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such he gave us, for whom the Church has ever found the soaring eagle as the fittest emblem."-(pp. 48-52.)

Such is Mr. T.'s view of the gospels. We see in them difference but not diversity; and this is the true answer to those who bid us note how unlike the Christ of the first three gospels and of the fourth.

"So far from being first detected by an hostile criticism, an early Father of the Church had expressed this very distinction in words which, in sound perhaps, are almost overbold, styling the first three gospels, evayyedia owμaτικα, and the fourth an ευαγγελιον πνευματικὸν—thus implying that those set forth more the outer, and this the inner, life of Christ."-(p. 53.)

To this difference Mr. T. finds an analogy in the two lives of Socrates-those of Xenophon and Plato. The analogy is skilfully managed, but cannot well be abridged.

With the early Church Mr. T. sees too in the four rivers of Paradise, and in the four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision, pregnant symbols of the gospels and evangelists,-four, and yet in their higher unity, but one. In their application of these images "there was something more and better than a mere fanciful playing with scripture: there was a deep truth lying at the root, and abundantly justifying its use." The early Hymnologists, as well as the Fathers, make great use of these symbols.

Another illustration of the manifoldness of scripture is thus stated:

"As we have a gospel which stands thus four-square, with a side facing each side of the spiritual world, so have we a two-fold development of the more dogmatic element of the New Testament. For like as the seed, one in itself, yet falls into two halves in its fructifying process, or as the one force of the magnet manifests itself at two opposing poles, exactly according to the same law, re-appearing in the spiritual world, we have two developments of the same Christian theology, which make themselves felt from the very first, whereof St. Paul may be taken as chief representative of the one, and St. John of the other.... We see St. Paul making man the centre of his theology.... But St. John.... (¿ coλoyds) starts from the opposite point, from the theology in the more restricted sense of the word.... His centre and startingpoint is the Divine love, and out of that he unfolds all.... We have man delivered in St. Paul;-God delivering in St. John :-man rising in the one, God stooping in the other; and so each of them travels over an hemisphere in the great orb of Christian truth, and they, not each singly, but between them, embrace and encircle all."

We cannot further develope this idea. The following continuous passage, which closes the comparison between St. Paul and St. John, will interest our readers, and serve as a specimen of the author's peculiar style, and turn of thought.

"As it was meant," he observes, "that the Gospel of Christ should embrace all lands, should fix, at its first entrance into the world, a firm foot upon either of its two great cultivated portions; so in these two, in St. Paul and in

St. John, we recognize wondrous preparations in the Providence of God for the winning to the obedience of the cross both the western and the eastern world. Who can fail to see in the great apostle of Tarsus, in his discursive intellect, in his keen dialectics, in his philosophic training, the man armed to dispute with Stoic and Epicurean at Athens; who should teach the Church how she should take the West for her inheritance: him too who by the past training of his life and the consequent fulness with which he brought out the scheme of our justification, should become the spiritual forefather of the Augustines and Luthers, of all them who have brought out for us, with the sense of personal guilt, the sense also of personal deliverance, the consciousness of a personal standing of each one of us before God. And in St. John, the full significance of whose writings for the Church is probably yet to be revealed; and it may be, will not appear till the coming in of the nations of the East into the fold, we have the progenitor of every mystic, in the nobler sense of that word-of every contemplative spirit that has delighted to sink and to lose itself, and the sense of its own littleness, in the brightness and in the glory of God. Shall we not thank God, shall we not recognize as part of his loving wisdom, that thus none are left out; that while there are evidently among men two leading types of mind, he has made provision for them both-for the discursive and the intuitive, for the schoolman and the mystic,-for them who trust through knowing to see, and for them who believe that only through seeing they can know; that whatever men may be, the net is laid out to catch them? For then, when once they are taken, all that might have been in them of over-balance in one direction,-all of faulty excess, is gradually done away, till they and those that have been brought in by an opposite method, are and were led to a mutual recognition and honouring of the gifts each of the other, and to the unity of a perfect man in Christ Jesus."— (pp. 60, 61.)

