The Gospel in all its parts and all its forms makes provision for the infinite future by giving answer to finite questions already asked. The same character is stamped on the written records in which it is conveyed. There too human search precedes Divine revelation. The words of our Lord belong more to dialogue than to discourse; and it is seldom possible to arrive at their principal meaning while they are treated as solitary aphorisms, without a history, and therefore without a purpose. The definite fitness with which they were first spoken is the measure of their lasting power, and even of their universality.

On the other hand few if any of the questions addressed to our Lord received an answer in the shape that was desired. It is not enough to say that His merciful wisdom withheld such replies as might have proved injurious to the moral state of the questioners. The replies which He gave were not merely more profitable but more true, and more apposite in their truth, than any others could have been. It is an idle fancy that to what seems a clear and positive question there must needs be somewhere a clear and positive answer of pure truth. The necessity exists only for the most abstract or the most concrete things. All questions in which the spiritual realm has any part contain within them assumptions in thought and in word; and these assumptions cannot but be more or less affected by human infirmity.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

ON THE ACQUISITION AND TRANSMISSION OF TRUTH

Smooth ways of thought are like smooth ways of action: truth is never reached or held fast without friction and grappling.

To move in the direction where movement is easiest is not action or work: all action involves struggle and conquest.

We want not relaxation but bracing and binding: we are all abroad, never at home. We need to live with girded loins and lamps burning, ready instantly to throw ourselves on what is needed. Yet the time is gone by for gaining concentration by narrowness of aim.

We must beware of a slavery of the mind to its own tools, not the less tools that they are part of its furniture and frame.

All processes of logic and method are only mechanism, extending and correcting the inborn mechanism of the eye. Behind, and apart from all alike is the power of sight.

Vision

Its three qualities are clearness, completeness, proportion.

Vision is essentially personal and individual, involving selection and interpretation.

No hearsay can be a substitute. What we have ourselves seen and learned and known is the dominant and the vitalising factor in all real belief.

The earthly life and acts of the Lord, in Himself and in the Church of His disciples, are divided according to His own express teaching into two parts. Before the discourse of the Last Supper reaches its close, He opposes them to each other in sharp contrast. “I came out from the Father and am come into the world: again I leave the world and go unto the Father.” When these two words of His are received in their distinctness and their mutual necessity, as setting forth at once historical fact and eternal truth, then the Gospel is embraced. To refuse both is to fall back into heathenism. To receive the first but let go the second, or to confuse the second with the first, is to retrace our steps and become once more believing Jews. To hold fast both together is to stand and move in the faith of Christ.

The first period is in its origin a coming forth, in its progress a descent. The Father or the Father's presence is the beginning. The Son is sent forth and Himself comes forth into the world which He is to redeem. The weight of the world's sin and misery lies on Him more and more. Each step in His ministry brings Him into deadlier conflict with the world; and as He goes steadily forward, the conflict ends in His death. The Death belongs to both periods.

In the counsel of God David the righteous was succeeded by Solomon the wise; for both characters had to be combined in the true king of Israel. The kingdom already set up had now to be consolidated, administered, and maintained. While the demands upon what the Bible calls righteousness were greater than before, righteousness itself could subsist and prevail only by growing to a higher type, and so increasing in subtle complexity of power. The time was past when rude impulses could suffice: without the constant enlightenment of wisdom the efforts of righteousness would be narrow in purpose and poor in result. Nor was the highest sanction wanting to the advance, for both characters were already embraced in the faith in God Himself. As the righteous Lord loved righteousness, so human wisdom came to be regarded as His requirement and His gift, as soon as His own wisdom in the creation of the material world and in the ordering of the ways of men received distinct homage.

Though Israel stood virtually alone in its emphatic exaltation of wisdom as a divine virtue, other nations knew how to admire it for its beauty or prize it for its uses. After a while their own progress led them to perceive that wisdom has no independent existence, but lives by knowledge; and that knowledge must become an object of conscious and sedulous pursuit if wisdom is to attain maturity.

The better heathenisms at their height were religions of life. This was the source of their greatest power. The chief causes of their fall proceeded from the inevitable limitations of that life which alone they were able to express and uphold. It was divided into many separate and exclusive lives. It was a fluctuating and transitory life, dependent solely on the human emotions which it should have sustained, and therefore itself subject to the same encroachments from without and from below which struck them sick and killed them. It was a life confined within the sphere of emotion, and therefore incapable of progress. It was divided from knowledge, and therefore knowledge was able to bear a part in destroying it. Its chief influence over action was by way of restraint. It was a life which sought satisfaction within the confines of the present, and so could often dispense with hope, though it could not annihilate fear. But these limitations do not set aside the fact that life itself was once the glory of heathenism.

In time the heathen world for the most part ceased to possess life, or to care for it. The sense of life had always been accompanied by pleasure and now, for nearly all, it was only pleasure that remained behind in the vacant place of life. Death, which it had once been possible to hide or forget in the strength of life, refused to be hidden or forgotten any longer.

THIS volume chiefly represents the Hulsean Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge in November and December 1871. The first and second lectures are printed substantially as they were first written, the parts omitted in delivery being restored, and the whole being revised, with occasional expansions. The third and still more the fourth lectures were originally written with difficulty under physical depression, and fell far short of their intended scope: in their present form they are to a considerable extent new. A vain hope of finding some space of undistracted leisure for recasting them altogether has held back publication; but the delay has already been too great. A sermon preached at the Trinity Ordination in Ely Cathedral on June 15, 1873, is appended to the Lectures: though addressed to a very different congregation, it may illustrate some of the thoughts which they are intended to set forth.

According to the design of Mr Hulse his Lecturer had two duties, to be performed in different courses of sermons; to show “the truth and excellence of Christianity,” more especially by “collateral arguments”; and to explain “some of the more difficult texts or obscure parts of the Holy Scriptures, such as may appear to be more generally useful or necessary to be explained.” Recent legislation, while curtailing the number of lectures, and abolishing the requirement of publication, has likewise removed these conditions of subject matter.