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He has ordained, it is true, a kingdom of souls, like ourselves, for the education and perfection of our recovered life. But all the way, from the beginning to the close of that recovery, the brightness of that face is the source, the strength, the life of our souls. It turns the very bitterness of our sins and of our despair into a healing medicine. Our Lord can restore us as He restored His great apostle by a look. "What is virtue," asks Hooker, "but a medicine, and vice but a wound? Yet we have so often deeply wounded ourselves with medicine, that God hath been fain to make wounds medicinal. . . . Ask the very soul of Peter, and it shall undoubtedly make you this answer: My eager protestations, made in the glory of my spiritual strength, I am ashamed of. But my shame, and the tears with which my presumption and my weakness were bewailed, recur in the songs of my thanksgiving. My strength hath been my ruin, my fall hath proved my stay."

LECTURE IV.

THE OLD TESTAMENT.

THE object of this lecture is neither to attempt to give an account of the contents of the Old Testament-which would be quite impossible in one lecture, or in many-nor even to pronounce an edifying discourse, taking the Old Testament for a text; for the subject is too great. My object is to weigh certain leading characteristics of this first part of the Bible, such matters as would first arrest the attention, awaken the interest, secure the conviction of a thoughtful mind looking for the evidence of a supernatural Revelation from Almighty God. Before beginning, I would like to make two remarks: one upon the subject, the other upon the inquirer. I direct my attention now chiefly to the Old Testament, not merely because this is viewed with more convenience first by itself, nor as forgetting that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are really a unit-the New, as S. Augustine saidbeing latent in the Old, and the Old revealed in the New -but because there have been two distinct Revelations, the first preparatory to the second. I remaık, next, in regard to the character of the inquirer to whom this evidence is now to be offered, that a certain preparation is necessary in order that it may be appreciated or even understood. Aristotle, you may remember, said: "He, in each subject-matter, is a judge who is well educated in that subject-matter, and he is in an absolute sense a judge who is in all of them well educated." "A well-educated man will expect exactness in every class of subjects, ac

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cording as the nature of the thing admits; for it is much the same mistake to put up with a mathematician using probabilities, and to require demonstration of an orator." These words of the wise heathen, after all, suggest the same lesson as our Lord prefixed to His teaching: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," "He that is of God, heareth God's words." I do not now stipulate for mental cultivation or learning, for knowledge of history or of language; but for a candid mind, for such virtues as natural religion has everywhere taught men, a hatred of impurity, falsehood, cruelty; some humility arising from a sense of sin; a willingness and even an expectation to hear that God has spoken to His creatures. Without some such preparation the evidence for religion will be as sounds to the deaf, or as colors to the blind. Neither the evidence now to be given, nor any part of religious evidence, however splendid and convincing, is of the nature of resistless demonstration, compelling the assent of unwilling or disobedient minds.

The English Bible contains 66 books-39 of the Old and 27 of the New Testament. I do not here reckon the 14 books of the Apocrypha mentioned in the Sixth Article of the English and American church, all of which, save three, are placed among the Canonical Books by the church of Rome, though not by its great doctor and author of the Vulgate, S. Jerome. Fixing our thoughts upon the 39 books of the Old Testament, the first impression that occurs to the mind, upon the most general consideration, is of their very miscellaneous character, that they are rather a collection of different books, than in any sense One Book. The Jews characterized their Scriptures, the same of which we are now speaking, as the Law, the Prophets, and the Sacred Writings-mean

1 Nicomachean Ethics. 2 S. Matt. xi. 15.

The Prayer of Manasses, and the Third and Fourth Books of Esdras.

4

Except the Psalms, which is the

old Italic Psalter corrected by S. Jerome; and the Apocryphal books of Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, and the two of Maccabees, which are retained from the old Latin version.

ing by the Law the five books of Moses; by the Prophets, first the Elder Prophets, who wrote the six books entitled Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and next the fifteen Later Prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets, beginning with Hosea and ending with Malachi; and finally, under the general term Sacred Writings, including the thirteen, the Psalms (which sometimes gave its name to the whole division), Proverbs, Job, Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the two Books of Chronicles.

I have gone into this detail not only to remind you of the miscellaneous character of the contents of the Old Testament, but to call up before your minds some of the very elements of this variety:-that you have here a history of the formation of heaven and earth, of the rise of the tribes and kingdoms of men, and especially of that chosen people and kingdom intrusted with Revelation; the first Covenant; that family of man through whom the Incarnate Son of God was to be born; the civil and religious constitution of the theocracy, its schisms, its judges, its two lines of kings, its prophets, its great men, its private heroes, its typical saints; the most marvellous of earthly histories, the most exalted of earthly literatures, legislation, narrative, the lessons of homely and practical wisdom, the loftiest strains of piety, the adumbration of the Christian character and of the Catholic Church, its teaching and worship, and in particular the miraculous image of Him who is its foundation and its life; and along with law, with annals, with ritual, and intermingled with their details, humble individual histories, the sins of the great, human infirmities, the fortunes of an empire or a mighty city, treated in their great outlines or with homely minuteness; every part of these compositions flavored with the peculiar characters of their human writers, prophet, law-giver, shepherd, herdsman, king, priest, poet, or seer, yet rising in spiritual insight to a vision of the eternal world, and describing the fortunes and experiences

of men, the past and future of the whole earth, not only with fidelity to facts, but with a dignity, a grandeur, a poetic splendor, that have never been surpassed.

No thoughtful observer, however briefly he may consider the contents of the Old Testament, can avoid the impression, that, in spite of the apparent diversity of the books, their matter, their treatment, their authors, they are still in substance one: I speak not now of the unity of the Old Testament with the New, which will appear further on, but that the Old has a completeness and oneness of its own, as much as if every part had the same Author (which we are convinced it had), and subserved a single end. The unity of the Old Testament consists not only in the fact that it was written in the Hebrew language, but that it was the possession of that one marvellous people, given to them by its Author as the repository among men of His Revelation, the charter of their national and the food of their spiritual life, the law of their worship, the record of the judgments and mercies vouchsafed to them and visited upon them. Nothing could be more absurd, upon the face of the matter, than for any individual to suppose he understands these sacred writings better than the people whose possession they were. Yet because Christians have convicted the Jews of one great perversion, namely, in their conception of the Messiah, persons have assumed without grounds that they knew better than the Jews the authors and the dates of their sacred books. But we are to remember that the first Christians were Jews, and that the Christian interpretation of the prophets once prevailed among the Jews themselves. Their obdurate blindness respecting the true Messiah is itself predicted in the very prophecies, of the letter of which they have ever proved most faithful custodians. But let us cast aside the absurd imagination that pedantic philologists, or so-called theologians, who do not believe in a Kingdom of God, can give us any information respecting the author of the Pentateuch, or overthrow the tradition on any such point of the nation

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