Division SS b 00
Section * — ' l — *
BIBLICAL CRITICISM
BY THE LATEX
RIGHT REV. WILLIAM STUBBS, D.D.
{Reprinted by permission of Messrs. Longmans from a Charge delivered
in 1893, and from Ordination Addresses of the Bishop.]
WITH PREFACE
BY
PROFESSOR MONTAGU BURROWS, M.A.
PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTEE.
LONDON :
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE,
NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C.
43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C.
BRIGHTON: 129, north street.
New York : E. S. GORHAM.
1905.
WORKS BY THE
Right Rev. WILLIAM STUBBS, D.D.,
Formerly Bishop of Oxford.
ORDINATION ADDRESSES. Edited by the Rev. E. E.
Holmes. With Photogravure Portrait. Crown 8vo, is. 6d.
net.
VISITATION CHARGES. Delivered to the Clergy and
Churchwardens of the Dioceses of Chester and Oxford. Edited
by E. E. Holmes, Honorary Canon of Christ Church, and
Vicar of Sonning, formerly Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop
of Oxford. Svo, Js. 6d. net.
LECTURES ON EUROPEAN HISTORY. Edited by
A&THUR Hassall, M.A., Student, Tutor, and sometime
Censor of Christ Church, Oxford. Svo, \2s. 6d. net.
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTIONS TO THE ROLLS
SERIES. Collected and edited by Arthur Hassall, M.A.,
Student, Tutor, and sometime Censor of Christ Church. Svo,
1 2 s. 6d. net.
THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS. With 2 Maps. Fcap.
Svo, 2s. 6d. {Epochs of Modern His lory.)
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.,
39, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON,
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY.
PREFACE
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
has, at my suggestion, sought from the Publishers,
Messrs. Longmans, and obtained permission, to put
forth in a separate form certain pages, on the sub-
ject of the so-called Higher Criticism, extracted
from their recently issued " Charges " and " Ad-
dresses " of the late Bishop Stubbs. These excerpts
seemed too valuable to be lost in the midst of
matter which, however excellent, was not likely
to be extensively read, at least by laymen. Their
usefulness for the present time consists not only
in their evidence of the heartfelt sense entertained
by the Bishop of the perils of reckless criticism, but
in the fact that this evidence proceeds from one
whom many consider to have been the greatest
historian the English people possessed in the
nineteenth century. Such a man has earned a
right to say, " We cannot treat Holy Scripture as
any other book, even if it were susceptible of such
treatment; but it is like no other, and the fact
that it is like no other has led critics to apply to
it methods of arbitrary, wanton, and conjectural
criticism which, if applied to Greek or Roman, or
even Anglo-Saxon literature, would be laughed
out of court." — Charges, p. 142.
The extracts have been printed in the order of
subjects in spite of the repetition which is the
occasional result.
MONTAGU BURROWS.
Oxford, Jan. 13, 1905.
CONTENTS
Higher Criticism ... ... ... ... ... 5
The Kenosis ... ... ... ... ... 27
The Miraculous in the Bible ... ... ... 36
The Study of the Holy Scriptures ... ... 45
The Psalms ... ... ... ... .., ... 61
BIBLICAL CRITICISM
HIGHER CRITICISM.
Second Visitation Charge, April and
May, 1893, p. 138.
OF important topics you will not be surprised
to hear that I regard as the most important
the discussions on the higher criticism of
the Old Testament Scripture, and the resulting,
but even more directly absorbing question, how far
the results of that criticism may be allowed to
affect the doctrine of the Incarnation, especially
in relation to the fulness and perfection of our
Lord's knowledge. Three years ago, in my first
charge, I ventured to advise that, in the contem-
plation of these questions, we should do well to
maintain an attitude of calmness, patience, and
tolerance for a developing view ; whilst holding
firmly — and it is only by those who do hold firmly
that such calmness, patience, and tolerance can
be maintained — whilst holding firmly the divine
6 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
authority of scripture, and the perfect knowledge,
as well as the perfect power, of the Son of God
Incarnate. I certainly was inclined at the time
to be hopeful, that God, who knows the hearts of
those who raise these questions, and sees the faith
and sincerity of their treatment, would guide, as
time went on, their investigations and speculations
to the confirmation of the faith of others, to edifi-
cation rather than to the increase of doubts,
difficulties, and negations, amongst earnest inquirers
after truth.
Now, however, whilst I would still urge the
calmness, patience, and tolerance as before, I con-
fess that I do not see that the dangers which I
apprehend have become less dangerous than they
were, or the crisis of belief less critical. Time has
been given for the explanation of difficulties, and
they have not been explained : opportunity for
the reconciliation of inconsistencies, and they have
not been reconciled : occasion, ample occasion, for
the reconstruction of affirmative arguments which
seemed to be impaired by the negative character
of the criticism, and they are, to say the least, very
slow, indeed, in the process of reconstruction.
Meanwhile, the leaven of misgiving has spread :
the sermons preached in churches, where better
things might be expected, have, in the mouths of
some of the younger clergy, I fear, taken an apolo-
getic and attenuating tone with regard to the great
features of the faith : and the popular foible, that
nothing should be believed against which any objec-
tion could or can be raised — a weakness of public
sense, which gives to the argument of negation
HIGHER CRITICISM. 7
a preponderant importance before discussion is
fairly begun — has spread accordingly. Manuals
of theology are drawn up and circulated, in which
these difficulties have a place, and find far too
irresolute and indeterminate handling ; matters are
treated as conclusively proved that are only nega-
tively mooted, and the true suspensive attitude of
real criticism is superseded by the assumption that
everything requires to be re-stated and re-proved.
I have no wish to say anything severe of the
scholars whose work has conduced to these painful
stages of theological thought ; for real results, I
fain would hope, they are not. I believe that in
many cases, certainly in all the cases of men with
whom I am personally acquainted, it is the very
strength of the conviction that the verities of the
faith must come out unimpaired from the ordeal
with which they are being tested, that makes them
bold in the handling of matters which men of less
vivid convictions would handle more cautiously.
I admire the strength of their convictions, but I
grieve over the short-sightedness, and I had almost
said the self-will or absolute selfishness, of their
procedure. A man may sometimes, by reason of
his own strong conviction and faith in his own
cause, overstate the case of the adversary to a
degree that is very dangerous to those who, with
all candour, are not blessed with the same strength
of conviction or the same knowledge. A man's
humility will occasionally blind him to the fact
that he may unintentionally be misleading those
to whom his sincerity and humility constitute
a strong- attraction. Rash confidence and too
8 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
generous display of candour will never justify us in
understating the merits of the cause which we
have to defend, or in contenting ourselves with in-
completely realising the issues of our points and
methods of controversy : whether it be the question
of Inspiration, or the Roman Catholic question,
or of Education, or any other that touches the life
of man. In such matters the theologian must be
more than the mere lawyer or the mere logician.
Souls are at stake ; and no one can deceive himself
with the belief that the want of sympathy and care
for others can be excused by the finesse of the
advocate or the assumed impartiality of the im-
petuous critic, or even by the ingenuous setting
forth of the difficulty which the writer has of
making clear to himself his own convictions.
But I will say something now of the questions,
rather than of the school of students that are
raising them. Most of us can remember the cry
that was raised thirty years ago about the Bible
being treated like any other book, and of the good
men who tried to believe that if it were so treated
the result would be that its divine character and
authority would come out all the clearer from the
treatment. I have no doubt that if it were so
treated, that would be the result ; and perhaps, by-
and-by, when the bonds of old faith and the new
elasticity of emancipated thought have changed
their present form and character as forces of action
and reaction, it may come to pass. But I do not
expect to live to see it ; and to men who have
lived and worked and looked on so long as I have,
it seems impossible that the Bible could ever be
HIGHER CRITICISM. 9
treated so. The Bible is not like any other book ;
no other book comes to us with a claim authorised
by the Church of our Baptism as containing the
Word of God ; or containing so constant assertion
of its claim to be heard as the Word of God ; or
as cited, one part of it by another part, by a sort
of mutual testimony, as of divine authority, or as
consistently upheld by the long consent of the
Christian ages as the Law and the Testimony.
So it comes to us, and it is not reduced to the
level of other books even by the complete repudi-
ation of every point of this claim at the hands of
those who would treat it otherwise. This means
that it is to us a paramount witness of truth : if it
fail, that is, if the Lord Jesus is not, in it and
through it all, the key and binding-string and
central truth that holds it all together, then the
result of its promulgation is the most ghastly of
all delusions and disappointments by which all the
best instincts of human nature have ever been
repelled and belied ; it is a phantasm, by which
He who would deceive us or let us deceive our-
selves to our own destruction would be no fit
object of worship, even if such a person exist at
all : a book which comes to us thus cannot be like
any other.
But, secondly, our own relation to it is such that
we cannot look upon it so. We have been brought
up in profound respect for it and love of it. We
have been taught to base all our faith in the
unseen world upon it ; our convictions or antici-
pations of eternity ; our belief in immortality ; our
ideas of the government of the world, of the
10 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
existence of God, of the law of life, right, and
virtue ; of our own subjection to and inability to
keep that law ; of the love that provided a way
to forgiveness and restoration ; of the work of the
atonement, of the Incarnation and the sacrifice ;
of the resurrection of the dead and eternal judg-
ment ; of the destiny of our own souls and of
theirs, without whom happiness in its true per-
fection is altogether inconceivable ; in a word, our
knowledge, if we call it knowledge, our appre-
hension, if we dare not call it knowledge, of all
that is desirable, hopeful, and other than miserable
in this life and that which is to follow it. The
whole form and character of our religious thought
is framed on it ; all has come to us through the
teaching of this book, or through the teaching of
the Church which bases its authority and teaching
upon it. It is impossible for those who have been
so taught to put themselves into a neutral or im-
partial attitude regarding it, without such a strain,
such a wrench of mental and moral force, as drives
them past the central station of fair judgment.
The effort that carries us so far carries us further.
Indifference to Holy Scripture means disregard for
it: we cannot treat it as any other book even if it
were susceptible of such treatment ; but it is like
none other, and, indeed, it is the fact that it is like
no other that has led critics to apply to it methods
of arbitrary, wanton, and conjectural criticism,
which, applied to Greek or Roman, or even Anglo-
Saxon literature, would be laughed out of court.
But do not think that there is not something to
be said on the other side. First, the Bible, although
HIGHER CRITICISM. II
speaking with authority, speaks with an authority
that contemplates proof and deliberate acceptance ;
and, secondly, we, unless our acceptance is to be
servile and abjectly unintelligent, are bound to do
our utmost to realise both what we believe and
why we believe it. That is to say, the Book itself
recognises, and we by our very constitution of
thought and affection are bound to the exercise
of what it recognises, the necessity of judgment,
the proving and holding fast.
Nowif these two considerations formed a dilemma,
the only possible attitude of fair thought would be
one that, long before now, would have set the
Bible, and all religious ideas drawn from it, outside
the region of practical questioning : either it must
be accepted writh the mechanical receptiveness of
an empty vessel, or it must be treated as on a level
with a leading article : it must long ago have lost
the hold on the heart which, humanly speaking, is
the result of nineteen centuries of faith. There
is no such dilemma : so much is clear to our appre-
hension of what is going on in the world now, in
commentary, in controversy, in exposition, in in-
spiration. The practical lesson is the inculcation
of a habit of moral or spiritual, and mental or
intellectual effort. Morally and spiritually we must
try to approach the study writh a living and loving
sense of what we owe to our Bible ; grateful accept-
ance and prayer for guidance ; trustful receptive-
ness : whatever mental trials await us in it, we hold
our Bible as the gift of our Lord's love, with a
desire to prove true that which we humbly believe
that the guidance of the Holy Spirit disposes us
12 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
to believe as true. The effort must be trustful ; it
must also be patient ; longing to see clearer but
conscious of its own imperfection, ready to work
sincerely, candidly, industriously, and also waiting
humbly on what may be the divine reticence in
revelation : recognising contradictions that we can-
not reconcile, looking down promising vistas of
loving anticipation that seem for the present to
close in obscurity ; analysing records of events and
prophecies of events, that need to be brought into
correlation with each other and with the general
purpose of Revelation, and with the course of the
history of the Church and of the world. The
patient attitude will not be shaken, either by the
impetuosity of spiritual devotion or by intolerance
of intellectual suspense. And a third point is
humility ; the sense of our own fallibility in faith
and apprehension of truth, our human and personal
ignorance.
