existence, not so much by a self-conscious trying to be good, and making our improvement our chief aim, as by an enthusiasm for GOD and Goodness, and Humanity, and a consequent desire for service which can only come directly from our Heavenly FATHER. Happiness, it has been said, is more certainly found, when not directly sought; we find it in seeking something else. So it may be with our personal Goodness. If our hearts are fixed upon the Sun of Righteousness, we shall be "changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit."

C. C. C.

ART. VII.-The Formal and the Vital in the Bible.1

THE object of this Article is to furnish a contribution towards a review of the Scriptures which shall be a common. ground on which those who accept the results of sound advanced criticism and those who wish to retain the whole Bible in their confidence may stand.

From the necessity of the case, if there was to be a revelation from God to man in a book, and if that revelation is in the Bible, there must be in the Bible an ideal, authoritative, vital element, and a structural, formal element. If in any proper sense the book had a supernatural origin, the Divine Author, in bringing it into being, must have caused his agency to enter as really into the structural element as into the vital; as the care of a painter is as really directed to the means by which he expresses his idea as to the idea itself. But now that the book has been long written and passed among the active forces in shaping the world's thought and life, it becomes an important question to discriminate between the two elements.

It is the want of this discrimination which leads to not a little mistake and confusion. Many look on the Bible as a crystallised whole, solid, inflexible, all its parts and elements inseparable in authority and claims, and not rather as a spiritual power, a divine message, made up of principles, truths, duties, vital facts and forces, lodged in a structural, formal support.

1 From the New Englander.

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Its enemies, by this misapprehension, assuming that all its parts are equally authoritative and valuable, or equally worthless, and finding that some things in it are obviously not pertinent to our times, pronounce it all outgrown, and have no faith in it. If they realised that the formal parts, even the portions now apparently obsolete, existed necessarily at first for the purpose of putting the vital part into the world of thought and action, and may be necessary now for the purpose of retaining it there, and that, while the vital is the part which the world now principally needs, it cannot have that without having that on which it rests also, most of their objections would cease. In like manner, a class of semi-believers in Scripture, not understanding the interdependent relations of the formal and the vital elements, are led to treat the volume with disparagement. They go through it as an expert through a collection of brilliants, saying nothing of the diamonds but decrying the less valuable stones as paste. They adopt a harsh tone towards the book, as if it were guilty of practising deception and making an unnatural alliance between the good and the bad, and needed to be thoroughly exposed. So they ruthlessly attempt to tear asunder the two parts, accept the one, and reject the other. If they took a deeper and juster view, they would see that the two parts are structurally and necessarily interwoven, and that a book revelation could not be made or perpetuated without such a union. And the friends of the Bible, not consciously recognising the two elements, and their necessity and relation, are often perplexed and bewildered, sometimes trying to give to the one the importance and faith due only to the other, and sometimes questioning if even the ideal and vital element may not, after all, be more or less struck with the imperfection and weakness of the more unimportant things associated with it. If they understood the nature of revelation, and how the supernatural things in it rest necessarily on a basis of common human things, while these common human things by this use are taken up into a divine service and become sacred, they would be saved from much anxious thought and perplexity.

Thus, the sooner we come up out of the bewildering notion that the Bible in all its aspects is equally full of divine meaning and authoritative to us, the better it will be for all parties; and the sooner we apprehend that the formal and structural and

seemingly transient elements were all necessary in bringing the vital part into effective use and retaining it there, the better also. All parties need to grasp the fact that we have in the blessed book a Bible within the Bible, a spiritual, ever-living Bible in the visible, tangible, outward Bible-and both of God-the one as really as the other, though in different senses and with different uses. In both God's thought is passed into the human mould-he using the spirit, conceptions, and inspirational faculty of man, in putting the inner Bible in the human intelligence, in the first place, and then using human language, human facts and personality, in giving the inner Bible form, and so shaping the outer Bible. The former, the ideal parts, however, were no more truly chosen by him than the latter, the formal, by which they were expressed. In every portion of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, we find timemarks, race-marks, human personality-marks, betraying its human relationship; but none the less there are God-marks there also, showing that in both elements, the formal and the vital, it is the Book of God. He chose to give it through man, and in a way to put it in a living union with man at the time. His thought seemed to lay itself down on an elect mind, here and there, now and then, during the inspirational ages, grasp it, qualify it, co-work with it, enter into vital oneness with it; and so these two agencies, the divine and the human, took together the desired step in advance in giving that section of revelation to mankind. Thus man is in the inner and outer Bible; God also is there, from centre to circumference. Dual as the book is in its nature, its duality is not mechanical but vital, like that of other vital things. The two portions are not joined together like dead branches and a living tree, but more as soul and body. You cannot travel through it, and mechanically toss asunder the two interblended elements, any more than you can pass through it and say, These portions are put here by inspiration, and those without it. We like that view of inspiration according to which two spirits are regarded as having been present and active when all the parts, all the sentences and words, too, if you please, were born into the record, -God's and man's-in dynamic union, each in its freedom and integrity, neither overlaid and crushed nor crowded out by the other.

