After some important practical remarks, he passes on

4. To the past development of scripture (John xii. 16);—

"To show how this treasure of divine truth, once given, has only gradually revealed itself: how the history of the Church, the difficulties, the trials, the struggles, the temptations, in which it has been involved, have interpreted to it its own records, brought out their latent significance, and caused it to discover all which in them it had: how there was much written for it there, as in sympathetic ink, invisible for a season, yet ready to flash out in lines and characters of light, whenever the needful day and hour had arrived. . . . The apostolic Church-that of which the sacred writings of the new covenant are a living transcript-was not merely one age and one aspect of the Church, but we have in it the picture and prophecy of the Church's history in every future age."

We are thus brought to the subject of development.

"It is this fact," says Mr. T., "that the Holy Scripture contains within itself all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, but only renders up those treasures by little and little, and as they are needed or asked for,-which jus tifies us in speaking of a development of doctrine in the Church, and explains much in her inner history that might else startle or perplex. But about this matter so much has lately been spoken,-and another theory of the manner in which the Church unfolds her doctrine, looking at first sight the same as this, but at heart entirely different,-has so diligently been put forth, and that with purposes so hostile to that sound form of faith and doctrine, which it is given us to maintain and defend,―that it might be worth our while to linger here for a little, and consider wherein the essential difference between the false theory and the true is to be found, and in what sense, and in what only, the Church may be said to develope her doctrine. It is familiar to many who have watched with interest the course of the controversies of our day, that those who have given up as hopeless the endeavour to find in scripture, or in the practices or creeds of the early Church, evidence for the accretions with which they have overlaid the truth, have shifted their ground, and taken up an entirely new position. True, they have said, these additions are not there, but they are the unfolding of the truth which is there: they are but the producing of the line of truth, the later members of a series, whereof the earlier in scripture are given: they are necessary developments of doctrine, such as the Church has ever allowed to herself, and which will alone explain many of the appearances which she presents.

"Now doubtless there is a true idea of scripture developements, which has always been recognized, to which the great fathers of the Church have set their seal; and it is this, that the Church, informed and quickened by the Spirit of God, more and more discovers what in Holy Scripture is given her: but it is not this, that she unfolds by an independent power anything further therefrom. She has always possessed what she now possesses of doctrine and truth, only not always with the same distinctness of consciousness. She has not added to her wealth, but she has become more and more aware of that wealth her dowry has remained always the same, but that dowry was so rich and so rare, that only little by little she has counted over and taken inventory and stock of her jewels. She has consolidated her doctrine, compelled thereto by the provocation of enemies, or induced to it by the growing sense of her own needs. She has brought together utterances in holy writ, and those which apart were comparatively barren, when thus married, when each had thus found its complement in the other, have been fruitful to her. Those which apart meant little to her, have been seen to mean much, when thus brought together, and read each by the light of the other: and in these senses she has enlarged her dominion, while her dominion has become larger.

But all this which she has laboriously won, she possessed before, implicitly but not explicitly, even as the shut hand is as perfect a hand as the open, even as our dominion in that huge island of the Pacific is as truly ours, and that region as vast in extent now, as it will be when every mountain and valley, every rivulet and bay, have been explored and laid down in our maps, and the flag of England has waved over them all. All, for example, which the Church slowly and through centuries defined upon this side and that, of the person of the Son of God-of the relation of his natures and the communication of their properties-of his divine will and his human,-all this the earliest had, yea and enjoyed, not having arrived at it by analytic process; not able perhaps, as not needing, to lay it out with dialectic accuracy, but in total impression, in sympathetic unity. She possessed it all, she lived in the might and in the glory of it; as is notably witnessed by the prophetic tact, if one may venture so to call that divine instinct, by which she rejected all which was alien to and would have disturbed the true evolution of her doctrine, even before she had fully elaborated that doctrine: by which she refused to shut the door against herself, and even in matters which had not yet come before her for decision and definition, preserved the ground clear and open from all that would have embarrassed and obstructed in the future.

"We do not object to-rather we fully acknowledge, the theory of the development of religious truth so stated. We no more object, than we do to a Nicene creed following up and enlarging an Apostolic, which rather we gladly and thankfully receive as a rich addition to our heritage. But that Nicene creed in the same manner contains no new truths which the Church has added to her stock since the earlier was composed, though it may be some which she has brought out with more distinctness to herself and to her children, as it contains broader and more accurately guarded statements of the old. But the essential in this progress of truth is, that the latter is always as truly found in scripture as the earlier-not as easy to discover, but when discovered, as much carrying with it its own evidence ;-and these, not in some obscure hint and germ, putting one in mind of an inverted pyramid, so small the foundation, so vast and overshadowing the superstructure: as, for instance, the whole Papal system, which rests, as far as scripture is adduced in proof, on a single text; nor yet there in some passage which is equally capable of a thousand other turns as that given; as for example, when the worship of the Blessed Virgin is found prophesied and authorized in the Lord's answer to her at the marriage in Cana of Galilee.

