Why we must take it for granted that Scripture has only one meaning, we are nowhere told. Why we must take Professor Jowett's dictum rather than the teaching of the apostle, who said "Which things (though the real history of Abraham) are an allegory" (Gal. iv. 24), we are not informed. How that one sense, can be the sense of the speaker, and the sense of the hearer, when we are often assured that the hearers quite misunderstood the speaker, as in Matt. xiii. 13, John vi. 41-52. Or what one sense there can be in such declarations as those, which state that we are to eat the Saviour's flesh and drink his blood (John vi. 53), hate our father and mother that we may love him (Luke xiv. 26), pluck out our eyes, cut off our offending hands and feet (Mark ix. 4345-47), "have salt in ourselves,' (v. 50.) "receive the morning star;" (Rev. ii. 28.) and others too numerous to mention. How we can assume that we have exhausted by some one meaning, all the wisdom of an Infinite speaker, is really difficult to perceive, or rather, it is evident, that such a rule of criticism is totally inconsistent with the idea of any inspiration whatever. Hence in the extremes to which it leads,—all the distress

ingly dangerous conclusions of these " Essays and Reviews," we may hope will be seen the beacon which will warn the student from it. Yet these canons of criticism are not peculiar to Professor Jowett, they are those which have long prevailed in high quarters in the Church, and at the Universities. Let us hope that this revelation of their destructive tendencies will lead to their reconsideration, and it will be really admitted, as Professor Jowett somewhat inconsistently but very truly states elsewhere, Scripture has an inner life or soul; it has also an outward form or body (p. 389); and so will the ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ in our day, like the early ministers of the Word, confess "Our sufficiency is of God, who hath also made us able ministers of the New Testament; not of the letter, but of the Spirit, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." 2 Cor. iii. 6.

Nor, must we be supposed, when we speak of the spiritual meaning of the creation in Genesis, to have the slightest community of thought, with that unaccountable

more

declaration of Professor Baden Powell, that 66 recently the antiquity of the human race, and the development of species, and the rejection of the idea of creation, have caused new advances in the same direction" (p. 129, Essays). Geology speaks as loudly as any other science, of creation, by the power of the Infinite Creator. Geology leads us from the living, blooming surface of the world on which we stand, through miles upon miles of strata, formed time after time, through incalculable ages, but always conducts us to a beginning. Though we pass through the tertiary strata, and we notice through all the beds of pleistocene, pliocene and eocene, the indications of ever-varying life, through the seventeen hundred feet deep of sands, clays, crags, the results of ages of creative energy, yet during the secondary formations, they were not. Though we go down again through the cretaceous wealden, and oolitic deposits, again, crowded with the fossil remains of life, forming three or four thousand feet thick of strata, all of which, were once swarming with living beings, yet there was a time, however remote, when they were not. And, pass we lower still, through the lower oolites, the lias and the triassic beds of the Mesozoic formations, or through the eighty thousand feet of the magnesian limestone, the coal measures, and the Devonian and Silurian deposits, notwithstanding we are conducted to periods inconceivably remote, yet the mind sees as clearly as it discerns it of the daisy of to-day-all these began to be, and in their beginning, and through all their changes, they are the results of the Almighty energies of that Adorable One "by whom all things have been made that are made” (John i. 3). From the grain of dust, whose form and qualities are the bases of vegetable and animal existence, to worlds, and suns, and systems, however grand and gorgeous, and impossible to number, they may be, fitness, arrangement, order, law, reign. Order and law imply MIND, and the unutterable benefits order and law subserve, imply benevolence and love in Him who is the upholder and sustainer of all things. Life and motion everywhere declare the power Divine, which fills, sustains, and governs all existence. Preservation is perpetual creation. All the parts of the universe are pregnant

with the creative energy now, as from the beginning, and all announce the fulness of that Omnipotent Being who is the Head of all things, and from whom, and for whom, all things exist. Let us rather speak then of creation being every moment seen, and announcing the unceasing presence everywhere of His power, who is all in all, and who has revealed Himself to the human heart, in the glorified person of Him who said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father;"-who is Himself the Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.

THE

By the same Author. Second issue.

THE DIVINE WORD OPENED. Illustrating the spiritual interpretation of specimens of every portion of the Scriptures, but especially of the events of the early chapters of Genesis -The Creation-Garden of Eden-The Fall-The Flood-The Ark -Noah-The Tower of Babel.

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GREAT TRUTHS ON GREAT SUBJECTS. 2s.

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TWELVE DISCOURSES

ON

ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, ETC.

BY THE

REV. DR. BAYLEY.

THE

DISCOURSE No. II.

MIRACLES.

MIRACLES OF THE LORD JESUS WERE EVIDENCES OF HIS LOVE, AND VERY SECONDARILY, EVIDENCES OF

HIS DOCTRINE.

"When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole ? The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool; but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me. Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed and walk."-JOHN v. 6, 7, 8.

ON Sunday last, we intimated that we should this morning consider the subject of miracles, as they are introduced to us in the history of our Divine Redeemer's life in the world; and, also, as they have been presented to the reflections of the student, in the work now famous, the "Essays and Reviews."

The miracles alluded to, are those wondrous displays of Divine power, by which both the Jewish and the Christian dispensations were established in the world. To us, the evidences of these miracles, inwoven as they are with both parts of that Divine Revelation, which is the power of God unto salvation, appear complete and triumphant.

That the Jewish nation, with its marvellous tenacity of character, a tenacity that has been proof against Christian persuasion and persecution alike, for nearly twenty

NO. II.

B

centuries, against bribes, blandishments, and terrors, wielded by caliph, emperor, king, or pope, and yet found everywhere, in the east, in the west, in the north, in the south, with its ancient faith and costly customs, witnessing to the law of Moses, is a standing miracle. That this nation was induced to leave Egypt, not only their own history attests, but Egyptian monuments confirm; that they were induced to accept a system of religion painful, costly, multifarious, permeating their whole existence, loading them with rites and sacrifices, involving them in great self-denial, there must have been some adequate cause. Their miraculous history gives one. Without that, they are the enigma of the world—the sphynx, far more than that of Egypt, which refuses to unfold its mystery.

Institutions affecting the whole nation-circumcision, the passover, and the other national feasts, to celebrate miracles declared to have taken place before the eyes of the whole people, and which declarations the whole people must have known to be false, if they did not really happen, were established in the life-times of the first-actors; these institutions were accepted, nationalized, worked into the Jews' nature with a depth and power that are visible still, and energetic still. Only one solution for this standing miracle seems to be philosophical, viz., that there must have been an adequate cause for all this. The Divine will, manifested by Omnipotence working the wonders alleged, bringing Israel out with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm, is such an adequate cause. If it be not the real one, what is? On this foundation, the prophets rise, and the psalmist sings, a glorious superstructure! The Israelitish lawgiver spoke the language which gives a solution perfectly easy when he said :—

?

"And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying what mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments which the Lord our God commanded you Thus shalt thou say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh's bondmen in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt, with a mighty hand, and the Lord showed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household before our eyes, and he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware to our fathers. And the Lord commanded us to do