid
cash and then fling it among the wastrels of
a city, he would have taken the most suc
cessful means in his power of reducing self-
respect, of fostering poverty, and of minis
tering to vice. You cannot imagine Jesus, if
He had the means, buying a large farm and
becoming a successful corn merchant, but if
one of His disciples employed his resources
to-day in building a manufactory in some
country town, and giving employment to
some hundreds of people upon fair terms, he
would be rendering a practical service to the
commonwealth, and be helping to build up
men and women in habits of industry and in
sound character. Jesus carefully refrained
from interfering in the politics of His day,
and never said one word against the oppres-

94 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
sion of the Roman yoke ; He did not encour
age His fellow countrymen to strike a blow
for freedom and He cast the shield of His
friendship over the hated tax gatherers.
There were reasons for this attitude of the
Master, and He was always justified in what
He did, but if His disciples were to withdraw
from all concern in the affairs of the state,
and to be indifferent to the sacred cause of
freedom, then politics would be left in the
hands of the most selfish and corrupt section
of the community, and nationality would per
ish beneath the hand of tyranny. This
plausible suggestion, "What would Jesus
do ? " lends itself to discussions which become
profane, and to situations which are childish,
and this because it confounds the great prin
ciples of life with the minute details of con
duct. Jesus has not told us what to do, for
that were impossible, as every man has his
own calling, and is set in his own circum-
/ stances, but Jesus has told us how to carry
( ourselves in the things we have to do, and
He has put the heart within us to live becom
ingly, not by pedantic rules, but by an instinct

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 95
of nobility. Jesus is the supreme teacher of
the Bible and He came not to forbid or to
command, but to place the kingdom of God
as a living force, and perpetual inspiration
within the soul of man, and then, to leave
him in freedom and in grace to fulfill himself.
Again, it is necessary for the preacher to
remember that the Bible is not a book of
theology, but that it has afforded the material
for all the theologies. We ought to think
clearly, and we may be helped in making
this distinction by the difference between
nature and science, which is the parallel to
the difference between revelation and the
ology. Nature presents a vast field of phe
nomena, and it is the work of science to ex
amine, to classify them, to find out the laws
which govern them, and the effect which they
produce. Science began very humbly and
very weakly, and during the history of human
knowledge, has been gradually extending her
circle of light and embracing wider provinces
in her kingdom. Science is ever making
fresh discoveries and revising old theories,
holding firmly what has been finally proved

96 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
and keeping her mind open to what may yet
be discovered. Science has had her dis
asters and her defeats ; science has suffered
and been put to death ; science also has had
her controversies, and has not been without
her bigotries. But on the whole her march
has been forward from twilight into sunshine,
and science is honourably distinguished by
self-denying labour, patient investigation,
love of truth, and a belief in the order of the
universe, and the unity of knowledge. How
ever much science has learned, she believes
that it is nothing to what will yet be con
quered. Theology in the same way has for her
sphere the phenomena of revelation contained
in Holy Scripture — the innumerable and
marvellous experiences of the soul in its
communion with God, and above all, the
history of Jesus Christ, in which the religion
of the Bible came to its height. The business
of theology is to examine this wealth of
spiritual facts, and to estimate their meaning,
to consolidate them into doctrines which are
simply generalizations and equivalent to laws

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 97
in science, to discover also their practical
application, and to bring them into relation
with individual life. Theology is the science
of religion, and has served a great purpose,
as a handmaid to faith, and a nurse of re
ligion. It is imperative that the preacher
should have a working knowledge of theology,
because unless he has an ordered system of
thinking, his preaching will be invertebrate.
Without a skeleton to support the fleshy
body his sermons will be like a jellyfish, that
most futile and helpless of creatures. Just
however as a skeleton is concealed and does
not appear in a perfect figure, so should a
man's theology be covered by the flesh and
blood of living humanity and practical re
ligion. The preacher, that is to say, ought to be a
theologian, but not a professor of theology ;
he ought even to teach theology, but in such
a manner that his congregation never know
that they have received it. And in the study
of theology, I suggest he should be guided
by the following considerations : The first is,
that he should base his theology upon the

98 THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
Bible, and instead of building up doctrine
with stones found in the quarry of philosophy,
or taken from the ruins of ancient theological
documents, that he should gather his facts
from this comprehensive record of religion.
Nothing is more dangerous in theology than
laying down theories at the outset, of what
God must do, or what God can do, and then
making the facts of what He has done square
with k priori dogmas. The return to the
Bible is equivalent to the return to freedom,
and the continual resort to this spring pre
vents theology from withering and dying.
Nor should the preacher forget that theology
is no more infallible than science, that it has
made many mistakes, and may make many
more, and that therefore while the theological
explanation of regeneration or the Atonement
is to be received with respect and to be used
for the illumination of faith, no conclusion of
theology is to be accepted as final, and none
should be bound upon the acceptance of be
lieving Christians. There is a wide gulf fixed
between the allegiance to Christ and the ac
ceptance of theology. As the Bible is better

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK 99
understood — and the Bible like nature is ever
opening up fresh treasures — theological doc
trines will have to be revised and readjusted ;
some may be discarded, and others will be
created. The preacher also will not forget
that theology is a progressive science, and
that only upon those conditions can it exist.
Some one has said that the concordance has
been one of the worst enemies to theology,
and if the writer meant the unscientific and
unintelligent use of texts, he was speaking
to the point. Under the old theory of an un-
progressive revelation a text from Genesis
had the same value as one from St. John's
Gospel, and a reference to some local event
in the Holy Land could be used to prove a
principle of the spiritual life, with as much
force as an argument of St. Paul. With our 1
theory of spiritual evolution in our hand, and I
with our constant reference to the history of
the time, we are able to assess texts at their 1
right value, and to set them in their bestj
light. We do not assume that Jacob knew
as much of God as St. John ; we do not place
Job on the same level with the Epistie to the

lOO THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK
Romans. Theology, therefore, has advanced
from the conception of God, which made Him
an arbitrary Eastern despot, who did whatso
ever He pleased with His subjects, without
regard to their merit or demerit, to that more
convincing idea which makes Him the God
and Father of the human family. There is
an ancient town in Scotland which stands
upon a rock that rises out of the plain.
You can trace the history of the centuries in
the architecture of the houses from the strong
and dark fortress of the days of feud and
blood, to the roomy and lightsome house of
the modem time of peace and liberty, but
all the houses rest upon the same rock, and
for the most part were built with stone hewn
from its bosom. So the Bible raises itself
above the rich and fertile level of human
literature, the immovable rock of God. Upon
it all the theologies, Roman and Protestant,
Calvinistic and Arminian are based, and out
of its treasures their edifices have been
gained. Some have grown obsolete and un
inhabitable, some are modem and inviting.
But each was justified in its turn and served

THE STANDPOINT OF THE BOOK lOl
its own purpose. And as on the height of
that rock, there was a cathedral Church, in-
which men have worshipped through all the
centuries, though under different rites, so let
the preacher continually remind his people,
and with the thought console their hearts in
days of derision and confusion, that men of
all schools and of all traditions within the
Christian creed meet together in Christ
Jesus their common Lord, and are sheltered
beneath one roof, the wide-spread and kindly
shield of the Fatherly love of God.

LECTURE III
THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK

LECTURE III
THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
IF the inspiration of the Bible be of God,
so that the Book may be justiy called
divine, its range is as wide as humanity.
With its anchor cast within the veil, resting
in the unseen and eternal, it compasses in its
interest the circumference of human history.
No religious literature, and no Christian
preacher is as entirely and unreservedly
human as the Bible, which embraces the
universe of human incident and emotion.
Within its pages is contained the story of
the individual from youth to old age — Samuel
in the Tabernacle and Simeon in the Temple ;
the story of the nation from its humble rise
to its pitiable fall, from the bondage of Egypt
to the siege of Jerusalem ; the story also of
the race from its emergence on the plane of
life, on through its sin, its sorrow, its long
martyrdom, its magnificent victories, till the
105

Io6 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
glory of the nations passes in the vision of
the poet through the gates of the city of gold.
From the Eden of innocence in Genesis to
the Garden of Holiness, in the book of Reve
lation, the Book marches. The whole comedy
and tragedy of life are in this record ; it is a
more glorious Homer, a more enticing Scott.
If its chief commandment of wisdom be
" know God," and it has lifted the veil from
the face of the Eternal, its second command
ment is, " know thyself," and as in a mirror
it shows every man his face. The secret
motives which influence our actions, fhe hopes
which nestle in the sacred place of the heart,
the fears which shadow the pilgrim, as he
makes his journey from this world to the
next, the shining visions which float before
the imagination in our highest moments, are
all written in the words of this Book. No
where else has the possibility of human good
ness or of human badness been so convincingly
or profitably set forth. The ideals of heroic
virtue, and the warnings of instructive wicked
ness are both found in its gallery. The
double nature of man is described with such

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 107
artiess simplicity, and such incisive tmthful-
ness, as never has been equalled in the subtlest
fiction ; the riddle of our complex nature has
been unravelled as it never has been in the
profoundest philosophy, especially the glory
of humanity, has been declared by the Incar
nation, which reveals man as much as God.
Against the despair of pessimists and the
slander of satirists, is set the transfigured
Person and radiant life of Jesus Christ, " white
as no fuller on earth could white them," in
whom all that the seers of the race had
imagined was revealed, and all that the saints
of the race desired was fulfilled. He is the
typical man, to which the race is to rise ; as
we look on Him, we know what man is to be
and we measure his destiny.
Within the Bible every experience of life is
touched in turn and the last word is said.
The sweetest pastoral in Hterature is Ruth
following Naomi for love's sake into a foreign
land, and "fair among the fields of com,"
gleaning after the reapers of Boaz. The sad
dest of tragedies is the fall of poor mad Saul,
bravest and purest of the kings of Israel.

I08 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
" Saul ye remember in glory — e'er error had bent
The broad brow from the daily communion; "
and the most touching elegy is the tribute of
David to Saul, "Saul and Jonathan were
lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their
death, they were not divided." There are
three war songs which make the pulse beat
faster, and would put courage in a coward,
one was written by Burns, " Scots wha hae
wi' Wallace bled." The second is "The
Marseillaise," which rouses the French people
to a frenzy, but the chief is that of Moses and
Miriam, when he sang, " The Lord is a man
of war, the Lord is His name," and Miriam
with the women of Israel answered, " Sing ye
to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously,
the horse and his rider hath He thrown into
the sea." There was a day when Christians
allowed themselves to despise St. Paul's
Epistle to Philemon, the only private letter
of the apostle's preserved, and to consider
that its contents were trifling. The maxim
of that day, as Bishop Lightfoot remarks,
seemed to be " De minimis non curat evan-
gelium." Of what account was the fate of a

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 109
single insignificant slave, long since dead and
gone, to those before whose eyes the battle
of the creeds was still raging. Christians
have grown more human since, and have
passed further into the mind of Christ, and
now they are agreed that even the letter of
the younger Pliny, the very model of a Roman
gentieman, when he asked a friend to show
mercy to his freed men, is excelled in grace
by the appeal of St. Paul for Onesimus.
" We have here," writes Sabatier, "...
only a few familiar lines, but so full of grace,
of salt, of serious and trustful affection, that
this short epistle gleams like a pearl of the
most exquisite purity in the rich treasure of
the New Testament." If it be one of the
shortest portions in Holy Scripture, it is to be
ever treasured by the Christian preacher, be
cause it marks both the comprehensiveness
and the minuteness of its humanity. Among
the vices from which right-minded men turn
with an instinct of disgust, and which they
are moved to lash with indignant tongue, is
hypocrisy, and the famous Phillipics in which
classical literature reached its highest note of

h

IIO THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
scorn, fail before the irresistible scorching in
vective with which Jesus punished the Scribes
and Pharisees before they accomplished their
revenge. And if the virtue which wins our
most cordial and unanimous applause is
charity, its most finished and perfect eulogy
was pronounced by the Apostle of the Gen
tiles in a passage which might have fallen
from the lips of Jesus Himself.
If it is the Bible more than any poet or
dramatist or essayist or novelist, which has
released the strongest feelings of the human
heart, and given them satisfying expression,
it is also the Bible which has illustrated those
situations in human experience in which life
fulfills itself and character is declared. When
we think of an unselfish and chivalrous friend
ship between two men of rich nature and
high intention, our thoughts turn not to
Damon and Pythias, the classical illustration
of antiquity, but to David and Jonathan, and
when the Prince of Israel said unto David,
" Thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall
be next unto thee," the self-abnegation of
friendship touched its zenith. Jacob was by

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK III
nature a cunning and unscrupulous man, and
it is not suggested that Rachel had the dig
nity of Sarah or the ability of Rebecca, but
the most intimate love of husband and wife
will never have a more tender instance than
Jacob's serving seven years for Rachel, " And
they seemed unto him, but a few days, for
the love he had to her " ; and at the thought
of Rachel as he remembered her upon his
death-bed, an old man full of years and sorrow,
turning aside to mourn again ; " Rachel died
by me in the land of Canaan in the way, and
I buried her there, in the way of Ephrath, the
same is Bethlehem." We are taken to many
kindly homes in the Bible stories, but to none
do we go more pleasantly than to the house
at Bethany, where Mary and Martha lived
with their brother Lazarus, and had Jesus for
their welcome and congenial guest. The
peculiar bond which binds together a wid
owed mother and her only son has rescued
from oblivion and made eternal the name of
a Galilean village, for it was at Nain that
Jesus had compassion on a stricken woman,
and gave a son back to his mother. That

112 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
passion, which is the travesty of love and the
destruction of the family, has been the motive
of many a novel and many a play, but has
never been described and pilloried with such
convincing proof and pitiless power as in the
scandal of David and Bathsheba. History
has produced a swarm of traitors, and there
never has been any enterprise of the first
order without its betrayer, but of all the men
who have sold their cause, or their friend,
none is to be compared with Judas Iscariot.
When a rich man oppresses the poor, and
tries to rob him of his little portion — a recur
ring and burning injustice of life, — one thinks
in an instant of Ahab and Naboth. If a
prophet receives the word of God, and un
derstands its drift, and then for fear of man,
or for the sake of gain perverts his message,
and takes wages as the servant of unright
eousness, we class him with Balaam, who
taught Balak to cast a stumbling-block before
the children of Israel. There be many kinds
of worldliness, but the most specious and
dangerous is that which combines the profes
sion of godliness with the greed of wealth,

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 1 13
and this was the sin and the shame of Lot.
Peter remains the type of men who lose their
heads in the crisis of life and deny the Master
whom they love, and Rebecca of clever and
managing women who attain their ends by
trickery and falsehood. While the world
lasts, Abraham, who went out on his lonely
journey as the pioneer of pure reUgion, will be
the father of the faithful, and Moses, who
stepped down from the side of a throne to
take up the cause of a horde of slaves, will
be the shining example of patriotism. When
men of inspired vision and intellectual cour
age bid good-bye to the past, and go forward
to possess the new land of truth into which
the Lord is leading them, they will find their
leader in St. Stephen. No minister of Christ
will ever rise who will equal the enthusiasm,
the humiliation, the sufferings, the magna
nimity, the single-hearted devotion of St.
Paul ; and the mystics waiting for God in
lonely places or in secluded studies, as those
that watch for the morning, will ever envy
him who in Patmos saw the heavens open
and the Lamb leading His people to living

114 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
fountains of water. Cain will remain forever
the synonym for murderer ; Methusaleh from
that dim antiquity for age ; Ishmael, cast out
by womanly injustice, and embittered in
spirit, for the broken man ; Joseph, beating
down the insurrection of his youthful blood,
and disentangling his garment from the
hands of the temptress, for manly purity ;
Samson, triumphing with infinite humour
over his enemies, during the days of his pros
perity and in the days of his adversity pull
ing down a temple to be his tomb and monu
ment, for strength. Jezebel in common
speech will ever stand for a domineering and
fierce-tempered woman ; Abigail for gracious
and timely service ; Absalom with his undis
ciplined heart and his fair face, for filial im
piety ; Ahithophel with his far-seeing council
for the shrewd adviser; Daniel with his
sturdy loyalty to conviction, and his disre
gard of consequences, for courage; Herod
stained by the massacre of the innocents, for
cruelty ; Gamaliel with his avoidance of haste
and dislike of extremes, for an adroit eccle
siastic; Gallio with his elevation above re-

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 1 15
¦ ligious squabbles, for judicial neutrality. If
a society is formed to help poor women and
to give other women the opportunity of
service, it will likely be called after Dorcas of
the Acts of the Apostles, and nearly every
city has a hospital named after the good
Samaritan of the gospels. When any one is
richly dowered with sympathy and has grace
poured into his lips, we call him after Barna
bas the Son of Consolation, and Mary the
mother of the Lord, has been through all the
ages the ideal of womanly purity.
It is not only the preacher in the pulpit,
but the speaker on the platform who is
equipped with apt and telling images to seize
the mind of his audience, and to plead his
cause. He can draw from the gallery of life
which is known to every one, whose faces
are household portraits. The giant Goliath
still falls before the sling and stone of youth
ful David, the trumpet is blown before the
frowning fortress of some Jericho ; Gideon's
three hundred still win the victory of the
single heart ; the cave of AduUam gathers
the refugees from regular authority into its

1X6 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
shelter ; Goshen is the image of a land of
plenty, and Jordan stands for the river of
Death. We call an unbeliever a Sadducee,
and a formalist a Pharisee. A hypocrite is a
whited sepulchre, an anxious person is a
Martha, a doubter is a Thomas, and a guile
less man is a Nathaniel. The magnificent
style of this book dignifies ordinary speech,
and supplies felicitous expressions at every
turn, so that men who hardly ever read the
Bible, and others who have thrown off its
authority, are still dependent upon it for
phrases and illustrations. A popular orator
advocating bi-metallism, describes his nation
as crucified upon a cross of gold ; an English
statesman assailing the aristocracy, de
nounces them as those who toil not neither
do they spin ; a famous man of letters
divided books into the sheep and the goats ;
prophets of woe warning their nation against
the wrath to come, point them to the writing
on the wall, and prudent persons standing
aside from some doubtful cause, wash their
hands of it, as Pilate did of Jesus. The Bible
meets every emergency, and endows us with

