great unchanging truths about God and man and the world in which He has set man grasped firmly and made a part of our constant belief; and that we can never do without help from others. God's kingdom is indeed, blessed be His name, ever open to the ignorant and the dull: it is the pure in heart who shall see God. Yet in respect to the Bible especially, it remains true that whatever helps our understanding helps also in the long run our praying and our working.

I

I hope to be able to carry on this course of sermons with tolerable regularity. It may now and then be interrupted, either by special days of the Christian year, or by various accidental reasons. trust however that on the whole I may be able to go on from week to week, so that what is said on one Sunday may not be forgotten before the next time. For the same reason I shall not at present attempt to give a Sunday to each book. There are so many

books in the Bible that I could hardly expect to carry your memories on with me throughout; and I am especially desirous that you should at the end remember the beginning, that you should be able to take in the whole together, and to have the different parts of the Bible before your minds at once, just as we can see the different parts of a picture all at once.

Let me suggest also that you will find it a great help to take your own Bibles when you go home, and look over the part that you have been hearing about in church, trying whether you cannot read for yourselves there some of the things which you have heard mentioned from this place. Indeed, you will find

enough to employ you if you have time to carry on the subject during the week, and in this way you will fix it more firmly into your minds, and be better prepared to understand what you hear the next time. It will be enough to-day to speak of the Bible altogether, and to point out quite shortly the two great parts of which it consists. I do not propose

to dwell at any length on the character and value of the Bible. Little is gained by using high-flown language about it. It is a book literally above praise: there is a kind of impertinence in praising it. The best praise we can render it is to use it; to read, and practise, and read again. It was written for our learning: let us take care that it finds us teachable, willing to learn, possessed with a deep feeling of needing its help. And how is it that it is able to give us such help? For two reasons: because it is, above all other books, the book of man, and because it is the book of God. It is the book of man, not only because it was written by men, but because it is full of the deepest thoughts, longings, desires, struggles, victories of men, their best work done on the earth, their most passionate cries to the heaven above. It is the book of God, because in it we hear what He spoke to other ages, and through every part of it He speaks to us now, telling us what He has done for men in the days of old, what He has done for all mankind in all times, what He is doing for us now; pointing out the way to Himself, encouraging us to enter on that way, warning us of the dangers which beset us by the way, giving us gleams of light from above to cheer us and guide us on the way.

This is all that I think it necessary to say at present about the Bible as one single book. At a later time we may perhaps return to this subject with greater advantage. Let us now think of the Bible not as one, but as many books. This is an important fact about it which is too often forgotten. The latest part of it is very old-nearly eighteen hundred years old but the oldest part of it is far older than that, going back into distant times, when it is impossible to talk of years with any certainty. And from the time of the oldest books to the newest the other books made their appearance one after the other without much pause. Some were written just as they stand: others evidently had small beginnings, and have grown up by slow degrees to their present form. Some were written by great men, whose names are familiar to us for other reasons; others we have received without any sure knowledge of who it was that wrote them. Kings, priests, prophets, shepherds, fishermen, tentmakersthese and other classes of men had their share in building up our Bible. Some of the books had their first beginnings in wild and barbarous times, others in settled times of law and order. Some were written in bright prosperity, others in the midst of terrors and distresses from warfare with powerful enemies, others from the depths of captivity itself. One thing alone all the authors had in common: they all alike belonged to one people—they were all Jews, worshippers of the one God of Israel.

The first great division which meets us in the Bible is that of the Old and New Testaments. You

all know these names, but I do not think their meaning is well understood. People often speak of the Testament as if there were but one, when they mean the New Testament. But the Old Testament is as much a part of the Bible; and we should go strangely astray, if we were to take all our notions of God's works and ways from the New Testament. 'Testament' means the same thing as 'covenant.' Neither word is very easy to explain shortly. I think you will see its meaning best by regarding it as the kind of understanding which God has with men, the footing on which He deals with them at one time or another. God Himself does not change, but men are always changing; and God's ways of dealing with them cannot therefore always be the same. A father is on different terms with his son, according as he is still a child or has grown up to manhood. Supposing the father to be wise and loving, and the son to be dutiful and loving too, still when childhood has passed there will be a change in the outward form and the inward spirit of the understanding between them; there will usually be less of actual commanding and obeying, more of sympathy and mutual helpfulness.

Now the Jewish people went through a change like that. God promised by the mouth of Jeremiah (xxxi. 31 ff.) that in due time He would make a new covenant, a new testament, with the house of Israel, writing His law no longer on tables of stone, but in their hearts and inward parts; and that promise was fulfilled when Christ came. Properly therefore the Old Testament means God's manner

of dealing with His people in the old time before Christ came, and the New Testament His new manner of dealing with His people after Christ came. And then the books take their names from the state of things described there. We call the earlier books for shortness the Old Testament, because they tell us about God's ways under His Old Testament or Covenant. We call the later books for shortness the New Testament, because they set forth the nature of God's New Testament or Covenant, which began for mankind with the death and resurrection of His Blessed Son.

This leads us to the great difference between the books of the Old and New Testaments, as declared in the text. I have before preached on those words from the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews as a Christmas text: to-day they will help us to see the likeness and the unlikeness of the two great divisions of the Bible. "God, who at sundry times. and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son." First, Old and New Testaments have this one thing in common- -God speaks in both. He spoke to the men of old time. He spoke to the men of the apostles' generation. What He taught both the one and the other is written down in the two parts of the Bible, and through that writing He still speaks to us.

So much for the sameness; now for the differences. Under the old covenant He spoke to the fathers, the forefathers of the apostles-yes, and the spiritual forefathers of us, for we too are the children of