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the dying, and all faces became white in the desolate houses. High on a hill, by the sea, stood his own hamlet; his wife and little children were there with his aged parents, and his heart bled as he drew nigh. Then, with high resolve to do or die, he grasped the fiend fast and plunged with her beneath the waves. She rose again, but, quailing before a spirit so fearless, fled away to forest and mountain, and was

seen no more.

THE POWER AND DOCTRINE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE.

The attempts which have been made to discredit the claims of Holy Scripture as to Divine Inspiration, and to disprove Prophecy, have led to searching investigation.

A certain predictive power seems to be possessed by peculiar states of human consciousness, and prophecy of some kind has been found to exist amongst all nations. Apart from any sacred purpose, considering it as a mere faculty in the human mind, it is something distinct from intelligent thought and consciousness; but not inconsistent with them it is a part of the relation of the Psyche to the inner and outer world. In Hellas the office of the Pythia, with the rational prophet or oprns to stand beside her; and amongst the Jews, a school of the Prophets; are proof that the human soul was considered to be the organ of a mysterious knowledge of the future.

The power, in its lowest form, is a morbid condition of consciousness, or a sickly brooding enthusiasm; but, though uncertain in the degree and accuracy of prophetic enunciation, it has, through the whole course of history, obtained and kept power over stouter minds. In high states, or the spiritual grade, we speak not of the sacred and divine as found in Holy Scripture, the inward vision is allied with the faculty of recollection. It is related to, but is not what is called, demoniacal possession.

It is an error to assume that it belongs wholly to lower culture, and will be destroyed by higher medical knowledge. Higher medical knowledge will rather do well to investigate it as psychic power. In British India, moving, writhing,

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tearing men are entered by a psychic power, and oracles are uttered. This kind of prophecy, or prevision, arose in times of, so-called, barbarism; continued in full vigour throughout the classic world, and exists now scarcely altered. Men, who naturally have neither ability nor eloquence, will, in the spiritual or possessed state, prophesy with earnest lofty declamation in well-knit harangue of metaphor and poetic figure.

We are not prepared with any explanation, and only use the mysterious fact as one of the many links by which human consciousness is united to a world of occult influences; and as example, whether good or bad, of the verity of that high and holy power which is manifested in Scripture. The relation seems to be somewhat like that of the divining damsel, at Philippi, to St. Paul and the preached Gospel (Acts xvi. 16-18).

These investigations, carried into fields of thought, worked for the most part, by those who refuse Holy Scripture, show that the attempt of physicists to limit the universe to material existences is in opposition to universal consciousness and experience. So far from matter being the whole and only reality, it is but as one small piece of furniture in the many-chambered House of God. There is world within world, even as there are stars beyond stars; and space, where we see nothing, may teem with a yet more manifold existence than that exhibited in known material forms. It is the high attribute of true Art and Science to suggest infinitely more than they express; suggestions that all material things are not carcases of the dead, but rather germs of life. We all, at times, have the shuddering impression, embodied by Coleridge in dark and fearful verse, that something not of earth is behind us; and he is less than man who does not weave wild contrasts of spirits, of heights and depths, of solemn mysteries, of immortal joys, of holy and eternal triumph:

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Already are powers within us ready to be quickened into the life of manifold senses: senses by which we may see-not

with the eye; and hear-yet not by the ear; faculties enabling the soul to discriminate between spirit and spirit, evoking forms now coiled as in chrysalis web; that we may stand felicitously perfect in vital organization.

This is not romance, take an example, a cultivator of positive science, endowed with healthiest of human brains, Sir Humphry Davy. By inhalation of nitrous oxide, he was abstracted from all external things, losing perception of them. Trains of visible images, strangely linked with words, passed rapidly through his mind; so that he "existed in a world of newly-connected and newly-modified ideas." On awaking he resolved that the universe had its chief reality in the mind. If so slight a cause, till then unknown, gave exhilaration elasticity and vigour, refreshing, doubling the grandeur and might of intellectual man; what occult influences may run through all creation, establishing communication wherever beings live and think? Man already obtains favours that are marvellous; and, yet, he does but touch the infinite; can only meditate a little on evils that perplex-not disable and disarm them can but desire the exquisite and perfectly good -not possess it.