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 117
speech for every occasion — with proverbs
which are the essence of experience, with
commandments which are the compendium
of morality, with prayers which release the
desires of the heart, with promises which are
the staff of life. The peasant who knows his
Bible is richer in expression than the student
of the classics, and the preacher with this
book can awaken an echo within every hear
er's heart. It might be possible outside the
Bible, by ransacking literature in all ages
and in all tongues, to get a corresponding
gallery of types and situations, but it would
be a strange place to the multitude, known
only to a handful of literary archaeologists.
The preacher has been supplied with the
most taking and most popular handbook to
humanity. The humanity of the Bible is as essential
for its purpose as its divinity, and there is
this double parallel between Holy Scripture
which is the record of revelation, and Jesus
Christ, who is the revelation itself, that the
divine and human meet in both, and that un
til lately there was a tendency among believ-

1X8 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
ing people Jo^underyalue the human side.. If
Jesus be the eternal Son of God, yet He was
also the Son of Mary, a lad educated at
Nazareth, a workman toiling at His craft, a
prophet who was put to death by His nation ;
a man who was hungry and thirsty, who was
tempted and persecuted, who was cast down
and lifted up, who wore common garments,
and lived in small homes. So if God has
spoken with quite solitary authority through
the Holy Scripture, the body of the Book is
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. The
story is of human life, as it fulfills itself in love
affairs, in diplomatic negotiations, in mercan
tile transactions, in military campaigns, in
the relations of husband and wife, parent and
children, master and workman ; as it is con
tained in ancient traditions, national poems,
tribal histories, family chronicles ; as it is
stained by domestic intrigues, acts of heredi
tary revenge, violent outbursts of passion,
hideous crimes of lust, as well as it is re
deemed by instances of sacrifice, prayers of
agonized souls, visions of saints, and achieve
ments of heroes. The book is as human as

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 1 19
Christ, and if it had not had this human na
ture, could no more have been for us men, a
divine revelation than Christ without His
human body, could have been a divine re
demption. Through life God has revealed
Himself. While there may be always specu
lation about the inspiration of the Bible,
there is no doubt whatever that it is a his
torical revelation. While it is often repeated,
" thus saith the Lord," and the word of the
Lord did come to prophets whose ears He
had opened, it might be still more truly and
more widely stated " thus did the Lord," for
it was by the Lord's doing, rather than His f-'
speaking that He made Himself known unto
them who had eyes to see. The Bible, that
is to say, moves, not in the region of philos
ophy, but in the region of history, not where
men enquire into the being of God, but where
they study the character of God. It is a r'
book of common life, not a book of oracles.
The end of revelation is ethical, not meta
physical. As has been said " the philosopher
does not rule in Israel." Job may be called
philosophy on a generous interpretation of

I20 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
the word, but Job is not philosophy in the
Greek sense, and there is no other book
which could be so described. St. Paul was a
theologian in the most profound sense of the
word, but he was not a theologian in the
scholastic sense ; he was writing from the
depths of his own experience and with a pen
dipped in blood and fire. The book is al
ways moving, and the people are always act
ing ; something is being done from the day
when Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before
the Lord, to the day when Jesus died upon
the cross.
We should fix it in our minds on whom
lies the commission of preaching the evangel,
that it was only through history God could
express Himself, Jest we be caught in the
snare of philosophy, and become theorists
and not evangelists, weaving gossamer specu
lations about God, instead of boldly setting
forth His actions. If the Messiah had only
visited this earth as the angels did in the
gospel story, appearing and disappearing be
fore a few wrapt souls, then we had never
known Him ; if the eternal had spoken from

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 121
an open heaven to one or two elect men,
such as Abraham and Moses, then Israel had
never come to call Him their Holy One. It
is only through the consciousness of men
that God can make Himself known, an ever
brightening and more pervading presence in
life. As the years come and go, God makes
His arm bare in times of trouble and com
forts in times of sorrow, and guides in times
of darkness. If He be real to the fathers, He
becomes more living to the children, till
saints, even in the midst of this shadow and
surrounded with the mystery of life, can cry,
" Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and
why art thou disquieted within me ? Hope in
God for I shall yet praise Him, who is the
health of my countenance, and my God."
Until the memory of living men. Christian
preachers were afraid to insist upon the hu
manity of Jesus, lest they should be supposed
to deny His divinity, and so in many cases
they had fallen over into the opposite heresy ;
so the human element in scripture was spir
itualized out of existence. As fields of
flowers are swept and crushed and mixed

122 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
with foreign material and distilled into an
essence, so the rich provinces of human life
in Holy Scripture were robbed of all their
dramatic incidents that they might yield the
doctrines of technical theology. The love
and hate, the striving and ambition, the de
spair and victory, the laughter and the tears
of men and women, passed in to this re
morseless machinery, and came forth Elec
tion or Justification, the Covenant of works
or the Covenant of Grace. When you read a
Dutch theologian like Witsius, or a Puritan
like Owen, you wonder how men could have
had the Bible in their hands all their days
and studied it with honest, prayerful hearts,
and yet never have detected the method of
revelation or felt the breath of its common
humanity upon their faces. We ought to be
thankful that to-day a more real and compre
hensive view of the Incarnation has taken
hold of the Christian mind, that we believe in
the Incarnation not only as a fact but also as
a force, that Christ was not only actually
born into the race, but that He lived so many
years in the Holy Land, as a man lives to-

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 1 23
day in America or England, and that He is
still living and proving His presence in the
direction and elevation of human Hfe. He is :
within and not outside humanity, and in the
same way we ought to hold that God is in
side and not outside life, an immanent not ,
transcendental deity.
With the humanity of the Bible as a spirit
in his heart, the preacher should be able to
preach a living God, as He was not preached
when that humanity was denied. It is noth
ing short of unbelief to hold that the action
of God is confined within the centuries which
are embraced in the Bible record, and that if
we desire to find God we must go to Pales
tine instead of America. We should be
firmly convinced that the Eternal who made
Himself known to the patriarchs in their
tents, and the prophets in Jerusalem, is as
near to-day to shepherds in their glens and
merchants amid the turmoil of great cities.
It were disheartening to think that God who
spake to Abraham does not speak to men to
day, or that He spoke to the Jews after a
nearer and more friendly fashion than to our

124 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
generation. That He did make Himself
known to the Fathers is beyond question, but
that He made Himself far more clearly
known by His Son is quite as certain and
therefore we may boldly say that in the dis
pensation of Christ at the right hand of God,
God is still more active in human history,
still more visible to human souls. When we
have firmly grasped the idea of historical rev
elation, and our minds are cleansed from the
idea that God is a provincial or temporal
deity, we shall be the more ready to recognize
Him in the present time and to put our trust
in Him as a God near and not far off. And
the recognition of God is the transfiguration
of life, both on the larger historical and on
the lesser individual scale. If Bible history
is lit by the fires of Sodom and Gomorrah,
and the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem,
God also wrought terrible works of judgment,
in the catastrophies of the Roman Empire
and the French Revolution. If God was the
deliverer of the oppressed and the hope of
those that put their trust in Him in the days
of Israel, surely His right arm succoured the

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 1 25
Protestants of the low country in their resist
ance of Phillip and his Spaniards and opened
up a way for the Puritans in this land and
built them into a strong people. If the con
verts of St. Paul were to be numbered by
hundreds, the converts of Wesley were to be
reckoned by thousands, and if St. Luke wrote
the first romance of missions, surely it has
been continued with chapters quite as con
vincing and fascinating in the lives of St.
Francis Xavier, David Brainerd, Father
Damien, and David Livingstone. The
answers to prayer in Holy Scripture can be
paralleled in the lives of saints who have
lived centuries after the canon was closed
and thousands of miles away from the land of
sacred wonder. While the preacher speaks
he is thrown into relief against a historic
background which is full of God, he stands
in the presence of the Eternal, who is the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
is doing yet more abundantiy and revealing
Himself yet more clearly than in the ages of
patriarchs, prophets, or apostles.
^ The Bible in this historical setting becomes

126 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
not an ancient but a modern book ; it is con
temporaneous, and we are at liberty to be in
different as to its dates, because we can
place it in many periods. Books of the Bible
which had almost passed into oblivion, sud
denly glow with light, because they describe
a similar situation, and prophesy a similar
deliverance. The Puritans drew strength
from the iron age of the Judges, and went
into battle and died for the freedom of their
nation to the trumpet call of the sword of the
Lord and Gideon. The fiery letter which St.
Paul wrote to the Galatians and in which he
asserted the supremacy of grace over works,
and of the cross over ritual — the magna
charta of the human soul — inspired Martin
Luther and was the spring of the Reforma
tion. Social reformers raging against the
luxury and tyranny of the rich, and full of
pity and sympathy for the poor, striving and
praying for their Utopia have found their
leaders in the Hebrew prophets, while the
martyrs, hiding in dens and caves of the
earth, or dying in the blood-stained arena,
have been lifted above their suffering and as-

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 1 27
sured of their victory by the vision of the
Apocalypse. The Bible situations are end
lessly repeated because the Book is not the
detached achievement of a scholar's study,
but the harvest of centuries of human life. If

the nation finds God in its public life, should
not the individual find Him in his private life,
and ought not the preacher to insist more
constantiy and more practically, that if we are \
to know God it must be through life ? If the
Eternal made Himself known in the past
through history, will He not make Himself
known in the present through biography?
Whether is it more in keeping with the Bible
to send the child to learn of God in a
catechism or in its own home ; whether is God
more likely to be real to the child when His
nature is stated in the abstract terms of
theology or by the analogy of his father and j
mother? Is it not also the lesson of the Bible, \
that the knowledge of God is dependent, not ,
upon reasoning, but upon obedience, and that
no speculation will ever bring us so near God, 1
as action ? Was it not by doing God's will
that man came to know Him in the Bible, and

128 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
was it not because Israel at its best in its
saints and prophets loved and did righteous
ness, that in the clean mirror of their souls,
God was reflected, as on the quiet surface of
a lake the eternal mountains shape them
selves ? Amid the inevitable mystery of life
and the vexing questions which agitate the
intellect, men should be reminded that light
always arises to the righteous, that wherever
a man is bravely doing his duty, he is in the
way of life everlasting, and must sooner or
later come into the conscious fellowship of
God. To say that the Bible is intended to
teach nothing but conduct and that it
presents no person, is to come short of facts ;
but to say that conduct is a road to faith and
that the righteous man ascendeth to the Hill
of God is one of the most profound facts of
Bible life.' I
While the preacher has reason for insisting
that the Bible as a whole is contemporaneous
because it is historical, which is only another
way of stating that humanity is the same in
all climes and in all ages, he should frankly
admit, or rather he is bound to point out.

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 1 29
that upon the principle of evolution certain
parts of the Bible are obsolete. The worship
of the Jews for instance has now no authority
for the Christian Church, and time need not
be wasted in studying its sacrifices, any
f further than understanding the references of
1 some New Testament writers when they state
j the work of Christ in altar terms. It is amaz
ing to remember the time that was given by
worthy divines of the past to the processes
of sacrifice laid down in the books of Moses,
when the same time could have been spent
upon the life of Christ, and the careful ex
position of Jewish ritual, when the same care
might have been bestowed on the exposition
of Jesus' words. The chronicles of the Jews
and their ritual together with many of their
social regulations may be laid aside, for they
possess now nothing but an antiquarian in
terest. With those remains of the past in t
the limbo of superseded ideas may be placed |
the rade conception of God in the earlier |
Scriptures. Surely it is, to say the least, un
timely that the Christian preacher should be
representing God, as a jealous and revengeful

I30 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
deity, who requires to be reconciled by blood
before He will show mercy, and who is pro
voked to anger if any mother should forget
Him for the moment in devotion to her child.
When the preacher speaks as if God required
to be reconciled to His children, he is stand
ing on the Old Testament but he is contra
dicting the New, and when he teaches that
some loved one is taken away in order
that the affection given to the wife or child,
should be monopolized by Him, he has
surely not heard of our Heavenly Father.
Surely Jesus' teaching counts for something,
and if He superseded the law of Moses,
has He not also spiritualized the God of
Moses ? If I am not bound to-day to offer
bulls and goats because the Jews offered
them in Old Testament days, neither am I
bound to believe in a suspicious and grasping
deity, such as they feared in the days of their
childhood. Jesus Himself laid down the
principle that religious ideas are to be tried
by human experience and according to the
religious consciousness must therefore be the
conception of God. It follows that Isaiah

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 131
would have a more gracious consciousness
than Moses and that the idea of God in the
minds of Christian people on whom the
spirit of Jesus has been playing, should not
only be clearer but sweeter than that of Old
Testament religion. If considerable portions
of the Old Testament, both legal and spiritual
have not been superseded by the teaching of
Jesus, so that they are no longer to be quoted |
or preached as truth, then Christ has come in]
vain and there has been no advance from the)
patriarchs to the Messiah.
While it is necessary to distinguish be
tween the temporary element in the Old
Testament, which has no force to-day, and
the eternal, which is as true and binding to
day as ever, let us be careful in making this
distinction, and not, in laying aside what has
served its day, part with any real treasure.
There are certain books of the Old Testament
which have fallen into disrepute and into dis
use for various reasons, but which ought to
be studied afresh with the aid of criticism and
from the standpoint of humanity. They have
one way or other been sold into captivity,

132 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
and ought to be redeemed. One I frankly
admit it is difficult to appreciate from the
New Testament standpoint, because it ap
pears to have no spiritual message. Should
any Christian be asked what book of the Old
Testament he would omit, I take it he would
answer the book of Esther. He would be
expressing not only a Christian instinct, but
also confirming a Jewish objection. The
rabbis had gfreat difficulties about its inspira
tion because it was so secular, without a
mention of the name of God ; and so foreign,
mentioning the King of Persia a hundred
and eighty-seven times. There is no doubt,
however, it was included in the Jewish canon
when the latter was closed at the council of
Jamnia in the first century, and it became
afterwards extremely popular with the Jewish
people. It is the most unchristian book in
the Old Testament, and it is also the least
religious by any standard ; but Esther justi
fied its place in the canon by its spirit of in-
*¦ •' WBTnii ,i,ui^ I ¦"¦¦¦¦¦'  — '-"^
tense and self-sacrificing patriotism. By her
beauty, according to the story, which can
hardly be looked on as historical, and by

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 133
her courage as well as by her womanly tact,
she saved her people from a cruel massacre
during the Persian captivity ; and to com
memorate this deliverance the feast of Purim
was instituted, which is the celebration of
nationality. When theological ingenuity en
deavours to read Christian truth into this
book, it turns Scripture into a cryptogram,
and lays an unnecessary burden upon the
religious mind, but it does not follow that the
book with all its defects and all its offenses
has not made its contribution to human his
tory. It is a vindication of nationality, that
every people, however weak and unfortunate,
has a right to live ; it is a condemnation of
wanton cruelty, that a strong man should
order a massacre for reasons of personal re
venge. It is an incentive to patriotism, teach
ing that people of one blood should recognize
their common tie, and that in a nation rich and
poor should stand together for their rights ;
and it is a eulogy on womanly courage, for
here was a young queen who was willing to
risk her place and her life in the interests of
her people. No doubt she used her influence

134 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
for vengeance upon the chief enemy of her
people and those who attacked them, but
even here patriotism, though bloodthirsty,
was not mercenary, for the Jews, if they slew,
did not plunder. The book sustained the
Jews in after ages amid their unmitigated and
unmerited sufferings, and, rightly read, may
still infuse the iron of patriotism into the
veins of a nation either oppressed by force
or enervated by luxury. It is a book which
requires to be dated " B. C," and then to be
cleansed by the spirit of Christ ; but when it
is first related to its period, and then elevated
above it, it remains a call both to national
and civic patriotism, and a condemnation of
those who, if it go well with themselves and
their own interests, have no care for the mass
of the people from whom they sprang and
whose blood they share.
The second of the unredeemed books is the
prophecy of Jonah, and here one is on much
surer ground, and has a more convincing
case. Nothing is easier of course for an out
sider to the Bible and to faith than to ridicule
this book, and believers have too much played

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 135
into his hands. Because the story is so dra
matic and because the dramatic device is
somewhat rude and simple ; because many
good people have refused to see the dramatic
element and have closed their eyes to the
hopeless absurdity of its reality, the book has
been made a thing for laughter. The
preacher, therefore, must bend his back to
brush the scorn from off this fine work of
Jewish literature, and seizing its spiritual in
tention, vindicate its execution. The central
figure is Jonah, who was a prophet in the
reign of Jeroboam II, and whose preaching
at Nineveh was no doubt a historical fact,
but the incidents of this book are not known
to history, and it must have been written at a
far later date than the life of Jonah. It was
a book of the post-exilic period when the at
titude of the Jews to the Gentiles was one of
sullen resentment and acrid bigotry. This
book is an exposition of the all embracing
love of God, to whom Nineveh was as dear as
Jerusalem, and a satire on the narrowness of
Jewish religion which would monopolize God
and count every man of Gentile blood an

136 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
outcast. When Jonah refuses to go with the
gospel of divine mercy to Nineveh, and when
he is jealous of the conversion of the Nine-
vites, he represents the worst spirit of Jewish
religion ; and when the heathen seamen show
their good spirit on board the vessel, and the
Ninevites repent at the word of the Lord,
the piety which may exist outside the line of
Jewish revelation is convincingly suggestive.
It may be granted that the whale is a some
what inartistic expedient, but the rest of the
book is most artistically arranged, and is
charged with the highest spiritual meaning.
If only a Philistine would laugh at the par
able of Andromeda and the Sea Monster,
which has been so often painted, why should
any one mock at the device of the Jewish
writer? Can there be found anywhere a more
telling exposure of national exclusiveness, or
a more engaging assertion of the love of God
towards all men, and towards the very beasts
of the field, than in the book which declares
that if a man has pity for the gourd, " for the
which thou hast not laboured neither madest
it grow, which came up in a night and per-

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 137
ished in a night," surely the Creator and
Father of all men would " spare Nineveh
that great city, wherein are more than six
score thousand persons that cannot discern
between their right hand and their left hand,
and also much cattie." This gracious and
genial book was as a root out of a dry
ground, and so comprehensive is its charity,
and so gracious its view of God, that it is a
question whether the Christian Church with
all her advantages in the dispensation of the
Holy Ghost holds as firmly, and declares as
unreservedly the universal Fatherhood of
God, and the brotherhood of man. It is the ^'
irenicon of the Old Testament.
The Song of Songs is one of the most ex
quisite books in Holy Scripture, and came
from the finest period of Hebrew literature,
but the Jewish scholars themselves were per
plexed by its theme, and in the early Chris
tian centuries there were doubts about its
canonicity. It was only saved from exclu
sion, and included in the Scriptures, first pos
sibly because its authorship was ascribed to
Solomon, and certainly because it received

