UNITY OF LIFE TO BE LEARNED FROM THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.

[TRENCH.]

Holy Scripture gives testimony for a pervading unity, an inner law according to which it unfolds itself as a perfect and organic whole, in the epoch at which growth in it ceases, and it appears henceforth as a finished book. So long as humanity was growing, it grew. But when the manhood of our race was reached-when man had attained his highest point, even union with God in his Son-then it comes to a close. It carries him up to this, to his glorious goal, to the perfect knitting again of the broken relations, through the life, and death, and resurrection of Him in whom God and man were perfectly atoned. So long as there was anything more to tell, any new revelation of the name of God, any new relations of grace and nearness into which he was bringing his creatures, so long the Bible was a growing, expanding book; but when all is given, when God, who at divers times spake to the world by his servants, had now spoken his last and fullest Word by his Son, then to this Book, the record of that Word of his, there is added no more, even while there is nothing more to add; though it cannot end till it has shown in prophetic vision how this latest and highest which now has been given to man, shall unfold itself into the glory and blessedness of a perfected kingdom of heaven.

For thus, too, it will mark itself as one, by returning visibly in its end upon its beginning. Vast as the course which it has traced, it has been a circle still, and in that most perfect form comes back to the point from whence it started. The heaven, which had disappeared from the earth

ince the third chapter of Genesis, reappears again in visible manifestation, in the latest chapters of the Revelation. The ree of life, whereof there were but faint reminiscences in all he intermediate time, again stands by the river of the water of life, and again there is no more curse. Even the very differences of the forms under which the heavenly kingdom reappears are deeply characteristic, marking, as they do, not merely that all is won back, but won back in a more glorious shape than that in which it was lost, because won back in the Son. It is no longer Paradise, but the New Jerusalem -no longer the garden, but now the city, of God, which is on earth. The change is full of meaning; no longer the garden, free, spontaneous, and unlaboured, even as man's blessedness in the state of a first innocence would have been; but the city, costlier, indeed, more glorious, more wonderful, but, at the same time, the result of toil, of labour, of pains -reared into a nobler and more abiding habitation, yet with stones which, after the pattern of the "elect corner-stone," were each in its time laboriously hewn and painfully squared for the places which they fill.

And surely we may be permitted to observe, by the way, that this idea, which we plainly trace and recognise, of Scripture as a whole, this its architectonic character, cannot be without its weight in helping to determine the canonical place and worth of the Apocalypse, which, as is familiar to many among us, has been sometimes called in question. Apart from all outward evidences in its favour, do we not feel that this wondrous book is needed where it is ?-that it is the key-stone of the arch, the capital of the pillar-that Holy Scripture had seemed maimed and imperfect without it-that a winding-up with the Epistles would have been no true winding-up; for in them the Church appears as still warring and struggling, still compassed about with the weaknesses and infirmities of its moral existence-not triumph

ing yet, nor yet having entered into its glory? Such a termination had been as abrupt, as little satisfying, as if, in the lower sphere of the Pentateuch, we had accompanied the children of Israel to the moment when they were just entering on the wars of Canaan, and no book of Joshua had followed, to record their battles and their victories, and how these did not cease till they rode on the high places of the earth, and rested each man quietly in the lot of his conquered inheritance.

Thus, brethren, we have been led to contemplate these oracles of God in their deep inner unity; we have seen, not merely how they possess, but how we can reverently trace them in the possession of, that oneness of plan and purpose, which should make them effectual for the unfolding the spiritual life of men. We have seen how men's expectations of finding something there which they did not find, have ever grown out of a mistaken apprehension of what a Scripture ought to be; how the presence of that which they miss would indeed have marred it, would have contradicted its fundamental idea, would have been a discord amid its deep harmonies, even as the discords which men find in it come oftentimes as its highest harmonies to the purged ear. Nor is it without a warning to us that these murmurings and complaints do most often grow out of a moral fault in them that make them. Men have lost the key of knowledge-the master-key which would have opened to them every doorand then they wander with perplexed hearts up and down this stately palace which the Eternal Wisdom has builded, but of which every goodlier room is closed against them, till, in the end, they complain that it is no such peerless palace after all, but only as other works which man's art has reared. Nor is this strange; for unless they bring to it a moral need, unless that moral need be to them the interpreter of every part, and gather all that is apparently abnormal in it under

higher and reconciling law, the Book, in its deepest meanng and worth, will remain a riddle to them still. And this moral need, what is it? It is the sense that we are sundered and scattered each from God, each from his fellow-man, each from himself-with a faith that it is the will of God to gather all these scattered and these sundered together anew -this, with the conviction which will rise out of this, that all which bears on the circumstances of this recovering and regathering is precious; that nothing is of highest worth which does not bear upon this. Then we shall see in this Word that it is the very history which we require-that altogether, nothing but that-the history of the restoring the defaced image of God, the reconstitution of a ruined but godlike race, in the image of God's own Son-the deliverance of all in that race, who were willing to be delivered from the idols of sense, from the false gods who would hold them in bondage, and would fain make them their drudges and their slaves.

And, brethren, what is it that shall give unity to our lives, but the recognition of the same great idea which gives unity to this Book? Those lives, they seem often broken into parts, with no visible connection between one part and another: our boyhood, we know not how to connect it with our youth, our youth with our manhood; the different tasks of our life, we want to bind them up into a single sheaf-to feel that, however manifold and apparently disconnected they are, there is yet a bond that binds them into one. Our hearts, we want a central point for them, as it were a heart within the heart, and we oftentimes seek this in vain. Oh what a cry has gone up from thousands and ten thousands of souls! and this the burden of the cry, I desire to be one in the deep centre of my being, to be one, and not manyto be able to reduce my life to one law-to be able to explain it to myself in the master-light of one idea, to be no longer rent, torn, and distracted, as I am now.

And whence shall this oneness come? where shall we find amid all the chances and changes of the world, this law o our life, this centre of our being, this key-note to which set ting our lives, their seeming discords shall appear as thei deepest harmonies? Only in God, only in the Son of Godonly in the faith, that what Scripture makes the end and purpose of God's dealing with his race, is also the end and purpose of his dealing with each one of us—namely, that his Son may be manifested in us; that we, with all things which are in heaven, and all things which are in earth, may be gathered together in Christ, even în him.

ON THE RIGHT METHOD OF READING OF THE SCRIPTURES.

[ARNOLD.]

It is too common a case to excite our wonder, that knowledge is not always followed by goodness: and we know that without goodness God cannot be glorified. It seems, then, a very difficult thing to read on a great variety of subjects, and yet read as God's scholars: difficult, as most Christian graces are difficult; but not surely impossible, if we follow the right way of effecting it. Now, we cannot read all things as God's scholars, if we have never been his scholars at all; we cannot find him, or see him, by faith, in every place, if we have never learned to know his voice where it speaks in its own proper tones to us. In other words, we cannot make a Christian use of other books, if the Book of God itself be not familiar to us. Nor, again, can we possibly turn common things into our spiritual food: we shall not easily be led to think of the highest things by the study of books on worldly matters, if, even when the occasion directly calls for it, our thoughts are still slow to travel heavenward. I can conceive