SERMON XXXI.

THE EPISTLES TO

TIMOTHY.-CHRISTIAN

USE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

2 TIMOTHY, iii. 1.

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.

So little regard has been paid to chronological order in the present arrangement of St. Paul's Epistles, that the two first written are immediately followed by the two latest of all; the two to the Thessalonians, I mean, are immediately followed by the two to Timothy. We may thus pass at once from the beginning of St. Paul's written Gospel to its end, from a period only a few months later than his first crossing over into Europe, to one in all probability only a little while preceding his death. And in doing this, we may compare the more full language of hope which abounds in his earlier Epistles, with the darker anticipations which are more common in his later ones.

For

although it was revealed to him very early, as we see by the second Epistle to the Thessalonians, that the progress of the Gospel would be grievously obstructed, still the full sense of the extent and greatness of the evil does not appear to have possessed his mind so thoroughly then, as we find it to have done some years afterwards, when it was not only a matter of expectation and belief, but of actual experience.

To those who love to realize past times, and to bring them before their minds with something of the freshness and distinctness of the scenes actually present to them, it is often a grievous disappointment to find great chasms here and there in the records of history, where the road, so to speak, has been almost wholly carried away, and there is no possibility of restoring it. But of all these chasms, none is so much to be regretted as that wide one of more than a century, in which all full and distinct knowledge of the early state of Christianity after the date of the Apostolical Epistles has been irretrievably buried. In the Apostolical Epistles themselves we have a picture clear and lively, from which we can gain a very considerable knowledge of what the Christian Church then was. But from these Epistles, which merely as historical monuments are so invaluable; from these records, undoubtedly genuine, uncorrupted, uninterpolated, and in which every thing is drawn with touches

equally faithful, bold, and distinct, we pass at once into a chaos. We come to works of disputed genuineness, with a corrupted text, full of interpolations; and which, after all, are so different from the Apostolical Epistles in their distinctness and power of touch, that even if we could rely on their authenticity, the knowledge to be derived from them is exceedingly vague and scanty. In this absence of good and trustworthy records, all manner of wild guesses, and stories either without any foundation or greatly altered and exaggerated, grew up plenteously; and it is sufficiently striking that while we have a legendary account, pretending to relate the place and manner of the deaths of all the Apostles, there are scarcely two of the whole number, of whose deaths we have even so much as a statement of probable authority.

Thus God has, as it were, encircled the goodly garden of Scripture truth, in which there grows the tree of life, with a wide belt of desert on every side, preserving it manifestly distinct from all other and merely human cultivation, and condemning to a more than ordinary blindness those who can see but little difference between the garden of the Lord, and the howling wilderness that reaches up to its very walls. We stop then at the last Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, with something of the same interest with which one pauses at the last hamlet of the cultivated valley, when there is no

thing but moor beyond. It is the end, or all but the end, of our real knowledge of primitive Christianity; there we take our last distinct look around; further the mist hangs thick, and few and distorted are the objects which we can discern in the midst of it.

Into

But this last distinct view is overcast with gloom. "In the last days perilous times shall come." Then there follows a picture of what men would be, who in word and form were Christians, but in deed led the lives of the worst heathens. Those who had the form of godliness, or of Christianity,for the two words in the Epistles to Timothy are generally synonymous,-those who had the form of Christianity, were yet false, unholy, disobedient; lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. what hands then was the Church of God to fall, when such men as these were to be its members? But the Apostle relies that Timothy would in his own generation struggle against this evil, because he had from a child been familiar with that revelation of God which was profitable for the teaching of truth, and for the removing of error, for correcting all that was amiss, and fostering every seed of good in us, for the perfecting of God's servants in all good works. This is St. Paul's testimony to the importance of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, when as yet the truths of Christ's Gospel were known more by the hearing of the Apostles'

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preaching than by the reading of their written works.

This testimony is one that is well deserving of our attention. No doubt it is applicable, and even in a higher degree, to the writings of the New Testament; but yet this is not its original meaning; St. Paul spoke it entirely of the Old. And it is manifest that he points to the Old Testament as to the only sure foundation, to speak generally, on which Christianity could be built; that those who received it without this foundation were likely grievously to corrupt it, that those who received it upon this foundation were likely to be made wise unto salvation.

Now it is manifest that St. Paul is not here referring to the types or prophecies of the Old Testament; he is not regarding its witness to Christ, but its own preparation for Him. For it is plain, that although a knowledge of the prophecies might greatly contribute towards making a man believe in Christ, yet if he had believed on Him without knowing these prophecies, he would, so far as their witness was concerned, be exactly in the same place as though he had known them: they would but have helped him to that faith which he had reached without them, by the mere hearing of the words and works of Christ, and of His resurrection from the dead. What St. Paul means, then, is something different from the witness afforded by