138 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
an allegorical meaning. Had it been re
garded as a love drama, it would certainly
have been excluded when the canon was
finally concluded, and in modern days it
would never have been so much in favour
with pious people. But it was looked upon
as a parable of the fellowship between the
Church and Christ, and at the Sacrament ad
dresses based on its warmest passages were
delivered with unction and effect. Its spiritual
interpretation has been a triumph of mysti
cism, in which the most erotic language has
been charged not only with religious experi
ences, but even with elaborate doctrine. The
idea that this book could have had love as its
original motive and be a poem on the chief
passion of life, would have been repudiated
in days when the humanity of the Bible was
not only ignored, but denied. With the re
turn to a more real and historical view of the
Bible, the Christian mind is prepared for a
more literal and human reading of the Song
of Songs. Whoever was its author, it could
not be Solomon, and it is far more likely that
the poem was a powerful and skillful protest

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK I39
against the immorality of that luxurious
monarch and his corrupt court. It is indeed
a romance such as effects the popular mind
in every age, and whose theme has never
been treated with such beauty. Besides the
chorus, which is supplied by the ladies of the
court, the persons are the king, a magnificent
and dissolute monarch, the heroine, a beauti
ful and simple country girl, and her lover a
young and honest shepherd. During some
royal journey through the provinces, the
King's eye falls upon this rustic maiden, and
after his habit he desires to add her to his
harem. She is brought to Jerusalem, and is
given a place in the palace, but her heart re
mains true to her shepherd lover, and in her
dreams she recalls their meeting in the fields,
and seeks for him through the streets of the
city. She rejects the advances of the King,
and declares her longing to be again with
her betrothed ; finally she returns in safety,
and the poet concludes with a lovely descrip
tion of the meeting between the two lovers,
and the contempt which she pours upon the
addresses of Solomon and all his riches. The

140 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
poem reaches its height in the eulogy of pure
and unworldly love : " Set me as a seal upon
thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm, for love
is strong as death. . . . Many waters
cannot quench love, neither can the floods
drown it. . . . Solomon hath a vineyard
at Baalhamon ; he let out the vineyard unto
keepers ; every one for the fruit thereof was
to bring a thousand pieces of silver. My
vineyard which is mine is before me ; . . .
make haste my beloved and be thou like to
a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of
spices." Does it not invest the Bible with a fresh
interest, that this pure and fascinating love
idyll should be included in its compass and
that the chief book of humanity should place
the crown upon simple and unworldly love,
and pay this noble tribute to the country
maiden who resisted the unholy advances of
magnificent Solomon. Transfer the scene for
instance to England and the seventeenth
century ; replace Solomon by Charles II and
the Shulamite by some English country girl ;
imagine her enveigled to Whitehall and as-

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 141
sailed by the blandishments of that gay court,
and then invulnerable against all Charles's
appeals and faithful to her rustic lover, re
turning in triumph to her home amid the
greenery and oak trees of some English
county. If any one in those days had been
given the spiritual genius to n^ake this
powerful and graceful protest against the
most licentious king and the most degraded
court in English history, how we should have
cherished and admired his poem, and how
generations to come would have counted it
the classic love piece of our tongue ! What
neither English literature nor any other has
afforded is given by the Song of Songs in
perfect and unapproachable beauty.
The fourth book of Old Testament Scrip
ture which illustrates the wide humanity of
the Bible is Ecclesiastes, and no one can
blame the Jewish doctors for hesitating about
the inclusion of this book. The Song of
Songs may be allegorized into religion, but
no ingenuity can spiritualize the Preacher.
It is the dreariest book in the whole Bible,
and touched throughout by the spirit of pes-

142 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
simism. Certainly it was not written by
Solomon or any other king, for the stand
point is that of the people who are suffering
and helpless under misgovernment, and who
are hopeless of either reform or justice. The
writer himself seems to have been wronged
by society and to have lost faith in every one,
rulers and people, men and women together.
Everything is out of joint, and his only con
solation is a cold and hesitating faith in the
moral order of the world. It is indeed as
nearly as possible the utterance of one who
has despaired of human society and has only
the faintest hope in God. He is the agnostic
of the Bible, and it is one of the most con
vincing evidences of the range of Holy
Scripture that room is found in it, " for the
sigh of defeated hopes, for the gloom of the
soul, vanquished by the sense of the anoma
lies and mysteries of human life." If there
be not room in the Christian creed or in the
Christian Church for a man with this irre
ducible minimum of faith, he is made wel
come in the Bible, and the complaint of his
soul expressed. For he also is a son of God.

THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK 143
The Bible, in short, reaches from the depths
of human experience where the mist is lying
heavy upon the valley to the heights where
the soul lives in the shining of God's face,
and each man can find his own level in the
Book. The lad whose blood is dancing and
who loves the excitement of life, will be
vastiy taken with the homeric conflicts of
Hebrew champions, with Samson and his
foxes, with David and Goliath ; the business
man shrewd and worldly wise, will find in
Proverbs the experience of life, as in an es
sence ; the seeker after God will have prayers
laid to his hands in the Psalms, and the relig
ious soul will be satisfied with St. Luke's
Gospel, the most beautiful book in all the
world. If you turn over the pages of a
private Bible you can almost tell the age of
its owner, and if he be " stepping west
ward " and the light of the setting sun be on
his face, you will find that the fourteenth
chapter of St. John's Gospel has been worn
thin. It has indeed become but a slight veil,
which some day will disappear, and the faith
ful Christian who has followed the Lord

144 THE HUMANITY OF THE BOOK
through many experiences, both of light and
shadow, will at last stand face to face with
Him, whom not having seen he loves.

LECTURE IV
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK

LECTURE IV
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
IF it be granted that criticism has in
creased pur knowledge of the Bible,
has it not diminished its authority, so
that a preacher cannot use the book with the
same confidence as in past days, nor expect
its words to have the same hold on the
allegiance of his people ? According to the
old idea of the Book it came directly from
God, through the hands of writers who were
simply its penmen, and were guided so ab
solutely by the Holy Spirit, that they could
not commit any error in facts or in doctrine.
They simply transmitted the mind of the
Eternal to His creatures. Possibly a guarded
use of accommodation might be allowed,
but progression in revelation was unknown.
The Book was therefore of equal authority
from its first volume to its last, and in all its
parts. If a word was quoted, unless it had
been uttered by an enemy of God in Bible
147

148 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
history or had the most obvious local refer
ence, it was an end to controversy, for it
was the intervention of God. Any one in
perplexity would turn to the Scriptures for
guidance, and any text spoken to his case
would be accepted as in old days men re
ceived the oracles of Delphi, and it was not
unusual for pious people of a simple mind to
allow the Bible to open and then to seek advice
from the first passage which caught their eye,
which was practically a casting of lots.
Promises were then ministered to souls in
distress, and they were exhorted to put
their trust in the word, as a communication
made to them from the very lips of
God. If people within the province of faith
differed in those days, it was not about the
validity of any single word, it was only about
its interpretation. The evidence was per
fectly undeniable, the only question was, when
it was all arranged and summed up, about its
balance. The Arminian would not endeavour
to escape the force of any quotation from
the Old Testament Scriptures, in the interests
of the most absolute and pitiless predestina-

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 149
tion ; he would content himself by bringing
forward other texts to colour and qualify. A
single incident in Jewish history would justify
the most amazing action in modern times, so
that Puritans perpetrating the Irish massa
cres found their defense in the doings of the
Judges, and the imagery of Hebrew seers
was accepted to the letter, so that in the
days of the Commonwealth veteran soldiers,
tried in many fights, were going about to es
tablish the Fifth Monarchy. To-day there
are excellent people who use the Bible to
calculate the end of the world, and who by a
stringent use of prophetic rhetoric, expect to
see Jerusalem again the Holy City and the
sacrifices once more offered in the temple.
With this view of the Bible, men could be
silenced, comforted, enlightened, rebuked, by
a single phrase chosen almost at will, from
its rich and varied story. The preacher
could speak with boldness, for what he said
was not of man but of God, and the pastor
could console with confidence, for he carried
with him, and applied to the heart in trouble,
the very grace of God.

I50 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
Can this impressive principle of authority
be maintained under the modern idea of the
construction of the Bible ? If the Book is a
long and comprehensive literature, extend
ing over many centuries and marking many
stages of progress, can it lend itself to the
same treatment, and be as confidently
handled ? Will it not be necessary to con
sider the date of any passage which is to be
used, and the character of the man through
whom it was given ; will not the Scriptures
have to be analyzed historically and arranged
spiritually ; will not the religious value of
each part have to be fixed, and the compara
tive value of the various parts calculated?
How shall we know whether what is said in
the Old Testament has been abolished in the
New, and what force to attach to a word put
in the mouth of a patriarch compared with
the utterance of a prophet ? If the Apostles
are superior to the prophets, what function
has prophecy, and if Jesus be the supreme
teacher in. the Bible, what place is there for
His servants ? Is the preacher to discuss the
critical position of every passage before he

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 151
uses it, which would be intolerable pedantry,
and the destruction of the pulpit, or is he to
use every part of the Bible as if criticism had
never existed, with the result that his voice
have a note of insecurity, and reading men in
his Church dismiss his evidence as irrelevant ?
Is the only course open to him to claim no
divine authority for the Bible, but only to
treat it as one of the supreme books of relig
ion, and its utterances as suggestions to
wards the religious life ? The preacher then
ceases to be the ambassador of God and be
comes a lecturer on religion, or an ethical
teacher. This is a very serious question for
the minister, and one is afraid that in some
quarters criticism has weakened the power
of the pulpit, and by depriving the preacher
of an infallible book has left him intellectually
and spiritually helpless. If this were the in
evitable effect of criticism, then the increase
of knowledge would be a poor compensation
for the loss of power, and one would
regard with dismay a method of study
which enriched us with secondary infor
mation about the Bible, and silenced the

152 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
voice of God through its length and
breadth. We ought to face this question and to
think it out clearly. First of all let us ask
ourselves how those Scriptures came to be
regarded as the word of God. They are
only a portion of many writings both in the
days of the Old Testament and of the New.
Yet they have been elected, and the
Apocrypha of the Old Testament and the
Apocryphal Gospels of the New have been
rejected. No doubt there has been difficulty
because of the inclusion of, say, Ecclesiastes
and of St. James' Epistle, but long ago the
Canon was completed and has remained un
changed. There are moments when one
would be willing to exchange the Book of
Esther, for, say, the Wisdom of Sirach, and to
give up the Epistle of St. Jude for the Imita
tion of Christ or the Pilgrim's Progress. But
those are only passing impulses, for when
one looks first at the Holy Scriptures as a
whole and next at the other books he will
certainly conclude that the selection has been
justified, and that the Bible stands apart and

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 53
supreme. But who made the selection?
Was this done by a supernatural method,
the voice of an oracle or a declaration by
Jesus, and His Aposties? The Canon was
fixed by the Church, by Jews for the Old
Testament, by Christians for the New. In
other words by a body of fallible men.
When it is said that the Church created the
Canon, and that the Church is the guardian
of the Bible it should be remembered that
the Church did not assign their spiritual
value to the books, but that. their spiritual
value forced them upon the Church, and
that if the Church has the duty of ex
pounding the Bible, then the book itself is
immortal. If the Bible is stamped with this hallmark
of the Canon by the Church, it is because
every one knows the Bible to be gold, and not
because the Church can make it gold. The
Bible is presented, therefore, if you look into
the matter, not by the authority of the Church
but by its own authority, and claims the ac
ceptance of the human soul, not because the
Church bears witness to its excellence, but

154 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
because it bears witness to itself. The
Spirit of God within its revelation speaks to
the spirit of God within a man's heart.
The authority of the Bible is therefore
spiritual in the appeal which as a whole it
makes to the intellect and to the con
science. It is a fourth rate kind of unbelief which
denies the spirituality of the Bible, or its high
place in the province of religion, but there is
a tendency in other and better quarters to
depreciate the authority of the Bible in com
parison with other books, or rather to deny
its supremacy by pointing out that it is only
one out of many felicitous contributions to
the religious spirit. Why make so much of
the Bible as a book of morals, as an ideal of
character, as a conception of God, as a mes
sage to the soul, as a vindication of charity,
when those great services have been splen
didly discharged by books which are quite
independent of the Hebrew Revelation ? Can
any words describe the way of righteousness
more perfectly than the hymn of the stoic
Cleanthes,

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 55
" Lead me, O Zeus, and thou O Destiny,
The way that I am bid by you to go :
To follow I am ready. If I choose not,
I make myself a wretch, and still must follow."
Which has been admirably translated into
parallel Christian terms by the late Bishop
Stubbs the historian.
"Lead me. Almighty Father, Spirit, Son;
Whither Thou wilt I follow, no delay ;
My work is Thine, and even had I none,
Grudging obedience still I will obey ;
Faint-hearted, fearful, doubtful if I be.
Gladly or sadly I will follow Thee.
Into the land of righteousness I go.
The footsteps thither Thine and not my own ;
Jesus, Thyself the way alone I know,
Thy will be mine for other have I none ;
Unprofitable servant tho' I be.
Gladly or sadly let me follow Thee."
Has not Plato described in terms which echo
the fifty-third verse of Isaiah, the righteous
man who shall be unjustly accused and make
no complaint and suffer meekly, for the good
of the people? Did not the great Mogul
Emperor Akbar embrace within his charity
all men who under any creed or by any wor-

156 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
ship sought after God, so that in every
temple he found God's servants and in
every prayer heard their cry? Did not
Marcus Aurelius in his " Thoughts " which
Renan declared to be " the most human of
all books," and " the Gospel that will never
grow old," give a noble example of the fel
lowship of the soul with God, and that devo
tion to the highest ends which surely con
stitute life everlasting ? In the third millen
nium B. C. a code of laws was enacted by a
King of Babylonia which is not unworthy of
Moses, and must have profoundly affected
Hebrew tradition. The Egyptian theology
had a doctrine of the Trinity and the " Book of
the Dead " not only afl&rms the immortality of
the soul but lays down in picturesque terms
the salutary doctrine of rewards and punish
ments. Confucius laid the foundations of
family morality for China, and the doctrine
of the Incarnation is embedded in the great
religion of the East.
There was a day when Christian people
disliked the idea of any revelation either of
faith or morals outside the Bible, and when

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 157
missionaries did not think it necessary to find
the points of contact between the Christian
religion, and the faiths of the nations to which
they were sent. There is still an idea that if
a great Christian doctrine were to be found
in its essence outside the Bible, that in some
fashion its reality has been denied, and that,
if there were in human minds the seed of
Christianity already sown, Christianity there
fore must be a fond invention. It was held, if
it was not asserted, that the divinity of Chris
tianity rested upon the fact that it was some
thing no one could have anticipated or
imagined, and that it had no relation to
human thought or human experience. Ought
we not rather to think that if the Bible be the
supreme knowledge of God it will declare in
their clearest and most engaging forms those
ideas of the Eternal after which men have
been feeling for ages, and that it will be the
fulfillment of many hopes ? Is it not reason
able to believe that God did not forget the
nations though He spoke most plainly to the
Hebrew people, and that though Christ came
according to the flesh of the house of David,

158 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
yet He was the Ught which lighteth every
man that cometh into the world ? Has not
the Bible revelation both of God and of con
duct been confirmed, if it can be shown that
already it was dimly diffused among the
prophets of many people, and that Plato and
Aurelius have also carried the message of
God ? Would the Bible be more credible if it
were quite detached from human life ; is it
not more entirely human when its roots are
found to be struck in the reason and con
science of humanity ? A Christian minister
may do worse than have on a shelf near his
hand the Saints and Seers of the nations, for
he will obtain a wider view of the Father
hood of God, and build himself up in a
braver hope regarding the future of his race.
This recognition of the larger grace of God
need not impinge upon the unique authority
of Holy Scripture, for the Bible in com
parison with other books is unapproachable,
if the comparison be wisely and justly made.
No doubt nobler utterances can be found in
Plato than in the earlier Old Testament
Scriptures : I will not even say that Epictetus

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 59
is on every occasion hopelessly out-distanced
by St. Paul ; but there can be no question
that when you compare the prophets of the
Gentile succession with those of the Hebrew
line, that the Bible has a lonely place. The
Gospel of St. John raises its head high above
every other conception of God and of the
religious life, and if it were possible, as some
have said, to find elsewhere many of the
finest sayings in the Sermon on the Mount,
was it not Jesus who took them like rough
ore, stamped them with His own Image and
sent them into circulation. This Book has
not only revealed ideals of character, it has
created the reality of that which it revealed.
With other books the morality has been
maxims ; in this book it has been acts. In
other books the idea of God has been a dim
imagination, in this book a practical revela
tion. The solitary position of the Bible may also
be realized if one considers its catholicity,
and compares it in the matter of breadth with
other books of the Christian religion. Most
ministers have on their table a bracket of

l6o THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
books of devotion, drawn from Christian
springs and full of the Christian spirit. No
one can over-estimate the service to the
Christian life rendered by such works as
Law's "Serious Call," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's
Progress," Baxter's " Saint's Rest," a Kem-
pis' "Imitation of Christ," Rutherford's
" Letters," and Taylor's " Holy Living and
Dying." They are all admirable, but they
are all provincial. There are people who
cannot read Rutherford, because he is so
sensuous in his imagery, and others who ob
ject to a Kempis because he is so ascetical.
Law is thought by some not to be Evangel
ical, and Taylor to be too rhetorical. But
the people who will argue over those
manuals of piety and come to no agreement
because of different heredity and different
tastes, will find themselves at home within
Holy Scripture. A Presbyterian divine de
clares " The haughty contempt of that book
(Rutherford's " Letters ") in the heart of many
will be ground of condemnation, when the
Lord cometh to make inquisition after such
things," and no doubt other books would be

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK l6l
made a standard of personal piety. But we
may be perfectly certain it will not be by any
provincial standard that we shall be judged,
but by the large and broad rule of Holy
Scripture, wherein every man findeth what
he desires, and is satisfied. The Bible is
supreme, not only because it has exceeded
all other books both in its vision, and in its
dynamic together, but because it has gathered
into itself all the excellency which has been
diffused throughout the prophecy of many
nations. As the Bible, however, in distinction from
other books of religion is a prolonged litera
ture, with an immense mass of detail, one
may not claim that the book as a whole and
in all its parts is authoritative, and therefore
the minister should clearly lay down what is
the authoritative element in Holy Scripture.
Upon first sight this may seem a difficult
and irreverent task. " Do you propose," a
conservative critic will ask, "to go through
the Bible with a black lead-pencil and to
erase such passages as you may not think
binding on the soul, as if you were a censor

