and in deciding that the abolition of slavery must take place not in opposition to law, but by means of law not by inciting individuals to disobedience, but by instilling principles which when received forced those in power to love and respect their poorer brethren, and so purified law by degrees from all that is oppressive and tyrannical.

The polemical discussion into which we have been led has carried us away from the region of practice; yet it will not have been without some practical fruit if it have fastened more firmly in your memories and hearts the great rule which I have chosen as my text; for the lessons of the Gospel come with equal force to men in every rank in life. There can be no better rule to regulate our discharge of the duties which fall to our lot than that which the Apostle gave for the conduct of slaves that we too should do our work, not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but striving to commend ourselves to the approval of Christ whose purchased servants we are, whose benefits demand of us that we should show our gratitude by doing His will, and whose all-seeing eye cannot be deceived. "Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men."

XIV

THE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE

"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.

At

IT has been often remarked that the advocates of opposite doctrinal systems find no difficulty in each supporting his views by Scripture texts; and, accordingly, at the time of the Reformation, a leading Roman Catholic divine irreverently compared the Bible to a nose of wax which any one can twist into what shape he chooses. the time when this comparison was made, there was far more justice in it than now. For there was then current a system of mystical and allegorical interpretation, which indeed had been handed down under the authority of some fathers of great antiquity and of the highest reputation, but by which it was possible for an ingenious man to find any doctrine in any text.

The principles, indeed, from which this method of interpretation started were such as might readily be granted by Christians, namely, that God's method of revelation was progressive; that truths were clearly made known to men of a later age of which their predecessors had had but dim perceptions; and yet that all was a continuous plan, and so that even to early times obscure intimations had been given of truths afterwards to be distinctly revealed. In particular that the Jewish dispensation spoke in type and shadow of the salvation afterwards to be revealed through Christ. The New Testament writers had given their sanction to the discovery, in Mosaic ordinances or in sayings of the ancient prophets, of a deeper meaning than was understood in the ages when these prophecies were delivered,-deeper, perhaps, than was understood by the prophets who had delivered them. Christian interpreters of the Old Testament could not then avoid putting to themselves the question, Are we limited to find Christ only in those typical or prophetical passages where the sacred writers of the New Testament have authorised us to find Him, or may we not follow out for ourselves the principles of interpretation on which they appear to have acted?

There is a multitude of Old Testament pas

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sages in which Christian interpreters of all ages have not hesitated to find a Messianic reference, although without any express authority from the New Testament for doing so; a multitude of Old Testament institutions or incidents in which they have seen Christ prefigured, and have not doubted that that the undeniable correspondence between type and antitype had been foreseen and ordained by the common author of the two dispensations. It would therefore be felt to be an overstringent rule if we were to insist on New Testament authority before we admitted any Messianic reference in our interpretation of the Old Testament.

Yet when the bounds assigned by such a rule have been passed, it has been found hard to keep interpretation within the limits of sobriety. Take, for example, Justin Martyr, one of the earliest of Christian writers, a great number of whose interpretations passed into the common stock of patristical exegesis. His own conversion had been mainly effected by the argument from prophecy; yet a modern reader would reject, as strained, his interpretation of several passages which seem to him clearly Messianic; and in his controversy with a Jewish opponent we cannot pronounce him uniformly successful. Nearly the same may

be said of another second century writer, Irenæus, a man by no means deficient either in sobriety or good sense, and from whose interpretations, therefore, we are obliged to dissent, mainly on account of a difference in principle as to how far it is permissible to disregard the context or the original drift of an Old Testament passage which seems capable of a Messianic application. It will suffice to give one example of an interpretation which a modern commentator would reject without ceremony, and yet which many ancient commentators thought worth borrowing. In the terrible description given in Deuteronomy xxviii. of the sufferings which would follow if the Jewish nation rejected the Divine commands, we read, "Thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning!" Here, instead of the commonplace interpretation of the words, "Thy life shall hang in doubt before thee," which the context suggests to us, the words, "Thy life shall hang," were taken as a plain prediction that Christ, who is our life, should hang upon the tree.1

It will easily be understood, however, that

1 Iren. Haer. iv. 10; v. 18.