Every one, I imagine, would grant this much on
the moral and spiritual side. But how about the
mental or intellectual attitude of the believing
critic ? Here comes the great difficulty. Given
a book which, as I have said, on its own claims
and on the grounds of our personal relation to it,
is unlike any other book, how can we criticise it ?
Does criticism really require a position of such
indifference as amounts to unfriendliness? Must
all criticism begin with negation ? How about the
parallels and analogies of other literatures and his-
tories on which the laws of criticism must, if they
are to have comparative value, be framed ; how
about the nature of the proof which is to be
HIGHER CRITICISM. 13
demanded, and with or without which the mind
of the student, studying trustfully and lovingly, is
or is not to be contented ? How about theories of
inspiration, and the questions of scientific, literary,
and historic investigation ? And what of the re-
lation between spiritual devotional study, and the
results of these sorts of questionings ? We cannot
say that these are simple considerations, or that
it is easy to formulate answers that will answer all
the questions that are suggested by them. There
is a criticism which analyses and distinguishes in
the hope of making that which is obscure in belief
clear and coherent. There is another which, be-
ginning from an untrustful starting-point, calls
everything into question, assumes the validity of
every negative suggestion, almost the equal cogency
of every new conjecture. There is a criticism
which is a very wantonness of experimental curi-
osity. There is a need of distinction and caution
in calling these by the same name.
But now, first, we have to remember that, as
different subject-matters are only susceptible of or
amenable to different methods of proof, we must
not look for equal cogency in all conclusions from
the tests of evidence applied to the Bible, either in
its several parts, or as compared with other books.
It is only in mathematical matters that perfect
demonstration can be secured, and the Bible is not
a mathematical book. Next in degree to mathe-
matical demonstration comes the sort of proof that
natural science or physical science uses. Some of
the weapons alleged against the theories of inspi-
ration of the Bible are drawn from the scientific
14- UIBLICAL CRITICISM.
armoury ; such, for instance, are those connected
with the theory of creation and the doctrine of
evolution. With regard to these, which lie rather
across the line that I am taking, I must so far
digress as to say that scientific terms are used in
the Bible only for the purpose of helping a revela-
tion of the power and energy and will of Amighty
God ; a revelation which, to be a revelation at all,
must be made in language intelligible to those to
whom it was made, and which must accordingly
be open to the limitations of human speech and
language. As it is a growing revelation, its lan-
guage is liable to variety of interpretation, as the
knowledge of the laws of nature increases, and that
interpretation is susceptible of readjustment. The
original word, cleared of the incrustation of suc-
cessive interpretations, is simple, and, its purpose
being admitted, lies outside of scientific criticism.
Evolution, if it be true, is but what one may call
the grammar of the book of nature : an explana-
tion of a part of the law of the working of powers
for whose origination it cannot, does not really
attempt to give account. And yet before the
demand be made that the history of creation as
told in Holy Scripture should be surrendered as
less than perfectly and essentially true, science
should be called on to produce a theory more
reasonable, more in accord and consistent with its
own manifold demands, than the theory of a per-
sonal creator and a definite period of creation
supplies. This, I think it is no treason to truth
to affirm, no system of science has yet done.
Whether or no the first chapter of Genesis can be
HIGHER CRITICISM. 15
or ever will be reconciled with the discoveries of
physical science, it is surely clear that no system
of physical science has yet provided or can be
expected to provide a theory of causation, or
motive power, which is more reasonable : the whole
cosmogony of evolution can offer only to trace
and disentangle the links of a chain, the origina-
tion and maintenance of which depend on causes
that are as much beyond it as they are beyond the
reach of any other effort of human thought. The
whole array of modern philosophy, negative or
positive, hypothetical or inductive, has not got
nearer solving the problem of existence than did
the schoolmen. But that I must leave : a con-
jecture which is not disproved is not therefore to
be regarded as proved, and a theory which is not
proved is not therefore to be regarded as disproved.
As to the historical and literary criticism : one
may ask, how can the principles of an art which
depends on comparisons be applied to a material
which is without a parallel, and where will you
find a parallel to this material ? Seek it in what
are called the sacred books of the East : what
do you find there ? Except that they are sacred
books, nothing comparable with it or parallel to
it in spirit or authority. If any of them claim to
be older than the Bible, the claim, if proved, would
simply amount to a proof that the antiquity claimed
for Hebrew literature is no unwarrantable assump-
tion. I am sure that the true result of archaeo-
logical inquiry as to the history of the most
ancient nations, is the proof that, so far as literary
possibilities are concerned, there is nothing at all
1 6 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
that would make incredible the antiquity which
the earlier scriptures seem to claim and with
which, humanly speaking, the evidence of their
authenticity is so largely bound up. And are
not the older scriptures, nay all of them, and the
psalms especially, in all moral and spiritual bear-
ings, as much out of commensurable relation with
the latest as with the earliest date assigned to
them ? If the literary remains of Egypt and
Assyria are to any extent older than the Penta-
teuch, they simply show that there is no impossi-
bility in assigning the authorship to Moses. Older
or more modern, they have no element of divine
relation. Here and there there may be suggestions
of a primitive light, there is, so far at least as they
are interpreted, very little of the conviction of sin
or righteousness or judgment, nothing of love,
redemption, and life eternal. Neither does the
rationale of language, considering the necessity of
intelligible transmission, which involves an adap-
tation to the intelligence of the transmitters, supply
any decisive element for criticism. We have no
right to maintain the continuous miracle of invari-
able textual exactness for a period of two thousand
years, many centuries of which were centuries of
confusion and dispersion, during which ancient
forms of language may have suffered translation
and revision. But I am not aware that much
stress is really laid on the minutiae of linguistic
variations, which are themselves beyond the range
of comparative criticism, or that much categorical
dogmatism is based on facts, if there be any such
extant, of the history of textual development.
HIGHER CRITICISM. 1/
RESULTS OF CRITICISM.
It is in the testing and tracing of historical
developments that the greatest efforts of the
higher criticism are made, and the results reached,
which by some are regarded as most certain, and
which to others appear at once most hazardous
and destructive. Far be it from me to speak of
these with the rashness of dogmatism. Historic
criticism is a very patient study, with a very
cautious method, very suspensive conclusions. His-
tory is itself research ; and a research constantly
expecting and receiving revision. It must be so,
by the very limitation of human knowledge, in the
region of matters with which it is most conversant ;
the very variety of human records differing with
the angle of vision, the means, the capacity, and
the purpose of the recorder. How much more so
when and where the record is one without parallel !
The criticism of the Bible from this point of view,
the point of historic analogies, is full of risks ; full
of temptation ; conjecture is very alluring, when
and where the conjecturer is sure that his guess
can only be met by another guess, or by the
enunciation that guessing is unphilosophical, the
acceptance of old theory being unphilosophical
too : the very idea of a guess involves a tacit
suspicion of the authority as it stands.
There is a destructive criticism, lawful within
certain limits ; wherever it has been applied to
Holy Scripture itself, it has failed. There is a
constructive criticism also within certain limits
applicable and lawful ; this has been used with
B
1 8 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
Holy Scripture, and the result has been a sort of
confirmation of some of the evidences, the loss of
which would have been important. There is a
wanton criticism — tentative by destructive action,
tentative in constructive operation — against which
we have to guard all the more carefully because
it is liable to be so used, in irresponsible levity of
hypothesis, as to shake the faith of those who
listen curiously to it ; a trifling with the word of
God. It is a grievous thing when, treating con-
jectures as proved conclusions, men challenge the
whole of the accepted evidence of the creeds on
the truth of such considerations — most grievous
of all, beyond limit of patience or silence in pro-
test, when conjectural criticism is admitted as
evidence against the word of Him who is the
Truth.
For here the crisis becomes most urgent, the
issues most imminent and most fatally important.
I cannot imagine greater issues than those which
these considerations are likely to force upon us.
If the result of the present speculations should be
the displacement or rejection of any considerable
part of the Jewish law and record, it would involve
the re-writing of the whole of Catholic, of Chris-
tian theology ; and, what is more critical still,
such an explanation of the way in which the Old
Testament Scriptures are used in the New as
would call in question the knowledge and honesty
of the writers whom we believe to be inspired, and
in some matters endanger the authority of the
words reported to be spoken by our Lord.
For we have no doubt that we have at the
HIGHER CRITICISM. to,
present day the Old Testament Scriptures in
tnuch the same form as that in which they were
before our Saviour in His earthly life ; and we
have no doubt as to the meaning of the appeal
to the Law and the Prophets which He himself
used, and which, in argument after argument, is
pursued in the writings of St. Paul and the Epistle
to the Hebrews. This needs no proof, argument,
or comment from me : the Law and the Prophets
are cited not as an argumentum ad kominem, but
as a body of evidence of continuous, of eternal
counsel.
Is it enough to say we are content to accept the
Old Testament, implicitly as our Saviour accepts
and uses it ; that which it is to Him it shall be
to us ; in ignorance, in doubt, in perplexity, in
variety of applicability, in confusion of meaning,
in incoherence of argument, in inappropriateness
of quotation ; in uncritical and uninquiring ac-
quiescence, we are willing to hold it on His war-
rant ? There is something to be said for such
a loyal, trustful acceptance, but it is scarcely a
fulfilment of the recommendation to search the
Scripture for evidence, or for reproof, or doctrine,
or correction, or instruction in righteousness. Still
as to special phases of questioning it must be
practically sufficient for many minds ; and beyond
there is no room for appeal : —
" What His Word doth make it,
That I believe and take it."
But practically the matter cannot rest here. If
our Saviour Himself is supposed to be charged
with using as evidence matter that is not evidence,
20 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
either by intentional perversion or hazardous inter-
pretation, and such charge is proved, then His
authority falls to the ground, and we are of all
men the most miserable. No Christian can tolerate
such a supposition, and none do attempt it. Losing
hold on Him as the Truth, we lose our hold on
Him and truth together. But here comes in the
speculation about the limitation of our Lord's
knowledge, and the interpretation of the word in
the Epistle to the Philippians, which, in the Author-
ised Version is read, "made Himself of no repu-
tation," and in the Revised Version, " emptied
Himself." On St. Paul's use of this word, as I
need not tell you, a formulated idea has been
raised that threatens to affect the most essential
doctrines connected with the Incarnation : and our
Lord is supposed accordingly to have, in becoming
man, divested Himself of certain powers which
He had with the Father, of almightiness and all-
knowledge, so far as the exercise of them through
His human nature could, or could not, be supposed
to be possible.
KZVLOGIQ.
That such can be the direct and proper meaning
of the word "emptied Himself" in the passage
cited, I cannot, notwithstanding the array of
authority with which I may be pressed, at all
admit. There must be a parallel between the
example of our Lord's action and our duty which
it is cited to illustrate. There is in fact no parallel
whatever between such a Ktvwtrig as that which I
HIGHER CRITICISM. 21
have described and that by which it is in our
power to imitate the Lord Jesus, as we are ex-
horted to do upon this principle. It is self-
surrender, self-effacement, and humiliation for the
sake of others, that we are to attempt to practise
— not the limitation of our power of helping them,
but the devotion of our whole self for them, as He
devoted Himself for us.
