LECTURES FOR THE TIMES.

Globe, Volume VI, Issue 643, 11 July 1876, Page 3

LECTURES FOR THE TIMES.

Another of these lectures was given on Sunday evening by the Rev J. Elmslie, the subject being “ The Old Testament and the New.” The lecturer took for his test, “ Search the Scriptures,” and went on to say that hia object was not so much to combat the infidel, as to assist those who, whilst striving to bow at the shrine of revelation, had been led into difficulties by reason of speculations regarding the hooka which are to be comprised within the sacred canon. He would go upon the supposition that intelligent beings would not have been created and left without a clear expression of the Divine will, and that there had been given to man a Divine revelation. He would undertake to show, logically and morally, that the Old and New Testaments must be taken, as a complete whole. There was m othet alternative. There must be a whole Bible, or none at all. There were those who

told them (good men, perhaps, though not enlightened) that the Old Testament was done away in the New, whether by absorption or reproduction they did not say; but as he had dealt with that subject before it need not detain them then. There were others who, while respecting the New Testament and certain portions of the Old, do not hesitate to reject the Divine authority of the most ancient of these records, the five books of Moses. In his book on the Pentateuch Bishop Oolenso manifests no small concern lest he should be regarded as slighting any of the fundamental doctrines of the Chris tian faith ; yet had he known the veriest elements of systematic theology, or been such a master of some things as he was of mathematics (a science that the greatest men in the world might sit at his feet and learn something of) he would have seen that he was sapping the very foundations on which that system was resting. There was another class of persons who receive along with the Bible the fourteen books of the Apocrypha, but whilst he would show that they were bound either to accept the Bible as a whole or reject it, he would show also that the apocryphal writings formed no part of the sacred canon, and they must oppose with a firm determination the laxity of those who would add to these sacred writings, and also those who in their folly and ignorance would take away from them. He might show the impossibility of accepting one portion of scripture, and disregarding another portion on the grounds of the oneness of spirit that pervades the several portions of it, and on the unity of plan which characterises it as a whole. The unity of spirit here was a very remarkable thing. The Bible is made up of some sixtyfive different books, which were not written at once, but during a period of time extending over between 1500 and 1600 years. Then they contain all kinds of writings, embracing histories, prophecies, poems, proverbs, letters and speeches, simple biographies and deep argumentative epistles. They contain a code of civil law and a system of ecclesiastical ritual, also a Christian system of dhurch order without any ritual. Now if all these contributions had been the work of one author, they could understand them being bound up together, but the authors were men differing from each other in station of life. Two of them were kings, two were fishermen, one an Eastern patriarch, and one cup bearer of an Eastern court, one a surgeon, and another a learned Jewish rabbi, yet notwithstanding this variety, the books form one complete whole, the same unity of spirit transfused the lot, and they could not account for it, but on the supposition that the selfsame spirit animated the minds of all these writers. He might also bid them notice the unity of plan. A stranger, for instance, who had never seen the Bible, and was asked to read it through from Genesis to Revelations (a thing ho feared not many did) would observe in it this unity, and see a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the beginning, he would read of things being created on the earth, and at the end, of a new heaven and a new earth, or of the serpent first appearing to tempt man, and then at the last being bound and cast down. Such a stranger reading this book in the light of literary criticism would say, we dare not take away one part without taking away the rest. This, however, was not the argument he intended to pursue ; but he would set out by stating a fact not known to all, namely, tbat in the New Testament there were no fewer than 850 references to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and the great majority of them were actual quotations eighty-eight of these were from the Gospel of saint Matthew, which showed a moat remaskable intimacy on the part of that Evangelist with the history of the Old Testament, and he quotes from every portion of it—from Psalms, Proverbs, and prophecies. In the Gospel of St Mark, which consists only of sixteen chapters, they had thirtyifour references ; while in the Gospel of St Luke there were fiftyeight, and twenty-one of these make direct appeal to the Five Books of Moses. Again, in the Gospel of St John, they had forty passages. His text, too, which was from John, showed that the Scriptures—which the Jews were commanded to search—must have been the Old Testament, as the New Testament did not then exist. Passing from that they would come to the Book of the Acts, and running over that first history of the early Christian Church, they found no fewer than fifty-eight references to the Old Testament, But turning aiide from the writings of the evangelists to those of the apostles, they could find in the Epistle to the Romans, no fewer than seventy-four inspired recognitions of Old Test ament Scripture, sixty-one of these actual quotations. He need not pursue this enumeration any further, but would say that the books were very largely laid under contribution in every one of the epistles. In the Hebrews alone there were eighty-five recognitions, and of these twenty-seven were to be found in one chapter, the eleventh. While in the Apocalypse, where, if anywhere, the Old Testament writings would be forgotten, we have no fewer than 245 recognitions of them —a circumstance which has led to its being termed the chromatic tense of the Bible. He would again observe that whilst there were in the New Testament extending from Matthew's Gospel to the Book of Revelation no fewer than 850 references or direct quotations to the books of the Old Testament, extending from Genesis to Malachi, there was not one single reference in all these books to the writings of the Apocrypha, He would not take credit to himself for these numbers, but they could be verified by reference to Baxter’s Polyglot Bible. The lecturer concluded by giving some practical advice with regard to the study of the Bible, and saying ho thought no one could go away without admitting that he had logically and morally proved it was impossible to take away any portion of it without taking away the rest ; both parts of it, the Old and the New Testament, were so interwoven with one another that they must stand or fall together.