unto the Father."

"It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send Him unto you; and when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth." Nor is this into the truth that Christ Himself had spoken, but into things unuttered as yet; for He introduces this by the remark, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now." This is surely a declaration of incompletion which does not admit of being explained away-a declaration so reasonable, and in accordance with fact and man's nature, as well as with the wisdom of the Divine Teacher, that its contrary only would require explanation.

John speaks of the multitude of Christ's unrecorded works, but what shall we say of His unrecorded words? What a world of spiritual truth may lie in these forgotten words of our Lord! Scholars join in lamentations over the lost books of a Latin or Grecian writer, which may have fallen a prey to time, or the ignorance of their keepers; and if such grief is reasonable, what regret must we feel, that these words of spiritual wisdom and heavenly truth, which fell upon the air on Galilean hills, or mingled with the ripple of the lakes, or with the traffic of the town, or dropped like dew in midnight loneliness,-that these words of life and hope have passed into unseen vibrations, and vanished from the memory of man.* So we in our ignorance think and speak, forgetting that far greater world of unspoken truth shadowed forth in the expression, "ye cannot bear them now." It is not merely that any material record is inadequate to completely picture all that Christ did and said; this is acknowledged by the writers themselves, and is felt by all with spiritual life of any vigour. It is rather the complete insufficiency of any written history fully to express Christ. "Certainly," it has been well said, "a genuine prophet, who has worked a long time, has, in the sanctuary of his heart, far more thoughts and experiences, than he ever has publicly expressed, or may express." Every thinker has the same, and many know how much a good author is superior to his books. But, what is true of prophets and others is in a greater degree true of Christ. No book could give us His mind and heart. If this were attempted, the

The record in the Gospels, although extensive, considering the then means of preserving and handing down such information, is yet meagre in the extreme, as an account of three years' teaching.

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world would not contain the books that should be written. Nowhere but on the tablets of our renovated hearts, and the hearts of all men in all times, will this great revelation be unveiled in any approximate fulness.

If we live in Him, then through the Spirit that proceeds from Him and God we may be shown the deep things of God. We limit ourselves to a book, instead of freely accepting the Spirit of promise, and the power of the new life. It is not a history, a literature, or a book that Christ gave-it is spirit and life imparted through His love. The thought of a man at one with Christ, living in Him, hid with Him in God, is as Divine and true a revelation to that man (and to all men), as if he read it in a universally approved literary and religious canon. There is along with the thought, the witness of the Spirit with ours, which, as the Westminster Confession says, is the only adequate testimony to spiritual truth, as the same Spirit was the only guide to spiritual truth in the past, and, according to Christ, will be the guide to all such truth in the future. It is at this point that Paul's dictum is so true, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life," a saying which has been verified again and again in the history of Christianity, and the first part of which was never better attested, than it is in the present day. There is abundant regard for the letter of Christ's times, and of later and earlier times, but no sufficient reverence for the spirit that lives through all times.

It would seem, however, as if it were impossible to deny one extreme without affirming another, which, in itself, is as untrue. Thus, men like Theodore Parker hold that any progress in theology and spiritual life must be conditioned by a substitution of absolute religion, for the special form of Christianity in the Bible; arguing, that because men did not stop at Euclid, neither should they stop at Christ. An unhappy illustration, if it means anything more, than we have been saying. No geometrician has got beyond Euclid in the sense of superseding his work, and the furthest advance of this science and its related sciences can never dispense with principles, lying at the basis of all true development of knowledge in these spheres. Such an extreme is old enough. It is not many years since Chatillon of Geneva held, that man's spirit could eclipse the light of Scripture, and Servetus and others, that the true Church of Christ could exist without Scripture, and that the living voice was more worthy. This, however, is not the life-giving spirit that was in the mind of Paul. We desire to see the Bible in its true

