PART II.

GENIUS OF THE SCRIPTURES.

1. Inductive Philosophy gradually applied. 2. Reason and Revelation. 3. Authority and Inspiration. 4. Divine Economy of Means and Miracles. 5. Preconceived Opinions. 6. The True more than the Supernatural the Object of Scripture. 7. Scriptural Scholiasts and Commentators. 8. Parallelism Indestructible and Self-interpreting. 9. Completeness of the Scriptures. 10. Earliest Poetry resembles the Hebrew. 11. Simplicity and Perpetuity of the Hebrew Life and State. 12. Primitive Energy of the Hebrew. 13. In the Scriptures, Union of the Human Intelligence with the Divine. 14. Christ the Centre of the Scriptures. 15. The Origin of Types in Nature and Revelation. 16. Scriptures Unaffected by Time.

I. THE Philosophy of Lord Bacon has been gaining ground but slowly. It was sometime of being applied to the study of nature, where its use is most obvious; it has lately and imperfectly been applied to the study of mind; and still more imperfectly to the study of religion. Such is the slow progress of the advancement of knowledge, and so many are the difficulties which beset its early way!

Yet the material world was always spread out before the view of man; and his faculties, instead of spending themselves in their own proper contemplation, flow out by a Divine and almost irresistible impulse, upon the external objects with which he is surrounded. Besides the arts are elder than the sciences; they are the first and immediate

offspring of his wants and necessities; and the arts are always inductive, employed in observation and in experiment; and these might have led their followers by an easy and smooth process, to the footstool of genuine science.

But the mind is unconscious of its own weakness, and the conviction of its limited powers, could only be gained, as all true knowledge must be, by experience; by trying what its own unaided efforts could do in the discovery of truth; and whether or not by an innate energy, it could excogitate the true system of the universe, instead of waiting for the slow results of experiment and observation.

As the law was a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, shutting us up, by the impossibility of accomplishing its commandments, to trust in the one Being who alone could fulfil them; so Bacon found a teacher in the Genius of Greece, which showed him by its wonderful, but unsuccessful efforts, that there must be some better guide to science, than the energy of our understanding when unsupported by the data of experience.

Now if it was natural to the mind to imagine that it possessed-included within its own being, the elements of all knowledge; and if it could believe that it understood the material world, unshaken in its conviction by the monstrous representation of every part of nature which it was all the while shaping out; representations more uncouth than the hieroglyphic paintings of the gods, and of the creation of the world, spread over their sacred edifices by the hands of the priests of Babylon and of Egypt; still more natural was it to suppose that its own nature was thoroughly comprehended. But, alas! every original thinker had an original theory. Every one was confident in his own view, but all their views were discordant; and the mind which aspired to know all things, was evidently unknown to itself.

If theories respecting the material world were extrava

gant, checked as they were, by the evidence of the senses; and if theories about the mind were discordant, in spite of the testimony continually borne by consciousness; much more were all reasoning concerning the Deity lost in endless clouds, and inextricable error, wandering, as they continually did, through the waste and infinite void.

Furnished, as we are, with the clue of Bacon's Philosophy, we can traverse, though with slow steps, and meeting with many an obstacle, the labyrinth of nature, unravelling the mysteries that are without us, by the aid of observation, and the mysteries that are within us, by the more painful and precarious operation of reflection upon our own thoughts; but where is the new philosophy or the new Organum by which we might find out the Almighty? We can know exactly as much of him, but no more, than he himself is pleased to reveal. It is to the Bible alone, that inductive philosophy is to be applied, receiving the Divine declarations as the ultimate facts in religion; in the same way in which the laws or ultimate facts of nature, become the basis of natural philosophy; and the ultimate principles of consciousness become the foundation of morals.

II. "Here, therefore, I note this deficiency," says Lord Bacon, "that there hath not been to my understanding sufficiently inquired and handled the true limits and use of reason in spiritual things, as a kind of Divine dialectic;" and what was a want in Lord Bacon's time, remains a want still. Here we have no intention of entering fully into the subject which deserves to be considered either separately, or in connection with the other branches of inductive logic. It may however be remarked that the deficiency of a treatise upon this subject is of the less consequence that the Bible itself supplies the want. It does not indeed supply the rules of the Divine dialectic

which Bacon speaks of, but it does still better, it furnishes us with numerous and varied examples; it not only lays down the fundamental principles on which religion is founded, but it draws out these principless into every application which can be required for the ordinary uses of life. Mere reason is not a self-sufficing faculty, it can do nothing unless it have the proper data on which to proceed. As we have before observed, all reason must terminate in first principles; and these first principles are a Divine communication no less than the truths of revelation. The mode of communication may be different, but we are passive in the reception of each.

Thus the stream of knowledge descends upon us from two sources; and of the way in which these sources unite together, we have an example and parallel in the two inlets of sense, sight and touch, by which we become acquainted with the different modifications of space. By touch we can only grope our way, and derive some confined notion of the forms that surround us; sight alone, would present colors without depth and distance; but sight and touch, when their notices are blended together, open out a new world of vision, and carry us beyond our narrow neighborhood, to the remote prospect of other worlds, and to the immensity of the heavens.

III. The Scriptures come to us as absolute truth, pure from any admixture of error. We are to receive them, not as the words of man, which ought always to be canvassed and examined, but as the words of God, who can neither deceive, nor be deceived; whose knowledge is truth, as his essence is reality. Every communication from God is not only true but imperative. It is the will of Him whose will must be done. The authority of Scripture is therefore the authority of God. Whatever is affirmed in the sacred volume is proved. "It is written," is a decision which admits of no appeal. Every sentence in

the Bible is as much sanctioned by the place which it occupies as if, like the law given upon Mount Sinai, it were ratified with all the thunders of the heavens.

Reason may

And it is necessary that it should be so. detect its own errors, but mistakes in a revelation would be irremediable; to all serious inquirers, the errors would be forever enshrined by the sanctity of the heavenly truths with which they were surrounded. Of course it is not supposed that religion sanctions the imperfections of human language in which it is necessarily conveyed, or that it anticipates the discoveries of science by revealing a complete system either of natural or of moral philosophy. But the more importance we attach to Scripture, the more importance we must also attach to the inquiry concerning the canon of Scripture; or to the rule which separates the inspired books from those which are merely apocryphal. This is a question either very plain, or very difficult, according to the manner in which it is handled. Jones has observed, "It is not so easy a matter as is commonly imagined, rightly to settle the canon of the New Testament. For my own part, I declare with many learned men, that in the whole compass of learning, I know no question involved with more intricacies and perplexing difficulties than this." And in his work, which is neither deficient in ingenuity or learning, he has made his point good, since in the manner in which he has treated the subject, it does present considerable difficulties. On the other hand, if we look to Paley, who has omitted all doubtful and extraneous matter, the question is easily resolved, and the decision is both prompt and conclusive. But even without Paley's citation of authorities, the canon of Scripture may be settled, on the plainest and most obvious considerations.

With respect to the Old Testament, we may remark, that the Jews, before the time of our Saviour, had lost the