It is, to my mind, very incidentally and not at
all appropriately that this expression is pressed
into the service of the doctrine of limitation. It
does, however, illustrate it so far as to give an
instance of something which the Son of God
becoming man, for us men and for our salvation,
did give up ; who when He was rich for our sake
became poor, that we through His poverty might
be rich. And so far it does illustrate the theory
of limitation, but only so far. Nor ought it ever
to be used as the keyword of a theory with which
it has so little to do : or as the decisive proof of
a doctrine which if it were intended to be taught
could not safely be left to an isolated text.
That our blessed Lord in the Incarnation did,
by His own determinate counsel, one with that of
the Father and the Holy Spirit through whom He
offered Himself without blemish, place Himself
under conditions by which habitually he regulated
the exercise of His divine power in and through
His humanity, I think is a matter of unquestioned
Catholic doctrine — an habitual self-restraint put
upon the exercise of those powers of fulness of
the Godhead which dwell in Him bodily ; a re-
straint upon the display of the treasures of wisdom
22 BIBLICAL CRITICISM. .
and knowledge which are all in Him, hidden
whilst He was with us, but never suspended or
laid aside, never dissembled or repudiated, a
7r\i}pL0fjLa with which Ktvwvig has no common term
or element. Whenever and wherever it is said
of our Lord that He could not do this or that,
or that this or that which He had with the Father
was not His own to give, the expression can
certainly be interpreted as meaning that such
exercise of will or power was incompatible with
the conditions under which He had placed Him-
self; and the same interpretation applies to all
expressions in the Gospel which imply any change,
or development of purpose, or exercise of desire
in prayer on the part of Him who is, in His divine
nature, unchangeable and beyond all limitation of
foreknowledge of will ; even to the last words of
identification with us, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthaui'?<
But the limitation of knowledge is a very different
thing from the limitation of the exercise of power.
Power itself has its essence in posse, its manifesta-
tion in exercise of will ; knowledge has its essence
in esse. We cannot, in our thought, define or intel-
ligently explain away the knowledge of the Lord
Incarnate. We cannot conceive that He could
have knowledge and not use it, as He could have
power and not exercise it ; His omniscience is of
the essence of the personality in which manhood
and Godhead united in Him.
With this belief I feel that I am bound to accept
the language of our Lord in reference to the Old
Testament Scriptures as beyond appeal. Where
He says that Moses and the Prophets wrote or
HIGHER CRITICISM. 23
spoke to Him, and the report of His saying this
depends on the authority of His Evangelist, I
accept His warrant for understanding that Moses
and the Prophets did write and speak about Him,
in the sense in which I believe that He means it.
Where He speaks of David in spirit calling Him
Lord, I believe that David in spirit did call him
Lord, and I am not affected by doubts thrown on
the authorship of the 110th Psalm, except so far
as to use His authority to set those doubts aside.
The matter is more difficult when we look at
the one passage in which the Son is understood
to declare His own ignorance of a matter which
the Father hath kept in His own power. For the
inquiry as to the meaning of the words would lead
us into very high and transcendental regions, and
yet the Church has lived for nineteen centuries
and believed patiently without having them ex-
plained. The question turns on an idea quite
different from that in the other case. It was quite
within the limits of possibility for Jesus, or indeed
for any mere man, to know whether Moses wrote
Deuteronomy or David wrote any of the psalms ;
without any exercise of divine knowledge or power
He might know this by tradition, by historical
evidence, by critical or diplomatic skill. But the
knowledge of the coming of the day of the Lord,
"Of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not
even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the
Father," is a matter quite beyond us. The words
are surpassingly strong ; the powers are in an as-
cending scale — no one — not even the angels, not
the Son ; as if even the Son in His divinity above
24 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
the angels, not lower as in His humanity, had yet
something to be shown Him by the Father, to
whom He, begotten before all worlds and being
of one substance with Him, still appeals as the
one source of all being, as well as of all authority,
power, and knowledge. We do not venture to
put such an interpretation on the words, we would
rather stand in awe and sin not : we would veil
our faces in our absolute ignorance of the method
and character of divine knowledge. For we can-
not even see how the Father's perfect knowledge
of a point, the fixedness of which would seem to
limit His divine freedom of action, His liberty to
alter it, can be reconciled with His perfect power :
we cannot see how we are to evaluate the common
measure by which the divine way of knowing, the
divine power of determining, can be compared
with any way of knowing or determining that is
within our reach. We cannot see how our know-
ledge, conditioned and made intelligible, possible,
only under terms of time and space, can be made
to translate a sort of knowledge in which no such
terms can be supposed to limit affinity. The words
as understood by those to whom they were spoken
were a simple denial that it was within the con-
ditions of the work of Incarnation that the day
and hour should be revealed. To us they mean
thus much more, even the Son could not translate
the Father's determination into words or language
of our knowledge. And He does not say, " I
know not ; " but, as it is no function of the Father-
hood to judge, when He has committed all judg-
ment unto the Son, so it is no function of the
HIGHER CRITICISM. 25
Sonship to know that which the Father hath kept
in His own power; as "to sit on My right hand
or on My left is not Mine to give." Although
" what things soever the Father doeth, these also
doeth the Son likewise ; for the Father loveth the
Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself
doeth."
The doctrine, then, of the perfect possession but
habitual restraint of His divine powers by the Son
of Man during the thirty years of His life on
earth, does not allow of any imputation of ignor-
ance or incapacity. If such imputation be once
admitted, notwithstanding all argumentative safe-
guards and compensating considerations, the great
Gospel of Grace and Salvation is touched on its
keystone, and on whomsoever it falls it shall grind
him to powder. Grant it — then, could Jesus of
Nazareth forget, could He mistake, could He
become confused in argument, could He be incon-
sistent in His teaching, could He be Himself
mistaken ? Grant it, and what safeguard have
we that He did not forget, was not mistaken or
confused or inconsistent or Himself deceived ? We
may ask no end of such questions. If the Saviour
were ignorant once, how, when, or where does the
limitation of His knowledge cease, and within
what terms, beyond that of the self-conditioning
of constant self-restraint, does it affect the region
of His mediatorial work? Could our loving God
— for if all else is a mistake, there must be a true
and a living God — could He treat us so?
I will make no apology for saying this to you.
I cannot rationalise the doctrine of the Atonement,
26 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
or weigh or analyse the blood of the covenant. I
cannot draw the articles of the everlasting cove-
nant of the Incarnation. It is only in a very
distant way that I can fashion to myself my idea
of what my Lord has done, is doing, and will do,
as I trust, for me. I cannot read the doctrine of
Incarnation as I could a book of Euclid, or the
Bible as a poem of Ovid or Milton. But I think
that I know whom I have believed. I would that
all men could think of Him as I do ; but I cannot
bear to anticipate a day when the Church shall
cry out to Jesus of Nazareth, Thou hast deceived
me, and I was deceived ; or to the unknown and
unknowable, Why didst Thou let Him deceive
Himself and us? Does it strike you that my
words are too strong? I have indeed run on a
long way from my starting-point, but He who will
help our unbelief and increase our faith, will surely
give us grace also to observe a loving, trustful,
courageous patience until all such things are made
plain, and He has guided His own into all truth.
THE KENOSIS.
Ordination Addresses, /. 173.
It will not, I hope, distract your thoughts from the
great matter about which we are directly engaged
this week, if I ask you to give your attention for a
few minutes this morning to a great question of
theology, about which the minds of men are just
now grievously exercised. You are, of course, all
aware that the recent investigations into the history
of the Old Testament, which are known by the
name of the Higher Criticism of the Scriptures,
have brought some of our leading scholars to
what seem to them certain conclusions as to the
authorship of various books of the Bible. Some
of these conclusions appear very startling, and
indeed are difficult to reconcile with the expres-
sions used in the New Testament about those
books, and even with the words which our Lord
Himself is recorded to have used in citing them.
If, it follows, the Evangelists truly record the words
that our Lord spoke, and those words, not being
a mere condescension to popular ignorance or to
the exigency of argument, imply a belief on the
Saviour's part in the literary authorship of the
28 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
books cited which is contrary to proved or prov-
able decision of criticism, then our Lord Himself
was ignorant of the true state of the facts, and His
words were formally, if not substantially, fallible.
That would mean that, although His use of the
citations as the word of God was substantially
justified, His ascribing them to the particular
writers, Moses, David, and so on, was not. And
therefore that our Lord was ignorant. But if
He was ignorant of such matters, it must follow
that He was not, in His incarnation and life on
earth, exempt from ignorance in other matters,
although with respect to His moral and doctrinal
teaching He must be credited with perfect and
infallible knowledge. In illustration of this certain
passages are alleged, such as those in which St.
Luke describes his increase in wisdom and stature,
and St. Mark records his own expression about the
knowledge of the Father and ignorance by the
angels and by the Son about the day and the
hour "when the Son of Man shall be seen coming
in the clouds of heaven with great power and
glory." It being thus supposed that the know-
ledge of the Son of Man was limited during His
sojourn on earth, it is scarcely a step further to
allege that in other respects His divine power was
limited, and that accordingly, when He prays, He
prays in some uncertainty as to how His prayer
will be answered, and, when on the Cross He cries
out in His agony, He is under the misgiving that
the Father has forsaken Him. I am putting this as
briefly as I can, and I must at once advance to what
is the apparent inference3 namely, that the Son, the
THE KENOSIS. 29
divine word, consubstantial and co-eternal with the
Father, and so possessing all knowledge and all
power, becoming incarnate for us men and our
salvation, emptied Himself of certain qualities of
Godhead, divested Himself, by the act of becoming
man, of the possession of all such knowledge and
power as would be out of the reach of the most
exalted and perfect humanity ; and so, notwith-
standing the union of perfect Godhead and perfect
manhood in His one person, made Himself ignorant
of certain things which as God He knew, and incap-
able of certain acts which as God He was almighty
to do. This theory of an act of self-emptying, or
k£vw<tiq, for I may as well use the expression which
recent debates have made so sadly familiar to us,
and which is based on Philippians ii. 8 — this theory
of an act of kenosis, understood to involve the con-
sequences which I have described, of ignorance of
certain truths, of growth from ignorance to wisdom,
of actual uncertainty about the results of prayer,
and actual incapacity to do certain acts, the divest-
ing Himself of the consciousness of perfect oneness
with the Father, may be opposed to or contrasted
with another theory, which I believe to be true,
and to be the theory of the Catholic faith. That is
that our blessed Lord, God and Man, did during
the whole period of the incarnation on earth, as
still in His incarnation in heaven, possess con-
sciously all the power and the knowledge which
He has with the Father ; that His humbling Him-
self, His kenosis, consisted in His divesting Him-
self of the exercise of those qualities through the
humanity which He assumed ; that His growth
30 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
implied His learning, as men learn, to know as
men know, and to earn experience as men earn
it by suffering, learning, knowing, and suffering
what as God He knew well, but what, having come
to identify Himself with man, He had to learn as
man, for us men and for our salvation. Thus in
a way He emptied Himself, thus in a way He
divested Himself, thus in a way He limited
Himself; not, as it seems to me, by a single act
of incapacitating, but by a continued exercise of
self-restraint or a suspension of the exercise of
divine power — a fulfilment of conditions as to
the use of powers, and manifestation of glories,
in and through humanity, to last until He was,
in His humanity, glorified with the glory that
He had with the Father before the world was.
