only be presented to you in a vessel. Thus cach saving truth is enclosed, is contained in a mystery which has in itself no saving virtue.

At last, as at first, you will not understand everything in the doctrine of the gospel. This is probably because you had necessarily to be saved by things that you could not comprehend. Is there any misfortune in that? Are you any the less saved? Does it become you to ask account from God of a remnant of obscurity which does not injure you, when he so prodigally showers light on all that is essential to you?

Love first; one day you shall know.

3. The Bible and Christianity; Progress in
Christianity.

It is made a stumbling-block that the Bible should not have been so arranged as to render divisions impossible.. No doubt, that he who gave the Bible could have given a creed in its place, and the most perfect of all creeds. . . . But why should he have done so? That man might not be obliged to enter immediately, and with his whole being, into relations with him? That the strict provision and the concentration of religious ideas, should dispense him from employing his conscience in the study? That nothing might put his uprightness and candour to the test? That he might receive the true meaning of the Bible ready made, and not

make use of the Bible to determine it?

In a word, that he should remain passive there, where it is most important that his activity and liberty should be displayed, his responsibility engaged? God be praised, that it has not been so ordered, and that man is at once capable and bound to discover, through all the parts, all the personalities of which the Bible is composed, that general and eternal truth which only presents itself to him in the Bible, with a character in some sort occasional, under the form of an application, and always blended with some event or some life. God be praised that this our book has not the clearness of a symbol or creed; that we are not forced to comprehend it aright, and that we may give many meanings to his word. God be praised that he has left our activity some share in the acquirement of faith; and that, willing our belief to be an action, he has not added to the Bible, all-sufficient for simple hearts, the dangerous appendix of a symbolism.

We must not flatter ourselves with being faithful in proportion that we are literal; often we shall be so much the less so; and this is easily understood. We are very far from possessing an exact translation; and if in order to have the Word of God we must have the letter of that word, why, then, we do not possess God's word.

It is not in a chain of dry sentences that God reveals to us his will and the principles of his government; it is essentially by facts. In the book he

This

has given us, everything is history or everything is connected in history. It is sometimes said that this antique and oriental book refuses to assimilate itself with the modern forms of our thought. Oh! in this book of the human race, the local and the temporary disappear in the universal! Will you not believe the testimony rendered by the child? Without one aid of archæology, he understands the Bible as he does the talk of his playfellows. language of the childhood of nations seems made. for human children. But the child does better than understand; these exquisite narratives are his delight. Much is said about improving and explaining solemn truths; this is the favourite task of writers for children. But the Author of the Bible is their master in that as in all besides. Who could have so well spread honey on the edges of this cup offered to all men, at the bottom of which childhood finds nothing bitter? For it, everything in the divine chalice is honey. What book more attractive? What more glorious stores, what more dazzling marvel? Where was there ever gravity tempered with more grace, or grace accompanied by more gravity? Where was morality ever better exemplified in action? This whole book is the history of an education, a vast and sublime. education that of the human race; and the child receives it without need of being told so, as its one education.

The silence of the gospel on such and such a

subject is not always a reason for our silence. The gospel contains all the truths necessary to salvation and the conduct of human life; but of those truths some are explicitly contained therein, and others implicitly. The gospel could not say everything. Had it done so, preaching would have been superfluous, and by preaching I mean all those developments, applications, and explanations of which the gospel is susceptible; the sermon is in this sense only one of the forms of preaching. If the gospel was to have said all, it never would have ended, never would end; it would be constantly growing, and the world, to use the expression of St. John," could not contain the books that should be written" (John xxi. 25).

The gospel would be much less perfect if it were more complete, much less eloquent if it said all, much less powerful if it were more scientific in its method and more strict in its language. We insist pertinaciously upon treating it as a book or a treaty, but it is neither a book, nor a treaty, nor a code. What, then, is it? It is the gospel. It is a divine word, conceived and formularized so as to address the whole man, and consequently totally unlike that abstract method, that system of ideal distinctions, with which science cannot dispense; nay, which constitutes science, but only touches the intellect, and cannot reach the man. All in the gospel is synthetic, complex, intermingled; symmetry and material proportions are noticeable only in their

absence; almost everything appears circumstantial and occasional. We have dialogues, allocutions, letters; we should search in vain for that general and abstract character which appears to us more in conformity with the majesty of a universal religion; and although there be in the gospel neither void nor superabundance, there is perhaps not one of us who does not feel surprised to meet there with certain things and not to meet with others. This is what the gospel should be, to give full scope to all our faculties, to leave much to be done by the logic of the heart and conscience, to make our religion indeed one of grace and liberty, in other words, a spiritual obedience; the word religion has no other meaning. Now, such a compilation of the gospel as an analytical spirit might have conceived and desired, would have greatly hindered this admirable design of God.

On those points upon which we cannot avail ourselves of what the Bible says, a Christian may avail himself of what it does not say. It does not attempt to make of its silence an absolute limit to our thoughts; beyond a certain line it refuses us its assistance, but that is all. That God who has himself responded to the most pressing questions of agonized humanity, puts to that humanity questions in presence of which he seems to leave it to itself. These questions are many and grave; they issue from the centre of the globe, the centre of society; and all that faith exacts from us is that we should make use of what has been revealed, to remain