hitherto unquestioned authority men should be on the spot recalled to the first principles of reason on which the dicta of that authority reposed, this, if this had been an utterance of merely human wisdom, would be without parallel in the history of the transmission of thought, the history of religion and philosophy. It is true that the natural reaction of an age of criticism is to throw the mind back on first principles; that the rigorous deduction of gloss and commentary practises in the end a kind of reductio ad absurdum on its premisses. But the process in all the instances which history supplies has been slow and gradual, and the simple moral axioms have been only rescued from the artificial casuistry with which they have been overlaid after many efforts, many mistakes, an ardent controversy and vehement exaggerations of them. The establishment in any society of simple truths of morals is in the ordinary course of the world the result of a reaction and agitation of opinion. In the case of Christianity these first axioms are the antecedents and cause of the reaction which oc

curred, and proceed at once in their faultless purity from the first originators of the religion.

This is one aspect in which these words of our Lord may be viewed; a second must be mentioned which is necessary to correct the former. For it is the case with respect to the whole moral teaching of the Gospel that to enable us to estimate it aright two opposite characteristics which it possesses must be embraced in our mind. It possesses at once novelty and antiquity. The ethics of Christianity are at once the same as, and different from, the ethics of the Old Testament. It is from dwelling on one of these characteristics of them to the exclusion of the other that erroneous views of the relation of the New to the Old Covenant have appeared, and are from time to time reappearing in Christendom. When the surprising originality of the morality inculcated in the discourses of our Lord is alone had regard to, we find persons contrasting it with the moral doctrines assumed in the Hebrew Scriptures, exalting Christianity by a comparison with Judaism, eulogising the religion of the New

Testament, while they repudiate with abhorrence that of the Old.

On the other hand, when the fabric of the Gospel history comes to be critically examined, and it is found that every idea, whether of morals or religion, may be traced to its germ in the older Scriptures, that the facts of the biography of Christ are but the realisation, both in their general character and in detail, of that anticipatory sentiment which was the life. and substance of the old Jewish creed, and that the very language and expression of the narratives themselves are adopted from the Law and the Prophets, from these observations, which have been conducted by recent investigators with the highest ingenuity and all the resources of learning, a conclusion has been drawn that the Gospel story is a product of Jewish imagination, that its material cause existed in the sacred books of the Hebrew canon, and its efficient cause in the long-cherished Messianic expectation and the current ideas of the Palestine Jews, drawn to a head by the awful destruction of their religion and nationality at the close of

This is the theory

the first century of our era. to which men have been conducted by dwelling exclusively on the resemblances of the Christian doctrine to the written and traditional belief of the Jews of that age. The first and obvious mode of encountering this mythical system is by pointing out those elements of the Christian scheme for which no Oriental creed furnishes a type, to insist, in short, on the originality of Christ's character and teaching. In answer to the first-mentioned class of objectors, those who, dazzled by the novel simplicity of the Christian morality, profess to embrace it as alone worthy of divine purity and holiness, it is necessary to bring forward the identity of principle in the moral teaching of Christ and that of Moses. By combining these two points of view we can alone obtain a just appreciation of the relation of the Old Testament to the New. To the latter alone I shall confine the few remarks which now remain to make. This endeavour to separate the Old Testament from the New, though revived of late years, not without considerable popularity, is no novel

effort of thought. We are familiar with it in the speculations of the earlier centuries, not only in the extreme and dogmatical form of Manicheism, but as a tendency more or less prevailing throughout the Christian body. We may select from representations popular at the present day one or two points of objection of this character.

One especial head of objection is drawn from the supposed contrast between the conception of the Deity presented by the Old Scriptures and the New. Instead of the Father of mercies and God of consolation of the New, we have, it is said, in the Old Testament an awful and terrible King of the world, a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, angry with the wicked every day, and keeping His anger for ever, of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. His favour is scarce less terrible than His anger. He is the jealous rival of the tutelary deities of Syria or Phoenicia, exacting from His votaries an exclusive homage. His code of laws is Draconian.

He that offends in

one point is guilty in all.

Good were it for