This theory, for such I must call it, satisfies, so
far as we are capable of seeing, the difficulties of
the case ; if there was anything that the Incarnate
Son could not do, the incapacity grew from the
condition under which He had resolved to do
His work ; if there was anything which was not
His to give, it was something which, by the con-
dition under which He was keeping His resolution,
was reserved for the Father ; if there was anything
which He could say that He did not know, it was
something which, under the condition which He
was observing with Himself and the Father, no
one, not the angels, nor the Son, the Father
only knew ; for it is as the Divine Word that the
Saviour refuses to speak. How the Father's per-
fect knowledge of a point, the fixedness of which
would seem to us to limit His divine freedom of
THE KENOSIS. 3 1
action, can be reconciled with it ; how, in fine, we
can evaluate the common measure by which God's
way of knowing can be compared with our ;
what that is which the Father knows and the
Son not, it is not ours to ask ; only we know that
the Church has lived for 1800 years not knowing,
yet trusting, not having seen or heard, but yet
believing.
This doctrine of the perfect possession but
continued restraint of divine powers by the Son
of Man during the thirty years of His mortal life
does not allow of any imputation of ignorance
or capacity. If such imputation be once ad-
mitted, notwithstanding all argumentative safe-
guards and compensating considerations, the great
Gospel of Grace and Salvation is touched, even
the corner-stone, and on whomsoever it falls it
shall grind him to powder. Such considerations
may make the theory safer in the hands of a
theological expert, but will, like all such explana-
tions, be ultimately disregarded by those who
•either follow his conclusions or advance logically
upon them. Grant it ; and then, could Jesus of
Nazareth forget, could He mistake, could He
become confused in argument, could He be con-
sistent in all His teaching, could He be Himself
deceived ? Grant it ; and what safeguard have
we that He did not forget, was not mistaken, or
confused, or inconsistent, or Himself deceived ?
I hear it said, Well, if it is so, let it be so, let God
be true and every man a liar ; if the old Gospel be
not as we have received it, true, let us abide by
our convictions, let us live on our conclusions, let
32 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
us see our way to the God who must be above
the cloud of doctrine, of theory, aye, of fable
that is round about the tradition, the intuition of
His existence. Ah, indeed ! and is all the glory
of the Gospel, all the life of the Church, all the
experience of the saints, all the discipline of the
past, all the hope of eternity, as it has been given
us, to pass away ? What has become of the atone-
ment between God and man, for which God
became man, and learned man, and sorrowed
and suffered and died, realising the nature and
the sins and the sorrows and the sufferings of all
the human race, and identifying Himself with the
race and every individual of the race, as if He
Himself were those whom He died for, their sins
and their sufferings and their deaths His own.
For He was made sin for us who knew no sin,
as He learned obedience by suffering, whose will
is one with His Father's, so that He need not
have suffered to learn to obey, and who in His
divine impassibilty is beyond suffering, only in
His divine love draws near to us and draws us
to Him.
Is it not the surpassing mystery of the Incar-
nation, as the divine mystery of the atonement,
that our Lord God, the word, the effulgence of
the Father's glory and the express image of His
person, becoming man in the ineffable conception,
becomes man with the whole forces of Godhead
applied to the consummation of His work; not
merely becomes a man, to be a representative
man, or a pattern man, or an ideal man, or a
glorified man, one lamb for one offering of
THE KENOSIS. 33
propitiation for representative sins or exemplar sins,
for typical restoration, or even for a transcendental
illustration of the love of the Father ? The Son
of God becomes man ; He by whom all things
consist, and who upholds all things by the word
of His power, in whom are hid, not annulled or
suspended, all the treasures of the Godhead,
wisdom and knowledge, in whom dwelleth all
the fulness of the Godhead, bodily condescends
to go through human experience to fit Himself
for a certain end ; condescends to learn human
learning through the alphabet of childhood, the
discipline of boyhood, the experience of man-
hood ; to learn to think as man thinks, to speak
as men speak, to love as men love, to hear as
men hear, to feel as men feel, to come close to
all human experience of sin without sinning. Can
there be a greater wonder than for the pure God
to be so brought close to human uncleanness,
the strong God to be so taught human weakness,
the loving God to be so tried with human hatreds,
and jealousies, and low aims, and the vanity of
vanities ? And having so learned us, so identified
Himself with us, He offers Himself for us in His
great love to the Father, who in the same one
great love has given Him for us. Offers Himself,
still as the all-knowing and all-seeing, pervading
the humanity in which He suffers ; oilers Himself
for you and me and all men, seeing there on the
Cross our several souls, our several sins, our several
lives and deaths ; identifying Himself as if, in His
love, our souls, our sins, our iives and deaths were
His own. Did He not then and there bear our
c
34 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
sins and carry our sorrows, knowing them as ours,
as if they were His own, and in the very plenitude
of divine consciousness, experiencing the plenitude
of human abjection : My God, My God, why hast
Thou forsaken Me ? And now, He ever liveth,
making intercession for those whose lot He has
borne and bears.
It is but in a distant way that we can at all taste
of the cup that He drank of; it is when we realise
the sins and sorrows of those whom we love as life
itself, and whose sins are a burden to us greater
than our own. Can we, with this idea of the
atoning work of the Son, and of the power of the
Incarnation by which He made it possible — can
we, so taught, bear to think of Him as so limited
in His humanity, that He could be ignorant, or
forgetful, or^ confused, or inconsistent, deceived
or self-deceiving ? Or how, when, and where does
the limitations end, and within what terms be-
yond that of the self-conditioning of constant
self-restraint does it affect that region of His
work? If He were incarnate once, is He not
incarnate still ; if He were ignorant ever, how
has His humanity come to the perfection of
knowledge which those who believe and pray
trust in and have trusted ever since St. Stephen
saw the heaven opened ? If He even could
forget, may He forget us still? Nay, if in this
life only we have hope in Him we are of all
men the most miserable, for His teaching has
led us, by the development of all that seems to
be best in us, to what is neither more nor less
than a delusion or disappointment. Could our
THE KENOSIS. 35
loving God, for there must be a loving God, treat
us so?
I make no apology for treating this matter thus.
I cannot rationalise the atonement ; I cannot weigh
or analyse the blood of the covenant. I cannot
draw the articles of the everlasting covenant of the
Incarnation. It is only in a very distant way that
I can fashion to myself my idea of what my Lord
has done, and is doing, and will do, as I trust, for
me. I cannot read the Incarnation as I would a
book of Euclid, or a poem of Ovid or Milton. But
I think that I know whom I have believed ; I would
that all men could think of Him as I do ; but I
cannot bear to anticipate a day when the Church
shall cry out to Jesus of Nazareth, "Thou hast
deceived me, and I was deceived;" or to the
Unknown and Unknowable, " Why didst Thou let
Him deceive Himself and us?"
THE MIRACULOUS IN THE
BIBLE.
Ordination Addresses, /. 40.
Do you believe the Holy Scripture as the
word of life ; as containing in the Old and
New Testament, the revelation of the purpose and
work of Almighty God through Jesus Christ our
Lord ?
I think that that is the safe and legal interpre-
tation, but I am well aware that it is not by itself
sufficient to cover all the ground which I have
tentatively indicated. For it is quite clear that
Holy Scripture contains a good deal that only
by very indirect construction we can conceive to
be an integral part of the revelation of Jesus, and
with regard to which he would be a very bold man
indeed who would say that he realises in it any
distinct relation to the Gospel of our salvation.
Your own memories will at once supply you with
instances of small minutiae of record as to which
you cannot see any inkling of spiritual connection ;
as, for instance, supposing the wars with the
Philistines to be an important part of the training
of the chosen people for the state and position
in which the Word, the Christ, should come to
THE MIRACULOUS IN THE BIBLE. 37
them, to His own, and not to be received of them,
how should the detail of the Philistines going out
by the passage of Michmash add anything to the
body or contribute anything to the proof of the
revelation ? We see that there are many things of
this kind which are to our conceptions irrelevant;
and although we can well believe, and do believe,
that in the contemplation of the Most High there is
nothing whatever that is irrelevant, and does not
conduce in some way to the fulfilment of His great
purpose, we cannot but acknowledge that the
relevancy of such incidents is very small con-
trasted with the greater issues and grander steps
of development about which we are told nothing
at all, earnestly as we would desire to trace them.
And these small points, quite as much as the great
cosmic operations which, as detailed to us in the
Book of Genesis, and as interpreted by the dis-
coveries of modern science, fall into the class of
poetic or traditionary illustration, rather than dog-
matic teaching — these, small and great alike, throw
us back upon the idea of the gradual character of
the Revelations we believe in, and of the possibilities
and peculiarities of the agencies which He put
thus far within our reach, by written record of men
inspired.
The Scripture of the Old Testament is the
whole historic literature of the chosen people ;
framed by men inspired by the Holy Ghost, as
far as the inculcation of the law and promise of
God from time to time were to be revealed ; but we
do not imagine either that every detail of their
writings was so inspired as to keep them from all
38 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
error, or that everything they wrote was equally
matter of revelation. Far otherwise. We cannot
but believe that their language, even at the highest
grade of inspiration, was and must be language
intelligible to those who wrote and read, and
therefore limited and conditioned by their in-
telligence ; and the story which they told such
as would be possible to carry tradition from
generation to generation, with — as in all history —
variations and aggregations and inconsistencies of
detail which may amount in non-essential things
to contradictions.
Nothing but a theory of verbal inspiration which
the Church has not asked of us, could, under the
conditions of divine teaching, through the law-
givers, historians, and prophets of the Old Testa-
ment, preclude the existence of such inconsistencies,
which the growing criticism of generations far ahead
would find its work in readjusting, and, as we say,
rectifying and reconciling with the new materials
that language and historic discovery find for us.
It is of no use for us to speculate that the
Almighty might have chosen other ways of
signifying His will to us — of course He might ;
nor can we limit the methods by any theorising of
our own as to how He could have done it best,
and with the least strain on faith ; or how and why
faith should come into the operation at all, when
it might have been done by seeing and hearing, in
one of the countless ways of His versatility, the
wonderful counsels of His right hand. It must
suffice us that He did choose this way of dealing
with us, and that He suffered the revelation of His
THE MIRACULOUS IN THE BIBLE. 39
purpose to be weighted by the powers and possi-
bilities of the men and times that He chose. It
may have been of the necessity of His conditions
that the message of life could only be continued
and realised in and by means and methods that
carried more of temporal and secular interest to a
temporal and secular people, like the chosen race,
at their best, and at their worst. And this is always
to be remembered, that the revelation of God came
to a people that did not much care about it, whilst
they were living in the very discipline that it was
laying on them ; and it came not through astrologers,
ascetics, or philosophers, but through those whom
God appointed as His lawgivers and prophets, as
He chose, from all sorts and conditions of life.
However, granting all this, there still remains
the consideration, which cannot be left out of our
sight in these matters, and which I have mentioned
before. We cannot, we cannot possibly, eliminate
miraculous and angelical operation from the his-
tory of the Old Testament. We cannot look at
the Bible history as one that can be divested of
miraculous manifestation ; we cannot reduce that
miraculous manifestation to terms of psychical
subjectivity, or ways of relegating unusual pheno-
mena to supernatural agency, when more careful
appreciation would have discovered them to be
natural. There is no way of making the history
of the Bible non-miraculous ; the direct agency of
God is a primary condition of the simplest appre-
hension of it. It works in, and through, and to
miracle culminating in the greatest of all miracles,
without which the Gospel falls into the mere limbo
40 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
of pious deceptions by men themselves deceived —
the miracle of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection,
and the Ascension of the Son of God. " Why
should it be thought incredible among you that
God should raise the dead ? " Why incredible,
when the history of one nation was full of provi-
dential guidings, and positions and interpositions,
quite inconsistent with what were regarded as
natural law in the growth and rise and fall of
peoples ? Why incredible in the view of the
history of a people which, for the next two thousand
years after St. Paul asked the question, has seen,
through experience, the complement of what went
before. " Hath God dealt so with any nation ? "
If this element is to be eliminated from the Old
Testament, how much more goes with it, we
do not dare to calculate, we would not wish to
think.
