preparation has Providence laid this priceless gift before you. In such labor of articulation-spelling out the syllables of the message from on high, through multitudinous lives of men dutifully and devoutly walking with their God-does the Spirit speak to you, O, soul of man. Say thou

Speak Lord; thy servant heareth!

It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is; Is it true in and for itself?

HEGEL: "Philosophy of History," Part III.: Sec. III. : Ch. II. With reference to things in the Bible, the question whether they are genuine or spurious is odd enough. What is genuine but that which is truly excellent, which stands in harmony with the purest nature and reason, and which even now ministers to our highest development? What is spurious but the absurd and the hollow, which brings no fruit-at least, no good fruit.

GOETHE: "Conversations,” March 11, 1832. No article of faith is injured by allowing that there is no such positive proof, when or by whom these and some other books of holy Scripture were written, as to exclude all possibility of doubt and cavil.

WATSON'S "Apology for the Bible," Letter IV.

VI.

The Right Historical Use of the Bible.

The principle of development involves also the existence of a latent germ of being-a capacity or potentiality striving to realize itself. . . . What Spirit really strives for is the realization of its Ideal being.

The profoundest thought is connected with the personality of Christ—with the historical and external; and it is the very grandeur of the Christian religion that, with all this profundity, it is easy of comprehension by our consciousness in its outward aspect, while, at the same time, it summons us to penetrate deeper.

HEGEL: "Philosophy of History," pp. 57, 344. [Bohn.]

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences go on gaining in depth and breadth, and the human mind expand as it may, it will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity as it glistens and shines forth in the gospel! GOETHE: "Conversations," March, 11, 1832.

VI.

The Right Historical Use of the Bible.

"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His Son."-GALATIANS, iv. 4.

T. PAUL condensed the philosophy of Hebrew history into a metaphor. Israel travailed in birth with Christianity. In the mind of the nation was begotten, of the Most High, a conception of ethical religion, whose gestation was a process of centuries. The period of parturition came, and a universal religion was born into the world; bodied, as religion needs must be, in a man, Jesus, the Christ.

"When the fulness of the time was come God sent forth His Son."

The sacred literature of Israel is the record and ⚫ embodiment of this organic growth of her religion, through its various moods and tenses, toward its ideal in the Christ. The sacred literature of the Christian Church is the picture of this flower of the soul of Israel, and of the new growth springing up from its seeding down of humanity. The whole Bible presents us with the growth of the

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religion of the Christ, below ground and above ground; its rootings and its flowerings. The right historical use of the Bible is, through a critical knowledge of the sacred literature of Israel, to reproduce before our minds this process of the growth of the Christ in Israel and of His new growth in humanity; with a view to our intelligent perception of His true place in history, and of the significance thereof. The heart of the Bible is > Christ. That which our fathers saw we need to see, that in Him all things stand together, as the arch is holden by the key-stone. Rightly to read the secret of His life is to find the secret of earth's problems. Therefore our fathers insisted so strenuously on the Old Testament preparation for Christ. A tree's rootings are proportionate to its size. In the gradual prefiguring of Christ through Israel's story, they read the historic attestation of His revelation. The picture of Israel's history that yielded them their vision is dissolving before our eyes, at the touch of the new criticism, and men are fearing that the secret of the Bible is escaping from our age. I desire to-day to draw for you, in outline, the story of Israel's development, as traced by our new masters; that you may see the old vision re-emergent in truer, nobler forms. The re-construction of Hebrew history makes real and certain an organic, natural development of the religion of the Christ; a travail of the nation with the Son it bore to God.