its influences, have declared it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument, the only adequate organ, of humanity; the organ and instrument of all the gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is privileged to rise above himself, to leave behind and lose his dividual phantom self, in order to find his true self in that distinctness where no division can be,—in the Eternal I AM, the ever-living WORD, of whom all the elect, from the archangel before the throne to the poor wrestler with the Spirit until the breaking of day, are but the fainter and still fainter echoes."

LECTURE II.

THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE.

EPHESIANS I. 9, 10.

Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in himself; that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; even in him.

IT is the necessary condition of a book which shall exert any great and effectual influence, which shall stamp itself with a deep impression upon the minds and hearts of men, that it must have a unity of purpose: one great idea must run through it all. There must be some single point in which all its different rays converge and meet. The common eye may fail to detect the unity, even while it unconsciously feels its power: yet this is necessary still; this growing out of a single root, this subordination of all the parts to a single aim, this returning of the end upon the beginning. We feel this in a lower sphere; nothing pleases much or

long, nothing takes greatly hold, no work of human genius or art, which is not at one with itself, which has not form, in the highest sense of that word; which does not exclude and include. And it is hardly necessary to add, that if the effects are to be deep and strong, this idea must be a great one-not one which shall play upon the surface of their minds that apprehend it, but reaching far down to the dark foundations out of sight of this awful being of ours.

Now what I should desire to make the subject of my lecture to-day is exactly this, that there is one idea in Holy Scripture, and this idea the very highest; that all in it is referable to this; that it has the unity of which I spake; that a guiding hand and spirit is traceable throughout, including in it all which bears upon one mighty purpose, excluding all which has no connexion with that; however, from faulty or insufficient views, we might have expected it there; however certainly it would have intruded itself there, had this been a work of no higher than human skill. I would desire to shew that it fulfils this condition, which is the necessary condition of a book which shall be mighty in operation; that it is this organic whole, informed by this one idea;-how this one explains what it has and what it has not; much in its form, and yet more in its substance;

why it should be brief here, and large there; why it omits wholly this, and only touches slightly upon that; why vast gaps, as at first sight might seem to us, occur in some portions of it; infinite minuteness of detail in others; how things which at first we looked to find in it, we do not find, and others, which we were not prepared for, are there.

And this unity if it can be shewn to exist, none can reply that it was involved and implied in the external accidents of the Book, and that we have mistaken the outward aggregation of things similar for the inward coherence of an organic body: since these accidents, if the word may be permitted, are all such as would have created a sense of diversity; and it is only by penetrating through them, and not suffering them to mislead us, that we do attain to the deeper and pervading unity of Scripture. Its unity is not, for instance, such as might apparently be produced by a language common to all its parts. For it is scarcely possible, I suppose, for a deeper gulf to divide two languages than divides the two in which severally the Old and the New Testament are written. Nor can it be likeness of form which has deceived us into believing that unity of spirit exists; for the forms are various and diverse as can be conceived; it is now song, now history; now dialogue, now narration; now

familiar letter, now prophetic vision. There is scarcely a form of composition in which men have thrown their thoughts, which does not find its archetype here. Nor yet is the unity of this volume brought about through all the parts of it being the upgrowth of a single age, and so all breathing alike the spirit of that age; for none such beheld the birth of this Book, which was well nigh two thousand years ere it was fully formed and had reached its final completion. Nor can its unity, if it exists, be accounted for from its having had but one class of men for its human authors: since men not of one class alone, but of many, and those the widest apart, kings and herdsmen, warriors and fishermen, wise men and simple, have alike brought their one stone or more, and been permitted to build them in to this great dome and temple which God through so many ages was rearing to its glorious height. Deeper than all its outward circumstances, since these all would have tended to an opposite result, this unity must lie-in the all-enfolding seed out of which the whole book is evolved.

But this unity of Scripture, where is it? from what point shall we behold and recognize it? Surely from that in which those verses which I have taken from the Epistle to the Ephesians will place us; when we regard it as the story of the knitting anew the broken rela