But for all that, we do not value or regard all
recorded miracles alike. I do not imagine that in
these days in which the place of the earth in the
solar system is fixed on hypothesis mathematic-
ally unimpugnable, the most conscientious believer
would assert it as a matter of faith, that when
the sun stood still over Gibeon, and the moon in
the valley of Ajalon, the course of this world was
essentially altered ; and yet that essential altera-
tion remained unrecorded in the books of the
nations, whose first and most ancient steps of
knowledge were in the science of the stars. And
that is a test illustration to our faith. We should
as soon think of reconciling the anomaly by
the variations of clocks and watches, and the
THE MIRACULOUS IN THE BIBLE. 41
computation of true and mean times as we do in
travelling by land or by sea. Of such it is absurd
to speak seriously. But, in fact, we know that we
believe in various things with various kinds and
degrees of faith. We believe in the daily quota-
tions of the Stock Exchange with a belief different
in kind from that with which we receive the fore-
casts of the meteorological department. We believe
in the doctrines of the Apostles' Creed with a belief
very different from that with which we believe the
records of St. Paul's journeys, though we have no
doubt about the correctness of the details. And,
further, we know by experience that the acceptance
we accord to the faithful record of chroniclers and
historians may be very different from the negative
or suspensory creed with which we regard their
illustration and interpretation of the things which
they believed themselves to record truly.
Analysis, I may say, is an important element
in the comparative treatment of experience and
analogy. An historian of the eighth, ninth, down
to the thirteenth century, records the current of
history with names and dates of incontrovertible
authority ; and we believe in him so thoroughly
that we could risk a great deal on his exact ac-
curacy. And the same man, on the same page that
he gives us an essential date or decisive particular,
will tell us a miraculous story of something that he
saw with his own eyes, which we should never
think of accepting as possible, and the narration of
which we can only welcome with the kind assump-
tion that the man has told us what he thought he
saw, and that he himself believed that what he saw
42 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
was what he told us that he saw. Of analysis of
such record a great deal has at different times been
written, and the accepted conclusion as to the
phenomenon is, I think, that such episodes con-
stitute no objection at all to the credibility of the
author who has introduced them ; rather, as being
the specialities or marks of idiosyncrasy of a
sincere writer of limited and, it may be, perverted
intellectual insight, they add an element of credi-
bility to the acceptance of faith in so ingenuous an
exposer of his own weakness.
Well, we say we believe that he thought he saw
something of the kind ; he lived in an atmosphere
in which such things were of daily contemplation,
doubtless he longed to believe it true, and as
doubtless something occurred which he could in
such a frame and atmosphere so interpret. But
this is a very different thing from believing him
or his story. I mention this, however, not for a
moment intending a parallel between the most
apparently useless and inconsistent of the Old
Testament miracles and the fabled miracles of the
mediaeval saints ; rather to point out that the inter-
mixture of what is incredible to us is no bar to the
acceptance, as certain, of that which is credible
on the same evidence, and then to make the dis-
tinction of the kind and degree of faith which we
give to different sorts of narration. I do not say
that analysis is always, or indeed ever, easy or
perfect, or in many points safe and trustworthy.
To some things we pledge our belief on the issues
of life and hereafter ; to some we accord our assent
as believing them to be quite true, although, if they
THE MIRACULOUS IN THE BIBLE. 43
were not, it would matter very little to any
practical purpose for us ; to some we give just
the nod of assent. Well, I suppose he meant to
tell the truth, and thought he saw what he said he
did.
I could not dwell on this were it not that I see,
in various regions of modern criticism, an inclina-
tion to shut out such a consideration, and to
dogmatise about the credibility of authorities, on
theories which disregard its equity and cogency ;
and so the hearts of the simple are shocked and
averted, and the peremptory judgments of the
sciolist are accepted on his own terms ; and so
belief is weakened, and the area of faithful accept-
ance minimised, and the cry comes, How little
need I believe to justify myself in saying that I
believe at all.
It is very possible, very probable, that some such
questionings as I have referred to have presented
themselves to some of you. Let me add one
counsel. Believe in the Lord Jesus with all your
heart, believe in His word and His promise ; put
your whole trust and confidence in Him, ready
to stake your eternal life on His truth and faithful-
ness, but remember that faith is not sight, and
the methods of proof to which faith is amenable
are not the methods of mathematical analysis.
You may be as certain of the articles of the Creed
as you are of the proofs of Euclid, but the certainty
is not the same sort of certainty, and no intelligent
being will look at the promise of eternal life as he
looks on the forty-seventh proposition of the first
book, which is, as you probably remember, one of
44 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
the most beautiful theorems of the whole body of
the elements. There is faith, but it is not the
substance of the things hoped for, or the evidence
of things not seen. In the field of doctrine, of
spiritual faith, resting on the word of Christ and
His finished work, both the nature of the faith and
its hold on the things with which it is confident,
its earnestness, its patience, its tolerance, the agency
of the Blessed Spirit individually quickening, and
through the voice of the Church defining the
articles that are necessary to the true appreciation
of the revelation of God in the face of Jesus Christ,
are the key to all difficulty that we wish to
overcome. He will guide you unto all truth, all
the more intelligently as you seek the way of it,
not grudging, or assuming safe infallibility, but
showing, loving, working to enter the fulness of
that which we earnestly desire to see, and to be
justified among the children of wisdom.
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY
SCRIPTURES.
Ordination Addresses, /. 147.
I DESIRE to use the few minutes devoted to the
address this morning for an attempt to put before
you my idea of the frame and attitude in which we
all ought to approach the study of the word of
God, and in which it is especially needful for us to
train ourselves, who are by our office bound to the
constant practice of that study, and have to answer
the questions and to some extent direct the work
of those who give themselves to the same. In what
I am going to say I do not intend any specific or
exclusive reference to the subject of what is called
the Higher Criticism of the Holy Scriptures. It
is very possible that it is in reference to that
form of study that my counsels to you may have
the greatest practical importance, but what I shall
say will have a wider and more general intention
of application.
I will begin with laying it down as a fact that
the Bible cannot be treated as any other book.
First, it is not like any other book ; no other book
comes to us with a claim authorised by the
46 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
Church of our Baptism as containing the word
of God, or containing so constant assertion of
its claim to be heard as the word of God ; or
as cited, one part of it by another part, by a sort
of mutual testimony, as of divine authority ; or as
consistently upheld by the long consent of the
Christian ages as the law and the testimony. So it
comes to us, and it is not reduced to the level of
other books even by the complete repudiation of
every point of this claim at the hands of those who
would treat it otherwise. This means that it is to
us a parmount witness of truth ; if it fail, if the
Lord Jesus Christ is not in it and through it all,
the key and binding-string and central truth that
holds it all together, then the result of its pro-
mulgation is the most ghastly of all delusions and
disappointments, by which all the best instincts of
human nature are repelled and belied, a phantasm
by which he who would deceive us would be no
fit object of worship, even if he should exist at all.
A book which comes to us thus cannot be like
any other.
Secondly, our own relation to it is such that
we could not treat it so. We have been brought
up in profound respect for and love of it ; we have
been taught to base all our faith in the unseen
world upon it ; our convictions or anticipations of
eternity ; our belief in immortality ; our ideas of
the government of the world ; of the existence
of God ; of His law of life, right, and virtue ;
of our own subjection to, and inability to keep
that law ; of the love that provided a way to for-
giveness and restoration; of the work of the
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 47
atonement, of the incarnation and the sacrifice, of
the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment,
of the destiny of our own souls and of theirs without
whom happiness in its true perfection is altogether
inconceivable; — in a word, our knowledge, if we call
it knowledge, our apprehension, if we dare not call
it knowledge, of all that is desirable, hopeful, and
other than miserable in this life and that which is
to follow — our very simplest ideas of virtue and
happiness, justice, purity, and truth. All has come
to us through the teaching of this book, or through
the teaching of those who based their teaching
upon it, through the Church which carries it open
in her hand as her witness. It is impossible for
those who have been so taught to put themselves
into a neutral or impartial position regarding it
without such a strain, such a wrench of mental
and moral force, as drives them past the central
station of fair judgment. The effort that alone can
carry us so far carries us further. The very attempt
to leave the post of affirmation carries us so far
beyond the point of indifference as to set us near,
and in progress towards negation. In ordinary
language indifference towards Holy Scripture
means disregard of it. We cannot treat it as
any other book ; if we try, we find that we are
treating it as no other book ; as far the other
way as we started on the other; and indeed it
is the fact that it is like no other that has led the
critics to apply to it methods of arbitrary and
conjectural criticism which, applied to Greek or
Roman or even Anglo-Saxon literature, would
have been laughed out of court.
4§ BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
We are forced in the recoil as far in the direction
of negation as we started in the direction of affirma-
tion ; no tenable standing-ground between belief
and unbelief. This, I think, is certain of our own
experience, and it is not uncharitable to say that
where men have flattered themselves into the belief
that they can do it, it has been at the penalty of
self-deception, which not all their professions of
love and honour have been able to keep innocuous
to themselves or free from great danger to those
who are led by them. The claims of the Bible and
our own relation to it alike make the attitude of
indifference impossible, untenable, intolerable. But
there is something to be said on the other hand.
First, the Bible, although speaking with authority,
speaks with an authority that contemplates proof
and deliberate acceptance ; second, we, unless our
acceptance is to be servile and abjectly unintelligent,
are bound to do our utmost to realise both what we
believe and how and why we believe it. That is to
say, the Book itself recognises, and we by our very
constitution of thought and affection are bound
to the exercise of what it recognises, the necessity
of judgment, the proving and holding fast. If
these two considerations now formed a dilemma,
the only possible attitude of thought would be an
agnosticism, which long before this would have
set the Bible and all religious ideas drawn from
it outside the region of practical questioning.
Either it must be accepted with the mechanical
receptiveness of an empty vessel, or it must be
treated as on a level with a review article; it
must long ago have lost the hold on the heart
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 49
which, humanly speaking, is the result of the
experience of nineteen centuries of faith. The two
considerations do not constitute such a dilemma ;
so much is clear to our apprehension of what is
going on in the world now, in commentary, in
controversy, in exposition, in application.
We will now ask what is the attitude of
approach. I may perhaps arrange the counsels
that I offer under two heads : the approach
requires a moral or spiritual effort, and a mental
or intellectual one. I prefer the words spiritual
and mental, but as I am not a philosopher, or
speaking to philosophers, I shall not try to restrict
myself to philosophical expressions. There is to
be an effort of the will, the heart, and soul, and
spirit, and there is to be an exercise of the mind,
its logical, critical faculties.
First, the student of Holy Scripture must ap-
proach it with a living and loving sense of what
he owes to it ; it is the exponent of the influences
by which his spiritual life has been guided to the
point at which he approaches the study ; it would
not be a matter of consideration with him at all
if it were not so. He is a religious man, and
this book is the witness of the religion which
has made him what he is, and made him also
desirous of growth into knowledge. His attitude
is of grateful acceptance and, correspondingly, of
prayer for guidance. He holds the book with
a loving trust, a loving, trustful receptiveness ;
whatever mental trials await him, whatever spiritual
struggles he may anticipate, he hold his Bible as
the gift of his Lord's love, on the authority of his
D
50 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
Saviour's use of the Old Testament and sanction
of the New ; on the evidence of the Church, which
is to him the pillar and ground of the truth. He
comes, then, with the desire to prove true what his
experience and education, what we humbly believe
the guidance of the Holy Spirit within him, disposes
him to believe to be true. It is with a loving trust
in the Giver and the gift of the divine word, a
trust implicit as loving, that he is using and
proving as the Lord Himself would have him use
and prove, and as the Holy Spirit is leading.
