CHAPTER III.

THE WORD OF GOD.

In every age of the world's changing history, the Divine Being has held some intercourse with his creatures, and favoured them with some intimations of his will. Sometimes these intimations have been invested with circumstances of peculiar impressiveness and solemnity: the veil has been lifted up from the Eternal Mind with splendid and stately ceremonial; and with a trembling lip and faltering tongue, man has been constrained to testify that the secret of the Lord has been with him. But in our day, divine revelation is given unto us with the greatest simplicity; the word of the Lord is no longer audible enunciation-it is a written document; the grand and imposing media of former communications have retired; no finger writes the purposes of God in flame, or angel-voice publishes to some awe-struck prophet his commands: in a book penned under the influence of immediate inspiration, we have the declaration of the Divine will, the disclosure of the Divine purposes, and the law of human duty. This production is an object

at once the most extraordinary and interesting; it stands apart in its moral glory more lofty and commanding than any other subject of human contemplation; it embodies all the elements of the beautiful and the sublime; it has the marvellous and the instructive impressed upon it; a loftiness which might command the reverence of an angel, and a simplicity which commends itself to the apprehension of a child.

The contents of that book, which we denominate the Bible,* though derived from the same omniscient and eternal Spirit, have been communicated through the medium of different individuals. The monarch and the plebeian, the historian and the legislator, the orator and the poet, have each been employed to fill up the sum of its announcements; and though living in ages the most distant from each other, under different forms of civil government, under different dispensations of the Divine economy, their respective contributions beautifully harmonize in their spirit and in their tendency. There was a period when the canon of Scripture presented a very different aspect from that which it bears in our day-when it was imperfect and incomplete: the stream of truth had not always that broad and expanded surface which it has now; it was small

* The word Bible comes from the Greek Bißλiov, and is used to denote any book, but par excellence the book of inspired scripture. Biov comes from Bißλos, the Egyptian reed from which the ancient paper was procured. Chrysostom uses the term in the particular sense now assigned to it." I therefore expect all of you to procure to yourselves Bißλia. If you have nothing else, take care to have the New Testament, particularly the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospels, for your instructors."

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at its rise, and scanty in its flow; and though receiving accessions from age to age, yet it was not until the world had passed by far the greater portion of its present history that it attained its fulness. For nearly eighteen hundred years, however, the revelation has been completed. "Blessed," then, " our eyes, for they see; and our ears, for they hear." It is not the first dawn, but the meridian radiance of heavenly light, that has visited us: we have not only the law given by Moses, but grace and truth which have come by Jesus Christ; not only the dark and shadowy intimations of the prophets, but those more copious and exact exhibitions of Divine truth, given in the public teaching of our Lord, and in the written epistles of his apostles.

The Scriptures claiming to be a revelation made by God to man of himself and of his will, in addition to what he has made known by the light of nature or reason, it is an obviously incumbent duty to examine their pretensions in this respect, that the believer may be able to give a reason for the hope that is in him.

Admit the existence of a God of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, and the possibility of his making a discovery of himself and his will, in the manner we believe he has done in the sacred volume, must be admitted also. The possibility of an immediate divine revelation being granted, its probability will appear from many presumptive arguments. As we sustain the character of moral agents, and are therefore under a law or rule of conduct-as

no law can be binding unless it is made knownas men in all ages have been unable to attain any adequate information upon moral and religious truth of themselves-and as supposing any minds of superior order to have discovered the great principles of religion and duty by inductive processes; such discoveries would have no authority to render them binding upon the rest of mankind ;—it appears that there is a high degree of abstract probability investing the opinion, that the Divine Being has in his goodness made an express revelation of his will. But a strong presumptive argument in its favour may be drawn from the necessity of the case. The unassisted energies of the human intellect have been insufficient to rescue men from the most deplorable ignorance upon moral and religious subjects though endowed with mental capabilities of the highest order, they have remained the victims of doubt and superstition. The ancient world, with the solitary exception of Judæa,-a small and insignificant territory, was "without God and without hope;" efforts were indeed made by aspiring and philosophic spirits to arrive at the knowledge of truth, and some faint and partial glimpses dawned upon the horizon of the human mind. Socrates taught, and Plato lectured, and Homer sung; but the world, with all its "wisdom," "knew not God." Never, since the corruption of the primitive religion, has there been found, where the Scriptures are unknown, a religious system unfolding just views of the character of the Divine Being,