1 62 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
checking literature at the frontier of religion ?
What right have you to cut up the Bible
after this fashion ; upon what principle of
discrimination will you go ? What guarantee
of certainty have you that you will take the
right and leave the wrong? Will this
mangled corpse be worth possessing when
you have finished your dissecting?" This
objection would be very telling, and indeed
unanswerable, if one were simply to pick and
choose throughout Holy Scripture according
to his fancy, but this is not what one is pro
posing. And in turn one may ask the ques
tion of his critic : when he is preaching for
the guidance of human souls, or when he is
comforting his people in distress, does he
take indifferently a Chronicle of names, or
the story of a battle, or the murder of a king,
or the complaint of Ecclesiastes ? Does he
not rather turn to one of those beautiful and
gracious passages which in one age and an
other declare the loving-kindness and tender-
mercy of God, or one of those irresistible
invitations wherein Christ gathers human
souls into His love, as a hen gathereth her

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 63
chickens under her wings ? Of course he
does, and however extreme may be his
theory of the absolute infallibility and equal
authority of all portions of Holy Scripture,
he will let that theory go by the board when
he is bringing the Bible to bear upon the
wants of the human soul. What does this
mean, this preference of a comfortable word
of Christ to the war-like utterance of a He
brew judge, this elevation of the eighth
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans over
the regulations of Leviticus, but that God's
voice does sound more clearly and more
kindly in some portions of Scripture than
in others ? We do not erase Scriptures,
but we elevate Scriptures ; we do not re
fuse to hear any voice that speaks, but we
can recognize the voice of our Father,
and when it sounds in our ears, whether in
the Old Testament or the New, we give it
welcome. That is the heart of the Bible, and
when that Voice speaks the soul is bound to
hear. We must in short distinguish between the
Book and its message, between the record

164 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
and the revelation, a distinction which is
made in the Shorter Catechism with point
and lucidity. Q. " What rule hath God
given to direct us how we may glorify and
enjoy Him?" A. "The word of God
which is contained IN the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to
direct us how we may glorify and enjoy
Him." "The gospel, to use its royal name
for the message of God, is the souLflf the.
Bible^ and the literature is the body.
Through the Book from the beautiful de
scription of the Garden of Eden to the still
more glorious vision of the Heavenly city,
there runs a thread of gold which appears
and reappears till in the New Testament, and
especially in the gospels, the ground-work of
narrative is covered with its splendid pattern
and glittering embroidery.' When the Lord
said unto Abraham, " Get thee out of thy
country and from thy kindred, and from thy
father's house unto a land that I will show
thee, and I will make of thee a great nation,
and I will bless thee and make thy name
great and thou shalt be a blessing " ; or when

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 65
the Lord passed before Moses and pro
claimed, " The Lord, the Lord God, merciful
and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in
goodness and truth " ; or when a saint from
the fullness of his soul writes, " The Lord is
my Shepherd I shall not want. He maketh
me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth
me beside the still waters " ; or when a
prophet lifts up his testimony, " The moun
tains shall depart and the hills be removed,
but My kindness shall not depart from thee,
neither shall the covenant of My peace be
removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on
thee" ; or through the broken heart of Hosea,
the Holy One of Israel cried in a passion of
love, " How shall I give thee up Ephraim ?
How shall I deliver thee Israel . . . mine
heart is turned within me, my repentings are
kindled together. ... I will heal their
backslidings, I will love them freely for mine
anger is turned away" — the note of the
Evangel is as clearly sounded, though of
course not so winningly, as when Jesus said,
" Come unto Me all ye that labour and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest." It is

1 66 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
not necessary to ask by whose lips came
those words ; they came from God, and they
bear the impress of His heart. It is not
necessary to fix their date ; they are above all
the ages eternal as the love of God. The
classical Evangelical passages of the Bible
are contemporaneous with all generations.
The authority of the Evangel is beyond the
reach of criticism as the soul is beyond the
reach of physical analysis.
One may pause at this point and consider
the question which has always been dear to
the mystics, and makes a considerable appeal
to our own age, whether truth must rest on
the subjective experience of the believing
Christian, or on the objective revelation of
Holy Scripture. There is a pleasant story
that David Hume, the sceptical philosopher,
argued a whole evening with Dr. Jardine,
of the Tron Kirk, Edinburgh, an earnest
Evangelical, but Hume's good friend, to
prove that no revelation was needed, and that
the inner life is sufficient. When Hume left
Jardine's house and went down the long stair
which led to the street, he passed by mistake

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 67
into the cellar, and Jardine hearing him
wandering about in the darkness, came down
and rescued him with a candle. " David,
David," said Jardine, " what about the inner
light now?" It is reported that Hume
greatly enjoyed the situation, and was for
once thankful that a light had been sent him
from above. One must hold a balance be
tween the authority of the historical revela
tion, which reveals God, and the authority of
the moral sense which receives that revela
tion. A revelation were useless for any
spiritual end, were it not assimilated by the
man himself, so that he can say, " I know
whom I have believed, and am persuaded,"
but this personal and experimental knowledge
is always dependent, both for its beginning
and its growth, upon the Bible revelation ;
without the gospels the Christian would
never have known his Lord, and without
the same gospels he could not grow in the
knowledge of his Lord. When any one,
therefore, on sceptical grounds considers the
Bible unnecessary because he could find
everything for himself without it, and when

I68 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
any one, on mystical grounds, speaks as if it
were superseded because he has obtained all
he needs from it, both are out of touch with
reality. It is a matter of fact that the Bible
has given a knowledge of God which has
never been obtained elsewhere, and it is also
a matter of fact that wherever mysticism has
gone a- wandering away from the Bible it has
landed in foolishness. For different reasons
both the mystic and the sceptic making light
of the Scriptures have landed in the cellar.
The Bible is the sober standard of faith and
cohduct, and serves to correct the vagaries
of heady self-will, and unlicensed fancies.
The authority of the Bible, when one goes
to the root of the matter, whether we dis-
piminate the spirit from the form, or esti
mate the force of that spirit, must stand in
'Christ. The Bible is a unity, and by that
one means it is an articulated whole with
many parts, and the spinal marrow and
nervous system is the spirit^of Christy As
the Bible, according to our idea of its de
velopment, culminates in Christ, so all its
parts must be related to Christ. He is the

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 69
goal of its prophecy, and therefore the per
manent element in prophecy is what has
been fulfilled in Christ. Any imperfect con
ceptions of His person or limited ideas of ,
His work which the prophets taught, fall to
the ground, simply because He was greater
than those ideas, and wider in His range.
Whatever they prophesy truly of Him re
mains to illuminate and to expound both His
person and His life. Whatever in the mo
rality of the Jews before Christ was faulty or
local, is abrogated, as it were automatically,
by the teaching of Jesus ; whatever is sound
and lasting Jesus assimilates and spiritu
alizes. The Old Testament, therefore, has to
be judged at every point by the standard of
Christ, so that whatsoever is in harmony with
the gospels is authoritative, and whatsoever is
not, has no authority. By Christ are the Old
Testament Scriptures judged, and either
abrogated as temporary," or affirmed as
eternal, and when they are affirmed they^
have the very authority of Christ's own
words. The teaching of the apostles has also
to be brought to the same standard. From

170 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
time to time St. Paul turns aside from the
high road of Christian thought to argue with
I Jews after a rabbinical fashion, or occa
sionally he conforms to Jewish rites. His
teaching and his practice are not then bind
ing on Christians, because they obviously
differ from the teaching and practice of Jesus.
As a rule he carries on the ideas of Jesus and
carries forward Jesus' mission, and therefore
his epistles grip the Christian reason and his
example quickens the Christian conscience.
The authority of the apostles is the authority
of Christ. As a magnet will draw every
morsel of steel from a heap of sand, so Jesus
gathers to Himself from the wide and varied
literature of the Bible the spiritual and eternal
element of truth, and the preacher must
therefore saturate his mind with the teaching
of Jesus, that he may be able almost infallibly
to distinguish between the body and soul of
the Bible.
But Christ is not only the interpreter of the
Bible, He is also the life of the Bible — ^and
this must be firmly grasped by the minister.
Withdraw Christ from the Bible as a living

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 171
personality and the Bible is only a superior
religious literature. Place Christ in the
centre of the Bible as its living heart, and the *
Bible is a spiritual force. Apart from Christ*
the Bible is like a picture painted on a
sheet which can be studied with the aid of
candles and whose beauty can be partially
discerned. Place Christ behind it as an in
ner light, and the picture blazes into meaning
and glory. He then is Moses who gives the
law, and Joshua who conquers the land of
Canaan, the King who judges the poor of
the people, the Prophet who takes the veil
from the face of God, the Priest who opens
the way into the Holiest of all. He is the
Shepherd of Israel who called His sheep by
name ; He is the mediator who brings the
soul near unto God ; He is the manna which
cometh down from heaven, and the water
from the stricken rock. Without Christ's
person and life, without His death and res
urrection, the promises of the Bible are like
an elaborate covenant full of promises and
benefits, but of no validity because unsealed.
By Christ's cross and the red seal of His

172 THE AUTHORITY OF XHE BOOK
Blood every invitation throughout the length
and breadth of Holy Scripture is made effica
cious, and every promise becomes " yea and
amen." Just as the spiritual presence of
Christ lends its only value to the Sacrament
of the Lord's Supper, so the same presence
invests with power the words of Holy Scrip
ture. If any one receives the Sacrament in
faith, he receives Christ; if any one hears
Christ's word in faith, he also receives Christ.
The Christian minister is not therefore merely
an expositor of Scripture, he is the ambassa
dor of Christ, and whatsoever is promised in
Holy Scripture to the human soul, will be
fulfilled in time and eternity, because it is
promised by Christ Himself and He died and
rose again to secure its certainty.
It follows that the authority of the Chris
tian minister rests upon the same ground as
the authority of the Bible, that it is spiritual
and not formal, and that it is dependent not
upon the signs of office, but upon the pres
ence of Christ. There are indeed two con
ceptions of the ministry and it is well that we
should decide which is true and upon which

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 73
we are to work. One is that of the priest
who belongs to a certain cast, and is set apart
after a particular fashion, and obtains his
grace from a specially appointed officer and
whose chief act is the administration of the
sacraments. The defects in this theory are
first that the transmission of orders by Bishops
in direct and unbroken line from the Apostles,
cannot be proved historically. No scholar of
importance will now pledge himself to the
chain from the twelve to the Bishop of to-day,
and if the pipe be cut anywhere the flow of
grace has been broken. And secondly be
cause it is impossible to prove this theory ex
perimentally. No person can detect any dif
ference in the man before and after he was
ordained, nor any difference in the sacrament
which he administers. You have simply to
believe that he is connected without inter
ruption with the Apostles, and that there
resides in him a mysterious power which
renders a sacrament valid ; there is no
evidence which can be called even plausible.
According to the other theory the minister is a
prophet who declares the message of God con-

174 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
tained in the Holy Scriptures, and therefore
received by the preacher from God Himself.
Any one can trace the order of the prophets,
for it depends not on the laying on of hands
but upon the Evangel which they preach.
They are not one by an invisible and unin
telligible grace, but by the visible and effec
tual word in their mouths. Whether St. Paul
and Pope Alexander VI belonged to the
same order or not may be gravely questioned,
but there is no question that the Apostle of
the Gentiles and Charles Spurgeon had the
same commission and were of the same kind.
There is no difficulty in the prophet showing
his commission and none in his hearers veri
fying it. Does he preach the Apostolic Gos
pel, Christ and Christ crucified, and do signs
and wonders follow the preaching ? Then
every one may be certain that this man is
preaching in the name and by the power
of the Almighty. If one had seen St. Peter
administer the sacraments in Jerusalem, he
might have believed by his manner that he
was fulfilling a sacred commission of Christ,
but there would have been no objective proof.

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 75
If you had heard him preach the Gospel on
the day of Pentecost, and seen three thousand
people cast themselves on the mercy of the
risen Lord, you would have known for certain
that St. Peter was the chosen servant of
Christ. He who opened the gates of the
Kingdom to this multitude of penitent souls
carried before all men the keys of the Lord.
If any one believe that some ignorant and
evil-living South American priest is a true
minister of Christ, because he was ordained
by a Bishop in a doubtful succession, then he
is surely resting on a fancy which can never
be confirmed, either by the intellectual or
the moral sense ; but if you believe that John
Bunyan leading an innumerable multitude in
the way everlasting by his " Pilgrim's Prog
ress " is a veritable minister of the Lord
Jesus, you are resting on facts which satisfy
both the reason and the conscience. Can
any person imagine for a single instant that
if the Lord appeared in the midst of His
Church on earth that He would welcome that
priestly abject and reject the prophet of Bed
ford?

176 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
Whether the Word be higher than the
Sacrament or the Sacrament than the Word,
this is certain, that more people testify to the
effect of single texts of Holy Scripture, than
to the grace received in the sacrament.
Multitudes which no man can number have
set their seal in biographies, and in conver
sations to the great classical invitations of the
Gospel. " Upon such a day," they say, " and
by this word, light came to my soul."
When John Knox, worn out by his strenuous
life, lay a-dying, he ordered the fifteenth chap
ter of First Corinthians to be read over and
over. " When this was ended," according to
the account of his death, " he repeatedly said
to himself, ' O what sweet and salutary conso
lation has the Lord afforded me by that chap
ter.' The following day about twelve o'clock
he sat up in bed, but not long, for the weak
ness of his body did not suffer him ; at three
o'clock in the afternoon one of his eyes failed,
nor did his tongue perform its office so ex
peditiously as formerly. At six o'clock how
ever he said, ' Read the passages which I
selected, especially the seventeenth chapter

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 77
of John, since there I have cast anchor.' "
One of the ablest prelates of the Anglican
Church, and one of the chief reasoners
in natural theology asked his chaplain to
comfort him when he was near death, but
was not satisfied by anything which was
read, till the chaplain came to the passage,
"It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all ac
ceptation that Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners, of whom I am chief."
Upon that faithful saying, or rather upon the
Lord behind that saying, Butier rested his
soul. When Durham, one of the saints and
theologians of the Scots Kirk came near the
end of his journey, he was propped up in bed
and an open Bible laid before him. " Find
me," he said, "the eighth chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans, and read me the last
two verses. Place my hand on the words ' I
am persuaded that neither death nor life nor
angels nor principalities nor powers, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor height
nor depth nor any other creature shall be
able to separate us from the love of God
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.' " A

178 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
little later an expression of deep peace and
also of manifest joy settied on his face, and
he passed within the veil.
Does not this experience of the saints, the
men who really know about religion because
they have been there, prove the inherent
power of Holy Scripture to support the soul,
and its divine authority ? This is the Gospel
of God, because it is the message which one
would expect God to send, and which does
for the soul what it needs. Between the soul
in its necessity and the Bible in its Gospel
there is a convincing correspondence, and
therefore I should like in what remains of
this lecture to make an earnest plea for more
decided and unhesitating preaching. Is it
not a misfortune that preaching has_^
largely lost the Positive Note? We stand
aghast at the mental attitude of our fathers
who allowed no open questions, comprehend
ing everything from the origins to the ends
of time, and casting good men out for heresy
on subjects about which no human being
could know anything. " God could or could
not do this or that," they used to say and

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 79
beyond that point it is obvious none can
travel. It was practical omniscience. We
are much pleased with our own attitude —
who do not seem at times to have any closed
questions, being willing to discuss the ex
istence of God, or the resurrection of Christ
or personal immortality in a neutral spirit
with any person. There are no limits to our
religious diffidence, and conciliatory conces
sions. We do well to congratulate ourselves
upon our tolerance, provided that it arises
from modesty about mysteries, or charity
towards our fellow men, but we do far from
well if we are tolerant because we do not
think that there is any certainty possible in
religion, or because we have no convictions
to rouse our spirit. Preachers are affected
by the atmosphere, and this to-day is anti-
supernatural, so that without being conscious
that their faith has weakened, they come to
state truth in terms of worldly wisdom. The
Personal God of the saints becomes the
eternal Something or Other ; He who was
dead and is alive forevermore fades into " the
Christ idea " ; the miracles should really not

l8o THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
be taken as fairy tales after the suggested
discoveries of hypnotism; and immortality
is saved from incredibility by the perpetu
ally hopeful papers of the Psychical Society.
One fear§ that in . some ^IJiarters the .piJilpit
has lost nerve. It may be that our fathers
were too sure about everything ; it would be
an immense gain if their successors were ab
solutely sure about something.
If a preacher with the Bible in his hands
is not positive, he has fallen short of his vo
cation. It is within his function to instruct
and to defend, but he is chiefly a prophet
with a message to the world from God. He
is a witness to the supremacy of the soul, the
reality of the unseen, the glory of the re
ligious life — affirming with unfaltering voice
those things which all men wish to believe
and which they hold dimly in their minds.
For the preacher of the Gospels the first
qualification is not that he be learned or elo
quent, but that he believe ; and whatever be
the case with other men he must believe with
the marrow of his bones. If this be impos
sible then let him become anything he

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK l8l
pleases, but not a preacher ; and if doubts
settie upon him, let him face and master
them in secret — in the wilderness with God,
and stand before his fellow men with un
clouded face. There are enough men to
ventilate doubts without the preacher's as
sistance. From him the world expects faith,
'and the dynamic of one man believing with
all his mind and all his heart, is incalculable ;
it is a reservoir of life in the midst of a
bloodless and worn-out society.' Doubt can
be got anywhere ; faith ought to be supplied
by the pulpit.
Of course the preacher ought to be positive,
about thg right things and to distinguish
between the facts and the theories of Chris
tianity. Our faith has its being amid certain
realities in the sphere of religion: such as
revelation, that God has spoken to us in the
gospel ; the Deity of Christ — that Christ is
the Son of the Father in a sense which can
be asserted of no other man ; Redemption —
that Christ by His sacrifice delivers the soul
from the power of sin ; the Holy Ghost — that
God ministers grace to the soul by His in-

l82 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
dwelling Spirit ; the life to come — that there
will be a future existence with moral distinc
tions. Around those facts gather a number
of theories, such as Inspiration and Substitu
tion. The facts are religion, the theories are
theology, and while the facts should be de
clared with assurance, the theories should be
advanced with diffidence. It is one thing to
insist on the message of God springing out
of Holy Scripture as its very flower and
fruit, and another to explain how it was
given ; one thing to preach Christ as a Sa
viour and another to settle whether He of
fered an exact equivalent for the penalty of
our sin. When one is positive on the radiant
facts of our Christian faith, he is on strong
ground ; when he is dogmatic on the results
of theological science, he is at a disadvan
tage. If one insists on the virtue of Christ's
sacrifice to redeem the soul from the grip of
sin, he is resting upon experience ; when he
suggests the principle of the Atonement, he
has entered into the region of speculation.
He is now showing the picture with the help
of a candle in order to illuminate its shadows.