Mr. T.'s last illustration of the manifoldness of scripture is, that not only does it provide "different nourishment for different souls, but the same is also so curiously mixed and tempered that it is felt to be for all." The Book of Psalms, "a Bible in little," as Luther calls it, is taken as the most signal example. . . . Men of all conditions, all habits of thought, have here met, vying with one another in expressions of affection and gratitude to this book, in telling what they owed to it, and what it had proved to them. . . . " Nor is it wonderful," observes Mr. T.—

"For, to quote but one noble utterance1 in relation of this book, 'the conflict of naked power with righteousness, of the visible with the invisible, of confusion and order, of the devilish with the divine, of death with life; this is its subject. And because this is the subject of all human anxieties, this book has been that in which living and suffering men in all ages have found a language which they have felt to be a mysterious anticipation of, and provision for, their own especial wants, and in which they have gradually understood that the divine voice is never so truly and so distinctly heard, as when it speaks through human experience and sympathy.

"Indeed, in the fact of such a book as the Psalter, forming part of our sacred instrument, we trace a most gracious purpose of God. For in the very idea of a revelation is implied rather a speaking of God to men, than of men to God: and such a speaking from heaven predominantly finds place in all other books of Holy Scripture. Yet how greatly had we been losers, had there been no corresponding record of the answering voices that go up from earth unto heaven. How should we have craved a standard by which

'Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana.

to try the feelings, the utterance of our spirits,-a rule whereby to know whether they were healthy and true, the same voices, the same cries, as those of each other regenerate man. Such a rule, such a standard we have here; man is speaking unto God; that which came from heaven, is returning to heaven once more. Here we have insight into the mystery of prayer: streams of life are rising up as high as the heights from which they first came down ; the mountain-tops of man's spirit are smoking-but smoking because God has descended upon them."-(pp. 62-66.)

3. The advance of scripture, or its progressive unfolding of God's plans, is the next point-" an important element," as Mr. T. expresses it," in the fitness of scripture for the education of man. (Heb. i. 1, 2.)

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"For this we claim of the teacher to whom we yield ourselves with an entire confidence, that there be advance and progress in his teaching-not that this should be at every moment distinctly perceptible, but that it should be so when long periods and courses of his teaching are contemplated together. The advance may sometimes be rather in a spiral than in a straight line, yet still on the whole there must be advance: he must not eddy round in ceaseless circles, leaving off where he began, but evidently have a scheme before him, whereby he is seeking to lead on unto perfection those that have committed themselves to his teaching. It is of the essence of a true teacher, be that teacher book or person, thus to carry forward. If it be a book claiming to educate, it must be itself the history of an education, the record of an intensive as well as extensive development."-(p. 69.)

Now such a book, Mr. T. conceives, is scripture. . . . It speaks of itself as a progressive revelation . . . . and "in the three memorable epochs by which it marks the greatest unfoldings of the kingdom of God, . . . . in the calling of Abraham, the giving of the law by Moses, the incarnation of the Son of God,-we have the childhood, the youth, the manhood of our race, of that elect portion of it, at least, which God has gathered into a church, and constituted for a while the representative of all: and with this we have marvellous correspondences of these epochs to similar periods in the lives which we ourselves are living. In Abraham and the patriarchal church we have that which exactly answers to childhood-in Moses, the youth-in Christ, the manhood, of the race begins. "The sense of God's love which belonged to the childhood [of the church], of God's righteousness which predominated in its youth, are [in the Gospel] reconciled: they have met and kissed each other. His love is seen to be righteous, and his righteousness to be loving. His law is no more struggled against, for it is written in the heart, and it reveals itself as that which to keep is the truest blessedness." And so, most wonderfully" does this teaching of our race, which was thus written large, and acted out upon a great scale in the history of God's chosen people, repeat itself evermore in the smaller world, in the microcosm of elect souls, which are under the divine education. . . . Marvellously does

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[God] thus run oftentimes the lives of his children parallel with the life of the Church at large, as that life is unfolded in sacred writ, bringing each in particular under the same teaching as the whole. But this is not all. There is yet another correspondence.

"We have not merely in scripture God conveying Israel his son through successive stages, which may serve to explain to us the stages of our own innermost spiritual life: but we may trace there another sequence, another progress-that by which he is training his people into a sense of ever-widening relationships, and this also making answer to the sequence in which he trains each one in particular of his children into the same, and serving as a pattern thereto. For what are the great fellowships of men, which rest not upon man's choice, but upon God's will, which are not self-willed associations into which men gather of themselves, but societies wherein they are set by the act of God? Each will at once reply-the Family, the State, the Church. And this too in their order: the Family must go before the State, being itself the corner-stone on which the State is built; and the State, which is the fel lowship of certain men to the exclusion of others, waits to be taken up into the Church, which is the fellowship of all men who believe in the risen Head of their race."-(p. 76.)