position, as a help to spiritual life and an awakener of its powers. By one extreme it is looked upon as more than a means to thisas an end in itself. By another it is looked upon as less than a means, as something, in fact, obsolete a hindrance rather than a help. Apart from all theory as to the nature of the Bible, and so long as books are estimated according to their contents, I feel assured, that as in the past men of spiritual discernment saw and appreciated these various books, and felt their power, their elevated purpose, their clear insight into what was permanent and eternally true, and appraised their value by selecting them from other utterances of the human spirit in fellowship with the Divine; so in the future men like-minded, knowing the life that has entered into these accumulated experiences of God's people from earliest times, will not value less, but with growing estimation will regard the record of a past spiritual development, from which their own spiritual manhood has sprung, and in which lies the seed of the kingdom of righteousness and truth, destined to fill the whole earth.

What book can compare with these books, so various, yet so much one in their undeviating aim, that we are not aware of any anomaly in designating it the book of books! Never, in myth, poetry, history, biography, philosophy, prophecy, or letter, is its great moral purpose forgotten or concealed. Where, in all the round of literature, in the midst of such diversity of time, and place, and literary form, can we find such constant loyalty to God and truth? It is awful in its tension, terrible in its seriousness. If, in the future, not visible as yet by any sign of the times, men may happily leave such a record far behind, superseding it by a better and a purer exhibition of God's ways to man, and of man's walking in these ways, still we never can imagine the time, when in their progress they shall leave behind the supreme life, embodied in a portion of that record. That life is indestructible in its spirit, and repeats itself from age to age, in the life of all who are united by faith to what is Divine. Above the book itself is always the immortal life within it; but the life goes a long way in conferring a like immortality upon the book. At least such a book deserves of us nothing but reverent treatment, and it is matter of consolation to all who look to it as the sun of their spiritual existence-the awakener of a new element of life, as well as its means of growth and development to ultimate perfection, to know, that no amount of criticism of whatever kind, so be that it is honest and truthful criticism, can permanently affect its lasting usefulness. It also should be matter for con

gratulation to all, that, being what it is, it demands of us the wisest criticism and most rational assent we can command-that the basis of it is not literalism or traditionalism, but spirit and life. It communicates to men, not doctrines, but new energies of soul. On the speculative, as well as on the practical, side of its spiritualism, its first and last words are progress, freedom, truth: Follow Me: ye shall be free indeed: sanctify them through Thy truth.

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

"Die Weisheit ist nur in der Wahrheit."

ON some side or other it will yet be found, that all truth is related and dependent, as all things, in reality, are dependent, on some common source and centre. These relations we are at present far from knowing in any fulness, but in scientific inquiries, for example, the more we do know of them, the greater is the advance in discovery at large. The physical sciences have individually progressed sometimes by the suggestions of sciences from without; and this advance has in turn acted upon another division. It would be premature to predict what may happen, when wider views of merely physical subjects are attained, and the entire dependency of all on each is gradually realised; but every one must foresee, that a greater love of truth shall be one result-love, not of truth as represented by some special aspect of it in one of its divisions, but of that conception of truth, which regards it as an expression, " co-ordinating all things into one unity."

Although we have seen Scripture, on its human side, to be related to the sciences, it may be asked, Is it, in the special character of its contents, connected with other forms of truth? In this question there is much that is attractive. While many men have busied themselves with contrasts between the true and the false, between revelation as opposed to science and the like, this suggests a much more pleasant task, viz., that of comparing truth with truth-of recognising everywhere a form of truth. It is not difficult to see, that truth must apply to much more, than some would limit it to. One has only to consider the essence of truth to see why this must be the case. Truth is harmony between, what may be called, the idea and the real, in whatever sphere. This harmony we cannot yet be said to have absolutely reached anywhere. Truth, to our search, is progressively discovered. It dawns upon us as we are capable of apprehending it in detail, and of building up, what we designate, the different truths into one whole. We can, however, produce nothing in idea in all respects corresponding to the real, because we cannot unite all we know in the great sum of knowledge. We need a bond of union. For, only in one