3. He avers and avows their divine authority and original, and their indestructible character, and that too, in every jot and tittle of them.

4. He treats them as authoritative and commanding, when He teaches His disciples, or reasons with gain

In such ways as these, the Lord honours the Scriptures of the Old Testament. What a sight! What a precious fact! How blessed to see Him in such relationship to the Word of God; for that word is to ourselves the warrant and witness of all the confidence and liberty and peace we know before God!

We read the 119th Psalm with delight, there tracing a Saint's relation to Scripture; and we know it to be edifying to mark the breathings of the soul under the drawings and teachings and inspirings of the Holy Ghost. But it is a still more affecting, a more edifying thing, to trace and mark, through the four Evangelists, the relations to the same Scriptures into which the Lord Jesus puts Himself.

Then, when the ministry of the Lord is over, when the Son has returned to Heaven, and the Spirit comes down, He is seen (as in the Apostles whom he fills to write the Epistles) to do the same service for us; and in His way, to put Himself in connection with the Old Testament Scriptures, as the Lord had just been doing. For in all the Epistles, as I may say, we get quotations from them.

And here let me add, there is no limit to this. These quotations are found in every part of the New Testament, and are taken from every part of the Old. They are found in Matthew, and on to the Apocalypse, and are taken from Genesis to Malachi. And this is done very largely;

• This, among other illustrations of it, is finely seen in John xix. 28-30, where the Lord seems as though He were calling Scripture to mind; and first recollecting that one very short passage of it had not yet been realized, He refuses to withdraw Himself from the scene of suffering till it was, and then, all being fulfilled as was written, just said-"It is finished," and gave up the ghost.

so that in the structure of the divine volume, we have nothing less than the closest, fullest, and most intricate interweaving of all parts of it together, the end, too, returning to the beginning, and the beginning anticipa ting the end. So that, in a sense, we are in all parts of it, when we are in any part of it, though the variety of its communications is infinite. It reminds me of the figure of the body and its members, used by the Apostle to set forth Christ (1 Cor. xii). There are many members, but one body. There are many books, but one Scripture, one volume. All are equally divine workmanship, though all may not be of equal value to the soul. The foot is not the hand, nor the ear the eye. But God has set them together in one body, — as in the Heavens, He has set stars and constellations together, though one may differ from another in glory.

But to pursue the same figure of the body and the members, we do boldly say, one part of the volume cannot be touched without all feeling it and resenting it. "Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it;" God has so tempered it altogether. If Moses be insulted, Paul feels it: if Daniel or Zechariah be questioned, John and Peter will resent it. Yea, and I may go further in the same analogy, and say, the uncomely parts have been given more abundant honour. The shortest piece in the whole volume is made to be heard in the conclusion of the finest, and most elaborate and most weighty argument we find in it. Psalm cxvii. is brought forth as a special witness in Romans XV. And the book of the Proverbs, dealing as it does with common, practical, every day life, is honoured by being made as rich and blessed a witness to the Christ of God in His mysterious glories, as we get in any part of the whole Scripture (Chap. viii.)

Yea and I will take on me to say this further. As all other parts of the volume, like the members of one body, will resent trespass and wrong done to any part, so will the Spirit say of God and of the Scriptures, as He says of God and of His people, "He that toucheth you. toucheth the apple of His eye." The Scripture is His handywork; and God will make the quarrel of Scripture

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His own quarrel. If he will awake in due time, to the controversy of His temple or His covenant, or His Zion, o will he most assuredly to the controversy of His word. He has magnified His word above all His name. "He hat rejecteth me and receiveth not my words," says the Lord Jesus, "hath one that judgeth him."