Such, Mr. T. argues, is the sequence maintained in the Bible, in which we have, first, the history of the Family, then of the Nation, and lastly, of the Church.

"And this order of sacred scripture," he observes, "is also the order of our lives. I mean not that we first become members of a family, and then of a state, and lastly of a church: but this is the order in which we become conscious of relations. For what is it that a child first discovers?-that it is the member of a family-that it has kindred? What are its earliest duties? a faithful entering into these relations: its earliest sins? a refusal to enter into them. And what next? that there is a wider fellowship than this of home-love and home-affections, to which it belongs; that there are other men to whom it owes other duties; that it is the member of a state no less than a family; that it must be just as well as loving. And last of all is perceived that there is yet another fellowship at the root of both these fellowships, which gives them their meaning, which alone upholds and sustains them against all the sin and selfishness which are continually threatening their dissolution-a fellowship with the Lord of men, and in Him with every man of that race which He has redeemed, of that nature which He has taken. And so the cycle of God's teaching is complete, and that cycle in which the scripture shows us that He taught the world is found here also, again to be the cycle in which He teaches the individual soul."-(pp. 78, 79.)

Passing hence to quite another province of his subject, Mr. T. next notices the manner in which prophecy bears witness to this progressive unfolding of God's purpose with our race. In his view, it is dishonouring prophecy to regard it chiefly as evidence; as

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“A miraculum scientia, which, with the miracles properly so called, the miracula potentiæ, may do duty in proving against cavillers the divine origin of our faith. The fact that prophecy should constitute so large an element in scripture, finds its explanation rather in that law of an orderly developement, according to which there is nothing sudden, nothing abrupt or unprepared in his counsels, all whose works were known to him from the be

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ginning. It is part of this law that there should ever be prefigurations of the coming-that truths so vast and so mighty as those of the new covenant, so difficult for man's heart to conceive, should have their way prepared-should, ere they arrive at their highest shape, give pledge and promise of themselves in lower forms and weaker rudiments."

Such prefigurations we have, of the Incarnation, in the remarkable births mentioned in scripture-of the Transfiguration, in the shining of Moses' face-of the Ascension, in the rapture of Elijah -of the Pentecost, in the descent of the Spirit upon the seventy elders.

"All these should be contemplated as preparatory workings in a lower sphere of the same Spirit, which afterwards wrought more gloriously in the later and crowning acts, as knit to those later by an inner law, as sharers of the same organic life with them. . . . The rending away of isolated passages, and saying, This Psalm, or that chapter of Isaiah, is prophetic, and has to do with Christ and his kingdom,-and this without explaining how it comes that these have to do, and those nearest them have not, can never truly satisfy men's minds resist this fragmentary capricious exposition.. The subtle threads of prophecy are woven through every part of the woof and texture, not separable from thence without rending and destroying the whole. All the Old Testament . . . is prophetic: and this, not by an arbitrary appointment, which meant thus to supply evidences ready to hand for the truth of revelation, in the curious tallying of the Old with the New, in the remarkable fulfilments of the foretold,-but prophetic according to the inmost necessities of the case, which would not suffer it to be otherwise. . . . We may say of Judaism, that it bore in its womb the Messiah, as the man-child whom it should one day give birth to, and in the forming and bearing of whom it found alone its true meaning. This was its function, and according to the counsel of God it should have been saved through this child-bearing: though by its own sin it did itself expire in giving birth to Him who was intended to have been, not its death, but its life."

The long and patient training of God's ancient people is indeed itself" another remarkable aspect under which the progressiveness of God's dealings, and of that book which is their record," are presented to us.

"Nor is it unworthy of observation, that prophecy did ever run before that actual development, which alone would enable it to speak a language which men should understand. . . . Thus we have no mention of Christ the Prophet till a great prophet had actually arisen, . . . . or of Christ the King, till there were kings in Israel; . . . . and thus we might trace in much more detail, how not only in the idea of type and prophecy there is obedience to the law of advance and progress, . . . but in the very order and sequence of the prophecies themselves."

Such is a brief outline of Mr. T.'s argument to show-" how scripture is its own witness, gives proof that it is what it affirms itself to be a book for the education of men, in that it plainly contains the gradual unfolding of a great thought; such a thought as only could have entered into the mind of God to conceivesuch a thought as He only who is the King of Ages could have carried out."

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