dualism, combined with the legal precision which dated from the exile, produced Pharisaism. The Pharisee conception of the law is what St. Paul shares when he criticises and denounces a religion of law. The living morality of the old tribal faith was at an end. The instinctive sympathy of the individual with his people no longer operated. Thus it was that 'morality' had to be new given' by Jesus Christ. Christianity had to subordinate the individual without suppressing him, and had to combine the hope of personal immortality with a life of self-denial. We know how Jesus Christ's own personality did this, the living image of the Father, full of grace and truth; so that the outcome of Christ's work is a kingdom of God on the earth, whose destinies reach to heaven. Thus Christ is our point of view for reading the Old Testament's self-criticism, as well as for reading its elementary exercises in faith, and repentance, and love. In Christ we are raised above the differences and half-truths of the earlier time. What came in it in sundry portions and in divers manners' comes to us in a in the Son of God.

unity

Finally, the Old Testament contains prediction. Again and again, from different points of view, its seers look forward to a better time. Their manifold prophecies, not always consistent with each other, we generally include under the name, Messianic-a name taken from one of the most historically important classes of prediction, though not one of the deepest, spiritually. By these anticipations, God prepared the way of His Son. They record the Old Testament's own verdict, that perfection was not to be attained under the Old Testament system. Fulfilment might not-and did not-exactly agree with any of the anticipations contained in prediction. But the value of prediction lay in this, that the confessed imperfection of the Old Testament system, and its forward glance, completed its work as a preparation for Christ.

IX.

Now, when we say that the Bible appeals to us by its

internal evidence, or that we hear the witness of the Holy Spirit speaking to us through the word, we mean one of two things. Either we mean that the facts of the gospel are what we should expect from God,-what our moral instincts tell us must be true, when they are reported to us. Or else we mean that the way in which, either in the Old Testament or in the New Testament, God is represented as dealing with men, or men are represented as responding to God, are the ways which, in the light of the character and working of God revealed in Christ, the Spirit of God presses with demonstration on our own consciences, as the ways of God in grace, or as ways in which we ought to respond to the grace of God.

Hence we can have no sympathy with the celebrated sneer of J. D. Michaelis, that he had never himself, while reading the Bible, been conscious of the alleged supernatural testimony of the Holy Spirit. If he merely meant that he was not conscious of any extra-moral attestation of Scripture,—of any compulsion to believe, apart from the inner credibility of revelation, and apart from his own moral experience, then we should agree with him, though we must think his criticism badly expressed. But if he meant—in the spirit of his century—that only because of its accompanying miracles he knew the Bible to be (probably) true, then we must charge him with being dead to the real evidence for Scripture. Not that we dream of confining to Scripture alone the witness borne by the Holy Spirit. All goodness comes from God; and all moral piety, or even bare morality, which has the ring of sincerity in it, speaks to us, as a message from a spiritual world, unseen and eternal, with quite a different sort of cogency from that of logical demonstration. When I read in the words of Dr. Thomas Arnold, Differences of opinion give me but little concern; but it is a real pleasure to be brought into communication with any man who is in earnest, and who really looks to God's will as his standard of right and wrong, and judges of actions according to their greater or less conformity' -when I read this, I know that a greater voice is speaking to

me through these words. Or when I read in Tolstoi, 'Everything that once seemed to me important, such as honour, glory, civilisation, wealth, the complications and refinements of existence, luxury, rich food, fine clothing, etiquette, have become for me wrong and despicable; everything that once seemed to me wrong and despicable, such as rusticity, obscurity, poverty, simplicity of surroundings, of food, of clothing, of manners, all have now become right and important to me,’— the light is there, even if it be shining amid much darkness. Or we hear the same voice in T. H. Green :- His witness grows with time, in great books and great examples, in the gathering fulness of spiritual utterance which we trace through the history of literature, in the self-denying love which we have known from the cradle, in the moralising influence of civil life, in the close fellowship of the Christian society, in the sacramental ordinances which represent that fellowship, in common worship, in the message of the preacher, through which, amid diversity of stammering tongues, one spirit still speaks-here God's sunshine is shed abroad without us. If it does not reach the heart, it is because the heart has a darkness of its own, some unconquered selfishness, which prevents its relation to Him being one of sincerity and truth.' Or, elsewhere: 'Faith in God and duty will survive much doubt, and difficulty, and distress, and perhaps attain to some nobler mode of itself under their influence. But if once we have come to acquiesce in such a standard of living as must make us wish God and duty to be illusions, it must surely die.' Again, we hear God's voice in the de Imitatione,-"He that followeth me, walketh not in darkness," saith the Lord. These are the words of Christ, by which we are taught to imitate His life and manners, if we would be truly enlightened, and be delivered from blindness of heart. Let therefore our chief endeavour be to meditate upon the life of Jesus Christ.' We hear it even in the language of George Eliot: 'We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves;

