must be paid to what men at the time are capable of receiving. "I have many things to say to you," said our Lord, "but ye cannot bear them now." Read the religious history of the world as it is told in the Bible, and we find a history of training and continual progress, even a lower moral code being tolerated for a time on account of the hardness of heart of those who were to accept it, and higher truths gradually delivered as the recipients were able to embrace them. That there should be differences then in the aspects of religious truth as presented by different divinely-commissioned teachers to men of different ages and of different degrees of culture is not only a thing not to be wondered at, but we should have cause to wonder if the fact were otherwise; and the only question is, whether or not these differences amount to contradictions.

But before we charge a book with being self-contradictory, we are bound to know something of the character of the book we criticise. The propositions of a scientific treatise will bear to be separated from their context, and the work may be condemned if one proposition is at variance with another; but we cannot deal in the same way with a work which is hortatory and practical. No preacher, for instance, feels him

self to be guilty of inconsistency if at one time he exhorts his people to work as if everything depended on themselves; at another, to pray as if everything depended upon God. Much has

the Bible been often misread when systematising theologians have caught up statements from it and attempted to draw them out to what they imagined to be their logical consequences.

In theology, as well as in other sciences, Lord Bacon's remark holds true that speculators have underrated the complexity of nature, and have been disappointed to find that its facts will not always consent to range themselves under the trim divisions they have marked out for them. The fact on which so much modern speculation has turned, that the lines of demarcation between. different species are not as rigid as the early theorists had supposed, is but one of a class. When theologians have attempted to make a scientific definition of inspiration, and to classify its degrees and the various kinds of immunity. from error which it confers, or when they have attempted to give a scientific account of the action of the grace of God on men's free will, they would find, if their theories were analysed, that they were showing their ignorance of the principle that the boundaries of the various provinces of nature are not sharply defined, but

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shaded off by insensible gradations; not here a line of light, there of absolute darkness; but between both, a penumbra such that it would not be easy to tell where the darkness ceases and the light begins. Again, it is seldom remembered that if an object be of any considerable magnitude the whole of it cannot be seen from one point of view. Possibly the attempt to sum up in a single formula a complete presentation of truth might produce something as monstrously unlike the real truth as the five-legged Assyrian bulls, which aim at enabling observers from different points of view to see all that it is supposed they ought to see. But whether such a summing up in a single formula be possible or not, the Bible does not attempt it. It is essentially a practical book, and countervailing or mutually limiting truths are presented, not simultaneously, but each in turn as the needs of the hearers require.

It is not only in religion, but in all departments of philosophy wherever controversy still reigns that different solutions of the same problem are obtained when it is attacked from opposite sides; and it is exasperating to see the confidence with which able and clear-headed men will assert conclusions, the evidence for which appears to them so plain that the denial of them must imply stupidity or dishonesty, when,

in truth, the clearness of their view only arises from its narrowness, and those whom they condemn as stupid see things which they do not.

You will have understood from the texts which I read at the beginning, that what I have said in explanation of the fact that Scripture support has been claimed on behalf of opposing doctrines was intended as preliminary to a discussion of the Christian doctrine of reward, there being some texts which speak of reward as entirely gratuitous, God's free gift; others which speak of it as exactly proportioned to work. Having two Sundays at my disposal, I have thought it best to confine myself to-day to what I had to say respecting the interpretation of Scripture, leaving the discussion of the doctrine of reward to next Sunday.

XV

REWARD ACCORDING TO WORK

"The Son of man shall come in the glory of His Father, with His angels; and then He shall reward every man according to his works."-MATTHEW xvi. 27.

"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast." EPHESIANS ii. 8, 9.

ON last Sunday I attempted to give some explanation of the fact that the advocates on both sides of a controverted doctrine are so often able each to bring forward Scripture texts in support of his views. At the close of my sermon I referred to the fact that when, for the complete statement of a case, propositions which mutually limit each other must be asserted, the method of the Bible, which is pre-eminently a practical book, is not to attempt to embrace both at once in a formal scientific statement, but to dwell on each in turn as the immediate needs required of those at the time addressed. I intimated that these general observations were intended to be