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 83
One candle after serving its turn has burned
out and has been replaced by another, and
no doubt each candle had its own value.
Every theory of the Atonement, from that of
the Fathers according to which Christ paid a
price to the devil for the ransom of His peo
ple, to the modern Evangelical one called the
substitutionary, is a contribution to the better
understanding of the facts. With this dis
tinction in our minds theology becomes the
handmaid of truth, but it is on truth as de
clared in the Bible and not on theology as
created in the study, the minister of Christ
must be positive.
We ought to be positive in the right
^jmrit. When a pre^Ker offers the beautiful
'ra-ities of the Bible as the heritage of our
race, then the soul is captivated and made
eager for their acceptance ; wnen a preacher
gathers together the elements of the Chris
tian faith and demands that his hearers
should accept them with an alternative of
punishment, then the Evangel is held as a
pistol to the head, and imperfectly sanctified
human nature is apt to rebel. Preaching

l84 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
which attacks a man's belief irritates;
preaching which transfigures a man's be
liefs, concihates. Is your hearer an ag
nostic ? — assume that he longs to know the
nameless God, and drop the veil from the
face of Christ. Has he a besetting sin ? —
exhibit to him the opposite virtue in Christ,
whose Purity like a fire burns up our dross.
Is he a slave of this present world ? — let the
glory of the eternal cast into the shade the
glitter of the temporal. Let the preacher be
ever full of charity, believing that every man
is willing to exchange his error, which is a
half truth, for the whole truth, and that every
man in his best moments passionately de
sires to be free from his sin. Preaching
should never be destruction ; it ought ever
to be fulfillment, the shining of light into a
dark room, the rushing of a tide up the
empty channel of a river, against which
there is no resistance, with which comes ex
ceeding joy.'-
Above all speakers the Christian minister
has good grounds for being positive, and
ought to have them in his mind when he

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 1 85
faces his fellow men from the pulpit. He
g^ves a pledge of authority as he stands be
hind the open Bible, for beyond all question
the Bible has a voice of peculiar majesty.
Like the deep mellow sound of a bell floating
out from a cathedral tower on the violet sky
of Italy, and arresting for a brief moment at
least the confused babel of the Carnival be
low, the utterances of this Book fall on the
restiess questions, and fretful anxieties of the
soul. Hearers are of a sudden hushed into
reverence, and are inclined to submission,
not by the ipse dixit of a fallible preacher,
but because the mouth of the Lord hath
spoken it. What the preacher says will cer
tainly be verified in the experience of his
hearers, since the inner story of humanity is
ever the same. If he describes any particular
sin which is devastating his own life, many
of his people will tremble because he has
gone through the secret ways of their heart,
and with the candle of the Lord. If he com
mends the divine grace which in his sore
strait has comforted him, he may give his
imagination full scope, for this man and that

l86 THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK
will desire to rise in his place and declare
that the same Lord has done yet greater things
for him. We speak from life to life, from
conscience to conscience, from heart to heart
with unerring correspondence.
And the preacher of the Evangel does not
stand alone before his audience, for his single
puny figure is flung into relief against the
background of the saints of all ages — the
Catholic Church of God. They also have
grasped the promises and trusted in God ;
they also have made their venture, and have
not been put to confusion. Christ afar off or
near has been to them all their desire and
their salvation. When the preacher makes
his appeal for Christ, he wakens an echo
from distant places and many centuries.'
Abraham, going forth into a strange country
on the strength of the promise, cries Amen ;
Isaiah, writing his fifty-third chapter, joins in
the word ; St. John lifts his head from Jesus'
bosom to add his testimony ; St. Paul raises
his chained arm to bear witness to the Lord.
Unto the vision of faith the heavens are
opened, and there is seen a multitude no

THE AUTHORITY OF THE BOOK 187
man can number who have washed their
robes and made them white in the blood of
the Lamb, and unto the ear of faith the
preacher's voice is drowned in music like
unto the sound of many waters — " Blessing
and honour and glory and power be unto
Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto
the Lamb forever and ever."

LECTURE V
THE STYLE OF THE BOOK

LECTURE V
THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
AS the range of the Bible is wide as
humanity so its style is wide as lit
erature. There is indeed no form of
speech of which its writers have not availed
themselves. You have philosophy in Job, his
tory in the Pentateuch, poetry in the Psalms,
and biography in the Gospels. You have
the sententiousness of the books of wisdom,
and the glancing freedom of the Episties.
Every form of humour except the jocularity
of the West is found in the Bible, from the
irony of the prophets to the gentle humour
of Jesus in the parable of the midnight visitor
and the unjust judge ; the illustration of the
children's games, and the repartee of the
physician who visits the sick and not the
whole. With this comprehensive example
before him in his text-book, the preacher in
his sermon is entitled to use every form of
191

192 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
human speech, provided he be never trifling
or vulgar or irreverent or inhuman. If he
employs humour it must be with delicacy and
reserve. He is not to be condemned if he
provokes a smile — people often smile because
what is said is so perfectly true, not because
it is amusing. He is to be condemned if he
raises a laugh, for people only laugh when
they are amused. While the Evangel may
have every other kind of human quality,
it should never be made amusing. If there
is one man more to be despised than another
it is the jester in the pulpit ; he may gather
a crowd of groundlings for a season, but he
has insulted his high commission. I do not
say that the minister is to be envied who has
no sense of humour, for . his touch will be
heavy and, which surely is an irony of things,
he may become grotesque, and when he in
tends to be most solemn may be most absurd.
But I do say that the man who has this
tricky gift, and is called to the Christian min
istry, must bit and bridle it when he is en
gaged in his sacred duty. If he can use it to
ridicule folly and to expose sin, to check the

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 193
absurdities of good people, and to win men's
hearts, then it is a valuable instrument in his
hands, as it was in the hands of his Master.
But if humour has only the effect of lowering
the dignity of the ambassador of Christ when
in the discharge of his high duties, or be-
littiing the authority of his message, then
humour becomes a hindrance and an of
fense. When a congregation watches for
the jocose passages with which its coarser
palate is fed and pays no attention to the
seriousness between, then surely the vainest
and shallowest of preachers must see that he
is playing the fool, and doing so in the face
of heaven.
Just as critics insist that poetry of the first
order — the work of Dante or of Milton, is
distinguished by what is called the grand
note, so preaching ought to differ from a
literary lecture or a platform speech by a
certain indescribable but recognizable maj
esty of tone, and this can be best caught
from the Bible itself. Bunyan illustrates this
style of speech in its highest degree, combin
ing as no other man outside the Bible has

194 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
done grandeur with simplicity. But simple
men, without education or genius have
caught the infection of this dignity, and
when they spake of spiritual things were
raised above themselves and had the tongue
of the Prophets and Apostles. The Bible
has through its length and breadth the sound
of eternity, and by that one means that it is
never provincial in its spirit, but universal,
and the great preaching which is saturated
with the Bible spirit is always imperial.
Herein there is a great difference between
two kinds of preachers — the one who
preaches to the times and the other who,
like Archbishop Leighton, asks permission
" to preach Jesus Christ and eternity." The
mind of the imperial preacher breathes its
native air on that lofty table-land where the
saints live with God, and occupies itself with
those eternal verities which effect the human
soul in every age. It is his habit to dwell
upon the character of God, the impurity of
sin, the stainless righteousness of spiritual
law, upon the everlasting love and unfathom
able wisdom of our heavenly Father, upon

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 1 95
the coming of the Lord Jesus into human life
and the epic of salvation from His Incarna
tion to His Resurrection, upon the indwelling
and patient work of the Holy Ghost, upon
the unqualified freedom of the divine mercy,
and the unsearchable riches of the divine
grace, upon the anxieties of the soul in her
quest for God, and the sacred experiences of
the religious life, upon the awfulness of judg
ment and the glory of the life everlasting.
Amid those high themes, this preacher makes
his spiritual home as the eagle builds her
nest in the clefts of unsealed cliffs ; from
such heights he studies the plains of human
life, and descends to preach to his fellows.
His words may be simple and easily under
stood by the people, yet they will have
caught the tone of the unseen world. The
preacher himself will have the unconscious
dignity of one who is keeping high company
and he will speak with the indescribable au
thority of one with whom God holds con
verse. Such preaching is not confined to
any environment or period, it belongs to no
nation or time, it is ageless preaching.

196 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
Another type of preacher, though from
time to time he may climb the heights, and
although he may be ever conscious of their
wide view, builds by preference his intellec
tual home amid the circumstances of human
life and the interests of his own age. What
he studies with sympathetic mind is that life
of man which is " such a comedy to those
who think, such a tragedy to those who
feel." What fills his imagination is not so
much the " New Jerusalem coming down
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride
adorned for her husband" ; it is rather his
own city made clean and glad. What
rouses him to a white heat is not the inso
lent rebellion of man against God, but some
deed of political unrighteousness. The ideal
he holds out before men is not so much the
vision of God, dear to the heart of the mystic,
as a perfect manhood according to the stat
ure of Christ. The method of religion upon
which he fondly dwells is not,
" The silent life of prayer,
Praise, fast, and alms,"

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 197
but the service of man in philanthropic enter
prise or municipal politics. For his inspira
tion outside the Bible he would rather turn to
the last book on social service than to
k Kempis, whom he is apt to consider a type
of religious selfishness, or to Pascal who re
pels him by his intellectual austerity. His
ear is so besieged by the voices of men call
ing for help that it cannot always catch the
voice of God, and he is so immersed in the
practice of religion that he has no leisure for
its research. When he speaks to his fellows
this prophet does not come from a lonely re
treat, but rises in the market-place, his accent
is that of to-day, and he speaks of that which
has been buzzing up and down the streets.
Every one is glad to hear him, and under
stands what he intends, for his sermons are a
glorified echo of what men are discussing in
the club, and in their homes, what is being
written in contemporary books, and monthly
magazines. His sermons may have quota
tions from the masters of thought and may
refer at times to the great movements which
have made history, but they are certain to be

198 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
rich in local colour, and to show the soil
through which they have been running. As
one turns over the leaves he catches the
name of a living politician, of a popular
pressman, of an infamous criminal, of a fash
ionable novelist; he finds allusions to a
scandal in high life, to a controversy between
two Churches, to the last attack on Christian
ity by some dashing free lance, and to the
compensation of publicans. The sermons
are charged with the life of to-day, and the
hearer is perfectly at home : he understands
to the last word what is said to him, and is
never taken into solitary places where he
would be ill at ease ; he knows exactly what
he ought to do and it is never any hopeless
ideal. This is contemporary rather than
eternal preaching, provincial rather than
imperial, less rather than more Biblical. It
has the atmosphere of the Bible."-
When one makes this distinction he ought
to admit that the gain is not all on one side.
If the imperialist has a wider outlook and a
firmer grasp of principles, he may fail to
touch the multitude who are weary with the

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 1 99
g^reatness of his ideas, and may not be a
force in present day questions, because he
does not relate them to his heavenly doc
trine. It is possible to be a master in pure
mathematics and yet to be helpless in
physics, and indeed to reach that state of
mind which considers any application of
mathematics to be their degradation. There
are minds whose enthusiasm is confined to
the study and evaporates in the practice of
life, to whom ideas are everything and men
are nothing. They produce sermons which
for abstract speculation suggest the fourth
dimension, but for any human relation might
as well be preached in Mars as in this present
world. It is no reproach to the ordinary
man accustomed to the domestic life of the
valley, that he is not at home on the top of a
lonely crag with this intrepid climber ; it does
not mean that he is unspiritual, it may not
even mean that he is unintellectual, it simply
means that he is human. And it also means
that in this case the preacher in paying his
tribute to the divinity of the Bible has lost
touch with its humanity, and that the Christ

200 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
he preaches is a ghost and not the Son of
Mary. On the other hand there is no question
that the provincial preacher has an unde
niable opportunity and has wrought great
works. There is no power like speech in the
conflict of affairs, and preachers have often
turned the battle in the gate by sermons in
which every sentence told upon a present
situation ; they have beaten down unright
eousness, overthrown tyranny, delivered the
oppressed and established the kingdom of
God in their city and in their land. The
sermons a year afterwards were antiquated
and obsolete, and therefore, one sees, belong
to a different order from that of Jesus and
the Apostles. But who can say that they
had not served their purpose, and genera
tions to come who never heard of them
would reap their fruits. When Knox
preached in St. Gile's he dealt with the dan
gers of the day, and the duty laid upon his
countrymen, and if there be few who would
care to read his St. Gile's sermons, yet as he
says himself, "the Doctrin was proper for

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 20I
the tyme," and " in applicatioun qahairof he
was so special and vehement," that even
Maitland of Lethington said in mockage,
" We mon now forget ourselffis and beir the
barrow to buyld the housses of God." Per
haps it does not matter much that the ser
mon itself should be forgotten if it shakes
the life of a nation. Calvin was the perfect
type of a thinker, and with his dead hand
he still grips the reason of the Reformed
Churches, but his administration left no
trace. Knox was no scholar, and his ser
mons could not be read to-day, but in his
time they were as the sound of many
trumpets, and in Knox a nation realized
itself, and came into its kingdom. Wisdom
is justified of her children. It remains,
however, if God has given him genius, the
imperial preacher, in the Bible sense, with
the range of Isaiah or St. Paul, addresses
not only his own generation, but has genera
tions unborn at his command. So long as
there are sinners, and the English language
is spoken, Bunyan's great sermon on " Jeru
salem Sinners Saved," will be read with wet

202 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
eyes and tender hearts. You do not need
to know a circumstance of the period to feel
the force of that sermon, you only require to
know your own heart and the infinite pathos
of human life. Mr. Spurgeon addressed all
kinds and conditions of men and the ser
mons preached fifty years ago are a living
message to-day, and will not be out of date
when the twentieth century is drawing to its
close. John Henry Newman and Robertson
of Brighton have made a permanent contri
bution to our religious literature, and from the
past. South and Jeremy Taylor, two very dif
ferent men, still speak to us. Those
preachers have passed but they have
not perished ; they have won their place
among the immortals, because they have
dealt worthily with immortality. It is the
disability of the provincial preacher that
though he may work marvels by the grace of
God in his day, and is carried aloft like a
successful general upon the shields of his
enthusiastic soldiers, yet he does not remain.
The life goes out from his war cry because
the battle has been fought, and the meaning

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 203
out of his illustrations because the circum
stances have changed. Between the two
kinds of sermons, there will be the same dif
ference as between Cicero's " De Senectute "
and his " Letters to Atticus." The one can
be understood everywhere and in every time,
the other is the kind of book which in a gen
eration requires to be edited, and at our rate
of living would fade in six months. Chrys-
ostom and Massillon, to take instances far
apart, were soaked in the life of their day
and dealt frankly with its sins, but the hom
ilies of the one and the sermons of the other
are as convincing as when the golden-
mouthed orator moved audiences to tumults
of applause at Antioch, and the Court
preacher so adroitly rebuked Louis XIV that
the king left the Chapel dissatisfied not with
the preacher but with himself.
As we are living in a day when men are
more concerned about the things that are
temporal than those which are eternal, it is a
snare for the preacher to speak to his people
in the dialect of the moment, rather than in
the language of the ages, and to attract

204 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
audiences by treating the incidental affairs of
public life which is ever changing like a
kaleidoscope, and to be afraid to touch the
profound experiences of the soul which is
the air of eternity. Certainly the preacher
should be in touch with his day, and Amos
spoke to his generation, if any prophet ever
did, but it is well for the preacher enveloped
by our secular spirit to remember that burn
ing subjects soon die into white ashes, and
that when this artificial fire has perished
audiences also grow cold and seek some
other hearth, while congregations which are
fed with the living bread, grow more recep
tive every day, and will not lightly forsake
the teacher who has satisfied the hunger of
the soul. The ideal preacher is he who in
his sermon can so relate time to eternity that
he shall be able to deal with the most com
monplace affairs from the height of the loft
iest principles. It is characteristic of the
Bible teachers that they connected every
duty with the eternal law of righteousness,
and lifted the commonplaces of life to the
level of worship. Amos was indignant with

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 205
Israel not only because they had sinned so
wantonly in the excess of luxury and in the
oppression of the poor, but because they had
done all this after receiving such grace at the
hands of God, and he warned his people that
according to the richness of their privilege,
would be the heaviness of their punishment.
" You only have I known of all the families of
the earth, therefore I will punish you for all
your iniquities." Because the children of
Israel were a family which God had brought
up from the land of Egypt, therefore they
ought to be humble, self-denying, sympa
thetic, obedient. After the same fashion St.
Paul in his exhortations to the early Chris
tians condescends upon the humblest details
of daily duty, but he makes them the out
come of the life that is hid with Christ in
God. After his magnificent exposition of the
doctrine of the Resurrection, and after sound
ing the trumpet of victory over death and sin
he goes on, " Therefore, my beloved brethren,
be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abound
ing in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye
know that your labour is not in vain in the

206 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
Lord." And immediately thereafter, " Now
concerning the collection for the saints."
There is no truth so profound, but it can be
brought to bear on the most modest affairs of
life, just as iron bridges are built by a for
mula of pure mathematics, and no task so
practical but it can be informed by the highest
knowledge, just as scientific breeders of
wheat call to their assistance the calculations
of the mathematician. All knowledge is one
and no than to-day can be an expert physiol
ogist unless he have a working knowledge
of mathematics and certain discoveries by a
botanist have been used by the investigators
into the origin of cancer. All life is one ;
the life of Christ before the throne throbs in
the soul of the humblest believer, and the
great sacrifice which Christ accomplished is
repeated as often as one of us serves another
in the lowliest ministry of earth. As George
Herbert, the perfect pastor of the English
Church, pleasantly says :
" A servant with this clause,
Makes drudgery divine.
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws.
Makes that and the action fine."

