LECTURE VII.

PSALM XII. 6. The words of the Lord are pure words; as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.

THE Connexion of this passage shews that, by "the words of the Lord" here mentioned, we are to understand his promises of mercy and protection to his faithful servants, when they are exposed to sufferings from the treachery of false-hearted men, and when their hopes of aid from their friends are diminished by the death or oppression of the "godly" and "faithful." In opposition to the flatteries and deceitful actions of an unprincipled party, the author of this psalm exults in the fidelity of God, and the assurance that the fullest reliance might be placed on every authenticated declaration of the divine will. This is illustrated by the metaphor of metallic purity. Silver and gold occur native, in the proper metallic state; yet, even in that case, they cannot be got free from the stony substances which inclose or penetrate them, without the art of the refiner: but, when the processes of the hammer, the crucible, and the furnace have been duly performed, the precious metal is obtained in a state of high purity, and fit for completely answering every purpose in the arts of life, for which it is adapted.

That which is thus declared concerning the "exceeding great and precious promises" of divine grace, is equally true of every other part of what God has been pleased to reveal, for the purposes of his wisdom and benevolence to mankind; "for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness." The most scrupulous student of the Bible will not accuse me of making an arbitrary application of Scripture, because from this particular instance, upon the principle of evident analogy, I deduce a universal truth. That truth is, that every declaration contained in the writings of the prophets and apostles, which has a respect to the faith, the obedience, the consolation, and the use

fulness of believers; and when understood in the sense intended by the Author of inspiration; possesses the purity of the best refined silver, the INFALLIBILITY of unmixed TRUTH. The sentiment, in an enlarged form, is given by the son of the writer of this psalm; “Every word of God is pure. He is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar."* Every serious mind will perceive how solemnly this caution bears upon our proceeding, in the endeavour to elicit the sense of the Scriptures. It not less clearly follows, that one of our first duties is to ascertain, by those means which God has put into our possession, the genuine meaning of the divine oracles, without prepossession in favour of some interpretations, or prejudice against others. Our honest question must be, "What saith the Lord ?”

It is not, I trust, in disregard of this caution, that I avail myself of the analogy suggested by our text, as an instructive direction, not of fancy, but arising justly and naturally out of the imagery employed. The use of silver, though it is often found native in metalliferous veins, would be confined within narrow limits, if mankind could employ only the native metal. The quantity obtained, and the capacity of even the best specimens for being applied to the many valuable purposes for which the providence of God has given us that metal, would be very small, were it not for the skill and laborious diligence of the metallurgic workman. So the treasures of the heavenly word, "more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold," require that we should exert our best faculties, in digging out of the mine, (if I may carry on the metaphor,) and in separating the actual SUBSTANCE of divine communication from that which is necessarily human, the forms of language, and the condescending methods of comparison with the affections and actions of men, by which God is pleased to bring spiritual and divine realities within the sphere of our narrow comprehension. The matter is divine, but the vehicle is human. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels." Pursuing this train of thought, we arrive at some important principles for Theology and the study of the Scriptures.

I. Of the nature and attributes of the Infinite Spirit, of his purposes and his acts, which cannot but have the characters of his

* Prov. xxx. 5, 6.

own perfection, we have no intuitive knowledge: and we have no possible means of receiving knowledge, though communicated from its own Divine Fountain, except through the medium of RESEMBLANCES to objects of our own thought, or of sensible perception by our own organs. "Behold, God is great; and we know him not!" Of the Divine Nature as Infinite Intellect, PURE MIND, we can form no conception but by reflecting upon, and drawing conclusions from our own consciousness, and the operations of our own minds. In like manner, we gain our knowledge of the Eternity of God, by adding the notion of infinity to our perception of the flow of time. By our touch and our sight, we get the ideas of motion, resistance, and impulse; and, by reflecting on the lesson thus taught, we rise to the notion of effects and causes. We look and feel around, we lay hold of bodies extraneous to ourselves, and we discover certain states and alterations of states following upon certain conditions of tangible and visible things; we then rise to a wider survey of the sensible world around us, and we see a vast number of changes taking place, upon a scale of great magnitude; and at last our feeble minds having acquired the idea of power, we transfer it, with the highest increase of form, to our conception of the Infinite and Eternal Deity; and we call our new idea Omnipotence. In a similar way, we form conceptions of justice and kindness, from the action of parental and infantile feelings, and from the mental phenomena which we experience inwardly and the actions of our fellow-beings observed outwardly; to these conceptions we also annex the qualities of infinity and eternity, and thus we gain some notion of the MORAL attributes of the Supreme Majesty, his Holiness and his Benignity. But, how faint, how low, are our best conceptions! "Lo, these are parts of his ways and what whisper-word is heard of him!-The Almighty! We find him not!"*