and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else because our souls see it is good.' For the presence of God's Spirit does not imply the absence of all error or of all wrong-doing. It implies the possession of some truth and some life. Wherever there is a sincere utterance of conscience (which is the rudiment of all good), or of faith in Christ (which is the consummation of all spiritual knowledge), there God is present. People are afraid to praise sincerity lest they should make the way of life too easy. Is anything rarer than true sincerity of heart? Who is so free from all duplicity of motive that he can claim perfect sincerity? 'A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit'; a character alloyed with base elements cannot ring true. It is not, I think, the limitations of a prophetic message that render it powerless, but the affectation of an insight which the preacher does not possess. 'If any man prophesy, let him prophesy according to the proportion of his faith.' Otherwise he will seem to run uncertainly, and to fight as if he beat the air. One has known the very presence of God in sermons,-in prayers,in poems, in everything which (unlike the material world, where we have only images of moral things) bears witness to man's duty, or to God's grace. Yet the Bible has preeminence, due, as has already been said, essentially to this, that it enshrines Christ.

Spiritual evidence of this kind, either to the Bible or to other moral teaching, attests the general truth of what is taught -not its details. The Bible furnishes a safeguard against substantial error. For the heart of the Bible is the work of Christ; its primary function is to bring us into contact with Him; and, if we know that God is in Christ, then the gift of eternal life, and the leading certainties of spiritual experience, are at once assured to us. Yet it remains possible that we may have imperfect records of historical fact; it remains possible that we may have before us transcripts of imperfect spiritual experiences.

On what grounds do orthodox people believe the Scriptures ? Is it only because Scripture is authoritatively revealed to be true? Not so; when the orthodox are afraid of seeing the certainties of their faith lost in the mist, they will tell you that they are being robbed of their eternal salvation. Very good. But then it must be the general system of the gospel to which they cling-not the mass of so-called authoritative details. They do not believe an 'inspired' genealogy in Chronicles with the same kind of faith with which they believe an 'inspired' gospel. They may accept the first, because they think it inseparably connected with their salvation; they accept the second, because it is itself their salvation.

Observe that we pronounce no approval of the form in which the witness of the Holy Spirit utters itself in a Calvinistic mind. By urging that they must not lose the certainty of salvation, orthodox people show that they have a moral and religious motive for believing the Bible. But, when they speak of losing their hope of salvation, as if that loss would be mere personal disadvantage, they fail to press the real strength of the Christian position; they betray the taint of Calvinism. Christian faith is primarily faith in the character of God as love, and as therefore naturally, though in marvellous grace, interposing to save His children. Calvinism knows nothing of God's character, except that He is an inflexible lawgiver. The revealed character of God is represented as condemning the sinner; our hopes are built not on the Divine character, but on the arbitrary or inscrutable will of God. Man's salvation and God's glory are connected only by accident. Hence, when the Christian says, 'You slander my Father in heaven,' the Calvinist can only say, 'You rob me of my hope.' When the Christian says, 'I believe in redemption because it is like God,' the Calvinist says, 'I believe in it because it is authoritatively revealed,' or else, I believe in it because I need it so much.' Yes; one's needs prove much, if we have a loving Father in heaven; in that case every need is a prophecy of grace; but, if all that we know of God is that He acts for His