an institution standing in men's breath, a prejudice of past ages, and soon to be a memory of which wiser generations are ashamed, but a God-founded, eternal, and authoritative institution, standing with the family and the State, permanent and essential parts of civilization, ramparts and dykes which freedom must respect, lighthouses and harbors which human nature must support and endow, even with her last dollar and her last strength!

APRIL 12, 1857.

SERMON VI.

"THE WORD OF GOD."

"And the seed is the Word of God."-LUKE iii. 11.

IN sympathy with the season, I addressed you last Sunday morning upon the preparation of the spiritual soil for the seed; the opening and softening of the ground for the great Sower's hand, ever ready to fling its treasure into the open furrows. I propose now to follow up the analogy then traced between the showers of spring and the mild and subduing influences of God's providence, with a contemplation of the resemblances between the natural seed and the Word of God. But I must first enter upon a careful examination of the phrase, "the Word of God"; for in its perverted use lies the stronghold of modern error, the great obstacle to the progress of natural and simple opinions in regard to the will of our Creator and the teachings of our Saviour. At every step, the truth, as it beats in men's hearts, is blocked by some knotty text, which is assumed to call itself the Word of God, because it is contained within the covers of the Bible, no matter by whom it was said, on what occasion, or for what purpose. It is

time this melancholy and obstinate superstition, which crowds and chokes the truth, were treated according to its deserts.

to

It was neither to the New nor to the Old Testament that Jesus referred, when he said, "and the seed is the Word of God." Not a page of the New Testament was then written, nor was it to his purpose name the old Jewish Scriptures. It was of that Word, ever sounding in men's hearts, of God's voice heard in the conscience, felt in the soul, and illustrated and signalized in his own spirit and convictions, that our Lord spake, when he named "the Word of God." Free your minds at once from the narrow and modern sense in which the phrases, "the Word" and "the Word of God" are customarily used. "The Word of God" is not a printed or articulated sign of thought; a sound made by the lips, or suggested by a cipher. And it is a misleading and perplexing habit we have acquired or inherited of confounding the words of the Bible with "the Word of God," the literal syllables and sentences of the sacred book, with the mind, and will, and spirit of God, written in our natures and republished in our Scriptures. It is in the true interest of the Bible, and from a profound reverence for its essential truth and holy significance from an ever-increasing devotion to its study, and an ever-growing feeling of its permanent connection with the progress of civilization, and pure morality, and sound religion, that I feel it necessary to discriminate with great and unqualified plainness between a true, and a superstitious, veneration for the Scriptures. The Scriptures are holy, but they are not holier than conscience, than reason; and those who at

tempt to make them so, desecrate God's Word in one place to honor it in another. The Bible is the Word of God, as the conscience is the voice of God; but the words of the Bible are not the words of God, any more than the decisions of the conscience are the decisions of God. The mind, the will, the spirit of God, whose inspiration informed our consciences without making them infallible, has produced the Bible without making it perfect. He who studies the holy book in all its parts will discern a divine communication, a sacred teaching, an unmistakable guidance, running through and shining out of its complete tenor, as a river runs through a broken country, or as an expression of benignity, of law and order, of justice and mercy, runs through the diverse and often contrasted and puzzling effects of external nature. We must fasten upon the general effect, not the particular detail.

As it will not answer to separate and fragmentize nature, and pronounce each and every part, taken by itself, to be indicative of the benevolence of its author

-as there are deserts and disorders, defects and contradictions, cruelties and monsters, poisons and miasmas in nature, which no doubt have their providential use, but of which no one is to be regarded as having a right to represent any portion of the divine design and character, any more than the grumbling drum or shrill fife in a grand orchestra have a right to assert an excellence of their own, distinct from that they owe to combination and a disappearance in the general effect; so it will not do to consider each and every Old Testament story, or Jewish ordinance, or prophetic curse, or local argument, as in itself an expression of God's mind and

heart, whether it be the deceptions of Abraham, the cruelties of Joshua, the debaucheries of David, the imprecations of the prophets, the historical mistakes of the evangelists, the imperfect science or rhetorical rudenesses of any of the sacred writers. It is with the Scriptures as it is with nature. "By the Word of God," says St. Peter, "the heavens were of old and the earth standing out of the water and in the water." Yes, and every thing upon the earth, and above and beneath it, was created by the Word of God; but we do not on that account deem it necessary to admire, and curiously consider and maintain, as of equal value, and beauty, and instructiveness, all parts of nature— the disgusting and repulsive, or violent and cruel-as we do the lovely, attractive, mild, and generous operations and exhibitions of her hand! We believe, and truly, that all parts of nature, duly understood, have a divine significance. We know that what are poisons to some creatures are the chosen medicines of others, and that the offal of the nobler beasts is the banquet of the meaner ones. But we rightly leave the poison to its true proprietor; the offal to its natural owner. And it is precisely this that we ought to do with whatever contradicts our reason, or wounds our moral sensibilities, or shocks our Christian instincts and spiritual tastes, in that half-human, half-divine record of God's doings and judgments we call the Bible.

We are not to grieve the Holy Spirit by forcing ourselves to approve or justify any thing there which we do not approve elsewhere, nor are we at any time to think the words of the Scriptures have any authority against the general spirit of the Scriptures. There is