Next, the attitude spiritually is one of patience :
Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth. He longs
to hear more, to hear more clearly, to see the spirit
through the letter, to get to comprehend with a
clear comprehension, to reconcile all difficulties ;
and yet he is conscious that both by the imperfect-
ness of his own powers and the incompleteness of
his own faith, as well as by the possible reticence
of Almighty power in revelation, there is much
that he must wait for : seeming contradictions
that he cannot harmonise ; promising vistas of
loving anticipation that for the present seem to
him to close in obscurity ; records of events and
prophecies of events that need to be brought into
correlation with each other, and with the general
purpose of revelation, and with the course of the
history of the Church and the world, which tease
and. try him, as they have done the ages before
him, and will, it may well be, continue to do so
until the end come. His attitude is of patience ;
it is a patience that will not be overcome either
by the impetuosity of love or by intolerance of
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 5 1
suspense. He will not say, " Except I see the
print of the nails, I will not believe ; " but " I will
not let Thee go until Thou bless me." I will
worship the God whom I know as an unknown
God, rather than refrain from the worship which I
know to be true, scarcely knowing why. "I will
wait for Thy loving kindness ; " I must wait, but it
shall not be without. " I will wait in the midst of
Thy Temple ; " I will wait as those who watch for
the morning.
And, need I add, the fruit of trustful patience
is humility, and the result of it is the increase
of the power of trustful receptiveness : they that
eat Me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink
Me shall yet be thirsty ; and the water that I
shall give him shall be in him a well of water
springing up unto everlasting life. The know-
ledge so sought has ever-developing application.
The sense of one's own fallibility in faith and
apprehension is an element of the humility of the
loving receptiveness. I would know more, that
I may love better, and, loving better, may try to
be more like Him who in His word, and by His
word, reveals Himself. May God grant to you
and to me the power to make the will exert itself
under these conditions. I might have summed it
all up in the one expression — the attitude of prayer,
desiring, waiting, trusting.
Now of the mental or intellectual feature or
side or aspect of study : Given a book which,
as I have said, on its own claims, and on
the ground of our personal relation to it, is
unlike any other book. How can we criticise
52 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
it ? Does criticism require a position of such
indifference as by itself amounts to unfriendli-
ness ? Must all criticism begin from the angle
of negation ? or how about the parallels and
analogies on which the laws of true criticism
are based ? or how about the nature of the
proof which is to be demanded, and with or
without which the mind of the student, studying
trustfully and lovingly, is or is not to be contented ?
How, too, about the theories of inspiration and
the questions of scientific, literary, and historic
criticism ? And what of the relation between
spiritual and devotional study and the results of
those sorts of questionings? Far be it from
any of us to say that these questions are simple,
or that it is easy to formulate an answer that
will satisfy all. There is a criticism which analyses
and distinguishes in the hope of making that
which is obscure in belief clear and coherent.
There is a criticism which, starting from an un-
trustful standing-point, calls everything into ques-
tion and assumes the truth of every negative
argument, the equal cogency of every new con-
jecture. Need I caution you against this latter?
However, first, we must remember that, as different
subject matters are only capable of, or amenable
to, different methods of proof, we must not look
for equal logical cogency in all conclusions from
the tests or evidences applied to the Bible, either
in its several parts or as compared with other
books. It is only in mathematical matters that
perfect demonstration can be asked for, and the
Bible is not a mathematical book.
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. S3
The nearest approach to such demonstration
in other subjects belongs to what is now called
natural science, and some of the weapons alleged
against the theories of inspiration of the Bible
are drawn from the scientific armoury. With
respect to these, I will only say that the Bible
uses scientific terms only for the purpose of
helping a revelation of the power and energy
and will of the Almighty, a revelation that must,
to be a revelation at all, be made in language
intelligible to those to whom it was made, and
which, accordingly, must be open to the limita-
tions of human speech and language. As it is
a growing revelation, it is liable to variety of
interpretation as knowledge of scientific matters
increases, and that interpretation is susceptible of
readjustment as time goes on. The original word,
cleared of the incrustation of successive interpreta-
tions, is simple, and its purpose being admitted,
lies outside of scientific criticism ; and yet before
the demand can be made that it should be sur-
rendered as less than perfectly true, science should
be called on to produce a theory more reasonable,
more in accord and consistent with its own mani-
fold demands than the theory of a personal creator
and a definite period of creation supplies. This, I
think it no treason to truth to affirm, no system of
science has yet satisfactorily done. Whether or no
the Mosaic account of creation can or ever will be
reconciled with the discoveries of physical science,
it is surely clear that no system of physical science
has yet provided or can be expected to provide a
theory of causation or motive power which is
54 UifcLtCAL CRITICISM.
more intelligible or reasonable than that of the
first chapter of Genesis ; the whole cosmogony of
evolution can offer only to trace and disentangle
the links of a chain, the origination and main-
tenance of which depend on causes that are as
much beyond it as they are beyond the reach
of any other effort of human thought. The whole
array of modern philosophy, negative or positive,
hypothetical or inductive, has not got nearer to
the solution of the problem of existence than the
schoolmen of the middle ages. But that I must
leave ; a conjecture which is not disproved is not
therefore proved, and a theory which is not proved
is not therefore disproved.
As to the historic and literary criticism, on
which I do not intend to detain you now, one
may ask, how can you apply the principles of such
an art to a subject which is without a parallel ?
And where will you find a parallel to this ?
Seek it in the sacred books of the East, what do
you find there? Nothing to be compared with
it or parallel to it except the fact that they are
sacred books, which, if they claim to be older than
the Bible, simply prove that its antiquity is not an
impossible one ; if they are more modern, they
prove that they have no atom of the spirit in
which we recognise inspiration. I am very sure
that the true result of archaeological inquiry as
to the history of the most ancient nations is the
proof that, so far as literary possibilities are con-
cerned, there is nothing at all that could refute
the claim to which the Hebrew literature, as we
call it, makes or has made for it to the antiquity on
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 55
which its authenticity so largely depends. If the
literatures of Egypt and Assyria are older than
the Pentateuch, they would prove that there was
no impossibility in assigning the authorship to
Moses ; if the Sanscrit and Chinese books are
older or younger, they prove only that the spirit
that was in the prophets is not in them. Here and
there there may be a spark of primitive light, but
there is nothing whatever of the conviction of
sin and righteousness and judgment. Nor does
literature prove anything of importance if we
recognise that the very necessity of intelligible
transmission involves an adaptation to the in-
telligence of the transmitters.
Of historic, as distinct from properly literary
criticism, I would be the last man in the world to
speak with the rashness of dogmatism. Historical
criticism is a very patient study, with a very
cautious method, very suspensive conclusions.
History itself is a research, and a research con-
stantly expecting and receiving reversion ; and it
must be so by the very limitation of human know-
ledge in the region of matters with which it is
most conversant, the very variety of human records
differing with the angle of vision, the means and
capacity of every recorder. The criticism of the
Bible from this point of view, the point of historic
analogies, is full of risks ; conjecture is very tempt-
ing when and where the conjecturer is sure that
his guess can be met only by another guess, or
by the enunciation that guessing is unphilosophical,
if the acceptance of old theory is unphilosophical
too. The very idea of the guess involves a tacit
$6 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
suspicion of the authority as it stands. But I will
not puzzle you or myself with abstract terms.
There is a destructive criticism ; such criticism is
lawful within certain limits ; wherever it has been
applied to the Holy Scriptures it has essentially
failed. There is a constructive criticism which,
within a definite area, is lawful too ; this has been
applied to Holy Scripture, and has resulted in a
sort of confirmation of some of the evidences that
have been regarded as important. There is a
criticism, destructive by conjecture and constructive
by conjecture, intended to supply the place of that
which is destroyed. Against such, its methods and
its conclusions, I would warn all who wish for the
confirmation of the faith, whether of themselves
or others. It is a wanton, irresponsible sort of
temptation to shake other men's faith by vain
conjectures. We can, we will, we must have no
trifling with the word of God. It is a worse thing,
terribly worse, when, treating conjectures as con-
clusions, we challenge the whole of the accepted
evidence of the creeds on the truth of such con-
siderations; worst of all, inconceivably, beyond
limit of patience or silence from protests when we
admit conjecture as against the word of Him who
is the Truth.
The mental attitude of the student is like his
spiritual attitude, one of trust, patience, and
humility. He comes to the study prepared to
dispense with mathematical demonstration ; pre-
pared to be content with suspensive conclusions ;
prepared to listen to without accepting plausible
analogies ; prepared to be puzzled with unreasonable
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. S7
conjectures within the area of sincere criticisms.
But he comes also with his mental attitude
determined, as I have said, and in a faith which
he prays and waits to have assured. It is a
reasoning and a reasonable faith, but it is a faith
notwithstanding, not a mere intellectual appre-
hension ; itself of the substance of things hoped
for, of the evidence of the things not seen : the
assurance of the things hoped for, which shall be
demonstrated and determined, reconciled and ex-
plained ; the proving of things not seen, which,
when they shall be seen face to face, will have
solved all questions.
P. 51. I am going to speak now on your making
Holy Scripture your chief study. I am not appre-
hensive that any of you have offered yourselves
here without such a belief, purpose, persuasion, and
promise ; but I think it very likely that you may
have experienced some difficulty or some weakness
as to the last point, the study of them. Now
nothing can be allowed in excuse for the neglect
of this duty: no evangelising zeal, no busy engross-
ment of good works, no amount even of simple
devotion will entitle any of us to a dispensation
from it. It must be done, time must be found for
it, nothing must be suffered to stand in its way.
It is by study of the Scriptures that the simple
become wise unto salvation, and that the greatest
scholars learn their constant need of fuller progress
into perfect knowledge. The study teaches the
ignorant that even to them it is given to know,
and the wisest that there is very much of which
they must still be ignorant. As the revelation of
5 8 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
God's will, as the divinely recorded history of
experiences which the divine record alone can
interpret, as the story of the world's redemption
and as containing the rules for its reconquest and
restoration, the Holy Scriptures are the Great
Guide Book and treasury of all the ministers of
God. On that I need hardly expatiate. The duty
of study is as plain as the necessity of it ; you
ought and you must, by becoming familiar with
the language of God, try to become familiar with
the spirit that is in the words, so that you shall
come to view men, and sin, and righteousness, and
your own selves as with God's eyes ; seeing through
false excuses, discarding false mediums, casting
aside false exaggerations and attenuations, and by
sympathy with the Spirit of the Master entering
into the true burdens and troubles of His servants
in heart and mind. You ought and must try to
realise to yourselves the grounds of belief, and
the history of the doctrines of grace as the
Bible exhibits them. You must learn to bring
things new and old out of the good treasure
which you are daily amassing within. That is,
simply, you cannot teach, or preach, or visit your
people to advantage, or maintain your own spiritual
health, or render to him who asketh you a reason
of the hope that is in you, without constant refresh-
ing and sustaining study. Now how are you to
get time for that? Some of you are called to
work among large populations where there is much
demand for service and visiting, and probably much
necessary business in the way of teaching or con-
duct of business. It does seem perhaps exacting
THE STUDY OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 59
if I were to say to a curate of Crewe or of Birken-
head,1 You must find time to work every day at
your Greek Testament, or at some patristic com-
mentary, or some really standard work in illustration
of the Bible ; and by this I do not mean such study
as will enable you to pick up taking points for
sermons, or mere tricks or dodges for springing
surprises on your congregation, or enabling you to
pose before them as men who have a great know-
ledge of things that you have not a great knowledge
of, or to quote familiarly fathers and commentators
whom you have never read. You will not do that.
