How many of your people will see Him and live? something, and that not an easy something, will depend on you, your word of counsel and rebuke, most of all your word of comfort-God be gracious to you. Well, you say to me, the text was very cheering, the conclusion of the sermon is very depressing; very likely, I dare say it is, and, indeed, I feel sure that the apostle himself found it, occasionally, a somewhat hard matter to get the magnificence and the glory of the manifestation brought into such focus that the poor Jews and Greeks of Corinth could see what it meant or might come to mean to them. I am sure that he met many Jews who only asked for signs in the hope of puzzling him, and many Greeks who would not have seen any difference between folly and wisdom, even if they had found it. But, beloved, he was not working alone; the Holy Ghost was in him, with him, and upon him, a physician recognising every man's case, constitution, and history, and sending the word that he was empowered to speak, straight to the conscience, the case, and the cure. Even with that, all are not brought in; but He is with the man who tries, and will put into the heart a wakening and conviction, when His servant throws himself on His help. Ah yes, indeed, and often when He does not, for

we do not strive alone, and sometimes we do not strive at all.

It is for this gift that you are coming to-day. I do not say that we speak and think with humility about it; it is with a lower sense than our own unfitness; it is of our own almost, I would say, "non-entity." We cannot see what He will do by us; let Him do with us all that He will.

Have I been speaking as if the sense of sin was the only key to the calling, the desire of repentance the seal of forgiveness, the ascertaining our own need of salvation the revelation of the fulness of the power and wisdom? Our Father surely has ways that we cannot trace or number, by which He brings to Him who is lifted up men to be drawn into Him. We can love the purity, the glorious truth, and spiritual beauty of the Lord; and the sense of sin, itself the result of varied experiences, may come in varied ways and measures, nay, does so come to every soul that feels it, and we know that often and often it pierces deepest those who have taken the most care to keep themselves from it. for all that, we remember, it is Christ crucified whom we preach, it is Christ crucified who to the called is the power and wisdom; and why crucified? for sin, for our sins, and yours, and

K

But,

theirs, the whole of whose iniquity was laid upon Him. We seek Him in His beauty and majesty, but we begin to seek Him because we want the crucified, and when our eyes are opened we find all the rest. And so we preach Him, not the founder of Christianity, the competitor with Socrates and Buddha, but Christ crucified-verily and indeed the desire, and desirable chosen treasure, the desire of all nations-verily and indeed the Maker of the new earth and the new heavens; but first and foremost the crucified, and then to those who obey the call, the fulfilment of all the signs and the contentment of the desires that are to grow into the possibility of holding Him so revealed. So we preach, so we have believed.

THREE ADDRESSES ON THE HOLY

SCRIPTURES

I

I DESIRE to use the few minutes devoted to the address this morning for an attempt to put before you my idea of the frame and attitude in which we all ought to approach the study of the word of God, and in which it is especially needful for us to train ourselves, who are by our office bound to the constant practice of that study, and have to answer the questions and to some extent direct the work of those who give themselves to the same. In what I am going to say I do not intend any specific or exclusive reference to the subject of what is called the Higher Criticism of the Holy Scriptures very possible that it is in reference to that form of study that my counsels to you may have the greatest practical importance, but what I shall say will have a wider and more general intention of application.

It is

I will begin with laying it down as a fact that the Bible cannot be treated as any other book. First, it is not like any other book; no other book comes to us with a claim authorised by the

Church of our Baptism as containing the word of God, or containing so constant assertion of its claim to be heard as the word of God; or as cited, one part of it by another part, by a sort of mutual testimony, as of divine authority; or as consistently upheld by the long consent of the Christian ages as the law and the testimony. So it comes to us, and it is not reduced to the level of other books even by the complete repudiation of every point of this claim at the hands of those who would treat it otherwise. This means that it is to us a paramount witness of truth; if it fail, if the Lord Jesus Christ is not in it and through it all, the key and binding-string and central truth that holds it all together, then the result of its promulgation is the most ghastly of all delusions and disappointments, by which all the best instincts of human nature are repelled and belied, a phantasm by which he who would deceive us would be no fit object of worship, even if he should exist at all. A book which comes to us thus cannot be like any other.

Secondly, our own relation to it is such that we could not treat it so. We have been brought up in profound respect for and love of it; we have been taught to base all our faith in the unseen world upon it; our convictions or anticipations of eternity; our belief in immortality; our ideas