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opinion upon you and governs your opinions. The truest way to read the Bible is to live it, to become yourself a living Bible, known and read of all men. If we try to live what we know, that which we know not will become plainer to us. Then shall we know if we follow on to know the Lord. If any man will do His will then shall he know of the doctrine whether it be of God. The Bible has been given to us not to amuse our leisure but to direct and stimulate us in the way everlasting. It finds us going astray and it earnestly aims to bring us back; it finds us in sickness and it seeks to give us back spiritual health. We have been alienated from God and we need to be brought into loving relations with Him. We are under the power of sin and we need to be purified. This book has a serious, earnest purpose, may God help us to deal with it in a serious, earnest spirit. O God! open Thou our eyes that we may behold wondrous things out of Thy law. Write Thy laws upon our

hearts by Thy Spirit. Lead us into all truth; make us wise unto salvation through faith which is in Jesus Christ our Lord!

XII.

THE BIBLE AND ITS UNFOLDINGS

PAST AND FUTURE.

THERE is a fairy story for children which, like many other fairy stories, has a deeper meaning for grown men. A young prince brought to his father a tiny tent hidden. in a walnut shell. Placed in the council-chamber it grew till it was large enough to form a canopy for the king and his ministers. Taken into the courtyard it filled the space till all the royal household stood beneath its shade. Brought into the midst of the great plain without the city, where the army was encamped, it spread its mighty awning all abroad till it gave shelter to the host. It had infinite flexibility, infinite expansiveness. Mere child-story as this is, it may be taken as an illustration of the gospel of the kingdom of God, which Christ proclaimed, and which, beginning with a mere handful of people in the land of Judea, has grown with the world's growth till it covers beneath its shade not only the most wide-spread nations, but the mightiest.

This power of growth, this development from small beginnings, if it were not one of the commonest, would be one of the most wonderful things in the world. That an acorn which you can lightly hold in your hand should be a possible oak tree is a fact marvellous enough, but there is a greater wonder still. For in that acorn there

is not only a possible oak tree, but possible forests of oak trees to the end of time. The unfoldings of life are the standing mystery and the standing marvel of the world. So that we are not to measure a truth or a movement by its present influence, but by the amount of force inherent in its life. It seems to be a law almost universal in its application, that whatever shall last long and have wide-spread influence, shall be born in obscurity and feebleness, and grow up by slow and almost imperceptible stages, while quick growths have speedy endings. It certainly has been so with the religion of Christ. It began quietly enough in the stable of Bethlehem, and its beginning was as unpromising as it was quiet. A lowly life ending in the most shameful of deaths, the spirit of self-sacrifice to the uttermost, the doctrine that we lose in order to find, that we go through death to our deepest and noblest life, out of this unpromising seed has grown the great tree under which Christendom shelters to-day.

When Christ left His Church on earth it included a mere handful of people, by no means belonging to the wealthy or learned or socially influential classes of mankind. Yet even in their lifetime that Church had struck its roots into most of the large cities of the then civilized world. And it has never ceased growing. All Europe and America are more or less under its sway, and it is advancing with slow but sure steps to the conquest of the entire earth. This church of the living God, like some stalwart oak, lives and vigorously for the very storms which shake it. rooting it out. There is no cutting it down. arresting its spread. It was a word as true as that Theodore Beza uttered when he and his French compatriots were threatened with persecution by Henry IV.: Sire, it is indeed the part of the Church of God, in whose name I speak, to endure blows and not to give them; but you will also please to remember that it is an anvil which has worn out many hammers."

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I am not however, now speaking so much of the growth and development of the Church of God as of the Book of God. They stand together and are mutually illustrative and mutually helpful, but in thought they may be separated, and I propose to shew.

First-That in the past the Bible has grown with the world's growth. Let me try to set before you the very difficult problem which had to be solved. It was this: How to give a book which should not be out of place in the simple communities of the East in early times and yet should command growing respect and influence in the later and larger nations of the West. Try to throw yourselves back in thought to the people of Palestine and Asia Minor eighteen hundred years ago; realize the simplicity of their whole life and their whole range of thought when contrasted with the rapid pace and the elaborate civilization of these days in which we live-these days of the telegraph, of steam travel, and of the printing press. This was the problem-to give a book which should fit the one age as well as the other-which should bear being taken from the narrow circles of Judea to the islands and continents of the West, and should be just as much at home there as in the land where it was first written. Now how shall this problem be solved? In other departments of thought continued instruction is given by one book superseding another. In all the departments of science old books become obsolete and worthless as new books appear. If that had been so in the religious instruction of the human race, no doubt the end might have been secured, but there would have been some serious drawbacks. In the first place, there would have been no one book which with its one life should mingle with the life of humanity. It is in many ways a great moral and spiritual gain that while the book has grown, the Bible of the earliest ages continues to be the Bible of the latest. The Book which five and twenty centuries ago was more to the Psalmist than thousands of gold and silver, was the delight of our own childhood and

will be to our children's children what it was to us. And while the continued superseding of one book by another would break the spiritual continuity of the race it would necessitate a perpetual miraculous interference with the course of providence for the purposes of inspiration. For the miracle and the inspiration go together and are the guarantee of each other. But such perpetual interference would be contrary to the divine plan, and would seriously interfere with the freedom and uniformity necessary to a state of probation.

The second course which was open and which was taken by Infinite wisdom was this :-To give a book which, like the world unto which it was given, should ever expand and unfold to the growing wants and intelligence of man. I have already spoken of the cave dwellers who were the first inhabitants of these islands. The paleolithic man, who found his home in the Kent Cavern, lived in the same world in which we live to-day. He found in it what he required for the sustenance of his life. It was to him a home and a place of discipline, and in ruder forms a place of enjoyment. It met all the wants of his being and yet how much there was in it of which he did not so much as dream. There, hidden below the surface over which he chased the animals on which he lived, were the veins of coals which were to become so mighty a force in the future; there, too, lay the ironstone out of which should come iron and steel to supersede his flint knives and rude stone hatchets. In the limestone rocks and clay were the possibilities of future houses and cities; in the alluvial plains the possibilities of future harvests for the inhabitants thereof. He never dreamt of these; still less did he ever think of the great mechanical powers, the chemical forces, the electric currents slumbering in earth and air. Yet all these things were in the world when the first dweller stood up in it just as much as they are to-day. They were there to be unfolded side by side as man's observation grew closer and his

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