It is that you may strengthen your own hold on the
truth, and perseveringly applying to the letter not
only your own natural acumen, but the powerful
light of other men's experience, may qualify your-
self to speak out of the heart, not only out of the
head or the fancy, and speaking out of the heart,
speak to the heart, and not only to the head or
fancy of your people.
The study of the Bible will make men sincere
preachers, and, by the grace of God, effective
preachers too, but only on the condition that
they seek to know it first for themselves and then
to give their best to their people. Practically, I
think you should secure your time for study by
early rising. The clergyman's day ought to end
at ten o'clock ; it is not wise to keep your people
out late, or to rob yourselves of the chance of
rest by late reading. Early rising, moderately early
rising, will give you two hours a day for reading,
1 This Address was also given to Candidates for Ordination at
Chester.
60 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
or an hour and a half for reading and half an hour
for sermon-writing. You may think this a small
allowance for the latter, and to some people per-
haps it is too small, but sermons to be preached
with effect must be written with consecutiveness,
and however hard and long the subjects may be,
thought over before you take pen in hand ; when
you begin to write you should write on straight.
A sermon that has taken a week to think out, that
has been on your mind during all your visiting, —
and your visiting will scarcely fail to bring home to
you every week the bearings of a well-chosen text,
— a sermon that you have thought out well, will be
all the better for being quickly written. That,
however, vastly important as it is, is not the point ;
the point is that you maintain your belief, your
intelligence, your sincerity, and the many-sidedness,
the thoroughness of your knowledge by careful,
prayerful study. This has its great reward in
itself — it is purifying and exalting morally as well
as intellectually ; and it will come, as you give
yourselves to it, to have not only the charm which
every study faithfully followed has, but an especial
charm as it exercises the highest faculties of mind
and spirit on those highest subjects which they are
capable of approaching, and for the due contem-
plation of which they were made. In no study is it
more true that to him that hath shall more be
given, more power, more insight, more sense of
fitting application, more true pleasure as we enter
into the higher regions of perfect love and light.
THE PSALMS.
Ordination Addresses, p. 78.
The history of the preparation of the world for
the Redeemer's mission is written, not as a distinct
and paragraphed concordant of heavenly powers
with one another, not as a constitutional manifesto,
or charter, or report of a great transaction, but as
God vouchsafed step by step to reveal it to those
who waited for His salvation in Israel. The devo-
tional parts of the Old Testament, the Psalms, and
the hymns of the prophetic books are the revelation
of the mind of God through the life and experience
of those of His servants who came and desired to
come nearest to Him. When David tells us that
his heart showed him the wickedness of the un-
godly, or that his heart exclaimed, "Thy face,
Lord, will I seek," we know that for his admonition
and for our instruction through his experience,
God had revealed to him both the evil of the evil
heart and the true way in which the aspirations
of the penitent can make their way to His ears.
The Psalms are in one respect the most remarkable
book in the Bible, and therefore the strongest
example of the truth that I want to set forcibly
62 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
before you. For can anything be more strange
than that the songs of the wild, wilful, wanton
outlaw, whom yet God, knowing how constantly
and ever even in his sins he had set Him before his
eyes, calls the man after His own heart, — the
songs of the wild, wilful outlaw, written in cir-
cumstances and under conditions so various and
so different from those possible in other ages
and other lands, should yet become the songs of
the Universal Church both in the house of her
pilgrimage and in the bearing of her message to
every sort and condition of men throughout the
whole world that the Son of David died to ransom ?
In the wonderful insight and variety of the
Psalms, and even especially of those of which
no criticism has availed to rob the son of Jesse,
there is a key to all self-knowledge, and in that
self-knowledge a guide to all experience touching
the hearts of men. And I doubt not that it was
by a divine instinct, as well as by blessed experience,
that the ancient Church, and our own in conformity
with the ancient usage, made the daily repetition
of a large portion of the Psalter a part of the
proper devotions of her ministers. No man who
has not tried can at all realise how the practice
gives a tone and colouring, a seasoning and flavour
to the work of every day that has begun on such
wholesome fare of spiritual nurture. You will see
by what I have said of the Psalms what 1 mean.
The Scriptures contain the mind of God for man's
reading ; history as read with His eyes, philosophy
as read with His eyes, devotion as transfused
by His Spirit: not, of course, as completely or as
THE PSALMS. 63
clearly as if it were written with His finger, but
as, considering the circumstances and powers of
those who wrote it, and the conditions under which
the writing is* possible, conveys to us the spirit,
the sympathy, the wise judgment, the grounds of
faith, in the holding of which faith differs from
sight.
Of course, what I have said of the Old Testa-
ment is still more applicable to the New, the
direct revelation of which, in the mouth of Him
who worked the salvation of mankind, and of
the apostles and evangelists who had received the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit Himself, seems to
come more immediately, as well as more clearly,
to us than do the lessons of even one whose heart
we know as well as we know David's. The
recommendation or exhortation of the paragraph
before us seems to me to contain advice both for
the devotional and for the exegetical study of the
Scriptures ; the devotional to be especially pursued
in conformity with the direction that every clergy-
man shall read the daily office every day in his
church : an obligation which, I need hardly say,
no disuse of the practice can really be interpreted
to dispense. Those who have tried it know, as
I said, what a strength and stay, what a suggestive
fountain of holy thoughts, and what a supply of
good influences a daily service is to those who
are so happy as to enjoy it : a daily revelation to
the open mind of something more of the mind of
Christ. The elaborate and persistent study of the
same word, with lexicon and grammer and com-
mentary, as well as with prayer for enlightenment,
64 BIBLICAL CRITICISM.
is likewise an obligation that no young clergyman
can do without, and from which the oldest and
most experienced will be constantly gaining broader
and fuller light ; and I trust that all of you will,
from the beginning, make a point of securing some
regular section of every day for leisure to do this.
What the Bishop says about the exclusive study
of the Scriptures must, I think, in these days be
interpreted with some liberal construction. The
clergyman of these days is expected, and rightly
expected, to be abreast of the society in which he
lives in other subjects besides the study of Scrip-
ture; but for all that, the study of the Scripture
stands first, and a long way the first, of all in
his list ; and every other subject must be pursued
with the same desire to justify the wisdom of
the highest, that prompts the study of the word
of God. Take the word of one who has spent, it
may well be, too much time on other reading : all
reading that is worth the name of study can be,
and should be, made to subserve the great object
of your lives henceforth ; for all knowledge comes
from and converges to the same great purpose, the
proof and publishing of the truth that is of the
glory of Him who can in all these things make
His will clear to us.
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLI \M CLOWES AND SONS, IIMITKI).
LONDON AND BECCLES.
PUBLICATIONS
OF THE
§ocictjj for promoting (tthrtetran linotolci)gc.
CHURCH HYMNS.
NEW EDITION. Containing 658 Hymns.
WORDS ONLY.
Edition A. Long Primer, demy iSmo.
In various bindings from is. to 4J. 6d.
Edition B. Small Pica, small post 8vo.
In various bindings from ix. 6d. to 4s. 6d.
Edition C, Pearl, medium 32mo.
Paper cover, id. j limp cloth, cut flush, 2d.
Edition D. Diamond, medium 321T10.
Limp cloth, cut flush, 4^.
WORDS AND MUSIC.
Edition E. Nonpareil 8vo.
In various bindings from 2s. $d. to Jr. 6d.
Edition F. Long Primer, Imperial 1 61110.
In various bindings from $s. 6d. to gs.
8 PUBLICATIONS OF THE SOCIETY.
CONVERSION OF THE WEST.
A Series of Volumes showing how the Conversion of the Chief
Races of the West was brought about, and their condition before
this occurred.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth boards, 2s. each.
THE ENGLISH. By the late Rev. G. F. Maclear, D.D. With Two
THE NORTHMEN. By the above author. With Map. [Map?.
THE SLAVS. By the above author. With Map.
THE CONTINENTAL TEUTONS. By the late Very Rev. CHARLES
Merivale, D.D., D.C.L., Dean of Ely. With Map.
DIOCESAN HISTORIES.
This Series, which will embrace, when completed, every Diocese
in England and Wales, will furnish, it is expected, a perfect
library of English Ecclesiastical History.
Fcap. Svo, with Map, cloth boards.
BATH AND WELLS. By the Rev. W. Hunt. 2s. 6d.
CANTERBURY. By the late Rev. R. C. JENKINS, y. 6d.
CARLISLE. By the late Richard S. Ferguson. 2s. 6d.
CHESTER. By the Rev. Canon Morris, D.D. y.
CHICHESTER By the^tev. W. R. W. Stephens, M.A. 2s. 6d
DURHAM. By the Rev. J. L. Low. 2s. 6d.
HEREFORD. By the late Rev. Canon Phillott. p.
LICHFIELD. By the Rev. W. Beresford. 2s. 6d.
LINCOLN. By the late Rev. Canon E. Venables, and the late
Venerable Archdeacon Perry. 4s.
LLANDAFF. By the Rev. E. J. Newell, M.A. 3s. 6d.
NORWICH. By the Rev. A. Jessopp, D.D. 2s. 6d.
OXFORD. By the Rev. E. Marshall, M.A. 2s. 6d.
PETERBOROUGH. By the Rev. G. A. Poole, M.A. 2s. 6d,
ROCHESTER. By the Rev. A. J. PEARMAN, M.A. 4*
SALISBURY. By the Rev. W. II. Jones. 2s. 6d.
SODOR AND MAN. By A. W. Moore, M.A. 3*
ST. ASAPH. By the Venerable Archdeacon Thomas. 2j.
ST. DAVID'S. By the Rev. Canon Bevan. 2s. 6d.
WINCHESTER. By the Rev. W. Benham, B.D. 3*.
WORCESTER. By the Rev. I. Gregory Smith, M.A., and the
Rev. Phipps Onslow, M.A. 3*. 6d.
YORK By the Rev. Canon Ornsby, M.A. y. 6d.
PUBLICATIONS OF THE SOCIETY. 3
THE HOME LIBRARY.
Crown 8vo, cloth boards, 2s. 6d. each.
BLACK AND WHITE. Mission Stories. By the late H. A.
FORDE.
CHARLEMAGNE. By the late Rev. E. L. Cutts, D.D. With
Map.
CONSTANTINE THE GEE AT. The Union of the Church and
State. By the late Rev. E. L. Cutts, D.D.
JOHN HUS. The Commencement of Resistance to Papal Authority
on the part of the Inferior Clergy. By the Rev. A. H.
Wratislaw.
JTJD.EA AND HER RULERS, from Nebuchadnezzar to Vespasian,
By M. Bramston. With Map.
HAZABIN. By the late Gustave Masson.
MILITARY RELIGIOUS ORDERS 07 THE MIDDLE AGES : the
Hospitallers, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, and others.
By the Rev. F. C. Woodhouse, M.A.
MITSLAV; or, the Conversion of Pomerania. By the late Right
Rev. R. Milman, D.D. With Map.
HARCISSTJS: a Tale of Early Christian Times. By the Right
Rev. W. Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon.
RICHELIEU. By the late Gustave Masson.
SKETCHES OF THE WOMEN OF CHEISTENDOM. Dedicated to
the Women of India. By the late Mrs. Rundle Charles.
THE CHUECH IN EOMAN GAUL. By the Rev. R. Travers
Smith. With Map.
THE CHURCHMAN'S LIFE OF WESLEY. By R. Denny Urlin,
Esq., F.S.S.
THE INNER LIFE, as Revealed in the Correspondence of Cele-
brated Christians. Edited by the late Rev. T. Erskine.
THE LIFE OF THE SOUL IN THE WOELD : its Nature, Needs,
Dangers, Sorrows, Aids, and Joys. By the Rev. F. C. Wood-
house, M.A.