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 207
There are preachers who are extra-spiritual,
because they do not follow principles into
practice, and there are preachers who are
extra-secular, because they insist on practice
without principles. But there is another
order, and in our day Dr. Dale of Birmingham
was perhaps its most conspicuous representa
tive, who are able to wed principle and practice
together, as St. Paul did when in the Roman
Epistle he passes easily from the heights of
God's purposes to the duty of Christian
hospitality. And that preacher has come
near perfection, who can make the springs
hidden amid the everlasting hills pour their
water into the valley beneath, to make green
its meadows and to drive the peasant's hum
ble wheel.
While the most striking feature of the
Bible style is its combination of the eternal
and the temporal, there are certain qualities
which it may help us to note in detail and
which may pass with advantage into the
texture of the sermon. One is intelligibility,
or interest. Whether it be a prophet ad
dressing his generation on the sins of the

208 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
day, or an apostle declaring the gospel in a
Gentile market-place, or the Master giving
His most profound discourses, one knows
what the speaker means. The Bible style
may on occasion be oratorical, or it may be
familiar ; it may be kind or it may be severe ;
it may touch on the mysteries of life or on
life's simplest offices. It is always unaf
fected and straightforward, it always employs
the current speech of the day which the man
upon the street can understand, and not
precocities of literature which only the student
in his study can taste. It has dignity without
pomposity, sublimity without subtlety, spir
ituality without mistiness. As George Her
bert writes of the Bible,
" 'Tis heaven in perspective; and the bliss
Of glory here,
If anywhere,
By saints on earth anticipated is.
Whilst faith to every word
A being doth afford."
Bible language is impressive by an inherent
grandeur and perfect in its felicitous taste,
but it is always plain, so that he who run-

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 209
neth can read, and the wayfaring man though
he be a fool cannot err therein. It is indeed
a paradox that the style of the Bible is much
simpler than that of the commentaries written
to expound it, and one keenly appreciates
the experience of the good old woman who
was presented with a commentary on the
gospels and asked whether it had helped her
to understand. " Well," she said, " the large
print above (which was the gospel text) I
can easily follow, but the small print below
(which was the illumination of the com
mentator) fairly drives me stupid." The
common people heard Christ gladly for vari
ous reasons, but largely because they under
stood Him. And they understood Him be
cause He did not use the terms of the rabbis,
but the words of every-day life, and because
He did not take abstruse illustrations but
employed the panorama upon which their
eyes were looking.
Our Master beyond any prophet or apostle
must always be the chief model for the
preacher, and the fascination of Jesus' speech
can be traced to various sources, but never

2IO THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
is He more engaging than in His prodigal
use of the parable. Certain minds are so
governed by its abstractions that they can
never connect an idea with the system of
things, but keep it in a place apart ; others
are so destitute of imagination that they
never catch any analogy between the spiritual
world and the natural. Such minds in the
pulpit labour under a perpetual disability, for
they depend for the exposition of truth either
on the processes of reason or the deductions
of tradition ; their teaching may be valuable,
it will always be ineffectual. As Jesus looked
out on nature and on life, the scene was shot
through as in a transparency by the unseen.
No truth of religion ever came to Him naked
and austere, but in a comely shape and
clothed with fair colours ; no practice of re
ligion but realized itself before His eyes in
the habits of daily living. This outward
show with its rising and setting sun, its
pasture lilies and its growing corn, its view
less wind and flocks of careless birds, was a
sacrament — ^the sign of the sacred mysteries
of the soul. This varied human life with its

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 211
fishermen in their boats, its farmers sowing
the seed, its working women busy with house
hold labour, its rich men giving feasts, was
the rehearsal of the history of the kingdom
of God. The Gospel of Jesus can be found
in the parables, which remain the most be
neficent assistant which style has afforded to
thought. The parable always interests and although
some learned and pious persons seem to
consider it a duty to weary an audience, the
first aim of our Lord was to win and to con
ciliate. It was His custom to pass from rea
son to illustration, as one turns from the
dusty road into the fields. He came quite
as quickly to His destination, and distance
was forgotten on account of the beauty of
the way. Neither poetry nor pathos, neither
eloquence nor argument, will so surely catch
the ear or hold the attention as a tale. One
may hazard the guess that as soon as the
two first human beings realized themselves
and one another, Adam told Eve a story.
When the last two huddle themselves to
gether on the frozen earth they will tell the

212 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
things which have been. It is with a story
that childhood is soothed, with a story that
the cares of age are relieved. As Jesus
preaches, a panorama of life unfolds itself,
ever illuminated by the inner life. We watch
the farmer going down his fields and throw
ing his seed from side to side, and the tiny
pickles falling on the four kinds of soil which
divide between them human character. We
detect the treacherous neighbour stealing
through the field in the night-time and sow
ing the evil seed of tares among the wheat ;
we stand on the lake shore as the fishermen
draw in their net with toil and strain and
separate the fluttering spoil into the good
and the bad. We admire the glitter of the
goodly pearl in the merchant's hand, and are
concemed until he has secured it at a great
price ; we are excited as the plow strikes on
the buried treasure-chest and the fortunate
peasant tears open the lid ; we follow with
sympathetic interest the shepherd as he seeks
for his lost sheep, and the woman as she
hunts for her lost coin. We are indignant at
the Pharisee's self-righteous prayer in the

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 213
Temple, and are vastly pleased? when justice
is done to the unmerciful servant } we also
wait in the market-place with the unem
ployed labourers and approve the reward
g^ven to the men who have made good use
of their talents. True to the principle of
action which controls the whole revelation of
Holy Scripture, Jesus calls His hearers to con
sider the busy life of men, and in the midst
of vivid and varied scenes we are taught with
delight and ease the deepest truths.
Another quality of the Bible style which
should be imitated in the pulpit is its reason
ableness. Throughout its lengfth and breadth
the Bible deals respectfully with men in the
sense that it endeavours to win their consent
as intellectual and moral beings. They may
be brow-beaten by dogma, but they are not
bullied by the Bible ; they are not com
manded to believe whether they understand
or not, far less because the truth is incred
ible ; they are asked to accept the truth be
cause it is high and noble and in keeping
with supreme reason. The controversy in
the days of the prophets was between a rea-

214 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
sonable God and an unreasonable people.
" Hear O heavens and give ear O earth for
the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and
brought up children, and they have rebelled
against Me. The ox knoweth his owner, and
the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not
know. My people doth not consider." What
God asks in the Bible is that people should
think and if they will only take the trouble
of thought, they will both believe aright and
do aright. The typical fool in the Bible is
' not an uneducated person, he is a sinner ;
sin in the Bible is many things but chiefly it
is a tremendous mistake — it is missing the
mark. ' The sinner has failed and made a
ruin of life. Jesus did not complain that
men were doubtful and amazed about His
new doctrine ; that they asked questions and
did not at once make up their mind. He
was ready to explain anything, and desired
every one to be fully persuaded, and if He
dealt sharply with intellectual hypocrites. He
was the most patient of teachers to a sincere
sceptic. We do less than justice to the con
tents of our religion when we represent them

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 215
as commonplace like the multiplication table
without mysteries and without surprises ; we
also do less than justice to the reason of our
fellow men when we demand that they
should receive every truth of Christianity at
the point of the bayonet. Christianity is thei
most profound revelation within our horizon,
and he who would possess its fullness, must
not be afraid to ask questions, and the
preacher must not weary answering them
till his hearers' reason be fully persuaded.
When one is commending Christian truth
from the pulpit and when one is verifying it
in the pew, both preacher and hearer should
be careful to use the most convincing test and
should take note of the Master's own method
of conviction. When He was on His defense,
with what evidences did He support His gos
pel, and with what plea did He win its ac
ceptance? When His opponents denied
what He said, upon what aids did He fall
back? Never upon the accumulated the
ology of the schools, which was such an
armoury of weapons for the Rabbis, and which
Jesus absolutely ignored, and very rarely upon

2l6 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
mere logic, that kind of argument which
checkmates you according to rules in a game
of words, although Jesus occasionally conde
scended to worst the Pharisees by this
method. Sometimes He did appeal to texts,
but only when He was speaking to men with
whom the appeal to texts was an end of all
controversy. Occasionally He availed Him
self of His divine right of assertion and with
a " verily, verily " laid down the law of truth,
but He never did so in order to silence the
human reason but to rouse it to its highest
power. His chief weapon when He appeals
to the human soul was the absolute reason
ableness of His Gospel when tried by the
experience of human life. " You cannot ac
cept My representation of God," He says in
effect when making His great defense in the
fifteenth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, " or
the divinity of My mission. You cannot be
lieve that God will deal with sinners as I have
taught, or that I ought to treat them as I do.
Very good, then I will ask this single question.
Compare the action of God with the best
action of your own life, and tell Me if God as

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 21 7
I teach Him is not doing exactiy as you
would wish to do when you are at your best,
and whether My method of salvation is not
in keeping with the principles of life ? Look
round and behold My gospel in action ; look
within yourselves and see if I be not vindi
cated. What man of you? " — ^the decision is
left in our own hands. Jesus has appealed
to our moral reason ; by that reason He is
ever willing to be justified.
When Jesus appeals to the shepherd before
Him who has lost his sheep and the woman
who has lost her coin and the father who has
lost his son. He brings His teaching out of
the air and places it upon the earth, and this
is a very great gain for simple folk. Are we
not all apt to regard the doctrines of Chris
tianity as propositions, laid down by divine
inspiration through the writers of Holy Scrip
ture or by the councils of the Church, which
we ought to accept whether we believe them
to be true or not ? We imagine them a reve
lation of things which we never could have
discovered and which when discovered we
have no right to judge, because they are not

2l8 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
within the range of our knowledge and are
not a part of our experience. Are we ac
customed, as Jesus suggests, to believe that
life human and divine are one, that what is
fright with God is right with man, and what
\ is true with man is true with God, and that
{
I therefore religious truth will be confirmed
' before our eyes by the laws of human life ?
Jesus' revelation is not so much the unveiling
of a spiritual fact which is beyond our con
sciousness, as it is the unveiling of our mind
to the fact which, when once seen, we can see
always. He did not ask men to believe any
thing which they could not verify in their
own soul, but He did insist that if His Gospel
was sanctioned by the action and thought of
human life on its highest plain, that it was
true. According to our Master no doctrine
therefore makes any just claim upon our
mind which is not an induction from human
experience, and any doctrine which is con
demned by human experience is to be re
jected. Observe in passing how the application of
this Bible principle — whether it confirm or re-

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 219
move doctrine, will tend to the establishment
of the Christian faith. Among the doctrines
which have been held by all Christians with
a few exceptions is the Incarnation of the
Son of God. Doubtless there is no one who
would not wish to believe that God Himself
came into this welter of sin and sorrow for
our aid, but it comes over the mind that for
the Almighty to condescend so far, and to
limit Himself to human nature, is a thing not
only mysterious but incredible. Then we
turn to human experience, and ask what one
of us at his highest would wish to do in
similar circumstances. Suppose that at the
upper end of a city a man is living in a house
defended against disease and want, reinforced
by every comfort, and gladdened by every
beauty, and that at the other end of the city
men and women are living in hovels, without
sunshine, without air, beset by temptations,
worn out by labour, weakened by disease,
without joy, without knowledge, without
hope, would you not expect that man if he
were of the nobler order to make the case of
his suffering brethren his own, and if he went

220 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
SO far as to go down and live with his poor
kinsmen, sharing the same lot, placing him
self under the same conditions, save that he
carried from the past an immunity from evil,
would that not be from the point of view of
the moral reason, a noble and becoming
action, would it not be one worthy of God
Himself? Was not this what God did
through the Incarnation? And is it to
be supposed that He alone may not make
sacrifices or that He alone should be safe
guarded from sorrow ? Must not the cross
be also in the heart of God ? When Jesus
teaches the love of God and declares that in
His chief sacrifice He is fulfilling the will of
God, He carries our judgment with Him.
" The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving, too —
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face My hands fashioned, see it in Myself !
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of Mine,
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love.
And thou must love Me who have died for thee ! '
The madman saith he said so : it is strange."
Let us apply this principle to a doctrine

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 221
which has ever been a stumbling-block, and
which has been the opprobrium of Calvinism,
that of reprobation. It may, let us grant, be
proved by a few statements torn bleeding
out of their contexts and saturated with local
feeling, that God intended certain men to be
condemned to everlasting destruction and
that nothing they could do would be of any
service to deliver them from their doom.
But one cannot bear the thought that our
heavenly Father should so deal with any of
His children, and certainly if He did so one
could never trust Him again. We turn to
life and find that a father may have to dis
tinguish between his children, treating prodi
gals sharply for their own good, and for the
sake of his family ; that he may have to deny
the management of affairs to ignorant chil
dren and to place them under the charge of
those who are wiser. We also find, how
ever, that all such distinctions are intended
for the good even of those who suffer, and
that an earthly father of the best kind is ever
doing the wisest and kindest he knows for
his children. We look out on history and

222 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
see that the Jewish nation received special
favour in order that they might be the means
of special blessing, and that the gifts be
stowed upon certain people, the ability of
the statesman, the courage of the soldier, the
riches of the capitalist, are intended for the
welfare of the nation. And with this life
both of the family and of the nation before
us, full of comprehensive fatherly govern
ment, we see the doctrine of sovereignty
vindicated but the doctrine of reprobation
condemned, and we throw it aside as a slan
der upon God.
Our Master was ever in touch with life, and
therein He differs from the scribes of every
age. His paradoxes may startle you ; His
commandments try you. His deep sayings
solemnize you. His searching words offend
you ; but your higher self, your intellectual
and moral sense, is never outraged or driven
into revolt by Christ. You can never say of
His teaching, it is an offense to my conscience,
it is a contradiction of my experience. He
ever fulfills the highest function of the pulpit
to express our noblest thoughts and to ex-

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 223
plain our deepest feelings. Take twenty rep
resentative men of all ages and all schools,
ask them to leave their peculiar views out
side the room as one leaves his outer gar
ment in the hall, and then when they are all
cleansed from partial counsel, place before
them one of Christ's sermons — it does not
matter which, they all fulfill the same condi
tion. Ask this commission of various inter
ests, whether they object to anything ; it is
impossible. You dare not ask them if the
discourse is able ; it were a profanity. You
would not ask them if it were orthodox ; it
were an irrelevancy. It is true ; that is the
conclusion from beginning to end, beauti
fully and perfectly true. Christendom has
been torn in pieces by the doctrines of Chris
tians, yet there has not risen a man of note
inside or outside of Christianity, who has
denied anything Christ said, or found it in his
heart to criticise Christ. He could not be
cause our human experience responds to the
touch of Christ like the strings of a harp to
the harper. This reasonableness has been
the felicitous monopoly of Christ, and the

224 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
more reasonable His ministers are the nearer
they come to their Master.
The third quality of the Bible style is
sympathy ; each department of speech,
judicial, political, commercial and scientific,
has its own characteristic note. So has the
preaching of the Gospel from the days of St.
Paul to those of Whitfield, through a long line
of preachers with the most varied gifts speak
ing to the most varied times. Certainly there
is no kind of style which cannot be illustrated
from Bible literature, from the speculation of
Job to the cynicism of Ecclesiastes, from the
declamation of the prophets to the mysticism
of the Apocalypse. The preacher is justified
in using argument, imagination, sarcasm,
pathos, for has he not to win complete
humanity to Christ ? But through it all he
ought to be tender, gracious, conciliatory,
charitable. His speaking should be set to
the key, " Comfort ye, comfort ye My people,
saith your God, speak ye comfortably to
Jerusalem " ; " Corrie now and let us reason
together, saith the Lord, though your sins be
as scarlet they shall be as white as snow.

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 225
though they be red like crimson, they shall
be as wool " ; " O Jerusalem, Jemsalem, thou
that killest the prophets and stonest them
which are sent unto thee, how often would I
have gathered thy children together even as
a hen gathereth her chickens under her wing,
and ye would not." Men are like foolish
sheep, miserable and lost, who must be
found ; they are wayward children who must
be brought home. The Bible is the defender
of the oppressed and a friend of the prisoner ;
it pities the sick, and has endless promises for
the sorrowful ; its favoured children are the
widow, the orphan, the poor and the broken
hearted. Jesus Himself lived in a narrow
home, and led a struggling life ; He took His
illustrations for the most part from narrow
circumstances and ever turned aside to cases
of trouble ; He was the man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief. One of the great ends
of the pulpit is to console men and to put
heart into them,, to assure them of the victory
of righteousness, of the fellow feeling of
Jesus with us, of the blessedness of the de
parted and the glory of our Father's house.

226 THE STYLE OF THE BOOR
The light from the open gatfe of the city
should be ever streaming across the sermon.
The most unbiblical preacher is a hard man,
the most biblical is one whose heart is full of
tears. If the preacher has to denounce in
iquity, let him not do so savagely ; if he has to
preach punishment let him do so pitifully ; let
him rather turn men from badness to good
ness by the allurements of heaven, than by
the horrors of hell. It is not in keeping
with the love of God, or with the nobility of
human nature, that men should be dragooned
into faith. The messenger speaking in the
name of the Eternal Father to his sons,
however wayward or however ignorant,
should assume that the real self in every man
is his better self, and that in every one
there is a core of goodness — the defaced im
age of God, — and that every man recognizes
the good and would fain himself be like it.
While the preacher should appeal to rea
son, because Christianity is supremely rea
sonable, yet it is not wise for him to give
himself to the methods of philosophy, or to
spend his strength in vindicating the primary

THE STYLE OF THE BOOK 227
conceptions of religion. He had better re
member that religion deals with things that
are assumed and have not to be proved,
with intuitions rather than propositions.
The preacher should appeal to conscience,
for Christianity fulfills itself in godly living,
but he had better remember that there is
nothing a man knows more clearly than his
duty, and nothing which he finds more dif
ficult to do. He must not therefore dis
courage or weary his people by arid and
doctrinaire ethical sermons. It is not more
knowledge but more power that humanity
needs, and therefore the office of preaching is
to do more than enlighten the reason or
quicken the conscience ; its supreme effort is
to capture the affections and to make them
the motive power of goodness. Religion
rules over the whole of a man's nature, but
its throne is set in the heart ; when a man
loves the best with his whole heart, he will
not wish to do the worst. That which holds
his heart will govern his life, and therefore
the preacher of Christ will speak much of
love ; he will be ever reminding men, under

228 THE STYLE OF THE BOOK
many images and by many unexpected ap
proaches, of the sorrow of the Father who
has lost His children, and greatly misses
them ; of the love of God who has pitied this
sinful world and has not spared His own
Son for its salvation ; of the sufferings of the
Lord Jesus in the via dolorosa of His life from
Bethlehem to Calvary, and of the patience
of the Holy Ghost as He strives in human
hearts. His endeavour is not to batter down
the walls of human nature by blatant threat-
enings or to capture the citadel by some
brilliant assault of cleverness, for this were
to win a dangerous victory and to put the
garrison to shame. His chosen aim will be
to bring it to pass that the defenders of the
fortress will be so taken by the offers of the
besieging and friendly force that they will
themselves open the great gates with hearty
good will, and bid the King of Glory enter
in. And the preacher has finished his task,
and is satisfied when he sees his Lord seated
on the throne of a willing and obedient soul
for this is the final and unchangeable victory
of salvation.

