ON THE RIGHT INTERPRETATION AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE SCRIPTURES. No question can be of greater importance to every man, than that which regards the right use of the Scriptures. The volume of the Old and New Testaments is received by Christians as their rule of life they look to it as the source of all their religious knowledge, and all their hopes and fears beyond the grave; and as to the supreme guide of their principles and practice in this world. But that which holds good of God's natural gifts, holds good, also, of the revelation which he has been pleased to make to us of himself and of his will. It is not available to our use, without some efforts on our part; its benefits may remain hidden, nay, we may pervert it into absolute poison, unless we RIGHT INTERPRETATION OF THE SCRIPTURES. 375 apply ourselves to it with a sound understanding, and a sincere and teachable heart. As with God's other gifts also, so it is with the Scriptures, that the difficulties in applying them rightly become greater in proportion to our power of mastering them. This is a part of our trial, whose severity increases as we are able to bear it. A very ignorant man, therefore, and one who has no time to cultivate his understanding, is saved from perceiving the difficulty, which, if he did perceive it, he would be incapable of solving. Such a man, with the blessing of good elementary teaching, if he proceeds to read the Scriptures with a devout spirit and an honest purpose, finds in them all that is required for his own personal wants in belief and in conduct. There is much in them which he does not understand,-many benefits which he cannot extract from them,-many beautiful proofs of their divine original which he cannot discover or appreciate. But then he finds in them no perplexities, he does not see the apparent incongruities out of which their perfect harmony is composed; if there is much which he cannot interpret at all, there is little which he misinterprets. This state, however, is one which an educated man cannot remain in. With greater powers and opportunities of discovering truth, he gains, unavoidably, a greater sensitiveness to apparent error or inconsistency,-a greater impatience of obscu rity and confusion. It is vain for such a man to envy the peace of ignorance; God calls him to the painful pursuit of knowledge, and he must not disobey the call. Nor may he, as some do, strive to do violence to his understanding, and to the very nature of things, by trying to combine knowledge with an undisturbed tranquillity of belief, to enjoy the pleasures of a clear and active mind, without being subject to its pains. He may not say, "Here I will have the comfort of a reasonable belief, and here of a blind one." It must be all reasonable, or all blind; otherwise it will soon vanish altogether, and be succeeded by unbelief. Besides, he has not only himself to think of, but others. It is a fatal stumbling-block to many when they see a professed advocate of Christianity shrinking from inquiry, and manifestly replying to their doubts, and silencing his own, by considerations wholly inconclusive as to the point at issue. But I wish to consider particularly the case of the great majority of young men of the educated classes of society;-of all those, in short, who do not choose the ministry of the Church for their profession. Consider these men in the present age of intellectual activity; how much they will read, how much they will inquire, with what painful accuracy they will labour after truth in their several studies or pursuits. A mind thus disciplined, and acquiring, as it generally does in the process, an almost over-suspiciousness of every thing which it has not sifted to the bottom, turns from its professional or habitual studies to that of the Bible. I say nothing at present of the existence of any moral obstacles to belief; let us merely consider the intellectual difficulties of the case. From his own early education, from the practice of the Church, from the common language of Christians, a young man of this description is led to regard the volume of the Old and New Testaments as containing God's revelation of himself to mankind; he is taught that all its parts are of equal authority: but in what sense the revelation of the Old and New Testament is one, and all its parts of equal authority, he has probably never clearly apprehended nor thought of inquiring. He takes it then as one, in the simplest sense, and begins to read the Bible as if it were, like the Koran, all composed at one time, and addressed to persons similarly situated. His habits of mind render it impossible for him to read without inquiry: obscurities, apparent contradictions, and still more, what he would feel to be immoralities, cannot pass without notice. He turns to commentators of reputation, anxious to read their solution of all the difficulties which bewilder him. He finds them too often greatly insufficient in knowledge, and perhaps still more so in judgment; often misapprehending the whole difficulty of a question, often answering it by repeating the mere assertions or opinions of others, and confounding the proper provinces of the intellect and the moral sense, so as to make questions of criticism, questions of religion, and to brand as profane, inquiries, to which the character of profaneness or devotion is altogether inapplicable. When the man is thus intellectually perplexed, undoubtedly all the moral obstacles within him to his embracing the Gospel beset him with tremendous advantage. I speak not only of positive obstacles, but of such as are negative; the absence of devotional habits, and the want of an experimental knowledge of the power and living truth of the Gospel. There may be,and how often is there!-an absence of these, without any hostile disposition towards Christianity;nay, with a general reverence and regard for it. For the time being, in many cases such as I have supposed, the struggle is mainly an intellectual one: the difficulty lies in the understanding, not in the heart. No doubt every day that this struggle continues, the foundation, at least, of moral difficulty is being laid the heart cannot long hold aloof from being with Christ, without being seduced to turn against him. But, for the time, the heart might be firmly won if the intellect were satisfied; or, more properly, if, without being fully satisfied, it were at least put in the right way of becoming so. Above all, it must be satisfied on |