But fortunately it costs a child no effort to refrain from criticising. Though his understanding is not developed, and his mind ill stored with facts, he is quite capable of trusting and loving. He can know that his father loves him, he can believe that he is wise and good; and if there are things in his conduct which seem strange to him, they only cause him passing wonder and do not dwell in his mind as sources of serious perplexity. And so with us; faith can well supply the defects of knowledge. We can be sure that the Judge will do right, even though we cannot be safe in concluding that He will do this or that because this or that seems to us to be right. And the clouds that obscure the region of speculation do not descend upon the region of practice. Whatever else we may be ignorant of we have no difficulty in knowing what course of conduct is pleasing to God and approved of men. In the text the Apostle contrasts our imperfect and provisional knowledge with charity which never faileth. The time will

come, he teaches, when our best earthly speculations shall be set aside in the light of fuller knowledge, as a boy's notions about the business of life are replaced by better knowledge. But a character trained up by faith and hope and love will endure and be a source of blessing throughout eternity.

II

UNION WITH CHRIST

"Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: he that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without Me ye can do nothing."-JOHN XV. 4, 5.

THE course of modern controversies has forced us to take notice of the diversity of the authors whose agency has been employed in the composition of the Holy Scriptures. It was easy for interpreters of former days, in the fulness of their conviction that all was God's Book, to lose sight of the human element in Scripture. Thus they might establish their doctrines by arbitrarily combining sayings of writers who lived hundreds of years apart, and were, to all appearance, speaking of different subjects: they might be blind to all differences between the various writers except when their attention was roused by some striking apparent discrepancy which demanded explana

tion.

Our tendencies to error lie in the opposite

direction. In our days some of the most laborious students of the Bible have been men who absolutely refuse to recognise any Divine element in it. They have busied themselves in noting the characteristics of the various writers, their peculiarities in form of expression or turn of thought. It has been no shock to them to discover, or think they discovered, discordances in statement of fact or in modes of presenting religious truth. Nay, so super-subtle have they been in finding such differences, that they have persuaded themselves they saw them in what a more sober criticism has no hesitation in recognising as works of the same author, and have been led to cut homogeneous books into fragments, supposed to be inconsistent in their character. But when all exaggeration and fanciful speculation have been stripped away, there remain, as results of modern criticism, a number of facts which no honest student of God's Word can refuse to include in his system; nor is any theory of inspiration now likely to be advocated which does not fully recognise the character imprinted on the Bible by the diversity of agents through whom the Holy Spirit worked.

And when we consider the matter we see that, whatever we might beforehand have thought likely, this arrangement, in which our sacred volume is

not a book, but a library, not a single document written in a uniform style, but coloured with the personality of several individual writers, is intimately connected with the fact that ours is a historical religion. It rests on our belief of certain great facts attested by chosen witnesses who live for us in their writings. We know each by his style, his favourite expressions, his turn of thought. There are few living persons of whose character we have as vivid a conception as that of St. Paul. His character impresses itself on believers and unbelievers alike. All admit that he was incapable of deceit, and so whatever theory of our Lord's resurrection is framed must reconcile itself with the fact that one who was on the most familiar terms with the first asserters of the miracle, both most fully believed their story and claimed to have had himself personal confirmation of its truth. Again, the fact that the witnesses are not one, but many, gives a cumulative force to their testimony. It is well known to you what use Paley made of the argument from coincidences, in establishing the historical credibility of our documents. But also in ascertaining the doctrines of the Christian revelation, attention may rightly be called to the force added to the proof when we have the agreement of different witnesses. Divines of a former genera

tion might have been content to point out that such and such a doctrine was proved by so many Scripture texts. It is no disadvantage to us that

the course of modern controversies forces us to take notice that these texts are in many cases taken from different writings. We are thus enabled to see how the Church from the first performed her office of witnessing to the truth, when we can call up members of the Apostolic Church and find them in complete agreement, not only with regard to such external facts as our Lord's death and resurrection, but also with respect to what may be called revealed facts, such as our Lord's pre-existence, His share in the work of creation, the rule which He now exercises sitting at the right hand of God, His future return to judgment.

It is my purpose in this sermon to exemplify this accordance of teaching with regard to the doctrine contained in the text, the Union of Christ with His Church; to show that this idea, which is certainly not an obvious one, or one likely to have occurred independently to different disciples (for I do not know that the followers of any philosopher, or of any other religious teacher, imagined any such relation to exist between them and their master), was common to the different New Testament writers, and was made the basis