jurisprudence and song and prophecy. That rulers exist for the people; that the poor are in law the peers of the rich, and the ignorant, of the wise; that mankind are one brotherhood, with equal claims upon the fatherhood of God and the fraternity of each other, are the familiar and central thoughts of biblical poets, historians, lawgivers, prophets, and apostles. The whole strain of the volume is one long protest against the oppressor, and one perpetual song of cheer to the slave. No other literature is in this respect so uncompromising and so self-consistent. It is an incendiary volume to slaveholders everywhere. Popes place it at the head of the list of books anathematized.

Yet, on the other hand, the Bible is equally the manual of temperate and bloodless reform. It gives no place to the malign emotions in warfare against oppression. Fanatics expurgate and denounce it no less bitterly than tyrants. It tolerates wrong, and inculcates long-suffering, rather than to invite convulsive revolutions. It trusts to time, and the omnipotence of truth, for the emancipation of mankind. It subordinates civil to spiritual liberty, — a thing which fanatical reform has never done, and for the want of which it has always failed. If the spirit of biblical literature had held sway in history, there would never have been a servile war, never would a race or a nation have been emancipated by the sword. Yet the cause of human liberty would have been centuries in advance of its condition to-day. The equipoise of opposing truths, and the consequent smoothness and stillness of beneficent revolutions, are characteristic of biblical thought as opposed to the eternal war-song of all other literature. The ultimate culture of the world will

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BIBLICAL STYLES.

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transpose the passive and the active virtues in its literary judgments.

The symmetry of the biblical system of truth is a literary excellence. With no system in form, it is everywhere suggestive of system in fact. The biblical scholar degrades his own work who discerns in the Bible no implications of a self-consistent structure of theology. It is in this respect what every man's real life is, a plan of God. Every thing in it fits every other thing. What other literature not founded upon it has such balancing of opposite truths, such adjustments of the relations of truth, such diversity in unity, such unity in diversity, such a grand march of progress in the evolution of truth? In one sense the Bible is a fragment, made up of fragments; but it is fragmentary as the segment of a circle is fragmentary.

The number and diversity of literary styles in the Scriptures deserve mention. Although immaculate form is not one of their claims, yet incidentally to their loftiness of thought, and purity of character, excellence of form often appears as if by spontaneous creation. The style of some portions of the Epistles, art has never tried to improve. Who has ever thought to improve the form of the Beatitudes or the Lord's Prayer? What reformer or censor of public morals has ever attempted to improve the style of some of the Hebrew prophets? The narrative style of the evangelists, the lyric poetry of the Psalms, the epic grandeur of the Book of Job - what adventurous critic has ever assumed to equal these? They are as nearly perfect as human language permits. Poetic, didactic, philosophic, narrative, illustrative, allegorical, epistolary, dramatic, oratorical, prophetic, styles are all

illustrated in the Bible by specimens of the first order of merit.

As the sequence of some of the foregoing qualities, a certain power in the literature of the Bible to project itself into the future is worthy of remark. The materials of extant literatures may in one view be classified as literatures of the past and literatures of the future. Some standards of our libraries are only monuments. We admire them, but we never use them. Practically the world has done with them. To high culture the study of them has become a recreation only. They are receding from the earnest life of the world more and more distantly with every generation.

The Bible, as a literary power, is no such monumental structure. Though the oldest, it is still the freshest, literature extant. Covering all the past, it reaches over a longer and grander future. A favorite idea of critics is that of the immortality of literature. The Bible is the only volume which is sure of that. The future belongs to it as to nothing else which the world now reveres in libraries. Its own prophecies are a fair symbol of the prospective vision which illumines it, and assures to it an undying youth.

Such are some of the salient points definitive of our conceptions of the Bible as a literary classic. The majority of them occur to our thought first and most positively as moral excellences only; but good taste approves them as well. The affinities between our intellectual and our moral nature are such, that to ignore either involves deterioration of the other. An eminent English critic says that Lord Byron, in the lack of a keen conscience, suffered the lack of the first quality necessary to a true poet. A more subtle

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illustration of the same kind of affinity is seen in the power of a lofty morality to elevate the very vocabulary of a language, and the opposite power of degraded morals to degrade a language also. On the same principle, certain qualities in the Bible which first strike us as moral qualities only, we claim as literary virtues as well. They augment immensely the power of the volume as an educating force in the discipline of a scholarly mind. I do not dwell upon them at greater length, because they are familiar; and to expand them might easily degenerate into unmeaning eulogy.

LECTURE XVII.

THE PROFESSIONAL VALUE OF BIBLICAL MODELS TO A PREACHER.

THE claims of biblical study upon a pastor would be but incompletely treated, if no mention were made of its direct professional service. No other single principle of success in the work of the pulpit surpasses this, of its dependence on the models of the Bible as guides to both the theory and practice of preaching.

Every careful student of theology discovers the distinction between truth as it appears in uninspired forms of statement, and the same truth as it appears in the biblical forms. It is not chiefly the forms which attract us in the Scriptures: it is the truth itself, qualified and assisted by the relations in which it is uttered, by its antecedents and consequents in the biblical collocation of materials, by the objects for which it is spoken, by the illustrative elements by which it is pictured, by the frequency with which it is repeated, by the atmosphere which is thrown around it by the religious feeling of the writer, and by the moral authority which it derives from the reader's faith in its inspiration. These often change, by refraction, the perspective in which the truth is seen. It is a vast variety of such things which makes truth appear truthful in the biblical conception and statement of it. It