LECTURE VI
THE USE OF THE BOOK

LECTURE VI
THE USE OF THE BOOK
EVERY age has its own fashions and the
pulpit is not independent of the spirit
of the day. There was a time within
the memory of middle-aged men when not
only was the text taken as a matter of course
from the Bible, but the sermon was drawn
from the same source and might indeed be
nothing but a cento of passages from the
Scriptures. In our time if a text is quoted
from the Bible it is often only a motto — a
tuning of the subject like the ballads with
which Scott and Kipling start their chapters.
With this sonorous and becoming convention
the modern puts off from the shore of Bible
truth and sails upon his adventurous voyage
wherever the prevailing wind may carry him.
Our fathers might not know the exact theme
on which their minister would address them,
but they were certain that it would be within
231

232 THE USE OF THE BOOK
the province of religion. We are informed
in the advertisement column of Saturday's
newspaper on what our minister will speak,
and are quite prepared to find that it is only
distantly related to religion. This very an
nouncement of subjects, with fetching and
surprising titles, marks a departure from the
usage of the past and reveals another idea of
the place of the Bible. And the situation is
now so common that it may be useful to face
this question : Should the preacher in ordi
nary circumstances confine himself to the
Bible, or, in other words, should religion
alone be his subject ?
It goes without saying that of all public
men to him belongs the liberty of speech,
and speech has been the most powerful in
strument in forming character and making
history. Brave and honest words have been
more potent than the sword or all the treas
ures of gold. Those sounds which pierce
the ear and those black marks upon the page
have broken the fetters of tyranny and beaten
down unrighteousness and inspired with
hope despairing humanity and opened the

THE USE OF THE BOOK 233
vision of heaven amid the clouds of this
earthly travail. " Those poor bits of rag-
paper with black ink on them," says Carlyle,
" from the daily newspaper to the sacred
Hebrew Book ! For indeed whatever be the
outer form of the thing (bits of paper as we
say and black ink) is it not verily at bottom
the highest act of men's faculties that pro
duces a book ? " But the spoken word will
ever be more effectual than the written — not
only because it is plainer but because it is
stronger. From the pulpit of St. Gile's in
Edinburgh Knox reigned as a king over
Scotland, although he was often a lonely and
forsaken man. His sermons had such
power that Randolph, the English Ambas
sador, wrote to Cecil, " Where your honour
exhorteth us to stoutness I assure you the
voice of one man is able to put more life
in us than fyve hundreth tmmpettes con
tinually blustering in our ears." The real
maker of life is the speaker and therefore on
him lies a heavier responsibility to do his
work with a good conscience and with all
his might. The prophet who betrays his

234 THE USE OF THE BOOK
trust is the chief traitor of the race. And
therefore the minister must be very careful
of his commission both as to what its con
tents are and how he is to discharge it.
Every one who has anything true to tell —
whether he be a man of letters like Carlyle
or a man of science like Darwin — is in his
measure a prophet, but the minister of Christ
is the prophet in excelsis, and this because of
the gravity and dignity of his message. He
has not received a roving commission to
wander up and down the Universe of Knowl
edge. His subject is fixed, but its definition
is not a limitation, it is rather a concentra
tion. As Christ's representative he must
take his latitude from his Master, and Christ
concerned Himself alone with the relation of
the human soul to God and all that is con
tained in that fellowship. Whether in, the
Temple or on the hillside, whether discours
ing in the synagogue or conversing with
His disciples along the sweet country ways,
Jesus was ever speaking of His Heavenly
Father, of the foolish prodigal in the far
country, of the degradation of sin, of the

THE USE OF THE BOOK 235
engaging beauty of holiness, of the whole
some discipline of the cross, and the com
fortable hope of our Father's House. Jesus
insisted from first to last on religion, and
ought not Religion to be the lifelong text of
the Christian minister's sermons ? Here is a
message which must be forever fresh be
cause contemporaneous with every genera
tion, a message which must be ever in de
mand because it is an answer to the hunger
of the human soul.
One is not amazed that a preacher of the
lower and coarser order, a man without in
tellectual or spiritual culture, without vision
, or ideals, should reduce the pulpit to a
raree-show and meet the competition of a
gutter press with a gutter pulpit. But one
is astounded when some able and earnest
man turns aside from that Evangel which is
the heart and glory of the Bible to descant
upon poets and novelists, upon makers of
philosophy and leaders of the democracy,
upon the problems of politics and the laws of
commerce, upon the achievements or the
crimes of the day. One pities the preacher

236 THE USE OF THE BOOK
who has so despaired of the Bible that he de
pends for a message upon the last distin
guished name in the obituary or the last
flaming sensation of the week, and is empty-
handed if Saturday comes without a death or
a scandal. Browning, it is true, always re
mains a last resource and Mazzini has for
certain minds a mysterious fascination which
never fails, but there cannot be an earth
quake every week or a first-class social scan
dal. The nervous system of this kind of
modern preacher must be severely tried. It
is one thing to have the mine of the Bible
rich and inexhaustible for your working, and
another to go out prospecting through the.
wilderness of the press for an attractive sub
ject. Passing by the anxious uncertainty of
the preacher to the times, who knows not
whether there may be anything found for
Sunday wherewith to tickle the ears of the
groundling, there are various serious reasons
against this non-Biblical and secular style of
preaching. The first which occurs to one's mind is that
it has no authority behind it. When one

THE USE OF THE BOOK 237
notices that a certain school of preachers in
clude within their range science, literature,
the drama and politics, to say nothing of
stranger subjects, and that the only things
which are ostracized are the necessities, the
aspirations, the trials and the hopes of the
human soul in her highest and most religious
mood, then he is tempted to be critical.
What is this man thinking of who will de
liver himself on anything however tedious or
unpleasant but will have nothing to do with
the Evangel ? By whom was he called to his
life-work ? For what was he trained at his
college ? What office does he hold in the
eyes of the world? Is it not in virtue of
being a servant of Christ that he stands in
that pulpit? Has his whole education not
been to fit him for the exposition of the Bible ?
Has he not been raised above the crowd of
men and given his vantage ground upon the
foundation of the Christian Church? And
does the historic Church of Christ exist to
furnish a half-educated public with literary
institute lecturers or flaming journalists, and
is her message to the world a piquant review

238 THE USE OF THE BOOK
of the week's news ? If one feels that this
semi-literary, semi-social causerie be his
proper calling in life, let him hire a room and
deliver it to any audience who may care to
listen, but he has no moral right to employ the
Christian pulpit for this trifling end. Who
ordained him to teach English Literature or
Natural Science, and does he really suppose
that he can deal with those subjects better
than an expert ? Will not this man be twice
discredited, first because he has travelled into
another province than his own, and secondly,
because he is a stranger in it ? He has ob
tained the most imposing and influential
position in the world on false pretenses ; he
has frivolously perverted the most august
commission given to any human being.
It may also be fairly pointed out that this
rechauffe of stale news or this second rate
review of current literature is not what peo
ple are expecting from the pulpit or what
they come to hear. He is reall)' a simple
minded person who believes that a congrega
tion gathers to hear him discourse on the de
tails of their own business — that the politi-

THE USE OF THE BOOK 239
cians are hungering for more politics, and the
merchants for commerce and the scholars for
a new translation of the classics and the
scientist for the latest discovery in radium.
Human nature is so constituted that every
man, weary with his six days professional
work, desires an escape and a change — to
find relief in another world from that which
for the time has grown to him familiar and
stale. Hearers not only long for something
new ; they are secretly hoping for a lift.
After six days commonplace they cry for in
spiration, for a glimpse through the gates into
the City of Gold, for a break in the gray
clouds above their heads. When we take for
granted, as we are apt to do, that the average
man who talks with you about the weather
and the price of produce is indifferent to the
spiritual and wearies of its exposition, we do
him less than justice and forget that men are
reticent about their souls; no one can
imagine how sincerely and wistfully this mat
ter of fact, prosaic, and if you like, worldly
man, is hoping to hear a word which will
quicken and straighten him for the week's

240 THE USE OF THE BOOK
work. If he gets what he wants, this hearer
may never thank the preacher in an effusive
letter because he is shy about such matters
and has not the gift of religious expression,
but he will come again to the same preacher ;
if he be disappointed he will not complain
but he will have one reason less for going to
church. And it will not matter how clever
and up-to-date and common sense and secular
the sermon was ; if it had no word for the
soul, this tired, world-worn, half-sceptical
man will have no use for it. He can get this
arid, unspiritual stuff anywhere, from an
evening paper or in the Exchange ; he wanted
something from above. Is it not cruel to dis
appoint that thirsty man ? Is it not an irony
that a modern preacher will imagine that he
is pleasing this man of the world with the
chatter of the clubs and the market place,
when he is dumbly waiting for the Kingdom
of God ? Must not this preacher incur a
double condemnation because he received a
message and refused to deliver it, and be
cause men reasonably expected that message
at his hand and did not obtain it ? There are

THE USE OF THE BOOK 24I
many lecture rooms where intelligent people
can study Wordsworth and Darwin ; many
meetings where citizens can hear about
education and sanitation ; but there is only
one Christian pulpit where immortal beings
can be warned against their sins and com
forted in their sorrows, where peace can be
proclaimed by the Cross of Christ and the
struggling, disheartened soul confirmed in the
hope of everlasting life. If the pulpit fail in
its own high function, of which indeed it has
the monopoly, then all the journalists and
lecturers, all the teachers of science and
literature in the land united together, cannot
repair the loss or take the empty place.
The minister of Christ had better settie with
his conscience where he is to put his strength
— whether he is to be general dealer, supply
ing more or less acute and useful criticism on
a hundred present day questions, or an am
bassador of Christ discharging with all his
might the duties of his commission. It is
good that he should be, if possible, a man of
letters, to appreciate the construction of the
Bible, and a student of philosophy to grasp

242 THE USE OF THE BOOK
the principles of religion ; it is good that he
be in touch with the life of the world to apply
the medicine to its wounds, and that he be a
public-spirited citizen to sanctify the com
monwealth by the spirit of Jesus. But his
first concern and his imperative charge is the
eternal welfare of the human soul.
Perhaps, however, it may be urged that
this is falling back on the belated standpoint
of our fathers and limiting the true humanity
of the public. Is not this also sinking below
the comprehensiveness of the Bible to which
nothing human is alien? Will not the
modern say that in preaching on Art and
Politics and Books and Sociology the Chris
tian minister is carrying out the spirit of the
Incarnation and sanctifying the remotest
provinces of human thought and activity?
Can we not find Religion in every depart
ment of knowledge, and identify the Christ
in the most unexpected circumstances ? This
line of argument is very specious but it rests
on a confusion of thought about the order and
method of Christianity. According to Jesus
the Kingdom of God was not a state regulat-

THE USE OF THE BOOK 243
ing all the affairs of human life, it was a con
dition of soul. The Kingdom of God was
within a man, and Jesus dealt in the first in
stance not with the commonwealth but with
the individual. The supreme effort of our re
ligion is not to reform society in bulk but to
regenerate its members one by one. A man
renewed in mind and heart, in conscience and
will is its ideal. Then the new man will make
a new state as the influence passes from the
centre to the circumference. Christianity did
not begin by lecturing on the classics or art,
it made its appeal to the soul, and offered a
means of deliverance from sin and a way of
access unto God. Upon this line Christian
ity succeeded and upon the same line it has
always been most effectual. But the leaven
hid in human nature worked till the whole
was leavened. If a man's nature is quickened
and inhabited by the Spirit of Christ it will
flower in all directions. He will begin to
think ; he will grow enterprising, he will rebel
against bondage, he will acquire a sense of
beauty, he will come to be in love with
knowledge. Christianity in the mouths of

244 THE USE OF THE BOOK
the Apostles was an Evangel and it will ever
remain the message of God to men. But
Christianity has created the modern Univer
sity ; it has been the mother of modern
music, painting, sculpture and letters —
Raphael and Dante, Michael Angelo, and
Bacon had been impossible without Chris
tianity ; it has founded the Western civiliza
tion and is the guardian of Justice ; it has
been the spring of freedom, and to-day
national and municipal order in the West
rest on the principles of our religion. Mr.
Cotter Morison who was a trenchant critic of
Christianity points out in his "Service of
Man," "The intellectual revival which fol
lowed the spread of Christianity and gave to
the world the whole literature of the fathers,
Greek and Latin, in the third, fourth and
fifth centuries at the very time when Pagan
literature had fallen into sterility and decrep
itude, ... of all writers who have
used Latin as their mother tongue it is no
exaggeration to say that St.- Augustine is the
most original, suggestive and profound. He
is a genuine thinker, not a mere rhetorician

THE USE OF THE BOOK 245
like Cicero, Seneca and the rest." And he
goes on to say, "The controversies of the
fourth century which have given rise to much
tasteless ridicule, notably the Arian con
troversy and the witticism suggested that it
was preposterous that the world should be
divided into hostile camps by a diphthong,
these controversies were mentally the most
stimulating discussions, not only which the
age admitted of but which had ever occupied
men's minds, . . . the difference between
' homoousion ' and ' homoiousion ' is only
that of a single letter, but as Emile Saisset
well said, ' Probe the matter to the bottom ;
between Jesus Christ, man, and Jesus Christ,
man-God, there is infinity ; there is, if one
may so speak, the whole thickness of Chris
tianity.'" If Christianity be an Evangel it
has been also a culture and a civilization. It
has been the maker of men and therefore of
society. With the Bible as his text-book the
preacher has a wide range of subjects and it
may be useful to review the chief kinds of
preaching, noting both their strength and

246 THE USE OF THE BOOK
their weakness. The study of character has
very rich material in Holy Scripture and
there is no type which has not its vivid and
convincing illustration. The usefulness of
such studies is that they fling both virtues
and vices into bold relief, the one for imita
tion and the other for avoidance, and that
hearers are unconsciously led to love the
good and to hate the evil. They are drawn
to St. John and repelled from Judas Iscariot
as it were automatically. For this style of
preaching one needs practical knowlege of
life, insight into motive, appreciation of
evidence and a genuine dramatic instinct.
Two minds of quite opposite class will never
succeed with character sermons — that which
delights itself in subtle analysis and psycho
logical classification because this is for
philosophy and not for popular instruction,
and the other which is at home with the
doctrine and ill at ease with a living person.
It is the shrewd, observant, genial, sym
pathetic mind, which is most successful with
character, and gathers the most practical
lessons of daily life. The wise minister, even

THE USE OF THE BOOK 247
though he may have the gift of portraiture
will use it with a measure of reserve since
the mass of the people, while vastly enjoying
an occasional likeness either of saint or
sinner will soon begin to miss the aid and
stimulus of practical exhortation. The
spiritual life cannot be mainta.ined on char
acter studies, any more than the mind on
fiction. As so much space is given in the Old
Testament to history and the revelation of
God is made through its medium, it is
desirable that a congregation should know
the broad outlines of the Hebrew annals and
that their wealth of incident should be laid
under contribution for didactic purposes.
People should not be bored with ancient
genealogies and lists of empty names, or
with minute geographical details and
sketches of distant and unimportant battle
fields. But the struggles of the Judges for
national existence, the creation of the Jewish
kingdom, the causes which led to its dis
ruption, the character of Solomon's court, the
influence of foreign civilization, the relations

248 THE USE OF THE BOOK
of the Jewish State to neighbouring nations,
the internal friction between rich and poor,
and the tragedy of the exile, all these are of
lasting interest not only because the situa
tions formed links in the development of
that life which was crowned with the coming
of the Messiah, but because they are repeated,
circumstances being changed, in every na
tional history. While it is not expedient
that the preacher should teach politics and
while it were madness of him to venture into
party conflict he ought to make politicians
in his church, men of wisdom who under
stand the signs of the times, men of God
who will do righteousness, and he can attain
this end by extracting from the crises of
Jewish history those principles of govern
ment which save and glorify a nation. From
this ancient story one gathers, without
straining any point or playing tricks with
what may be called meta-poUtics, those laws
of mercy and righteousness which run in all
lands and in all ages, and by which alone
the commonwealth can prosper. By the
works of God in the former days. His

THE USE OF THE BOOK 249
chastisements and His deliverances, a nation
may be taught to depart from foolishness and
to follow after godliness. Thoughtful people
will be vastiy interested and instructed by
historical sermons, but although of greatvalue
as character studies, they should not be al
lowed to usurp too large a place in the pro
portion of a man's preaching. Preachers
must not forget that as they discourse on this
heroic scale, dealing with kings and nations,
there may be many in the congregation so
crushed by family sorrow and so perplexed
by personal duty that they cannot follow those
large themes, and will require homelier
food than this feast of magnificence.
A third and more practical form of Bible
teaching is ethical, and no student of Holy
Scripture can complain that in our day more
stress is laid on the moral than on the theo
logical side of religion. It is a distinct gain
that preachers can deal boldly with the duty
and necessity of good works without being
accused of denying the gospel and that the
most insidious and dangerous of all heresies —
Rabbi Duncan, the Scotch Hebrew scholar.

