For

through all the length and breadth of its revelations, flashing out like heavenly light from every page, teaching us, in the sense of guilt, our need of an infinite Saviour; in the sense of sin, our need of God's own Spirit dwelling in us; and then shewing to us the Almighty Jehovah, before whose awful throne our souls bow overpowered, as a reconciled Father in Christ Jesus. here the revelation of mysteries is mingled by God himself with all those appeals and applications which reach, and mould, and influence the moral faculties. All the elements which may be separately found in human teaching are harmonised and blended into the air of heaven. Its very difficulties, as St. Austin most wisely teaches us, are suited to our needs, and so framed as to sharpen our desires for truth, whilst they give to our faith the exercise and trial which it needs. This is the treasure hidden in the

* Obscurum aliquid est ; non ut tibi negetur, sed ut exerceat accepturum... Voluit ut exerceris in pulsando; voluit ut pulsanti aperiret, &c.-AUG. in Psal. cxlvi.. tom. iv. fol. 1644. ed. Benedict.

field; and cheap indeed would be its purchase, though a man should sell all other learning to buy it. But this is only to be gained from a patient and a humble study of God's word. A mere argumentative acquaintance with the various passages which seem to bear most directly upon controverted doctrines will be no substitute for such a knowledge: these will not breed within us, for example, that hearty faith in the Trinity, which grows up in the faithful man, as day by day his soul is taught more to rest, in times of darkness and distress, upon the blessed assurance that he is justified before a holy God by a living union with His own coequal Son; and as, in the weariness of his daily struggle with the remainders of corruption, he more and more brings out into reality and life the true presence in his heart of that Almighty Comforter who is working with and in him, and who will at last make him meet for the unclouded presence of the Holy One. This is a true faith in the Trinity; widely separate, on the one hand, from the unreality of the religion of the mystic, who, resolving

all faith into its inner life, in his subtle search after the vital principle, leaves go his hold of those great external truths on which, as on the articulations of the frame, all the rest of religion must depend: and, on the other, not less diverse from that cold concinnity of intellectual adjustment which changes this great mystery from a living principle of godliness into a mere subtilty of dogmatic teaching.

Seek, we charge you, as you love your souls, thus to use that sacred deposit which on this day the Church brings out before your eyes turn not from it idly, as from some ineffectual dogma of the schools; gaze not on it curiously, as on some fitting thesis for skilful argument; but receive it with earnest reverence; lay hold on it with your affections, as the very pith and kernel of that blessed revelation which from it unfolds itself in every part into a pervading principle of life, and peace, and joy.

And hence follows again, on a different ground, the same supreme importance of a

constant study of God's word; for to no other teaching may we trust, to carry out into detail the dogmas of our faith. Nowhere else can we be absolutely safe from imbibing, with the truth, some erroneous leaven, which may work strangely and fearfully within us. To this danger we must be exposed when we follow any uninspired expounder of doctrine: his virtues and his faults, his circumstances and those of the Church around him, the peculiar aspect of the truth for which he is compelled to strive, and the especial errors which he is obliged to combat, all these, will, of necessity, impart a certain colour to the faith as he delivers it, and alter, in a certain measure, its effect upon him who receives it. Those only can we follow with absolute security who "know these things" as "freely given to them of God;" and who "speak" them "not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth" (1 Cor. ii. 12, 13). But even beyond this, great as it is, without supposing any charm to lurk in the very

letter of the Scripture, we may look for a peculiar blessing on its teaching. We need not fear, with our wisest divines of the seventeenth century, to speak of "the word as one of those arteries which convey the Spirit to us." *

Hence, therefore, in a two-fold way, does the faithful study of the Scripture, by increasing in us the gift of the Holy Ghost, secure our receiving rightly the mysteries of God: first, since it is the especial province of the Spirit to reveal these mysteries, those will the most surely grow in light who grow in grace; they who the most humbly seek His teaching will be the most surely led on into all truth. It is written in God's word, "Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things" (1 John, ii. 20). "The anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you" (ver. 27). And there is in such words a deep and blessed truth, which must not be suppressed because it has been disfigured and debased by fana

* Bishop Andrewes' Sermon I. on Pentecost.