THE NOETH-AFEICAN CHUECH. By the late Rev. Juliu3
Lloyd, M.A. With Map.
THOUGHTS AND CHARACTEES; being Selections from the
Writings of the late Mrs. Rundle Charles.
4 PUBLICAriONS OF THE SOCIETY.
EARLY CHRONICLERS OF EUROPE.
Crown $vot cloth boards, 4;. each.
ENGLAND. By James Gairdner,
FRANCE. By the late Gustave Masson, B.A., Univ. Gallic,
ITALY. By Ugo Balzani.
THE FATHERS FOR ENGLISH READERS.
A Series of Monographs on the Chief Fathers of the Church, the
Fathers selected being centres of influence at important periods
of Church History and in important spheres of action,
Fcap. Svo, cloth boards, is, each.
BONIFACE. By the Rev. Canon Gregory Smith, M.A. (is. 6d.)
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. By the Rev. F. R. Mont-
gomery Hitchcock, B.D. (3^.)
LEO THE GREAT. By the Right Rev. Charles Gore, D.D.
GREGORY THE GREAT. By the late Rev. J. Barmby, B.D.
SAINT AMBROSE : his Life, Times, and Teaching. By the
Ven. Archdeacon TiiorntOxN, D.D.
SAINT ATHANASIUS : his Life and Times. By the Rev. R.
Wheler Bush. (2s. 6d.)
SAINT AUGUSTINE. By the late Rev. E. L. Cutts, D.D.
SAINT BASIL THE GREAT. By the Rev. R. T. Smith, B.D.
SAINT BERNARD, ABBOT OF CLAIRVAUX, A.D. 1091-1153.
By the Rev. S. J. Eales, M.A., D.CL. (2s. 6d.)
SAINT HILARY OF POITIERS AND SAINT MARTIN CF TOURS
By the Rev. Gibson Cazenove, D.D.
SAINT JEROME. By the late Rev. E. L. Cutts, D.D.
SAINT JOHN OP DAMASCUS. By the Rev. J. H. Lupton, M.A.
SAINT PATRICK: his Life and Teaching. By the Rev. E. J.
Newell, M.A. (2j. 6d.)
SYNESIU3 OF CYRENE, Philosopher and Bishop. By Alice
Gardner.
THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. By the Rev. Canon Scott Holland.
THE DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH; or, the Christian Apolo-
gists of the Second and Third Centuries. By the Rev. F.
Watson, D.D.
THE VENERABLE BEDE. By the Right Rev. G. F, Browne.
PUBLICATIONS OF THE SOCIETY. J
CHIEF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHIES.
This Series of Books deals with the chief systems of Ancient
Thought, not merely as dry matters of History, but as having
a bearing on Modern Speculation.
Fcafi. Svo, cloth boards^ 2s. 6d. each.
PLATONISM. By the Rev. Thomas B. Strong, M.A. (3,-.)
NEOPLATONISM. By the Rev. C. Bigg, D.D. (y.)\
EPICUREANISM. By the late William Wallace, M.A.
STOICISM. By the Rev. W. W. Capes, Fellow of Hertford College.
ARISTOTELIANISM. The Ethics of Aristotle. By the Rev.
I. Gregory Smith, M.A., Hon. LL.D. The logical
Treatises, the Metaphysics, the Psychology, the Politics. By
the Rev. W. Grundy, M.A.
NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS.
These Manuals furnish in a brief and popular form an accurate
account of the great Non-Christian Religious Systems of the
World.
Fcaj>. Svo, cloth boards, is. 6d. each.
BUDDHISM : being a Sketch of the Life and Teachings of Gautama,
the Buddha. By T. W. Rhys Davids, M.A., Ph.D. A
new and revised edition. With Map.
BUDDHISM IN CHINA. By the late Rev. S. Beal. With Man.
CHRISTIANITY AND BUDDHISM : a Comparison and a Con-
trast. By the Rev. T. Sterling Berry, D.D.
CONFUCIANISM AND TAOUISM. By Professor Robert K.
Douglas, of the British Museum. With Map.
HINDUISM. By the late Sir M. Monier Williams, M.A.,
D.C.L. A new and revised edition. With Map.
ISLAM AND IT3 FOUNDER. By J. W. H. Stobart. With Map.
ISLAM AS A MISSIONARY RELIGION. By C. R. Haines. (2j.)
STUDIES OF NON< CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS. By Eliot
Howard.
THE CORAN: its Composition and Teaching, and the Testimony
it bears to the Holy Scriptures. By Sir William Muir,
K.C.S.I., LL.D., D.C.L., Ph. D. A new and revised edition.
TEE RELIGION OF THE CRESCENT ; or, Islam : its Strength,
its "Weakness, its Origin, its Influence. By the Rev. W. St.
Clair-Tisdall, M.A., C.M.S. (4s.)
PUBLICATIONS OF THS SOCIETY.'
MISCELLANEOUS PUBLICATIONS.
ALUS TO PRAYER. By the Rev. Daniel Moore. Printed la
red and black. Post 8vo, cloth boards, is. bd.
ALONE WITH GOD ; or, Helps to Thought and Prayer, for the use
of the Sick. By the Rev. F. Bourdillon. Series I. and II.,
i2mo, cloth boards, each is.
BEING OF GOD, SIX ADDRESSES ON THE. By C. J. Elli-
cott, D.D., Bishop of Gloucester. Small post 8vo, cloth
boards, is. 6d.
BIBLE PLACES ; or, The Topography of the Holy Land. By
H. B. Tristram. New Edition, brought up to date. Witb
Map and numerous Woodcuts. Crown 8vo, half bound, 5*.
CALLED TO BE SAINTS. The Minor Festivals Devotionally
Studied. By the late Christina G. Rossetti, Author of
" Seek and Find." Post 8vo, cloth boards, 3s. 6d.
CHRISTIANS UNDER THE CRESCENT IN ASIA. By the late
Rev. E. L. Cutts, D.D., Author of "Turning-Points of
Church History," etc. With numerous Illustrations. Crown
8vo, cloth boards, 5j.
COMMUNICANT'S DAILY HELP, THE. Being Thoughts for
Daily Prayer and Hints for Daily Life. By the Rev. W.
Abbott. i8mo, limp cloth, 6d.
DAILY READINGS FOR A YEAR. By Elizabeth Spooxer.
Crown 8vo, cloth boards, 2s.
DEVOTIONAL (A) LIFE OF OUR LORD. By the late Rev. E. L.
Cutts, D.D., Author of " Pastoral Counsels," etc. Post 8vo,
cloth boards, $s.
GOSPELS, THE FOUR. Arranged in the Form of an English
Harmony, from the Text of the Authorized Version. By the
late Rev. J. M. Fuller, M.A. With Analytical Table of
Contents and Four Maps. Cloth boards, is.
GREAT TRUTHS AND HOLY LIVES. By Lady Hammick. Post
8vo, cloth boards, is. 6d.
HOLY COMMUNION : PREPARATION AND COMPANION. By
the late Bishop W. W. How. 181110. Cloth boards, 6d. ;
limp roan, it. 6d. ; and in various other bindings.
DITTO, with Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, in one vol.
i8mo. Cloth boards, red edges, is. ; limp roan, Is. lod. ; and
in various other bindings.
PUBLICATIONS OF THE SOCIETY. ?
HOLY COMMUNION FOR ENGLISH CHURCHMEN, A PLAIN
MANUAL OF. By the late Rev. E. Burbidge. i8mo. Limp
cloth, 6d. ; limp roan, u. 2d.
DITTO, with Collects, Epistles, Gospels, and Hymns, in one
vol. ;i8mo. Cloth boards, Sd. ; paste grain roan, is. 6d
LAND OF ISRAEL, THE. A Journal of Travel in Palestine,
undertaken with special reference to its Physical Character.
By the Rev. Canon Tristram. With two Maps and numerous
Illustrations. Large post 8vo, cloth boards, ioj. 6d.
LECTURES ON THE HISTORICAL AND DOGMATICAL POSI-
TION OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. By the Rev. W.
Baker, D.D. Post 8vo, cloth boards, is. 6d.
LESSER LIGHTS : or, Some of the Minor Characters of Scripture
traced. Series I. and II. By the Rev. F. Bourdillon.
Post 8vo, cloth boards, 2s. 6d. each. Series III. 2s.
OUR OWN BOOK. Very Plain Reading for People in Humble
Life. By the Rev. F. Bourdillon, M.A. Post 8vo, cloth
boards, is.
PALEY'S EVIDENCES. A New Edition, with Notes, Appendix,
and Preface. By the Rev. E. A. Litton. Post 8vo, cloth
boards, 4s.
PALEY'S EOR-E PAULINA. A New Edition, with Notes,
Appendix, and Preface. By the Rev. J. S. Howson, D.D.,
Dean of Chester. Post 8vo, cloth boards, 3*.
PARABLES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT (THE). By the Right
Rev. A. Barry, D.D. Demy 8vo, cloth boards, 4J.
PEACE WITH GOD. A Manual for the Sick. By the late Rev.
E. Burbidge, M.A. Post 8vo, cloth boards, is. 6d.
PLAIN WORDS ON CHRISTIAN LIVING. By the late Dean
VAUGHAN. Small post 8vo. Cloth boards, 2s.
PLAIN WORDS FOR CHRIST. Being a Series of Readings for
Working Men. By the late Rev. R. G. Dutton. Post 8vo,
cloth boards, is.
PRAYER OF CHRISTENDOM (THE GREAT). By the late Mrs.
Rundle Charles. Post 8vo, cloth boards, is.
READINGS ON THE FIRST LESSONS FOR SUNDAYS AND
CHIEF HOLY DAYS. According to the New Table. By
the late Rev. Peter Young. Crown 8vo, in two volumes, 5*.
RELIGION FOR EVERY DAY. Lectures for Men. By the Ri-ht
Rev. A. Barry, D.D. Fcap. 8vo, cloth boards, is.
8 PUBLICATIONS OF THE SOCIETY.
SEEK AND FIND. A Double Series of Short Studies of the
Benedicite. By the late Christina G. Rossetti. Post 8vo,
cloth boards, 2s. 6d.
SERVANTS OF SCRIPTURE (THE). By the late Rev. John W.
Burgon, B.D. Post Svo, cloth boards, If.
SOME CHIEF TRUTHS OF RELIGION. By the late Rev. E. L.
Cutts, D.D. Crown 8vo, cloth boards, 2s. 6d.
SPIRITUAL COUNSELS; or, Helps and Hindrances to Holy
Living. By the late Rev. R. G. Dutton. Tost 8vo, cloth
boards, is.
THOUGHTS FOR MEN AND WOMEN. The Lord's Prayer.
By Emily C. Orr. Post 8vo, limp cloth, is,
THOUGHTS FOR WORKING DAYS. Original and Selected.
By Emily C. Orr. Post Svo, limp cloth, is.
TIME FLIES : A READING DIARY. By the late Christina
G. Rossetti. Post 8vo, cloth boards, $s. 6d.
TRUE VINE (THE). By the late Mrs. Rundle Charles.
Printed in red and black. Post Svo, cloth boards, is,
TURNING-POINTS OF ENGLISH CHURCH HISTORY. By the
late Rev. E. L. Cutts, D.D. Crown Svo, cloth boards,
$s. 6d.
TURNING-POINTS OF GENERAL CHURCH HISTORY. By the
late Rev. E. L. Cutts, D.D., Author of " Pastoral Counsels,"
etc. Crown Svo, cloth boards, 4s.
WITHIN THE VEIL. Studies in the Epistle to the
Hebrews. By the late Mrs. Rundle Charles. Post 8vo,
cloth boards, is.
LONDON: NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, W.C
43, Queen Victoria Street, E. C
BRIGHTON: 129, North Street.
lA
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11