Christianity has gained by the issue; for it is an unspeakable advantage that the Books of the New Testament are now seen to be organically united with the lives of the Apostles: that they are recognised as living monuments, reared in the midst of struggles within and without by men who had seen Christ, stamped with the character of their age, and inscribed with the dialect which they spoke: that they are felt to be a product as well as a source of spiritual life. Their true harmony can only be realised after a perception of their distinct peculiarities. It cannot be too often repeated that the history of the formation of the whole Canon involves little less than the history of the building of the Catholic Church. The Bible is for us the sum of prophetic and Apostolic literature, but that is not its essential characteristic. It contains "all that concerns Christ" in the same sense in which the Gospel contains all the teaching of Christ. The completeness in each case is not absolute but relative to the work which is to be accomplished. The Bible justifies our loftiest Aspirations No one who regards with calm, open eyes the super ficial prospect of the world can fail to feel its sadness. That which we hold to be the highest truth is to a great extent unknown, or defaced by corruptions, or discredited by divisions. We are met on every side by signs of what appears to be inevitable waste, incompleteness, suffering. We look within, and find in our own souls the fruits and the elements of a conflict which make the attainment of peace by our own power impossible except at the price of insensibility. We look without upon society, and we find there reproduced upon a large scale the passions, the selfishness, the ambitions, the pains, by which we ourselves are distracted. We look on nature, and as we look we learn to recognise that in "meadow, grove, and stream" there is beneath the smiling surface a fierce and unending struggle for existence which in some sense makes the whole earth a tomb. If what we see with our feeble powers, our transitory experience, were all, we might well despair. To man, using his own faculties only, the present, as far as I can judge, offers no prospect of a future more bright than the chequered past. The certainty of change brings no assurance of progress. But in spite of every discouragement we cling to the trust with which we were born. Even when the last conclusions of despondency are forced upon us by the facts of life, the heart will not surrender its loftiest aspirations. And the Bible justifies them. The Bible, in which we can see human life, the simplest and the loftiest, penetrated by a Divine life, gives us as an abiding possession that which nature and the soul shew only far off for a brief moment, to withdraw it again from the gaze of the inquirer-the vision of a Divine Presence. The Bible discloses to us behind the veil of phenomena something more than sovereign law, something more than absolute being. It may for long ages be silent as to the future, but from the beginning to the end it is inspired by the eternal. It places man face to face with God from the first symbolic scene in the Garden of Eden to the last symbolic scene in the New Jerusalem. It enables us to discern with spiritual perception One who is not loving only but Love, One from Whose will all creation flows, and to Whose purpose it answers, of Whom and through Whom and unto Whom are all things. In a word, the Bible writes hope over the darkest fields of life. Man needs hope above all things; and the Bible is the charter of hope, the message of the God of revelation, Who alone is the God of hope. For us it is the view which the Bible gives of His forbearance and long-suffering; of His compassionate and gentle dealing with the rude, the ignorant, and the erring; of His large counsels, whereby all faithful though imperfect labour is made to minister to His service, which keeps our hope freshest in the face of our own trials. We are for the most part busily occupied with the cares, the problems, the lessons of our own place and time. The range of our activity tends to limit the range of our interest. We yield to the temptation of forgetting the great deserts of barbarism which are spread over the face of the earth-the long ages of dull monotony which represent the life of many peoples. But those dreary spaces also belong to the history of that one body of mankind in which we are members, of that planet which was the scene of the Incarnation. Each period of silence, the most unbroken in its awful stillness, is part of the education of the world. As we look upon the spectacle-the long discipline, fruitful in its manifold complexity; the glorious issue, prevailing in its infinite sorrows-there comes to us a joy proportioned to the vast blanks which we have felt. The Biblical interpretation of pre-Christian history reveals to us the law of God's dealing with men in the present. And so we in our day of trial gain strength to wait in the presence of ends unattained, and as yet unattainable. Humanity is not a splendid ruin, deserted by the great King Who once dwelt within its shrine, but a living body, racked, maimed, diseased, it may be, but stirred by noble thoughts which cannot for ever be in vain. Hope is the child of sympathy and faith, born not without pain. That we might have hope—hope for the single soul, hope for the body to which we inseparably belong; hope for the creation committed to our care-i -fair under conditions of decay; hope for honest thought in the contemplation of solemn problems; hope for courageous action in the presence of aggressive evil; the infinite hope which we need, and which, as far as I see, we cannot find elsewhere. Every fragment of human life will illuminate the teaching of the Bible, and no single race can exhaust it. That which the light of language and the monuments of antiquity did in the sixteenth century to illuminate the sacred writings and shew their power on the individual conscience, the light of science in its widest sense, and the broader apprehension of history, promise to do now. Symptoms converge from every side to shew that our own race and our own country is being called to fulfil the evangelic charge for which material prosperity, wide dominion, social freedom, unbroken national development, have been only the preparation. |