So, in the blending of the formal and the vital in

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Scripture, each in a sense rests on the other, yet neither overcrowds the other, and neither can be spared from the other. They hold each other up, and so constitute the indivisible and imperishable Word to mankind-the letter and the spirit. Such is the intimacy of the union in the one creative work that the problem of their exact demarcation, analytically and critically, is one of great delicacy and difficulty, perhaps never to be fully solved-needful as it is to recognise the distinction in thought, and hold the book on this basis theoretically.

This difficulty is greatly increased by the fact that God had in view, in giving all the Scriptures but the later portions, a double object, to give mankind religious instruction suitable to their wants at the time, and prepare their successors for higher instruction. He was sighting at the same moment the existing good and the future education of the race. He blended ends and means. He was giving man a revelation and getting him ready to receive a revelation. And these two processes went on simultaneously. The Bible, in form, in one view of it, may be regarded as a record of the educational system God adopted for the religious instruction of the race, beginning at the alphabet and going on to the end of the course, embracing the temporary illustrations and applications and rough sketches adapted to rude learners, as well as the interblended or supplementary principles, ideas, and fundamental facts, designed for permanent use. Of course it can be no easy matter to feel out and detect the permanent thus running in a sliding scale for many centuries through such an educational course, to disentangle the living and authoritative from the structural and transient, to raise the Bible out of the Bible. Indeed, this never can be perfectly done; and though it is important to have the conception and to hold and defend Scripture on this basis, it is doubtful whether, for educational and moral reasons, its Author would ever have it actually done.

But while, from the nature of the case, the boundaries of these two elements are subtle and evasive, there is something in experience that points, in a general way, to the reality of this distinction. A large part of the living truths of the word seem to have a special fitness for the conscience, moral nature, and spirit of man, so that when welcomed and practised they maintain their position in the faith by a self-evidencing light

They who do the inwardly test it, Thus in experi

and authority. The vital in them and the vital in the soul recognise each other, in the act of spiritual experience, as if they were old acquaintances, and the two consent together in a divine wedlock. The living things from above have come to their own, and their own received them. will of God know of the doctrine. They measure it, feel it, and know it to be of God. ence the soul recognises portions of the higher elements of Scripture as many as it comes in actual spiritual contact with and can appropriate,—and holds them; as quicksilver agitated among crushed ore seeks out the particles of gold, seizes and holds them, till the limit of its capacity is reached or there is no more gold accessible.

The formal, on the other hand, finds no such inward recognition. It remains something outside and foreign. It may be a support around which spiritual experience crystallises; it is not a part of it. It may furnish the arena of the race, not the elements which enter into the spirit and mettle of the race itself. The soul cannot test the formal by its own powers and know it to be true or divine, or feel, if it were varied, it would itself suffer by the change.

Thus individual Christians in every age are unconsciously feeling out portions of these distinctive elements, the formal and the vital, and finding in the mass of Scripture the inlaid divine meanings specially adapted to them. They are ever seeking, under the guidance of the Divine Spirit, portions of the living waters needed by their souls, and are not content to linger at channels of revelation whose streams have dried up or whose waters are not now suited to their needs. This does not imply that some of the overlooked or neglected portions may not be equally significant in themselves or precious to others. By no means; but it shows that spiritual instincts lead them, the moment they begin to read and welcome Scripture, to discriminate between the portions which enter into their experience and become a part of it, and those which remain outside.

In like manner the Church, acting on a larger scale and taking a broader survey, is ever feeling out, under the guidance of the Spirit, the special living truths, most needful for it in its time, about which its heart warms and its life crystallises. It