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thoughtful reader follows him the effort is not made in vain.

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I have added in an Appendix a very few longer comments than the notes admitted upon special texts and topics. It was scarcely possible to avoid altogether the great question of Inspiration. The one postulate of the Epistle to the Hebrews is the Inspiration of the Old Testament. How much this involves, and what it does not involve, seemed to require a few suggestions, negative and affirmative. It is the glory of this great Epistle to be in many senses the Gospel of the Old Testament. To assert the presence and influence of the breath of God' in the whole structure and composition of the Bible; to see an intention in its dark sayings, a meaning in its types, and a sequence in its arrangement; to show that, although 'the testimony of Jesus is (throughout) the spirit of prophecy,' the education of the world nevertheless required that the revelation should be made gradually, 'in divers parts and ways,' leading up to a dispensation of the fulness of times in which God should at last manifest Himself in His Son; this is the special office of the Epistle before us-Epistle, treatise, and homily in one: no generation needed it more than our own, and the growing attention paid to it shows that the need is felt.

I leave to larger works and more learned writers

the discussion of the still unanswered questions, who was the writer, and who were the first readers, of the Epistle. These are interesting and important enquiries. But the authorship in this case is not vital to the authority. And as to the authority, which is in other words the canonicity, of the Epistle, the brief summary of fact is unchallenged, (1) that, although it suffered an eclipse lasting for two centuries (not the first, however, after its writing) in the Latin half of the Church, yet from earliest times it was accepted as inspired Scripture by that other half of the Christian world to which it first spoke, and which had a nearer access to its witnesses and its credentials; and (2) that a time came, before the fourth century ended, when, under the judicial guidance of the two greatest of the Latin fathers, the authoritative verdict of the third Council of Carthage stamped it with that seal of canonical sanctity which the Church of all later generations has recognized as final.

The question of authorship is secondary to that of authority. It was not usual with the very earliest fathers to name authors in their quotations. As soon as the Epistle before us is ascribed to any author, it is ascribed to St Paul. No adverse testimony to this authorship is found before Tertullian. The great Alexandrine fathers, Clemens and Origen, impressed by its unlikeness in style to St

Paul's acknowledged writings, account for this discrepancy, the one by the supposition of a Hebrew original translated by St Luke, the other by that of a composition of which the thoughts are St Paul's but the words those of St Luke or Clement of Rome. The very conjectures should reprove the arrogance which imputes to the early Church either haste or credulity in the formation of the sacred Canon. Neither candour nor intelligence had its birth, as some would persuade us, in the opening years of the century now closing. The criticism of Alexandria was as keen and as outspoken as that of this day in Germany or England: and the particular criticism of which we are speaking has taken no step, certainly no stride, towards finality since the age of Clement and Origen.

It is easy to make a long list of resemblances and differences between the language of the Epistle to the Hebrews and that of the undoubted letters of St Paul. There are passages in the Epistle in which we might seem to hear his very voice. Such are the closing words, telling of the release of Timothy, and of the prospect of the writer's visiting with him the Church addressed. Like, yet not too much like, the passage in Phil. ii. 19-24, in which he purposes presently to send Timothy, and hopes that he also himself shall come shortly. The second chapter of our Epistle gives us a quotation used by St Paul

himself in writing to the Corinthians, and comments upon it almost to the same purpose. The argument of the fourth chapter recalls, at least by its ellipses, that of the third chapter of the letter to the Galatians; and the reproofs of the sixth and tenth chapters rival in their severity, and not less in their alternations of severity and tenderness, those of the fourth and fifth chapters of the same Epistle to Galatia. To say that there is no indication in the Epistle of any other doctrine than the Evangelical system of St Paul is to say little more than that both are Scripture; but the Scripture of both alike differs widely in expression from the Scripture of St James or of St John. Even passages of which the first reading suggests the comment, 'This cannot be St Paul,' may find their parallels somewhere, if not in his written words, yet in records of his speeches by St Luke: as, for example, the grand opening of the Epistle before us in the main paragraph of his address at Athens (Acts xvii. 24); and the clause most unlike him of all, 'confirmed unto us by them that heard Him' (Heb. ii. 3), in his own argument at Antioch in Pisidia (Acts xiii. 31), 'He was seen many days of them which came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are His witnesses unto the people.'

Nevertheless, and in the face of all resemblances and parallels, we echo the voice of Clement and

Origen in declaring that, however Pauline, the Epistle as we possess it is not St Paul's. Those who have lived for long years in the study of the Epistles can scarcely err in their instinctive perception of a something here which is not there. The position is altogether unlike that, for example, of the Pastoral Epistles. In them we have many more words, and many more topics, new to St Paul since he wrote even to the Colossians, than we have in this letter. But the living man is there, in those letters, and the living man, his very self, is not here. New words are nothing, new topics are nothing: a man lives and learns, a man lives and changes; but a man whose differentia of thought and speech was of one kind, a man whose whole method of treatment and dealing was of one kind, does not turn, in either respect, into another kind as life advances; least of all can we imagine a change into the different kind followed by a change back again-in other words, the Paul of the Romans and the Ephesians changed into the Paul of the Hebrews, and changed back again into the Paul of the Pastoral Epistles. We feel instinctively that such characteristics as we notice in this Epistle-inversions, transpositions, effects artistic rather than natural-belong to another personality than that of St Paul, whose own words (even if we demur to their rendering, or count the words themselves needlessly self-depreciatory) make him 'rude

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