"But with these limitations the scheme is altogether different from that which some of late have put forward; different not in degree only, but in kind and it is that mere comparison of unlike things under like terms, which is so fruitful a source of errors in the world, to call by this same name that theory which, refusing the scriptures as first and last authoritative in and limitary of the truth, assumes that in the course of ages there was intended to be, not only the discovery of the truth which is there, but also, by independent accretion and addition, the further growth of doctrine, beside what is there: which recognizes such accretions, when they fall in with its own notions, for legitimate outgrowths, and not, as indeed they are, for noxious misgrowths, of doctrine; and which thus makes the Church, from time to time, the creator of new truth, and not merely the guardian, and definer, and drawer out of the old. This is all that she assumes to be: whatever she proclaims, she has ever the consciousness that she is proclaiming it as the ancient truth, as that which she has always borne in her bosom, however she may not have distinctly outspoken it till now; as part of the truth once delivered to her, though it may be, not all at once, apprehended by her."(pp. 93-99.)

Mr. T. next proceeds to apply these remarks to the Reforma

tion; and the subject is one of such importance that we must be excused quoting him at length.

"Thus was it felt," he observes, "in the ages long past of the Church: thus also was it at the Reformation: for that too was an entering of the Church on a portion of the fulness of her heritage, on which she had not adequately entered before. It is hardly too much to say that the Reformation called out from their hiding-places the epistle to the Romans, the epistle to the Galatians, and generally the epistles of St. Paul, which then became to the faithful all which they were intended to be. It is not, of course, implied that these were not read, and studied, and commented on before, or that much and varied profit was not drawn from them in every age, or that they had not been full of blessing for unnumbered souls. But with all this, men's eyes were holden, and had been for some time, so that the innermost heart of them, the deepest significance, was not seen. For they were the need of souls, the mighty anguish of men's spirits, which were the true interpreters of these portions of God's word. When the vast and gorgeous fabric, the Papal Christendom of the middle ages, dissolved and went to pieces, that which, as one contemplates it on its bright side or its dark, one is inclined to regard as a glorious realization or an impious caricature of the promised kingdom of Christ upon the earth;-when the time arrived that men could no longer live by faith that they were members of that spiritual fellowship (for it was felt now to be only the mockery of such); when each man said, I too am a man myself and no other, one by myself, with my own burden, my own sin, the inalienable mystery of my own being, which I cannot put off on another, and as such I must stand or fall; it helps me nothing to tell me that I belong to a glorious community, in which saints have lived and doctors taught, wherein I am bound in closest fellowship with all the ages that are past; this helps me nothing, unless I too, by myself, am a healed man, with the deep wound of my own spirit healed, unless you show me how my own personal relations to God, which sin has utterly disturbed, may be made firm and strong again; '—then, when men thus felt, where should they so naturally turn as to those portions of scripture especially designed to furnish a response to this deep cry of the human heart, and which are occupied with setting forth a personal Deliverer from this personal sense of guilt and condemnation? And what else but this mighty agony of souls would have supplied the key of knowledge to the epistles of St. Paul, which had remained otherwise to the faithful as written in a strange language, to be admired at a distance, but dealing with matters in which they had no very close concern? But with this preparation, and thus initiated by suffering, men came to them with ineffable joy, as to the springs in the desert, and found in them all after which their inmost spirits had yearned and thirsted the most.

"Thus at the Reformation the relations of every man to God, consequent on the incarnation, and death, and resurrection of the Son of God, were those for which the Church mainly contended;-that those relations were perfect; that by one oblation Christ had perfected for ever them that were sanctified, that nothing might come between God and the cleansed conscience of his children, to bring them nearer than they were brought already, no pope, no work, no penance,-that all which sought to intrude and come between was a lie, and by consequence those records of scripture which were occupied with declaring the perfectness of these relations, were those most sedulously and most earnestly handled; bright beams of light flashed out from them, at once enlightening, and gladdening, and kindling, as these had never done until now."-(pp. 91-101.)

But, still further, the controversy has drawn even nearer yet to the very heart of the matter, in that country where alone a specu

lative philosophy, with which theology has to put itself in relation, is found to exist.

