The second portion of the volume consists of five Sermons preached in Bishop Fraser's earlier days; although the last of the five-Christ the Healer-was preached upon several occasions after his call to the Episcopate. The Bishop's sympathies were doubtless enriched, and his way of thinking, as well as of expressing his thoughts, wonderfully ennobled by his contact with the masses of toiling humanity in Lancashire; yet the deep, broad, lofty, practical utterances which signalized his conspicuous episcopal ministry, had signalized also his secluded parochial ministry. His entire teaching, from its commencement to its close, flowed from the fountains of intense communion with God and intense fellowship with his brother men. THE VICARAGE, MOSSLEY HILL, LIVERPOOL, St. Matthew's Day, September 21st, 1887. > UNIVERSITY SERMONS. I. THE TYPICAL PERSONS OF THE PENTATEUCH: THEIR MESSAGE TO THE CHURCH IN ALL AGES. I.-ABRAHAM. "Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham."-GALATIANS iii. 7—9. THE principle of typology, it must be confessed, stands in need of justification; and the adoption of this mode of interpreting Scripture has been, by some theologians, so profuse, so indiscriminate, and so extravagant as to throw a slur upon the principle itself, and to indispose minds of a critical and philosophic order to the reception of any teaching based upon what they consider to be such illusive ground. Even a pious purpose cannot be allowed to justify an unsound deduction. -7.3 B "What mean you," we are scornfully asked, "by these typical men; men made, so to speak, to order; cut out and shaped after a pattern; stereotyped in every thought and action down to the most insignificant; set, as it were, immovably in the block; mere painted pictures; automata, moving only at another's will; their whole life, therefore, a mechanical result; and so capable of meaning whatever the artist who designed it might choose that it should mean: but a result, judging by the processes we experience in ourselves and believe to take place in others, utterly impossible under the conditions of moral existence: at variance too, with all that common sense, and science, and Scripture unitedly attest to be the normal phenomenon of humanity?" Such a theory, if it were what were really held, of the typical relationship between one human being and another, whether human or divine, or between a human being and a dispensation, would be incredible and therefore untenable. If Adam, Noah, Abraham, were living historical men, they were not, they could not be, types in the mechanical sense as a mere external act or ceremony might be, the sprinkling of the blood of the Paschal Lamb on the doorposts, or the propitiatory rites of the Great Day of Atonement—nor even in the etymological sense, as impressions struck off with hard, defined outlines from a fixed die or mould. They must have been "types" in a higher, freer, diviner, idealised meaning of the word. They were "types" in the region of mind, not of matter; of moral and spiritual laws and workings, not |