of a wonder-loving fanaticism. The character of Christ, with only the lineaments allowed by a hostile criticism, is the one standing miracle which authenticates or which renders credible all the signs and wonders of the Gospels, while the signal revolution which Christianity wrought in the moral world within a generation of its birth confirms the sublime claim, to which eighteen centuries have added an unbroken testimony, and of which living Christendom is the visible and stupendous monu

ment.

THE ONENESS OF SCRIPTURE.

BY

WILLIAM R. HUNTINGTON, D.D.,

RECTOR OF ALL SAINTS' CHURCH, WORCESTER, MASS.

THE ONENESS OF SCRIPTURE.

the Scripture can not be broken."-JOHN 10: 35.

THAT which Christ here says can not be done, a thousand forces in our day are laboring to accomplish. To break the Scripture, to dismember the body of revelation, to tear into a multitude of unconnected parts a volume which the common instinct of Christians has hitherto affirmed to be one book, is the present endeavor of those who think it high time for intelligent men to be starting in search of a new religion.

The line of attack is well chosen. To the casual eye, appearances more or less favor the opinion that the Bible is simply the classic literature of a people whose line of thinking lay in the direction of religion.

How can oneness, it is urged, be attributed to a collection of historical, poetical, and epistolary writings, which confessedly range, as to their date of composition, over a period of many centuries, and which are known to have come from the

hands of at least forty or fifty different contributors?

With many minds, the mere statement of the proposition is the refutal of it. The thesis strikes them as involving absurdity in its very terms. And yet, in the face of this incredulous and, as it would seem, reasonably incredulous spirit, Christians have the boldness to maintain that, notwithstanding its wide sweep of dialects and styles and topics, the Bible does possess unity in the very most complete and thorough sense the word can bear.

Before undertaking to investigate the grounds of this conviction entertained by Christians, let us first attempt to form a clear notion of what we mean when we claim for any book the characteristic of unity. That a certain number of printed pages are contained between two covers may justify a librarian in saying, "This is a book ;" but it would not justify a reader in saying, "This is one book."

Take a collection of pamphlets, on various disconnected topics, which somebody, for convenience' sake, perhaps because the pages were of the same length and breadth, has had bound up into a single volume-shall we say of these, that they are one book? Not if we wish to use language accurately. The only unity the pamphlets have acquired by being stitched together is of a purely external and ma