I humbly think that these positions are self-evident to every reflecting person. Equally manifest it is, that the highest orders of created intelligences, though they may be immeasurably superior to man in their faculties of understanding, can know GOD in only the same way: by elevating their minds through aids of

*Job xxvi. 14. The word rendered parts signifies the extremities of lines, mere points: but I know not of any good English word which I could venture to substitute. The whisper-word is the barest literal rendering; and it is too beautiful to be lost, as in the common version. Chap. xxxvii. 23, also closely rendered.

analogy: unless the TRANSCENDENT ONE, in his boundless goodness, have reserved for them some mode of immediate communication; but to conceive which must necessarily be beyond our powers.

From this general statement some important consequences follow.

1. All the methods of representation, that may be employed to convey notions of the Deity to the mind of man, must, of absolute necessity, be designed to produce only analogical or comparative ideas; and must be adapted to that end. If we may so speak, they are pictures, which stand in the place of spiritual realities; but the realities themselves belong to the INACCESSIBLE LIGHT.

2. The materials of such comparison must be different, according to the varying states of mental improvement in which different minds are found. Let it, for a moment, be supposed that it had pleased the Divine Majesty to grant an immediate revelation of his authority and his grace to the Athenians, in the age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for their use; we may reverentially believe that, in such a case, the communication would have been expressed in the terms and phrases to which they had habituated themselves, and moulded upon a system of references to the natural scenery around them, to their modes of action in social life, and to their current notions upon all other subjects. Not only would the diction have been pure Greek, but the figures, the allusions, and the illustrations of whatever kind, would also have been Attic. The Hebraized style which was adapted to the people of Israel, would have failed to convey just sentiments to the men of Greece; or, though it would not have been absolutely unintelligible, the collateral ideas would have been misapprehended, false bye-notions would have insinuated themselves, and the principal sentiments, to inculcate which was the object of the whole process, would have been grievously distorted. Or, had the favour of a positive revelation been given to the ancient Britons, or to the aborigines of America, it would have been clothed in another dress of representative imagery, and described in other and very different forms of speech.

Yet, in any such case, and under every variety that could occur, the enucleating of the representations, if it were fairly accomplished, would bring out the same truths: and the practical benefit to piety and virtue, resulting from each mode, for the classes of

mankind to which each was adapted, would be the same, if improved with equal fidelity.

3. The earliest revelation which God was pleased to grant to man, whether in the state of pristine integrity, or in that into which by transgression he fell, must have been conveyed by representations of the character which we have described; they must have been composed of materials derived from the knowledge possessed by the subjects of those revelations, and the relations under which they stood to beings and circumstances around them.

This position is only the correlate of saying that the revelation must have been given and transmitted in the language spoken or written by those to whom the message of God came: or, to say all in one word, it must have been intelligible. If any objection be raised against the supposition, that, by this shewing, the revelation would be clothed in the imagery of gross and sensible objects, with the imperfections and misconceptions, under which those objects appeared to men possessing only the rude ideas of a primeval state of society; a corresponding objection would lie against the revelation's being conveyed in a rude and imperfect language. Then, to be consistent, it would be requisite further to maintain, that the terms and style of the revelation must have been in the most pure and abstract kind of phrase that human diction could afford, the most nearly approaching to the spirituality of the Divine Nature, and the majesty of eternal things; and this would be equivalent to saying, that it ought to have anticipated by many centuries the progress of man as an intellectual and social being; that it ought to have been written, not in the language of shepherds and herdsmen, but in that of moral philosophers and rhetoricians; not in Hebrew, but in Greek or English.

It would plainly also follow that, if the prescription, as to the forms of thought and diction, which such presumptions demand as befitting a revelation from heaven, were admitted, a revelation so expressed would have been unintelligible to the "ages and generations" of primitive time, and to the generality of mankind in all times.

II. We are thus led to another observation, which will bring us to the principle proposed as the solution of the Biblical question, with relation not to Geology only, but to human science universally. It is this.

The revelations, successively given to the fathers of mankind,