tations, set forth its complete fulfilment in Him as the Messiah prefigured in their prophetic Scriptures, direct their attention to His vicarious death as the great atonement typified by their ritual sacrifices, and call them to return to the God they had forsaken through a way opened, as it were, through His lacerated and wounded body. Surely nothing could be further from His thoughts than the introduction into their country of a faith foreign to their habits of thought, abhorrent to their religious feelings, and contrary to both the spirit and letter of the revelations with which they had, in their own opinion at least, been favoured, and in which they gloried.

Once more, our Lord in setting forth His absolute relation to God, as well as to humanity, adopted a method eminently fitted to dispel all pantheistic notions on the part of His hearers, if any were entertained by them. He drew a sharp line of demarcation between Himself and mankind at large. He referred to His pre-existence as a peculiar possession to which they had not the slightest claim; and He called God His Father in a peculiar sense and spoke of His intimate and inseparable association with Him as a blessing from which they must as creatures be eternally debarred. And finally He pointed to the wide impassable gulf that separated Him from them in such express declarations as this—“ Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world."

And lastly does the Arian view afford a proper explanation of the claims advanced by our Lord? According to this theory Christ was the first-born of creatures, the highest being created by God, and endowed with power and wisdom such as enabled Him to create the world, and to be its upholder and ruler. When the world was ruined by sin, He, in the fulness of time, came down to redeem it by offering up Himself as a sacrifice for sin. This view also is inadmissible, as Christ claimed supreme, not inferior, Divinity. He appropriated to Himself, as has

been shown, the incommunicable names and attributes of God, and He presented Himself as working and authorized to work as no creature, however high may be his position in the scale of being, could possibly have done. And He moreover claimed wor

ship such as is due to God alone.

Every theory, which refuses to recognise the Supreme Divinity of Christ, not only lacks consistency and rationality, but leads to a glaring absurdity, and consequently the only theory, which is both consistent and reasonable, is the dogma of the Church, the theory which represents Christ as God-Man, as God, Perfect God and Man, Perfect Man. This theory dovetails with all that is mentioned regarding Him in the Scriptures of which He is the Central Figure, with the stream of prophetic utterances and the ritual observances of the Jewish economy in which His whole career is typified and foreshadowed, His preternatural birth and astounding miracles culminating in His resurrection and ascension, the authoritative tone and majesty by which His teachings are characterized, the great work which He came to accomplish, the redemption of a lost world, as well as His own express declarations regarding His own Person and Authority. This theory, moreover, does not make free with the only existing, reliable documents in which His Life and Career are graphically depicted, and accounts moreover for the existence of the Church, the astonishing ascendency of His religion, the wonderful change wrought in the history of the world by its plastic power, the lofty types of moral earnestness and pietistic fervour raised under its banner, as well as the stream of regenerating influence of holiness and righteousness, of peace and joy, which is evidently flowing from heart to heart, community to community, nation to nation, race to race, and which will ultimately convert the whole world with its nations, languages and tongues into a paradise more glorious by far than that which was lost on account of human transgression!

The crowning glory of Christianity is the fact that it gives man exactly what he needs and longs for. It is not enough to give him a sublime system of doctrine or a pure code of morality :-these, however necessary or indispensable, cannot of themselves deliver him from the pride, the sensuality and the selfishness by which he is being plunged into misery, degradation, and shame. He needs an ever-living Divine Saviour to draw him towards heavenly realities by an overpowering exhibition of love divine, to assure him of pardoning mercy, to dwell in the inmost recesses of his heart and effect its deliverance from the power of sin, to breathe into his dead soul the breath of heavenly life, and then to lead him on, patiently, gently, with infinite forbearance as well as unerring wisdom, through the trials of life, to a peaceful death and a glorious eternity. And Jesus Christ is such a Saviour. Church, through the entire period of its eventful history, has uniformly borne testimony to the fact, and millions of redeemed souls may be found ready to-day to do so. And the striking revolutions accomplished in what may be called the region of universal history proclaim the same truth. Jean Paul Richter

The

simply states the verdict of universal history when he says: "It concerns Him who being the Holiest among the Mighty, and the Mightiest among the Holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages!"

VI. THE SUPERNATURAL IN

THE BIBLE.

"Thy testimonies are wonderful; therefore, doth my soul keep them," (Psalm cxix. 129). The writer of this paper, when passing through, at the age of 23, a period of religious doubt and perplexity such as most thoughtful and earnest minds pass through when they come into close contact with a variety of new opinions,

found great comfort in the above-quoted passage. The fact is, that the strangeness and unexpectedness of much that is in the Bible, so far from being a reason for rejecting it, is seen, when closely considered, to be a positive reason for its acceptance. Indeed, there could be nothing more damaging to the claims of a professed revelation than the discovery that it contained nothing to be wondered at, nothing (one might almost say) to be staggered at. If the doctrines of the Bible were only truths which reason had discovered or might easily discover, if its moral code were merely such as had been taught by the preceptors of the human race at all times, if the facts it narrates were all such as ordinary history recounts, one might well ask: Where was the need of a special revelation?

Now, of the wonderfulness of the doctrines and the moral precepts of the Bible, other papers in this series have dealt with. Our present business is with wonderfulness of the facts which it contains; and though there is really nothing more "supernatural" in these than in the others, yet the term is more commonly applied to these.

It is proposed, in the present paper, to deal with the subject under three heads :

1. The place which the supernatural element occupies in the Bible.

2. The reasonableness of its occupying such a place.

3. Brief reply to objections.

I. A very superficial acquaintance with the Bible is sufficient to show that it abounds in statements that events have happened of a clearly supernatural character. And these supernatural events are of two kinds. There are those which are commonly called "miracles," i.e. supernatural events in the realm of matter, and those which belong to "inspiration," i.e. supernatural events in the realm of spirit. But of whatever kind they be, whether miracles in the commonly accepted sense of the term, or inspiration (the

most wonderful instance of which is prediction), no reader of the Bible will dispute, that it is full from end to end of professed records of supernatural events. While, however, none can deny this, many have maintained that the supernatural element in the Bible is not essential to it, but can be eliminated with no loss to the remainder, but rather to its purification and improvement. It is easy, however, to satisfy oneself that this is a great mistake. It is precisely those parts of the Bible which contain that which is most essential to it, that abound most in the supernatural. The Book of Proverbs, for instance, contains perhaps no allusion to a miracle; but who would maintain that this was one of the most characteristic books of the Bible? On the contrary, the four Gospels, to which intelligent readers of the Bible almost instinctively turn first, are full of miraculous narratives. The essence of the Bible is Christ; and Christ, in His incarnation, His birth, His life, His works, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, is essentially and throughout supernatural. And the whole of what is distinctively Christian doctrine and moral teaching is but the unfolding of the consequences of these professed supernatural events. So with regard to the Old Testament. Take away the biblical account of the Creation and the Fall, and the whole history of the Bible becomes meaningless. Take away the mighty works said to have been wrought by Moses at the Exodus and afterwards, and the whole Law and history of that marvellous people-the Jews-becomes an enigma. Take away the inspiration of Isaiah and the other prophets, and what are generally felt to be among the most striking passages of the world's literature, become insipid and dull. In a word, the supernatural element in the Bible is so inwoven in its very tissues, that the two must stand or fall together. Without that element, it would be a husk with no kernel inside.

II. And now, is it reasonable that a revelation from God should so largely contain what is supernatural,