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such I think as reasonable men would regard as sufficient and satisfactory in any other department of human thought.

And now let me say I have gone into this narrative because to my own mind it is clear and convincing as to the continuity of external testimony concerning the handing on of the Scriptures from age to age, but not by any means because it is the only thing or the main thing we have to rely on. I, for my part, am prepared to stake everything on the person, life, and teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ as He is made known to us, no matter how the knowledge has reached us. The character depicted in the Gospels stands at such an immeasurable height above that of all other men as to be selfevidential, and has a unity about it which to my mind proves it to be the delineation of an historical reality, and not a fictitious creation. At the same time we may well be grateful that we have such continuous testimony from martyrs and teachers in long and unbroken line; that the account we have of our Lord and His teachings in the Gospels, and the great teachings founded upon that life in the Epistles, have been preserved for us in the Church, and were given in the first century by those who were "eye-witnesses and ministers of the word." We may well be grateful that we get the testimony to these great facts and teachings from men who could say "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled of the Word of Life: (For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.”

While we read these words of the Apostle, let us not forget to read and take to our hearts the words which follow :"And these things write we unto you that your joy may be full."

II.

THE MANY BOOKS LIVINGLY ONE.

I COME now to the living unity which binds into one complete whole the many books of the Bible.

There are, of course, different ways of securing unity in a book. Several writers living at the same time may combine together to give a united exposition of their views, or a sacred book may be the production of one man, as the Koran is the production of Mahomet. But I need hardly say that in neither of these ways did the Scriptures come to have the unity which we shall find in them.

Let me state as strongly and clearly as I can the difficulties which lay in the way of any mere formal unity. And first of all, there is the fact I mentioned in the last lecture, that the one book we call the Bible is made up of sixty-six different books or letters, and that centuries passed away between the first and the last. God spake at sundry times and in divers manners. Part after part was given to the world, and each part as it was given worked itself into the world's history before the next appeared, and all together they embrace a period of sixteen hundred years.

Moreover, so far as man was concerned they were not brought forth on any distinct and previously settled plan. Take, for instance, some of the books of the New Testament. One was written for a private friend, and probably at that friend's request, I mean the Gospel of St. Luke; the Gospel of St. John came into existence to meet an already

rising heresy in the Church; one of the Epistles had for its purpose the quelling of disorders in the church at Corinth; another was written because the Apostle had not been able to pay an intended visit to one of the churches, and he sent an Epistle instead, while yet a third was written to secure for a fugitive slave a favourable reception by his master. Could anything be simpler or freer from elaborate design? Moreover, these books, taking the Bible through, were not only written by men centuries apart in point of time, but also in languages as totally distinct in genius and character as the Hebrew and Chaldee of the Old Testament, and the Greek of the New. And they were in no way composed on any artificial system of agreement, for they are as various in form as can be well conceived; we have by turns song and history and dialogue, narration, familiar letters and prophetic vision. Finally the writers were separated from each other, not only by centuries of time, but by those social distinctions which in all time and among all nations count for so much; they were kings and herdsmen, warriors and fishermen, scholars and simple peasants.

Taking all these facts into due account there seems at first sight small chance of unity resulting. Yet I venture to assert that these different books form one grand Epic, and that they make up a living whole as much as the different members of a man's body make up a living man. I think it can be shown that one Divine Spirit presided over the whole, giving to the workers, almost unconsciously to themselves, their separate places in the great temple, and taking what may seem the accidents of these books, and as He does with what we call the accidents of our lives, so weaving them into the web of His Providence that they are seen to be not accidents at all, but parts of the sublimest order, of the profoundest system.

If you will think of it, unity is a much deeper thing than uniformity. Unity is vital, growing from within; uniformity is mechanical, made up by additions from

without, and there may be the most real unity where there is very little uniformity. If you look at the stars some bright clear night they seem as if they were glittering points of light flung at random over the face of the sky. Yet there is nothing random there, but such stately order and sublimest unity as that the coming of an eclipse or the transit of a planet may be predicted with perfect accuracy long years beforehand. Would there be any more system than there is, or any more beauty if the planets were all of one size, and all placed in straight lines or concentric circles on the face of the sky? Would the wild flowers of the fields and woods be any more beautiful, or have their different classes and orders bound together in a deeper unity if, instead of being scattered over copse and field, over hedgerow and woodland, they were planted in rows like a botanical garden? There is but one answer to the question. The unity which God gives is the unity of life, not of mere system, life being infinitely more than system. I can the more readily believe that this Bible is God's book because I find in it that which I find in God's world-unity of life. This is a unity which man could never have given to it, and which we look for in vain in any other writings the world can show. We have here a phenomenon which is unique. Speaking of the conclusion of Scripture De Quincey puts it thus:-"At length all is finished. A profound piece of music, a vast oratorio, perfect, and of elaborate unity, has resulted from a long succession of strains, each for itself fragmentary. On such a final creation resulting from such a distraction of parts, it is indispensable to suppose an overruling inspiration in order at all to account for the final result of a most elaborate harmony. Briefly,

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a great mysterious word is spelt, as it were, by the whole sum of the Scriptural books-every book forming a letter or syllable in that secret and in that unfinished word, as it was for so many ages."

Let me now show that there is this unity. We shall find it along three several lines-the line of its history, the line of its moral teaching, and the line of its spiritual purposethese three lines blending together in one great stream of light.

First, let us trace the unity along the line of Bible History. And here let me make a preliminary remark or two. Some people have treated the Bible as if it were a sort of encyclopædia of Ancient History. It is not that and was never meant to be. It gives us much for which we may well be grateful. No ethnologist, for example, can afford to pass by that wonderful tenth chapter of Genesis in dealing with the origin of nations. In the pages of the Bible the great peoples of early ages, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Assyrians rise into the light of history for brief spaces, and little as the Bible tells us of them, that little is almost all we know. But it cannot be too clearly borne in mind that surrounding nations only come within the purview of the Bible so far as they bear upon the development of the Kingdom of God in Israel. Voltaire used to make merry over the Bible because it devoted the great bulk of its pages to the annals of a small nation like the Israelites which occupied, as he said, a narrow strip of mountainous territory scarcely broader than Wales, leaving almost unnoticed the mighty empires of the East. It seemed a difficulty no doubt, but Sir Humphrey Davy once said that when he came upon a difficulty in his study of chemistry he was often on the verge of a discovery. In like manner Voltaire face to face with the difficulty spoken of might have made this discovery, that the Bible is not a world history, but a history of the development of the kingdom of God. You must not measure moral and spiritual forces by the territorial space in which they were first developed, but by the influence they have wielded. God in His infinite wisdom had willed that small as the little nation appeared, within its narrow boundaries the true restoration of humanity should be

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