We pass now to a definite examination of Holy Scripture. The examination is useful, and capable of being conducted by ordinary minds. It aims at showing that the Infinite Spirit has entered finite nature; that the Voice, which past generations believed to be the Voice of God revealing deep mysteries, is a true Voice; that Christianity consists of a definite and positive body of truths admitting neither addition nor diminution except by Divine Authority: and that the Bible is not such a book as man would make, if he could; or could make, if he would.

The indications of unity in the Bible, despite being the work of many writers who were separated by wide intervals in time and space, render it impossible for the Book to be a work either of chance or of human contrivance.

More varied in its contents, in its writers, in its ages, than any other book; it lifts up unwearied testimony against the universal tendency to polytheism; and, as if to disprove the possibility of it being the product or evolution of human con

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sciousness, everywhere maintains a sublime elevated doctrine of monotheism. This Book, alone of all books, resisted and overcame the tendency to worship many gods; and declared, of the one God-"His is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in XXX the heaven and in the earth is His; and He reigneth over amids all."

With the unique spiritual sublimity, is an inversion of the seeming relative importance of events. The rise and fall of empires, changes and revolutions which fill nations with terror or triumph, sure to be recorded on human page, have here little or no mention. A people obscure and despised, domestic scenes, family trials, traits of personal character, are invested with peculiar greatness as having some mysterious connection with moral government by the Supreme Ruler. The world rings with the fame of great captains, the earth shakes beneath the tread of innumerable legions, and the writers of this strange Book were not deaf; nevertheless, the Bible is silent and unconcerned, as sun and stars: only those events are regarded as great which bear on the development and issues of that spiritual empire or Kingdom of God, which, the Book asserts, is being founded and builded in the world.

While crowns and sceptres lie about as neglected things, the foundations of earthly morality are established on the fact of our intimate connection with Heaven. Human laws derive their sanction and authority from Divine Will: Will, determined by supreme rectitude, wisdom, and power, enjoining what is good, and claiming supremacy by right. This dominant idea subordinates everything to the ultimate triumph of a spiritual empire which establishes the happiness of man.

All other systems form two different spheres of dutyreligion and morality: religion, separated from its chief root, fails even to maintain the soul's consciousness of God; and morality, apart from Divinity, becomes utterly corrupt. The Bible alone co-ordinates morality with religion; and so, is not in analogy with any merely human system; nor does it accord with the hitherto universal tendency of civilization to fall into secularism and lose spirituality.

History shows that human nature, left to itself, would never

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have devised the moral code of Scripture; any more than the worm that crawls could claim the attributes of an eagle that flies. Patience, humility, meekness, spiritual purity, reliance on God, forgiveness of injury, are not, in the world's estimate, constituents of heroic character, nor most worthy of applause. These chief features of Bible morality are not at all the native utterances of human nature; and some, even modern men, doubt whether they really are virtues. Refined selfishness, systematic shrewd culture and indulgence of the natural appetites, self-assertion, are the worldly graces. Nevertheless, the adaptation and comprehensiveness of Bible religion are so great, that millions declare "every mood and necessity of our moral and spiritual life are therein exhaustively expressed." The morality and doctrine propounded are so exquisitely adapted to the circumstances of the nature which it guides, sustains, and exalts; and, yet, so out of the range of all that unassisted nature would suggest; that men, emulous of good, find their hearts filled with joy in realization of the good; and no more doubt concerning the Divinity than they doubt the evidence of their senses.

As to the Old Testament, every intellect, except the Jewish, is more or less at war with it now. In a sense, it may and does honour the Jews; but, so far from glorifying that nation, it constitutes, if false, one long libel; telling them that they are a "perverse and stiff-necked generation," refusing alike warning and reformation till they become a "hissing and a by-word among the nations;" nevertheless, as Pascal says, "they preserve it at the expense of their life." Not in Barbarian, nor Jewish, nor Greek, nor Roman nature, do we discover elements out of which the Bible Religion could have been spontaneously evolved as a growth of national genius and culture; or as an ideally conceived deliberate fiction; or as an aggregation of myth and legend. What we do discover is a plain statement that human nature, far from being able of itself to erect a kingdom of immortal glory, is ever going down to mouldering rubbish, to utter and perpetual desolation, forgetting to take God into account at all; but

1 "Cependant, ce livre qui les déshonore en tant de façons, ils le conserve aux dépens de leur vie."-Pensées, Tom ii. p. 189.

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