And again let me speak, as I stand in presence of God and His oracles, Scripture links itself with Eternity n ways that are divine, like every thing else in it. If ve have quotations in the New Testament of passages in he Old, so have we, in both Old and New, references to he Eternity that is past. And if we have foretellings n the Old Testament of events in the New, so have we, n both Old and New, the foretelling of the eternity that s to come. Scripture, as I may speak, retires behind the borders of time, and discloses the secrets and councils of he past Eternity, unsealing "the volume of the book," and lisclosing predestinations formed and settled in Christ ere worlds began; and Scripture passes beyond the borders of time, and is in the scenes and glories of the Eternity hat is to come, giving us to hear every tongue confessing Jesus to be Lord to the Glory of God the Father," and nany many kindred voices, and to see many many kindred glories. And happy for us, that it links itself with time as well as with Eternity. It goes before us to hew us the way all through the confusion and coruption that is abroad, to the last moments of the lispensation. All is anticipated; so that we need not be tumbled by anything, however saddened and ashamed ve may be. "Great peace have all they that love thy aw, and nothing shall offend them." We need not be fraid with any amazement since we have it. The conusion and corruption may be infinite, strange indeed n their changeful forms, and deep in their insolent vickedness; but Scripture has prepared us for all, supertitious vanities, and infidel insolence. The tare-field vas spread out on the page of Scripture ere it stretched tself out in the defiled plains of Christendom. The inmerciful fellow-servant is seen in Matthew xviii., ere he is seen in the wars and controversies of Christendom.

God in His word has not forecast the shadow of uncertain evils.

It is indeed marvellous, and yet not marvellous because it is divine. The Spirit of Him who knows the end from the beginning can account for it, but nothing else can. The Book itself, as another has said, is a greater miracle than any which it records.

And I would now end with a word about quotations, as it was with them I began.

These citations out of His own writings by God Himself, first in the Person of the Son, and then in the person of the Holy Ghost, are beautiful in this character; God is sealing what once He wrote: at the beginning He sent forth those writings as from Himself, being the source of them; so now, after they have come forth, and been embodied in human forms as in all languages of the nations, and been seated in the midst of the human family, He comes forth to accredit them there Himself, as with His own sign manual. God has both written them and sealed them, and we receive them as from Him, and in our way of responsive faith and worship, "set to our seal that God is true." "Thy testimonies have I claimed for my heritage for ever; they are the rejoicing of my heart." Surely these things are so.

To notice, with some care, the quotations themselves, as they meet us while we pursue our way from Matthew to the Apocalypse, is an edifying exercise of the soul. It helps directly to let us into the fuller light of the Old Testament oracles, giving us nothing less than God's own key for unlocking the treasures that are there. And this exercise has also another direct effectit binds all the parts, however distant, of the one volume together under our eye, and serves to present the whole as one complete and perfect piece of workmanship in full consistency with itself throughout. The light is one, though it may be that of the Patriarchal dawn, of the Levitical or Mosaic morning, of the prophetic fore-noon, of the Gospel Meridian or noon-tide, and then of the Apocalyptic evening hour with its shadows, just before the solemn night of judgment which is to precede the

cond morning, the morning of millennial Glory. But is indeed it is. In Scripture, from beginning to end, e are in the light of God, from the first morning of eation to the second morning of the kingdom; having ssed our own noon and evening hours, and also the ason of the world's midnight.

PARADOX.

The Church was, is, and is not, and yet shall be.

The Church was in God's counsels before the world was; it s, too, as set up by God on earth, as at Pentecost, entrusted its principles and the revelation of the truth of the Lordship Christ in heaven, and of the Spirit sent down here as His car during His absence) to man at Pentecost, and visibly sted upon earth. It was (fuit), for it is now a ruin among men. The Church is, in the Divine Mind, as that which God is forming w amid the confusion of man's wickedness here below; it is e delight of God, the glory of Christ, the work of the Spirit, joy of Heaven, for eternity.

The Church is not. Man cannot show now, what he could shew at ntecost, and at Ephesus; and the church, which faith realizes existing in the Divine Mind and as being the subject of the esent actions and operations and care of Father, Son, and Holy ost (to sense and sight) is not, though, where faith and the irit are in practical action, he that has them can identify that ich is known and owned of God with something which he s down here. The Church shall be the New Jerusalem-the de, the Lamb's wife in glory.

We have a good deal of need of wisdom and holy fear to hold nes chap. i. verses 3 and 13, as a balance by which to measure ways of trial. God leads his people through deep waters, en brings them where they have no standing for their feet, but y are always cleansing waters. His people may themselves to polluted waters which can neither cleanse nor be cleansed, n God's raging waves and billows: even these become, at His ding, "waters of cleansing." His living ones rest beside 1 waters; this can never be with the foul waters of the flesh. e desire of man's heart ends only in death.

How cheering to know God as a Father in the midst of all confusion around.

he Apostle's sorrows and trials, besides being his present our as conformity to the sufferings of his Master as a servant 7, were also the school of his own soul for eternity.