irrational, because more inconsistent, than wholly to repudiate them. The provision which the Church has made, by the authority of Christ and under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, for our spiritual necessities, is a whole of which the parts are in accurate and beautiful proportion. We are bound, therefore, without further option or alternative, not only to join in the common prayer and praise, but also "to hear sermons"; not only to hear sermons, but to partake, as often as we may be able, of the "Holy Communion of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ." We are not only to "mortify," during Lent, all our "evil and corrupt affections," but to rejoice at Easter with that exceeding joy with which "the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord." We are not only on Sundays to accompany our Lord Himself through the scenes of His earthly ministry, but to thank Him on Saints' Days for the inestimable benefits which He has graciously bestowed upon us in His holy Apostles and martyred Saints, and in the mysterious and blessed ministrations of His holy Angels.

Let us, then, remember, my dear brethren, that, wellnigh overwhelmed by the dangers and uncertainties of life, we cried to God, not for mere information and advice, but for law and authority. He has mercifully answered our prayer. Through the lawgivers and prophets of Israel, in the Incarnate Word, in the visible Church, He has given us "commandments." Let us see to it that promptly, always, and unfalteringly we perfectly obey them.

THE BIBLE AND THE GOSPEL.

I thank God that I baptized none of you, save Crispus and Gaius: lest any man should say that ye were baptized into my name. And I baptized also the household of Stephanas: besides, I know not whether I baptized any other. For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the Gospel : not in wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made void.-I CORINTHIANS i. 14-17.

The words which I have just read to you-as you cannot have failed to perceive-possess a double interest, a twofold value. They express, in the most emphatic terms, both positively and negatively, what S. Paul believed his work as an Apostle to be. It was “to preach the Gospel," and it was not "to baptize." But, in addition to this, they throw a very bright light upon the nature of the Holy Scriptures: they reveal to us the mode in which the epistles were written; they help us to understand that intellectual and spiritual power or aptitude, whether natural or supernatural, to which we commonly give the name of "inspiration."

It is of course conceivable that S. Paul's letter to the Corinthians-which we may here regard as a type or specimen of all "Scripture given by inspiration of God"-might have been written at the literal dictation of the Almighty; just as the Apostle himself dictated his letters to Tertius or some other amanuensis. In that case every sentence and word in the letter would have been literally "the word of God." He would have been directly responsible for the slip of memory

as to the number of Corinthians whom S. Paul had baptized, and for the assertion that certain counsels were not from "the Lord." Every departure from ordinary syntax or orthography would have been, if not an error—which the hypothesis would exclude— then a divine revelation of the true rules of grammar or of the structure of language. What seem now to be the expressions of S. Paul's own feelings of anxiety or alarm or affection, must have received a non-natural interpretation, as affirming not what S. Paul said he felt, but what God knew that he might have said that he felt. Indeed, the epistle would have been, as to many of its most characteristic passages, a divine work of fiction or of dramatic skill, like the book Wisdom, which is attributed to Solomon, or the various speeches in Thucydides or Livy. For, obviously, for the merely manual writing of any book whatever, no "inspiration" of the amanuensis would be necessary-nothing but a knowledge of the art of writing. He might be a good man or a bad, believing what he wrote or disbelieving it. His own feelings and character would be entirely irrelevant, and what he wrote from dictation would bear no trace of his literary style. For the direct imitation of the style of the amanuensis by the divine Author would have been so certain to deceive, while wholly unnecessary for the purpose of conveying the divine revelation, that we may safely regard it as an impossible hypothesis. Nay, if it were possible for the Almighty to dispense with the intellect, the character, the experience of His amanuensis, it would have been equally possible to dispense with his fingers. It would have been as easy to produce parchment by direct miracle, as to produce the skin of an animal; and

intelligible marks, such as the letters of an alphabet arranged in the words of a known language, as the forms and colours of the petals of flowers and the wings of birds. But all such speculation is at once idle and unnecessary. God might have produced a Bible in either of the modes suggested above, but certainly it would not have been such a Bible as we actually possess. Moreover, in this First Epistle to the Corinthians we have not only a very important part of the Sacred Scripture, but we can see it in the making. Here is S. Paul actually writing it, and in such a manner that we are able to understand not only the outside, but even the inside, of the process of its construction.

The Apostle has received a letter from the Corinthian Church, just as a modern rector on a visit to Europe might receive a letter from the parishioners he had left behind; also, he had received a good deal of news about them, of a very mixed character, from certain persons to whom he refers as "them which are of the household of Chloe." So he sets himself to answer their letter, and also to give them counsel and warning arising out of the information he had received about them from the Chloe people. He does not write a treatise On the Unity of the Church, or On the Dress of Women, or On the Peril of Idolatry, or On Marriage, or On the Holy Eucharist. We have well-known treatises on all these subjects, in the writings of the Fathers and the Books of Homilies, and elsewhere. But nothing can be more unlike such treatises than S. Paul's Letter to the Corinthians. It is a real letter, to real people, answering a real letter, dealing with real circumstances, expressing real feelings.

And it is full of S. Paul. His very style is as un

mistakable as the style of Shakespeare, or Macaulay, or Carlyle. But here we have the whole man-his moral earnestness, his almost womanly tenderness, his grasp of great principles, his skill and tact in their application to the minutest details of conduct, his lofty independence, his yearning for sympathy and love, his childlike simplicity and humility. Indeed, this letter is itself the source of by far the largest part of all that we know of the Apostle's character. If he did not write this epistle, we cannot be sure that he wrote anything at all, we cannot know for certain what manner of man he was. And, manifestly, whatever his "inspiration" may have been, it is perfectly certain that it in no degree superseded or overpowered his own individuality.

Now, how does S. Paul set about his task of writing this letter? Does he first of all claim to be inspired, scrupulously avoid even the bare appearance of oversight or mistake, or "second thoughts"? Does he repress all that is personal, so that the Holy Ghost alone may be heard? On the very face of the epistle, it is plain that he does nothing of the kind. He goes right on, as we all do when we are in earnest, when we are writing to friends whom we love on subjects in which we are profoundly interested. If he makes a mistake he does not carefully erase it, he does not even completely correct it; for what does it matter to the great purpose he has in his mind? "I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gaius." "Yes, I did "—"I baptized also the household of Stephanas; besides I know not"-" it may have been so, but I don't remember "" that I baptized any other." For, indeed, they were at most so few out of all the Corinthian con