"Now that we may more successfully and clearly understand Scripture by Scripture, these ensueing particulars are to be observed: (1) That Jesus Christ our mediator and the salvation of sinners by Him is the very substance, marrow, soul and scope of the whole Scriptures. What are the whole Scriptures, but as it were the spiritual swadling cloathes of the Holy child Jesus. (1) Christ is the truth and substance of all the types and shadows. (2) Christ is the matter and substance of the Covenant of Grace under all administrations thereof; under the Old Testament Christ is veyled, under the New Covenant revealed. (3) Christ is the centre and meetingplace of all the promises, for in him all the promises of God are yea, and they are Amen. (4) Christ is the thing signified, sealed, and exhibited in all the sacraments of Old and New Testaments, whether ordinary or extraordinary. (5) Scripture genealogies are to lead us on to the true line of Christ. (6) Scripture chronologies are to discover to us the times and seasons of Christ. (7) Scripture laws are our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ; the moral by correcting, the ceremonial by directing. And (8) Scripture gospel is Christ's light, whereby we know him; Christ's voice, whereby we hear and follow him; Christ's cords of love, whereby we are drawn into sweet union and communion with him; yea it is the power of God unto salvation unto all them that believe in Christ Jesus. Keep therefore still Jesus Christ in your eye, in the perusal of the Scripture, as the end, scope, and substance thereof. For as the sun gives light to all the heavenly bodies, so Jesus Christ the sun of righteousness gives light to all the Holy Scriptures."

(7) In rising now to the highest stage of interpretation-practical interpretation-we part company with the mystics as well as the scholastics, and return to the position of the Puritans and Westminster divines. The Bible is a book of life-a people's book-a book of conduct. It came from the living God. It tends to the living God. Here is the apex of the pyramid of interpretation. He who has not reached this stage has stopped on the way and will not understand the Bible. The Bible brings the interpreter to God. We san understand the Bible only by mastering it. We

need the master key. No one but the Master himself can give it to us. It is necessary to know God and His Christ in order to know the Bible. The Scriptures cannot be understood from the outside by grammar, logic, rhetoric, and history alone. The Bible cannot be understood when involved in the labyrinth of its doctrines. The Bible is to be understood from its centre-its heart -its Christ. Jesus Christ does not reveal Himself ordinarily aside from the Bible, by new revelations outside of it casting new light upon it from the exterior, as the mystics suppose. But the Messiah is the light centre of the Scriptures themselves. He is enthroned in them as His Holy of Holies, as was Jehovah in the ancient temple. Through the avenues of the Scriptures we go to find Christ-in their centre we find our Saviour. It is this personal relation of the author of the entire Scripture to the interpreter that enables him truly to understand the divine things of the Scripture. Jesus Christ knew the Old Testament and interpreted it as one who knew the mind of God.* He needed no helps to climb the pyramid of interpretation. He was born and ever lived at the summit. The apostles interpreted the Scriptures from the mind of Christ, read by the Spirit He had given them.† We have no such supernatural help. We cannot use their a priori methods, but we may climb toward them. We have all the enthusiasm of the quest-all the joy of discovery.

It is not necessary for us to complete our studies of the lower stages of exegesis ere we climb higher. The exegete is not building the pyramid. He is climbing it. Every passage tends toward the summit. Some interpreters remain forever in the lowest stages. Others

營

* See p. 313.

+ See p. 319

spring hastily to the higher stages and fall back crippled and are flung down to the lowest. The patient, faithful, honest exegete climbs steadily to the summit.

Our Puritan fathers understood this principle. The doctrine that the Holy Spirit is the supreme interpreter of Scripture is the highest attainment of interpretation. The greatest leaders of the church in all ages have acted on this principle, however defective their apprehension of it may have been, and however little they may have consciously used it in Scripture interpretation. It was this consciousness of knowing the mind of the Spirit and having the truth of God that made them invincible. It was Athanasius against the world. With the divine truth of the blessed Trinity he was mightier than the world. It was Luther against pope and emperor. He could do no other. The Word of God in his hands and in his heart assured him of justification by faith; and poor, weak man though he was, he was mightier than Church and State combined.

It was this principle "that the supreme judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture,"* that made the Puritan faith and life invincible.

O that their descendants had maintained it! If they had laid less stress upon the minor matters: the order of the decrees, the extent of the atonement, the nature of imputation, the mode of inspiration, and the divine right of presbytery,-and had adhered to this essential principle of their fathers, the history of Puritanism would

* Westminster Confession, I. 10.

have been higher, grander, and more successful. We would not now be threatened with the ruin that has overtaken all its unfaithful predecessors in their turn. Let their children return to it; let them cling to it as the most precious achievement of British Christianity; let them raise it on their banners, and advance with it into the conflicts of the day; let them plant it on every hill and in every valley throughout the world; let them not only give the Bible into the hands of men and translate it into their tongues, but let them put it into their hearts, and translate it into their lives. Then will Biblical interpretation reach its culmination in practical interpretation, in the experience and life of mankind.

CHAPTER XI.

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY.

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY, as a theological discipline, had its origin in the effort to throw off from the Bible the accumulated traditions of scholasticism, guard it from the perversions of mysticism, and defend it from the attacks of rationalism. Its growth has been through a struggle with these abnormal tendencies, until it has established a well-defined system, presenting the unity of the Scriptures as a divine organism, and justly estimating the various human types of religion, doctrine, and morals.

I. THE FOUR TYPES OF THEOLOGY.

The Bible is the divine revelation as it has become fixed and permanent in written documents of various persons in different periods of history, collected in one body called the canon, or sacred Scriptures. All Christian theology must be founded on the Bible, and yet the theologians of the various Christian churches, and the several periods of Christian history have differed greatly in their use of the Bible. Each age has its own providential problems to solve in the progress of our race, and seeks in the divine word for their solution, looking from the point of view of its own immediate and peculiar necessities. Each temperament and characteristic tendency of human nature approaches the Bible from its