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 connexion 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 many-to 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 of our life, this centre of our being, this key-note to which setting

our lives, their seeming discords shall appear as their deepest harmonies? Only in God, only in the Son of God-only 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 in Him.

LECTURE III.

THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE.

MATTHEW XIV. 20.

They did all eat, and were filled.

It was the aim of my preceding Lecture to trace the unity which reigns in Scripture, and how it has a law to which each part of it may be referred, a root out of which it all grows. It will be my purpose in the present to bring out before you how this Book, which is one, is also manifold; a fact which we may not be so ready to recognize the instant that it is presented to us, as the other. For the truth which occupied us last Sunday, of the Bible as one Book, not merely one because bound together in the covers of a single volume, but as being truly one, while it testifies in every part of one and the same Lord, while it is every where the utterance of one Spirit; this, whether consciously or unconsciously, has strong possession of men's minds in this our land. We feel, and rightly, that every attempt to consider any of

its parts in absolute isolation from the other, rent away from the connexion in which it stands, is false, and can lead to no profitable result; and it is hardly possible to estimate too highly the blessing of this, that the band which binds for us the parts of this volume together is unbroken even in thought; that we still feel ourselves to have, not a number of sacred books, but one sacred Book, which not merely for convenience sake but out of a far deeper feeling we comprehend under one name.

Yet, on the other hand, there are other truths which, if we mean to enter into full possession of our treasures, we need also to make thoroughly our own. This idea of the oneness of Holy Scripture is incomplete and imperfect, till it pass into the higher idea of its unity; till we acknowledge that it is not sameness which reigns there; that, besides being one, it is also many-that as in the human body we having many members are one body, and the perfection of the body is not the repetition of the same member over and over again, but the harmonious tempering of different members, all being instinct with one life-not otherwise is it with Scripture. For in that, whether we look at the Old or New Testament, the same richness and variety of form reveal themselves, so that it may truly be said, that out of the ground of this Paradise, the Lord God has made

"to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food;" all that the earth has fairest appearing here in fairer and more perfect form-the fable, only here transformed into the parable-the ode into the psalm--oracles into prophecies-histories of the world into histories of the kingdom of heaven. Nor is tragedy wanting, though for Edipus, we have the man of Uz; nor epos, though for the tale of Troy divine, ours is the story of the New Jerusalem, "which came down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband." And it will be my desire to shew how this also was needful, if it was to be the Book which should indeed leaven the world, which should offer nutriment, not merely for some men, but for all men; which should not tyrannically lop men till they were all of one length, but should encourage in every man the free development of all which God had given him ;—if the Spirit by this Word was to sanctify all in every man which was capable of being sanctified; which, coming originally from God, was to be redeemed from the elements of this world, and in purer shape to be restored to Him again.

It will be my task then to consider to-day the relations of likeness and difference in which various parts of Scripture stand to one another; to shew how the differences are not accidental, but do plainly correspond to certain fixed dif