by an inward necessity; they were linked together long before by the law of a secret affinity. It is not a happy accident, which has yielded so wondrous an analogy as that of husband and wife, to set forth the mystery of Christ's relation to his elect Church. There is far more in it than this: the earthly relation is indeed but a lower form of the heavenly, on which it rests, and of which it is the utterance. When Christ spoke to Nicodemus of a new birth, it was not merely because birth into this natural world was the most suitable figure that could be found for the expression of that spiritual act, which, without any power of our own, is accomplished upon us when we are brought into God's kingdom; but all the circumstances of this natural birth had been pre-ordained to bear the burden of so great a mystery. The Lord is king, not borrowing this title from the kings of the earth, but having lent his own title to them-and not the name only, but so ordering, that all true rule and government upon earth, with its righteous laws, its stable ordinances, its punishment and its grace, its majesty and its terror, should tell of Him and of his kingdom which ruleth over all-so that kingdom of God' is not in fact a figurative expression, but most literal: it is rather the earthly kingdoms, and the earthly kings, that are figures and shadows of the true. And as in the world of man and human relations, so also is it in the world of nature. The untended soil which yields thorns and briars as its natural harvest, is a permanent type and enduring parable of man's heart, which has been submitted to the same curse, and without a watchful spiritual husbandry will as surely put forth its briars and its thorns. The weeds that will mingle during the time of growth with the corn, and yet are separated from it at the last, tell ever one and the same tale of the present admixture, and future sundering, of the righteous and the wicked. The decaying of the insignificant unsightly seed in the earth, and the rising up out of that decay and death, of the graceful stalk and the fruitful ear, contain evermore the prophecy of the final resurrection, even as this is itself in its kind a resurrection-the same process at a lower stage -the same power putting itself forth upon meaner things."-Notes on the Parables, p. 17-19.

6. In the same general way, only with more direct and immediate relation, History also bears universal testimony to Christ and Christianity as the proper completion of the world.

History is not a mere multitude and succession of facts. It implies organization and process; and in this view belongs especially to man, in distinction from mere nature-which repeats itself, age after age, without going forward in the way of new fact. It becomes properly real, only when we conceive of Man or Humanity as being a single whole, which is animated by one

general life, and in virtue of this moves steadily onward, from period to period, towards some ultimate end in which all is to be brought to a conclusion worthy of itself and of God. But to see and admit this, is necessarily to own at the same time that all this movement has regard from the first to Christianity, and turns upon it at last as the true deepest and most central sense of the world. For how can God be taken to have one object or plan in History generally considered, and another in the revelation of the Gospel? Such an imagination is at once atheistic and profane.

"Properly speaking, where there are no workings, conscious or unconscious, to the great end of the manifestation of the Son of God in the flesh,-conscious, as in Israel, unconscious, as in Greece, -where neither those nor these are found, there history does not and cannot exist. For history, if it be not the merest toy, the idlest pastime of our vacant hours, is the record of the onward march of humanity towards an end. Where there is no belief in such an end, and therefore no advance toward it, no stirrings of a divine Word in a people's bosom, where not as yet the beast's heart has been taken away, and a man's heart given, there history cannot be said to be. They belong not therefore to history, least of all to sacred history, those Babels, those cities of confusion, those huge pens into which by force and fraud the early hunters of men, the Nimrods and Sesostrises, drave and compelled their fellows: and Scripture is only most true to its idea, while it passes them almost or wholly in silence by, while it lingers rather on the plains of Mamre with the man that believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness,' than by 'populous No,' or great Babylon, where no faith existed but in the blind powers of nature, and the brute forces of the natural man."-Hulsean Lectures, p. 40-41.

7. Thus related to Nature and History, as the true completion of man's life in the world, Christianity itself is no doctrine merely or law, but a living constitution; not only capable of falling in with the onward progress of humanity as otherwise known; but destined also to receive the entire stream finally into its own bosom, and to bear it triumphantly forward to that ocean of glory for which all has been set in motion from the beginning. In its full revelation, it comes not first in the order of time; but still it is first in the actual idea of the world, as forming the ground on which only in the end all other spheres of man's life can be brought to their true unity and perfection. It is not one among other such spheres, but a power that is required to embrace and rule all; art, science, politics, social life,

T

every form of existence that enters normally into the conception of humanity, not only may but must be taken up by it as its rightful property, and can become complete only by entering into it as the spiritual whole of which every such interest is legiti mately but parcel and part. Art must become thoroughly christian, in order to be fully worthy of its own name; so science; so business; so civil government. And Christianity can never acknowledge any such interest, as having a right to stand beyond itself. Whatever is human it claims for its own, as being in truth commensurate with humanity, nay the very fact of humanity itself, under its deepest and most comprehensive form.

8. Revealed Religion in this view is a single fact or constitution, reaching historically through successive ages from the first promise in Paradise to the time of its full completion in Christ. Hence the proper unity of the Bible, including the Old Testament as well as the New. It is characterized by endless diver sities in the form of its composition; but the idea which pervades it is always the same; it is throughout one harmonious whole, moving onward continually with the force of a living process to its own proper end in the mystery of the Incarnation.