"For now it is not, what is the meaning given us of this constitution in the Son? but whether there is such a constitution at all? it is not what follows on the relations which the incarnate Word established between God and man, but whether there have been any such relations at all established-any meeting of heaven and earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth,-whether all which has been spoken of such has not been only dreams of men, and not, as the Church affirms, facts of God."―(p. 102.)

Hence Mr. T. infers that the Gospels now come mainly into consideration, and as they are " the point mainly assailed, so are they the citadel in which they must make themselves strong, from which they must issue, who would win in our day any signal victory for the truth." He expresses also his strong conviction that as it was at the Reformation with the Pauline Epistles,-as it is now with the Gospels,— so . . . a day will come when all the significance of the Apocalypse for the Church of God will be apparent, (which hitherto it can scarcely be said to have been) that a time will arrive when it will plainly be shown how costly a gift,-yea, rather, how necessary an armour was this for the Church of the redeemed."

... ·

"Then when the last things are about to be, and the trumpet of the last angel to sound, when the great drama is hastening with ever briefer pauses to its catastrophe,-then, in one unlooked-for way or another, the veil will be uplifted from this wondrous book, and it will be to the Church collectively, what, even partially understood, it has been already to tens of thousands of her children-strength in the fires, giving her "songs in the night," songs of joy and deliverance in that darkest night of her trial, which shall precede the break of her everlasting day: and enabling her, even when the triumph of Antichrist is at the highest, to look securely on to his near doom and her own perfect victory."-(p. 104.)

This important and interesting subject is afterwards resumed, but thus briefly noticed by anticipation, to give weight to the great practical inference with which Mr. T. concludes this lecture-viz. that "if other generations before us have had their especial task and work, so also must we,--a work which none other have done for us, even as none other could:" that we are not to content ourselves with the theology of the first ages, or of the Reformation: .... that we must not, indeed cannot, "live on what others have done, the mighty men of the days which are past, the fathers or revivers of our faith-but as they earned their truths by toil and by struggle, by mighty wrestlings till the day broke; .... watering with the sweat of their brow, oftentimes with tears as of blood, -yea, with the life-blood of their own hearts, the soil which yielded them in return an harvest so large, . . . . so must we.

"So was it, and so only, that they came again with joy, bearing their

sheaves with them. And would we do the same, let us first indeed see that we let nothing go-that we forget no part of that which we inherit at their hands. But also with a just confidence in that blessed Spirit, who is ever with His Church, who is ever leading it into the truth which it needs,-let us labour, that through prayer and through study, through earnest knocking, through holy living, that inexhausted and inexhaustible Word may render up unto us our truth,-the truth, by which we must live,-the truth, whatsoever that be, which, more than any other, will deliver us from the lies with which we in our time are beset, which will make us strong when we are weak, and heal us when we are divided, and enable us most effectually to do that work which our God would have done by us in this the day of our toil."-(pp. 107, 108.)

Thus does Mr. T. conclude his view of the progressive unfolding of the Scripture for the Church-" how for the company of faithful men in all ages, considered as one great organic body with one common life, there has been such a lifting-up of veil after veil from the word of God: they were gradually coming into the knowledge of all the riches which in that word were theirs." He next proceeds

5. To the inexhaustibility of scripture—or, in other words—

"To consider.... the way in which it has been ordained that its treasures should for the individual believer be inexhaustible also, should be quarries in which he may always dig, yet which he never can dig out,—a world of wisdom-in which the most zealous and successful searcher shall ever be the readiest to acknowledge that what remains to know is far more than what yet he has known.... for this is a most important need for a book such as we affirm the Bible to be, a book for the cultivating of humanity, for the developing, by the ministry of the Church, through the teaching of the Spirit, the higher life of every man in the world."

It is the object then of the sixth lecture, "to trace . . . . what there is in the structure and conformation of scripture to constitute it this book of unsearchable riches for each . . . . for each one of the faithful in particular, and which all given to him in his baptism, he yet only little by little can make his own."

....

A very brief outline must here suffice. The points noticed are -the absence of systematic arrangement in scripture-that so much of it is occupied with the history of lives-that our own life brings out in it such new and undreamt-of treasures-that its apparent contradictions serve to awaken attention—that its minutest portions are rich in instruction, and so is its very silence—and, lastly, that it contracts itself to our littleness, that we, in return, may become able to expand ourselves to its greatness. Such are "a few of the aspects under which this word of the scripture may be contemplated, as one fitted evermore to provoke, and evermore to reward, our enquiries. Habet scriptura sacra haustus primos, habet secundos, habet tertios.""

It will be obvious that we cannot enter upon this wide field: nor yet, at any length, on the next point.