Moses and David and Isaiah, drawing our life from them and their work. But He could not speak to them all at once, for they lived at different times; many hundreds of years divided them. He could not speak to them all alike, for they were in different stages of growth and knowledge, and what would suit one would not suit another. So He spoke to them at sundry times and in divers manners, here a little and there a little, making the different and partial and broken declarations of His name and His will combine together into one whole, bestowing thus on the later generations a richer and fuller knowledge than any of their forefathers had enjoyed. Lastly, all this speech of His under the Old Testament was through prophets, men liable to fall into weakness and sin, each declaring some part of God's message, but only a part, each bearing his witness chiefly by words, each at best a trusty messenger, but nothing

more.

But in those last days a new order of things had come in. No longer in broken and scattered words from the stammering lips of men, no longer by a line of various messengers; but in one perfect life full of glorious words and full of deeds which had a yet more powerful voice than words, God had spoken once for all, and that life was the life of His only begotten Son, the exact likeness of His own nature, so far as it could be expressed in human character. This then is the substance of the New TestamentGod speaking in His Son. The words apply in the simplest and truest sense to the Gospels, but as we shall see presently they may take in likewise what

ever is contained in all our books of the New Testament, Acts and Epistles and Revelation as well. The Old Testament brings before us the hope of man, the promise of God; the New makes known the glory and rest of man, the fulfilment of God.

Next time I hope to speak of the Old Testament more particularly, especially of its first five books. I trust we shall be able to see how little we can afford to do without those records of an early time, even now that we are living in the sunshine of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He came not to destroy, He Himself tells us, but to fulfil. Looking back into the dim early world in which the faith in the one true God began, we are enabled to read its story not only with heightened interest, but with greatly increased profit, now that we can turn upon it the light which comes from the Perfect Son in whom the Father was well pleased. And again, the form of the Son Himself rises in far greater clearness and glory before our eyes when we have learned to know and love His many forerunners from Abraham onwards, and so been duly prepared to welcome at last the full message of the kingdom of heaven.

XIV

THE BIBLE. (11.) THE OLD TESTAMENT A HISTORY OF THE JEWS

"IN Jewry is God known: His name is great in Israel."-Psalm lxxvi. I.

A FORTNIGHT ago we began to consider the Bible and its different parts. We saw that first and foremost it is divided into two great well-known parts, the Old and New Testaments, neither of which ought to be read and cherished without the other. The name Testament, we saw, which is the same as Covenant, means here properly the kind of understanding between God and His people, the particular footing on which He treats them. In old times they were like children, they needed a different sort of treatment from what they need in later days, and so they were under the Old Covenant or Testament, and the book called the Old Testament is the account of what God spoke to them in one way or another under that Old Covenant. But when Christ came another state of things began. God's people had grown ripe

for a new and more advanced teaching. He took them into a New Covenant or Testament. His dealings with them were on a new footing; and the book called the New Testament is the account of what God has spoken to them in one way or another under that New Covenant.

Still the old is not meant to be driven out by the coming in of the new. When we pass from childhood to manhood, we are still the same creatures in body and mind, though much be changed and much added. We do not begin all over again. We carry with us to our grave that which has been formed within us in our early years. The teaching we have received as

children does not all at once lose its value. Some of it having been learned once for all does not need to be repeated, but still we should fare badly if it were lost out of our minds. Some of it again has till now been obliged to be put in such shapes as a young head and heart can receive: when we grow up, we can take it in more truly and more completely in another shape; but still we shall do well not to forget either, if we wish to have a hold on the perfect truth. Lastly, even the best and ripest among us are always liable to fits of what we must consider as childishness, slipping back into a wild and ungoverned state which they ought to have outgrown, and for them assuredly the rougher and more childish kind of teaching has not lost its use.

Even so is it with the Old and New Testaments. There are many things in the Old Testament which belong to the old state of things, and cannot without mischief be applied to us now exactly as they stand.

There is an undying lesson in them, but it requires to be well-considered and explained before it can be applied. Yet, for all that, the value of the Old Testament for us is not worn out and cannot wear out. Though we are living in a late age of the world, many of us are still so unripe in heart and mind that the lessons of those early days have a special fitness for us. For all of us the Old Testament is a useful way of entrance into the New Testament. We never can understand the New Testament while we are ignorant of the Old Testament. It supplies as it were the alphabet, the letters, the simple thoughts, in which the higher and deeper lessons of the New Testament are written. Nay more, there is much about our life here on earth as God would have it be which is taught plainly in the Old Testament, and which is either not taught at all or taught very slightly in the New Testament. Any one who tries to carve out for himself a religion out of the New Testament will assuredly make something extremely unlike the true complete Christian faith. He cannot throw away half his Bible without throwing away half of what should be his belief too.

I said to you before that all the books of the Bible, Old and New Testament alike, have one thing in common: they were all written by Jews, worshippers of the one God of Israel. Unless you get this fact clearly into your minds, you never can properly understand the Bible, least of all the Old Testament. You may be able to snatch at single stories and sayings here and there, but you will lose the thread of the chapters which you hear or read,