It is not the history of nature, but of man; nor yet of all men, but only of those who are more or less conscious of their divine original, and have not, amid all their sins, forgotten that great word, 'We are God's offspring;'-nor yet even of all these, but of those alone who had been brought by the word of the promise into immediate covenant relations with the Father of their spirits. We have seen it the history of an election,-of men under the direct and immediate education of God-not indeed for their own sakes only, as too many among them thought, turning their election into a selfish thing, but that through them he might educate and bless the world. That it does not tell the story of other men-that it does not give a philosophy of nature, is not a deficiency, but is rather its strength and glory; witnessing for the Spirit which has presided over its growth and formation, and never suffered aught which was alien to its great plan and purpose to find admission into it-any foreign elements to weaken its strength or trouble its clear

ness.

Nor less does Holy Scripture give testimony for a pervading unity, an inner law according to which it unfolds itself as a perfect and organic whole, in the epoch at which growth in it ceases, and it appears henceforth as a finished book. So long as humanity was growing, it grew. But when the manhood of our race was reached, when man had attained his highest point, even union with God in his Son, then it comes to a close. It carries him up to this, to

his glorious goal, to the perfect knitting again of those broken relations, through the life and death and resurrection of Him in whom God and man were perfectly atoned. So long as there was any thing more to tell, any new revelation of the Name of God, any new relations of grace and nearness into which he was bringing his creatures, so long the Bible was a growing, expanding book. But when all is given, when God, who at divers times spake to the world by his servants, had now spoken his last and fullest Word by his Son, then to this Book, the record of that Word of his, there is added no more, even while there is nothing more to add ;though it cannot end till it has shown in prophetic vision how this latest and highest which now has been given to man, shall unfold itself into the glory and blessedness of a perfected kingdom of heaven."-Hulsean Lectures, p. 43-45.

9. The Old Testament bears witness to Christ throughout; not so much by isolated texts, as in its universal life; which is in truth the power of that higher order itself out of which in due time Christ was to spring, and so could not fail to bring into view innumerable analogies and prefigurations on a lower scale of what should at last come to pass in Him on the highest.

The O. T. prophecies and types are not abstract and arbitray; naked vaticinations, standing out here and there, in an abrupt magical way; but they grow forth always from the living constitution of that revelation as a whole, and have such sense as belongs to them only in virtue of this organic connection with the universal system of which they are a part. They reach to Christ only as the entire system had regard to him as its necessary end, and in such particular utterances gave vent, so to speak, to its general meaning.

"We dishonour prophecy, when the chief value which it has in our eyes is the use to which it may be turned as evidence; when. we regard it as serving no nobler ends, as having no deeper root in the economy of God than in this are presumed; when it is for us merely a miraculum scientiæ, which, with the miracles properly so called, the miracula protentiæ, may do duty in proving against cavillers the divine origin of our Faith; when all that we can find is that the doers of the works and the utterers of the words did and said what was beyond the reach and scope of common men. But the fact that prophecy should constitute so large an element in Scripture finds its explanation rather in that law which we have been tracing throughout all Scripture-the law, I mean, of an orderly development, according to which there is nothing sudden, nothing abrupt or unprepared in his counsels, all whose works were known to him from the beginning. It is part of this law that the e

VOL. II.NO. VI.

39

should ever be prefigurations of the coming, that truths so vast and so mighty as those of the New Covenant, so difficult for man's heart to conceive, should have their way prepared, should, ere they arrive in their highest shape, give pledge and promise of themselves in lower forms and in weaker rudiments."-Hulsean Lect., p. 83. "The rending away of isolated passages, and then saying, This Psalm, or That chapter of Isaiah, is prophetic, and has to do with Christ and his kingdom,-and this without explaining how it comes that these have to do, and those nearest them have not, can never truly satisfy; men's minds resist this fragmentary capricious exposition. The portions of Scripture thus adduced very likely are those in which prophecy concentrates itself more than in any other: they may be the strongest expressions of that Spirit which quickens the whole mass; but it has not forsaken the other portions to gather itself up exclusively in these."-P. 85.

"All the Old Testament, as the record of a divine constitution pointing to something higher than itself, administered by men who were ever looking beyond themselves to a Greater that should come, who were uttering, as the Spirit stirred them, the deepest longings. of their souls after his appearing, is prophetic; and this, not by an arbitrary appointment, which meant thus to supply evidences ready to hand for the truth of Revelation, in the curious tallying of the Old with the New, the remarkable fulfilments of the foretold, but prophetic according to the inmost necessities of the case, which would not suffer it to be otherwise.

"For how could God, bringing to pass what was good and true, do other than make it resemble what was best and truest, which he should one day bring to pass? Raising up holy men, how could he avoid giving them features of likeness to the Holiest of all? appointing them functions and offices in which to bless their brethren, how could these otherwise than anticipate his functions and his office, who should come in the fulness of blessing to his people? Inspiring them to speak, stirring by the breath of his Spirit the deepest chords of their hearts, how could He bring forth from them any other notes but those which made the deepest music of their lives; their longings, namely, after the promised Redeemer, their yearnings after the kingdom of his righteousness,-mere longings and yearnings no longer now, since the Spirit that inspired such utterances, being the very Spirit of Truth, gave pledge, in sanc tioning and working the desire, that the fulfilment of that desire in due time should not be wanting? If the poet had right when he spake of

"the prophetic soul

Of the great world, dreaming of things to come;"

by how much higher reason must a prophetic soul have dwelt in Israel, by which it not vaguely dreamed, but in some sort felt itself