250 THE USE OF THE BOOK
used to say it was the only one — Antinomi-
anism, is almost dead. With psalms like the
fifteenth and the twenty-fourth, with pas
sages like the first and fifty-eighth chapters
of Isaiah, with the Sermon on the Mount and
the Epistle of St. James, the preacher has a
strong message to deliver on godly living,
and should lift up his voice like a trumpet
against the shortcomings and inconsistencies
of professing Christians. Hypocrites should
be pilloried without mercy, for Jesus showed
none to the Scribes and Pharisees, and cant
should be scourged in the pulpit with fierier
zeal and more utter contempt than in the
press, for the Church has suffered more by
tricky and dishonourable Christians than by
all the attacks of her critics from Celsus to
Voltaire. The time has come for declaring
that the capitalist who treats his workmen
unjustly, but gives large subscriptions to
foreign missions, or the merchant who makes
a shameful bankruptcy but takes part in re
ligious meetings, can no more be tolerated in
Christian society, and that he only can be
regarded as an honest and orthodox Chris-

THE USE OF THE BOOK 25 1
tian who keeps Christ's law and sets an ex
ample of brave living. One of the most
clamant subjects for careful and thorough
treatment is Bible ethics, and one longs for
more books like that admirable treatment by
Dr. Newman Smyth. The Church must give
its special attention to one province where a
keen attack is being made on morals, and
that is the family. Both in fiction and in
the drama, as well as in certain socialistic
quarters, the sanctity and authority of the
marriage bond are being ridiculed and con
demned. Upon the Church of Christ lies
the burden of the defense, and once more she
may prove herself the saviour of society.
The deliverance of women from slavery and
their elevation to a just place beside men, the
establishment of monogamy and the pro
tection of the child, are among the most be
neficent achievements of Christianity. What
has been won must not be lost, and it is one
of the duties laid upon the pulpit in our time
to protest against the growing fashion of
divorce and to safeguard on every side the
holy estate of matrimony. Upon the pure and

252 THE USE OF THE BOOK
united family as on a sure foundation rests
both Church and State, and the day mar
riage is superseded or slighted by vagrant
love the dissolution of society will begin. If,
however, ethics are to be a living practice
and not a doctrinal theory, they must be
related to faith and made the fruitage of
the Christ life. The eleventh and twelfth
chapters of the Epistle to the Romans must
not be separated. Upon the doctrine of
salvation which St. Paul celebrates in the
Doxology at the close of his doctrinal argu
ments, " Oh, the depth of the riches both of
the wisdom and the knowledge of God,
. . . for of Him and through Him and to
Him are all things, to whom be glory forever
and ever. Amen," is grounded his irresistible
appeal for noble living. " I beseech you there
fore, brethren, by the mercies of God that ye
present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy,
acceptable to God, which is your reasonable
service." This is the Bible idea of ethics,
the fulfillment and the revelation of the
Christ life.
There are two kinds of preaching which

THE USE OF THE BOOK 253
have fallen out of fashion in late days, and
might be revived with considerable benefit to
congregations ; one is what used to be called
experimental. By this is meant the treat
ment of the intimate commerce between the
soul and God, and on this pious people of
the past laid great stress. Preachers of a
spiritual cast of mind dealt at length and
often most ingeniously with the phases of
faith, the changing temperature of the affec
tions towards God, the varying moods of
despair, hope, penitence, joy, with backslid
ing and restoration, with the hiding of God's
face, and dryness in prayer, with the lan
guishing of the graces and their reinforce
ment, with the secret fellowship in the sacra
ment and the heavenly rapture when a saint
beholds his Lord face to face. Those were
the themes of the mediaeval mystics and the
finest Roman saints. They are treated at
length by men so different as Rutherford, the
Scots theologian, and Faber the hymn writer,
but they used to be the almost daily theme
of ordinary ministers up and down the land.
They spoke to the people of things which

254 THE USE OF THE BOOK
were real because people were then exercised
in the affairs of the soul. The eye was
turned inward and earnest Christians gave
themselves to introspection. Meditation was
not yet a lost art like the making of Venetian
glass, but was practiced by all who were fol
lowing the religious life. The soul was ever
being examined, its ways explored, and its
habits described, and an expert in the lore of
the soul was highly esteemed. The preacher
who could explain the symptoms of spiritual
health and disease was ranked higher than
the most eloquent teacher of duty or even
than the expounder of doctrine. Humble
and unlettered people could write a com
mentary on Psalms like the twenty-second,
" My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken
me " ; or the fortieth, " I waited patiently for
the Lord ; and He inclined unto me and heard
my cry ; " or the forty-second, " Why art thou
cast down oh, my soul, and why art thou dis
quieted in me. Hope thou in God for I shall
yet praise Him who is the help of my coun
tenance and my God ; "or the Fifty-first Psalm,
" Cast me not away from Thy presence nor

THE USE OF THE BOOK 255
take Thy Holy Spirit from me ; " or the one
hundred and thirtieth, "Out of the depths
have I cried unto Thee, O Lord." They were
human documents in those days, not mere
pieces of stately phrase ; they were the inti
mate journal of the soul. This delicate and
spiritual teaching has now become an anti
quarian curiosity or is regarded as an admi
rable fact of higher life conferences. Whether
our religion be exoteric or not it is no longer
esoteric ; if the stream of religion run broadly
and cover a large expanse, it has ceased to
run strongly and to cut a deep channel.
Piety talks so much now that it has not time
to think ; it is so busy with charitable works
that it has no place for spiritual research.
The kingdom of God is not now within a
man — a presence of the Eternal in the soul ;
it is scattered abroad through society, com
mittees, a babel of talk and endless confer
ences. One fears that under the spirit of
restless activity religion has lost its reverence
and peace, its penitence and humility, its
fragrance and tenderness. Is it not time
that we were entering into our chamber and

256 THE USE OF THE BOOK
closing the door; that we were learning to
be quiet and to wait on God ; that preachers
after exhausting themselves on every kind of
enterprise should turn their attention to the
life of the soul. If the scientist will spend a
year upon the construction and habits of a
worm, the teacher of religion may spend
many years upon the natural history of the
soul. It would come as a surprise upon
many congregations if their minister should
turn from the health of the city and the ques
tion of amusements and the analysis of the
last popular book and the morals of an elec
tion campaign and speak to his people of
their own complex spiritual nature with its un
expressed feelings, its haunting fears, its amaz
ing visions, its unsuspected dangers. Until
religion be rooted in experience it can never
be either sure or rich, and it still remains true
that though we have the Bible in our hands
and worship for our aid, it is within the soul
each man must meet with God. The draw
back to experimental preaching now as in
the past — and against this we must be on our
guard — is that it is apt to make religion too

THE USE OF THE BOOK 257
subjective, and to build faith rather upon the
moods of the individual than upon the Word
of God. It almost came to this, with certain
skilled masters of experience; not he that
believeth but he that feeleth is saved ; they
insisted so much on the varieties of faith, on
the changing dispositions of the mind, on the
degree of grace, on the exercises of piety.
Good people were inclined to pull out their
faith to see if it were growing, and to be ever
testing their love to see if it were real, till
they lived between extremes of the highest
joy or the darkest despair, according as the
clouds revealed or hid the sun. They were
apt to forget that the clouds rolled from their
own nature as from a marshy plain, and that
the sun was eternal in the heavens ; that their
salvation did not depend on their changing
moods but on the Unchanging Love of God.
Ebenezer Erskine, the eminent Scots minister,
during his last illness was visited by a rela
tive who came to see him and began to com
fort him thus — " I hope you get now and
then a blink to bear up your spirit under
your affliction." Erskine answered with

258 THE USE OF THE BOOK
much sense and courage, " I know more of
words than of blinks. Though He slay me
yet will I trust in Him. The covenant is my
charter, and if it had not been for that blessed
word my hope and strength had perished
from the Lord." And Dr. Chalmers, another
of the worthies of the Kirk, exhorted a sick
person who was looking too much within and
too little towards Christ with convincing
force, " I beseech you do not cast your
anchor within the hold of the ship." We
know too little of ourselves to-day, and a
return to a wise measure of experimental
preaching is distinctly required. But salva
tion stands forever in the knowledge of God,
and while our moods are like the shifting
ocean He is the Rock which abideth.
Another style of preaching, which is now
rarely heard, is exposition, by which is meant
taking a book of the Bible and opening up
its meaning verse by verse from beginning
to end. Expository preaching reached its
height in Scotland in the eighteenth cen
tury when preachers continued upon one
text for a month and would preach upon th§i

THE USE OF THE BOOK 259
Epistle to the Romans for a generation.
There was something amiss when from child
hood to middle age the people of a parish
were imprisoned in one Epistle, and one can
understand the feeling of the worthy hearer
who declared himself worn out by those
Ephesians. The method was to occupy the
former half of every sermon with a review of
the sermon preceding and then to take up
the following verse. Partly owing to the
tediousness of this preaching, partly owing
to new forms such as the character study and
the ethical discourse which came into fashion
last century, congregations now rarely hear
a book of Scripture expounded in order, and
this is a loss both to the preacher and the
hearer. For one thing, expository preach
ing secures that large and connected por
tions of the Bible shall be presented to the
minds of the people, and not merely per
petually varying and disconnected texts. In
the course of exposition a preacher is able
also to touch in passing upon many practical
subjects which would hardly warrant a full
discourse and which perhaps indeed he

26o THE USE OF THE BOOK
would have some delicacy in taking up un
less they came in the regular way of his ex
position. There are crises in a man's min
istry when he is haunted with the idea that
he has finally delivered his message and that
his preaching material is exhausted. He
feels himself growing stale and unprofitable ;
he is afraid that he can no longer lead the
flock into new and green pastures. It would
be a departure for a minister in those cir
cumstances to take a book of the Bible or a
subject stretching through several books and
make it the subject of careful and detailed
exposition. Professor A. B. Bruce, who was
one of the strongest men in the Scotch
Church of our time and one of the most sug
gestive writers, tells us how he came to write
what is perhaps his best book, " The Train
ing of the Twelve." " During an autumnal
holiday I was in such a distempered condi
tion of body that all thoughts and feelings
were dead and I dreaded the prospect of re
turning to pastoral duty, being sensible of
mental vacuity. At length my perplexities
shaped themselves into a prayer that I might

THE USE OF THE BOOK 26 1
be led into green pastures as the old ones
were all nibbled bare. Shortly after my
thoughts reverted to the lesson given to the
Catechumen's Class (Notes of Sermons on
Christ's intercourse with the Twelve Dis
ciples) and I at once resolved to make these
the subject of a course of lectures." Professor
Bmce says his studies proved to be green
pastures to himself at least. And certainly
they have been rich feeding ground for
Christian ministers. " The Training of
the Twelve" is not only one of the
weightiest volumes in the department of pas
toral theology but it is also a suggestive
model of the new form of expository preach
ing. Modern congregations would not en
dure the verse to verse commentary, and
there is not one man in a thousand who
could make this minute textual exposition
either intelligible or useful. What is needed
is, either that the preacher take some large
subject and then pursue it, say, through the
Prophets or the Gospels or the Psalms or the
Episties, as the case may be, setting it in the
light of the Book which he is using, and so

262 THE USE OF THE BOOK
expounding ideas rather than words ; or, if
one book is taken, to fasten upon its half
dozen leading themes and set them forth
in order without going into every hole and
corner of the book, and without pretending to
open up the meaning of every word. It ap
pears to me that this style of preaching in
the hands of a man who has a scholarly
knowledge of the Bible and a comprehen
sive mind, which will not be mastered by
details, but make details serve him, would
build up a congregation in faith and knowl
edge. For the success of this preaching it
is necessary that the course of sermons on
any book be limited in number, and that
the preacher through patient study have a
firm and confident hold of his subject.
No review of preaching, especially preach
ing based on the Bible, would be complete
without a reference to the evangelistic
sermon. As the Bible is an appeal of God
to the human soul and especially an appeal
to those who have gone into the far country,
it surely lies upon every minister of the
Evangel to address himself from time to time

THE USE OF THE BOOK 263
to those who are outside faith and strangers
to Christ. The evangelistic sermon has suf
fered reproach partiy because it has not as a
rule been prepared with sufficient care and
partiy because it has been too freqtiently re
peated. There is an unhappy contrast made
between other sermons, theological, ethical,
or historical, and the evangelistic sermon or
address as it is often called. While the
former are expected to be more or less
elkborate, the latter is described with the idea
of compliment as simple. While the phrase
" The simple Gospel " sounds well, it has done
much injury because it is really a deprecia
tion of the message of the Bible and a sanc
tion for shallow and ineffectual speech. In
one sense the gospel is simple as great works
of art, poems or pictures, are " simplex mun-
ditiis " but this does not mean that the gospel
is slight or silly. It is not by sentimentality
or by twaddle, it is not with the repetition of
conventional phrases or a multitude of words
without ideas that the preacher can win
either prodigals or unbelievers to the faith
and obedience of his Master. It is only by

264 THE USE OF THE BOOK
the most sympathetic study of their needs,
by the most vigorous reasoning regarding
the problems of religion, by the most gracious
presentation of the Person of Christ and by
the loftiest treatment of the ideals of life that
alien minds can be conciliated and those that
are afar off be brought near. Above all
things worn out catch- words must be thrown
aside and conventional arguments be re
placed by fresh statements of the truth. It
is said that a worthy but commonplace
evangelist was once offering a prayer before
his address which ran largely upon these
lines — " Lord, give us power. We want
power. We want much power. We want
power to-day. We want power now. We
want power for the old. We want power
for the young. . . ." So he would have
gone on for ten minutes simply because he
did not know what to say next, and could
only repeat himself, had not a voice called out
from the meeting, " It isn't power you want,
it's ideas." It was a rude and irreverent in
terruption but it touched his weakness as
with the point of a needle. What is wanted in

THE USE OF THE BOOK 265
most evangelistic sermons is strong thinking
and worthy style ; the Evangelist requires to
be a hard student of Bible Truth and a
diligent reader of English Classics. From
the proportions of truth in the Bible and
from our knowledge of the human mind the
minister will learn that the evangelistic ad
dress should only come at wide intervals
since nothing is more destructive than for a
congregation to become gospel-hardened
and to grow accustomed to the chief appeal
which can be made to the human soul. The
Evangel should come as a surprise and a
new message, with the dew of the morning
upon it.
Two kinds of preaching I submit may be
omitted without loss ; and one is the critical
sermon. No question troubles a young
minister entering upon his work more than
this. Ought I to give my people the results
of Bible criticism ; and, if I am going to do
so, what is the most expedient plan ? If I do
not say anything then I shall be suspected
of dishonesty and practicing the doctrine of
reserve ; besides in that case they will learn

266 THE USE OF THE BOOK
from other lips what is being done and their
faith may be upset. On the other hand, the
critical treatment of the Bible in the pulpit
may offend many members of my congrega
tion and may be very uninteresting to others.
Ministers must be guided by the circum
stances of their work, but, speaking gen
erally, it seems out of keeping with the
spirit of the Bible itself to occupy the too
short time given to the minister for his
sermon with what is literary information.
As Ruskin says, the preacher " has but thirty
minutes to get at the separate hearts of a
thousand men, to convince them of all their
weaknesses, to shame them for all their sins,
to warn them of all their dangers, to try by
this way and that to stir the hard fastenings
of those doors where the Master Himself has
stood and knocked and yet none opened, and
to call at the openings of those dark streets
where Wisdom herself has stretched forth
her hands and no man regarded; thirty
minutes to raise the dead in." Surely it
were a pity to take up the thirty minutes with
a discussion of the documents which go to

THE USE OF THE BOOK 267
form the Pentateuch or to enter into the
question of the two Isaiahs. The minister
who will stop to peddle with questions of
authorship and date in the course of his
gospel exposition is a pedant and ought to
be behind the lecture desk and not in the
Christian pulpit. The large principles of
Bible construction such as we have been dis
cussing ought to be assumed and if criticism
throws a direct pencil of light upon any
separate Scripture it ought to be used, but
the detailed results of criticism should not be
brought into the pulpit but be taught in a
Bible Class.
The other form of ineffectual and really
foolish preaching occupies itself with the
trifles of Bible History or its obsolete inci
dents. Within the last few years I heard
with mine own ears an earnest and able
minister spend a considerable part of his ser
mon upon the badger-skins of the Taber
nacle, explaining that they were got not
from a badger but from some other kind of
beast, I do not remember what, and that they
symbolized a certain doctrine I do not know

268 THE USE OF THE BOOK
what, but as I looked round a large country
congregation I wondered why their excellent
minister had not found somewhere in the
length and breadth of Holy Scripture a more
timely and practical subject. The Tabernacle
indeed seems to cast a less than happy fas
cination over many minds, for one of the
most saintly ministers in Scotland used to
lecture upon it in classes year after year, and
used to reconstruct it by a working model,
and, although he was the most reverent of
men, he would at a certain stage strike a
match and place the light inside the little
contrivance to show the glory of God in the
Holiest of All. It may be a matter of taste,
but personally I am more interested in the
fact (although I have never used it in pulpit
exposition) that when the prodigal was re
ceived with music, the word shows that the
instrument was what we would call the bag
pipe. I think that I could make as much
out of those bagpipes welcoming the prodigal
as out of the badger-skins of the Tabernacle,
but as time is short and the Bible has
many majestic themes, I suggest that no

THE USE OF THE BOOK 269
minister should waste even one Sunday upon
the curiosities of its texts or history.
For indeed, and this would be my last
word, the supreme end of preaching is one
which lifts a man above antiquarian investi
gations and historical disquisitions, for he is
set with every power that is in him, with all
his knowledge, his passions, his pity, his
humanity, to reconcile man to God. It is the
preacher's duty to expound the moral law
written on the Tables of Stone and also on
the fleshy tables of our hearts, to lift up his
voice against the madness of sin, and to re
mind his hearers of its just punishment ; and
he will judge it wise to bring his people from
time to time under the awful shadow of
Mount Sinai, but this is only a stage on the
journey, and he will fail in his charge if he
does not land his hearers at Mount Calvary,
for his commission is not one of judgment
but of mercy. Again, it is his duty from
time to time to assemble his hearers on that
Mountain of Galilee where Jesus laid down
the New Law of the Kingdom ; but he will
not be content till he has brought them to

270 THE USE OF THE BOOK
that " Green Hill, Far Away " where Christ
by His Passion and Sacrifice broke the bonds
of sin and opened the fountain of the new
obedience unto all believers, for he is not
merely the preacher of duty, he is the preacher
of grace. His work, according to the spirit
of the Bible, is to lay hold of his fellow men
in their exile and to persuade them to return
unto their Father, and once he has induced
them to set their faces homeward never to let
them go till they have arrived. The dark
disaster of human life is the quarrel of the soul
with God. We are not at home with God,
and we are therefore ill at ease. We have
an evil conscience, we are discontented with
circumstances, we carry a rebellious will,
within us is an aching heart. It is the busi
ness of philosophers to make their peace with
law. It is the business of religion to invite
men to make their peace with God, who is
behind all law, and it is the high privilege of
God's ambassador to declare that on God's
side peace is made and a welcome is wait
ing. Christ by His Perfect Obedience in life
and death, by His Sacrifice on Calvary, and

THE USE OF THE BOOK 271
His Resurrection from the dead, by His
Ascension into heaven and His Eternal Inter
cession, has made an open way from the
furthest country of sin and shame into which
the most foolish soul has wandered to the
Home and to the Heart of God. There is
no barrier in this way and no one to forbid
the returning sinner. The wayfaring man
though he be a fool shall not err therein and
the blind shall be led by a way that they
know not. And to make the highway of life
more easy and alluring it has been strown
from the beginning to the end thereof with
invitations and promises, with entreaties and
assurances. Along it the angels of grace are
ever travelling to guide the weary, wayworn
wanderers home, and among those angels I
dare to include the preacher of the Evangel.
Is any office so inspiring as his, any work so
charged with blessing ? It is his to heal the
bitterest controversies of human life, and to
make the most lasting peace ; at the same
moment to fill with gladness the heart both
of God and man ; by the same service to de
liver him who was ready to perish and to

272 THE USE OF THE BOOK
minister unto Christ of the travail of his soul.
For his word every man is waiting within the
heart, for the sound of his feet every one
must have a welcome. " How beautiful upon
the mountains are the feet of Him that bring-
eth good tidings, that publisheth peace,
that bringeth good tidings of good, that pub
lisheth salvation."