know God, that we may fear Him, is what the prophets labour and pray for. The darkest times among the Jews are those in which there is no knowledge of God in the land; the millennium of prophecy is when all men shall know the Lord. By knowledge cometh reverence of Him, or godly fear, which is the germ of perfect love. Those that know Him shall love Him: we love Him because He first loved us. Those that fear Him shall know Him: "the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." It was this and no mystical or metaphysical ens that Job saw when he said, "Now mine eye seeth Thee." It was such a vision that the psalmist prayed for, "to see thy power and thy glory as I have seen Thee;" a vision followed by the necessary consequences of self abasement or a desire to be perfect as God is perfect. This is the only kind of knowledge of God that can give any intelligible meaning to the profound words of John: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when it doth appear, we shall be like Him ;" and why like Him? "for," he continues, "we shall see Him as He is." How intimately Christianity is connected with what was best and vital in Judaism may be seen in the attitude of Christ towards the older revelation. It is, as I already had occasion to notice, no absolutely new revelation that He brings, but a clearer manifestation of the old in the first place. His purpose was not destruction but fulfilment, or, as we now say, development. When the scribe of whom I have already spoken came to Jesus with a question, Christ did not give him an answer that was in any way strange. He refers him to Moses, whose commandment could never become obsolete, although it might well become plainer and fuller as seen in Him who is the light of the world. He is thus a fulfilment of the hope, "In Thy light shall we see light." Perhaps the best hint we have of what Christ considered His true position in religious development to have been, is to be found in the concluding chapter of Luke's gospel, where He traces the stream of spiritual life through Moses and the prophets down to Himself: "He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." An exposition, I imagine, including many more passages, and most likely involving other trains of thought, than those usually given in Bible references and forming the staple of testimony too commonly received as the sole witness to Christ in the Old Testament scriptures, in the face of His general statement, "they are they which testify of Me." A great deal of what I cannot but think is mere sentiment, is often written about the connection of Greece, and paganism generally, with Christianity. One can surely hold to the evidence of a strict development of spiritual truth through Judaism without, as some suppose, laying oneself open to the charge of indifference and apathy to pagan thought. It is no question of admiration of the one or the other, but simply a question of fact. Pagan thought may be, in the estimation of some, richer and nobler than either Judaistic or primitive Christian thought, or, in the opinion of others, the reverse may be true; but neither position has any bearing upon our present question. Mr. R. H. Hutton may be taken, in our country, as a fair modern exponent of the connection between Christianity and paganism. In an essay published along with some others by Mr. Martineau, he lays down the position that Jewish history brings out the personality of God, other history the Divine capacities of man; and that, therefore, co-operation of different natures was needed for the fulfilment of revelation. The old revelation gives us the presence of a pure will among the Jews, which Greece could not accept because it saw a Divine in the human and yearned for an ideal. Christ fulfilled both the pure moral will and the ideal perfection. With reference to this, I must say that, I do not know about the personality of God being brought out in Jewish history, but certainly the Divine capacities of man are written on it with fully more plainness than on any other history. In His image was man made. "I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most High." God is reported as saying to Pharaoh, "Israel is My son." And were not the Jews in some way a peculiar people, a holy nation, living with God in paternal and filial relationship, and in a measure exhibiting the truth that Christ came to set forth more clearly, that God loved men so much as to call them His children? The declaration in the New Testament is a true development of Jewish spiritual life and thought, that "as many as received" Christ, "to them gave He power to become the sons of God." The desire for God and the knowledge of Him, so evident in Hebrew literature, show how deep was the feeling of capacity for the spiritual in a people, whose earliest story tells how their ancestors attempted to become as "gods, knowing good and evil." The more sweeping statement of this relation to paganism is that which I give in the words of Henry More, but the substance of which forms still the subject of Hulsean and other lectureships: "Christianity is not only the complement and perfection of Judaism, but also of universal paganism; the sum or substance of whatever was considerable in any religion being comprehended in Christ's gospel." The examples given by such thinkers of this summing up of paganism by Christianity are the following,-Christ's birth, crucifixion, resurrection, apotheosis, overthrowing of Satan, and judgment attended by reward of the good, and punishment of the