You do not enhance the value of a ruby by calling it an emerald, or by asserting that it possesses a genial warmth. You do not bring out the true value of gold by declaring that it is good to eat; and under no circumstances whatever is a good cause really strengthened by a bad argument, or established by a wrong assumption. Now, let us try honestly to understand what the Bible really is; we shall then see that its real value is not a thing about which there can be any reasonable dispute, and that real value is absolutely indestructible.

58. The Bible is not one book. Look at the index. You will see that the Bible consists of sixty-seven books. They were written by a great many different writers. Between the first and second portions there may have been an interval of 100 or 500 years, and so between the 'second and third, and so on, all written by different writers at sundry times, and in divers manners. These fragments are bound up in one book, and indeed there is very little connection between a great many of the fragments, except so far as, dealing with the religious history of man, they are records of the religious life of humanity.

Now, these records are valuable for two reasons: Ist, they represent to us the general levels of religious thought in different ages and countries; 2ndly, they indicate the spiritual elevation reached by individual minds, who may have been before or beyond the age in which they lived. But the religious revelations contained in the Bible are often so dimly perceived by the

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very persons to whom they were made, that we find many imperfect accounts of God, and of His dealings with humanity. And although we seem to see the image of His moral perfections face to face in Christ Jesus, yet when we read some of the records of the Old Testament, we see Him through a glass darkly.

And yet there are people who decline to part with the most unworthy views of the Deity and His dealings with the world; nay, some obviously mistaken or partial view is often declared to be so inseparably bound up with the rest, that to touch the authority of any part is to sacrifice the whole. This is the usual panic cry, 'The whole Bible or nothing!' It sounds a very dreadful dilemma, but, after all, it is but a parrot-cry.

59. Let us face it calmly. We are told that to destroy a chapter or verse, a book or books of the Bible is to destroy the whole, either all is true or nothing is true. If the Bible were one book you could say that, but the Bible consists of many books, and therefore, each portion stands or falls by itself. You never think of applying the all or nothing theory to the history of the English. It would be too obviously absurd. Supposing Wolsey had never said, 'Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my King, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies' supposing Cardinal Wolsey had never said that at all; supposing somebody else had said it. What would you say? 'There never was such a person as Wolsey?' or would you not rather say, 'We have found out one of those in

accuracies so common in history, we must correct it, not in order to damage, but to increase the value and trustworthiness of history. Certain things did not happen, or did not happen as they were described to have happened, and it is well to know it. We accept

the historical correction, but we do not deny the outlines of historical events, the substantial features of the men's lives, or the general drift of their characters; we do not deny all their utterances, only what we find to be untenable.'

Let us notice here, for our comfort, that if every line, or chapter, or book of the Bible that has ever been disputed, were simply dropped out and put away, we should still have a sublime body of truth which no sane person has ever ventured to doubt, and no critical inquiry has ever shaken.

60. But how do you know what is genuine and what is spurious? I will use no new simile; I will take an old one which I remember finding in one of Mr. Beecher's

sermons.

Here are a number of phials. One is marked 'spirits of wine,' another, 'petroleum,' and then I come to one marked 'iodine' and so on. On opening the one marked ' iodine,' I find nothing but water. Do I therefore say that all the others contain nothing but water? No. I go and see; I examine them closely; and if I find that the others contain what I expected according to the labels, well and good. So with the Bible. If, after examining most reverently, most closely, what my fellow

error, whatever

creatures hand to me as the Word of God, I find it is not in some parts what it professes to be-not moral, not righteous-I am bound to reject it. And I shall be most happy in having discovered the that error may be, and I shall tell other people about it, and listen to what they have to say in answer; and if they have nothing to say, I shall adhere to my opinion. Then you will ask, 'Don't you believe that God is speaking in the Bible?' That is just what I do believe. I don't believe that every chapter and every verse are inspired, but I do believe that the word of God is in the Bible, and that God is speaking to me in the Bible. St. Paul tells you, 'We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.' At times there comes what we call a revelation, or a certain committal of truth to man, and the way in which that truth is presented and handed down from age to age depends on the individuals who have got hold of it. It is manifest that God, according to fixed and necessary laws of thought and intelligence, imparts divine truth. He cannot, or, at all events, does not communicate truth to the human mind faster than the mind is able to receive it. Would you have it otherwise? What would be the use of my teaching algebra to a boy who had not learned arithmetic? It is of no use to communicate to people who are not fit to understand it a perfect view of truth, and so our instalments are necessarily partial. That only means, that the human mind receives the everlasting truth in a partial manner; it does not mean that God makes so

much a partial commitment of the truth to man, as that the mind of man appropriates it imperfectly and by degrees. For instance, here we have four glasses, red, green, yellow, and blue. I put a white light in each, but you won't see it to be white,-you say there are red, green, yellow, and blue lights; yet it is not so. The glass is coloured, only the light is pure white; so of God, His light is always shining with a pure, bright light, but you only see it through different coloured mediums. A man who goes out with green spectacles sees everything around him green; and another man who goes out with blue spectacles, sees everything blue; and another man who goes out blind, sees nothing at all. Now the writers of the Bible saw different colours and degrees of truth, took in many cases different views, and set up different standards of morality. Sometimes the light was seen through the dull lens of ignorance; sometimes the coloured lens of passion or prejudice; sometimes it was hardly seen at all. And hence, to preach that the Bible is infallible is most dangerous to morals, and especially derogatory to the character of the Supreme Being, as we have now learned to believe in Him. Knowing the higher standard of morals of the New Testament, we are bound not to rest in any of the imperfect standards of righteousness set before us in the Old. 'Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.' Understand this, and it is immediately seen to be quite beside the point, to talk about believing the Bible to be true or to be false; because the Bible is not simple, but complex-very highly