bad. But, not only are the fundamental ideas (and it is with these we have to do in discussing Christianity as a separate phenomenon) in Christian revelation independent of pagan influences, and separable from the common ground here alluded to by More, the whole attitude of thought in the one is unlike that in the other. There are paganisms in the Bible, just as there are in it metaphysics, mysteries, physics, ethics, ethnologies, myths, and many other things; but the paganism is not in the spiritual revelation, which is the special content of the Bible, but rather in, what I may call, the general culture of the various periods in which the Bible was composed, and which is a natural concomitant of an historical revelation. As a record, however, of a true and genuine spiritual revelation, it is a light shining in a dark place. CHAPTER XIII. THE ORGANON OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. "If we live truly, we shall see truly." THE Bible being a record in human language and with national colourings, radiating from a past era in history, we must necessarily get at whatever it may contain of truth, spiritual or otherwise, primarily through the forms of language. At the very outset, it is proper to notice that this collection of books is to be approached like other books, in whatever other way we may have to show that it can alone be truly apprehended. The Bible as it stands is no miraculous magical collection of vocables or sentences, which work a charm in some mysterious manner. We shall afterwards see that it is related on its human side to many sciences. It presupposes grammatical and historical knowledge, and demands philology and general scholarship of a very high order, for its full historical comprehension, and for a correct view of its varied contents. There is no science or branch of inquiry, perhaps, at least none that bear upon moral, mental, or social questions, but might be applied to it with advantage, either in interpreting its teaching or in criticising its multiform records. It is all the more necessary to call attention to this, lest, in the treatment of the method of what has been seen to be the special revelation in Scripture, there should be thought to be a latent sympathy on our part with those who ignorantly imagine, that Scripture is its own light. We have no desire to cry up a new light, or "A lib'ral art that costs no pains There has been some confusion, both with those who have asserted this too generally, and those who have laughed at the "dark-lanthorn of the Spirit, Which none see by but those that bear it." We have previously noticed the tendency to make mistakes in reasonings from analogy; nevertheless, an approximate comparison may at least be made on this subject between natural light, and the so-called spiritual light. It is necessary to remember, however, The rays of the san that it is no more than an approximation. may be said, vulgarly, to be visible by their own light; but when we say so, we are not supposed to have exhausted all that may be known regarding them. We only state that this outward phenomenon harmonises naturally with our physical constitution; that, independent of all scientific theories, light affects us so and so. But no one who cared for his reputation as a man of sense, would maintain that simply by basking in the sun, and enjoying its vivifying and pleasant influences, he could discover all the properties of light. We may be nourished by its beneficent beams, and yet be ignorant of the curvature of its rays as they pass through the atmosphere, and which determines for us the places of distant objects. Even so may a spiritual life be sustained by the Sun of Righteousness in those who have been irradiated by His beams. Many may well be gladdened by His cheering light, to whom historical inquiry and philological research are as strange as are the widespreading investigations on the properties of natural light, its mode of propagation, the origin of its colour, and its rate of velocity,-questions, some of which are dependent on recondite mathematical truths and celestial observations, which in their turn affect so many other branches of physical science, as to entitle them, in the estimation of some, to a principal place in the connection of the physical sciences. It is not improbable that there is a spiritual sense, or a kind of spiritual instinct of life, which assimilates to itself whatever is fitted to sustain it. And, thus, it may very readily come to pass in religion as in nature, that many may perceive and embrace a spiritual truth, into whose origin and growth they could neither philosophically, nor otherwise investigate. Discernment of these things is not always proportioned to subtlety of intellect or power of speculative and abstract thought, but more frequently to healthiness of that kind of life which the sphere of truth infolds, whether that be natural, moral, or spiritual. But when I say so, I insist, on the other hand, on the scientific side of physical facts. And so with the Bible. While, perhaps, claiming no special science in itself, and while, as we may afterwards see, not permitting of a scientific statement of its special truths in the usual sense in which theology takes it, there are likewise in the Bible matters to which many separate sciences can be applied, and a complete and thorough knowledge of which cannot be attained in any other way than through a series of related sciences. What is, for example, humanistic, or simply historical, mythological, moral, or quasi-scientific |