LECTURE III.

1 CORINTHIANS ii. 5.

That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men.

IN the two former Lectures it was endeavoured to shew, that there were reasonable and scriptural grounds for attaching a secondary and spiritual sense to much of the Law and the Prophets; and that such was, so far as we have the opportunity of ascertaining matters of this nature, the opinion, if not of the whole Jewish church, yet certainly of many among its most learned and pious members. That the practice of such interpretation was carried by some to an unwarrantable excess, affords no proof that it was not originally founded upon just conceptions of the character of the older revelation, or that it is repugnant to the wise and benevolent intentions of Him by whom all Scripture was given, and to whom

were known all his works from the beginning. The course of our inquiry has now brought us to that period, at which the preaching of a new and more perfect dispensation was committed by its divine Author to the apostles and ministers of his choice; committed with the express assurance, and confirmed and sanctioned by the conscious and sensible presence of his informing Spirit. If we believe them to have spoken and written under the guidance of that Spirit, to have been led (as it was promised) into all truth; if we hold upon any theory the proper inspiration of that which they delivered; I do not see with what consistency we can refuse (as some would do) to acquiesce in their interpretation of the Scriptures of the Old Testament. That to these Scriptures they do affix a secondary and spiritual meaning, and that they refer to them with this view, not merely in a few partial and dubious instances, but repeatedly, and with a distinctness to be questioned only by the most determined prejudice, seems equally clear. If indeed with one school we are to deny the exist

ence of all types and prefigurations of the Messiah and his kingdom, and to contend that where the Law is said to have had the shadow of the good things to come, no more is meant than that in comparison with the gospel it was as valueless as a shadow when compared to a substance"; we would answer, that such a theory claims for plain and specific language a much greater laxity and licence of interpretation than any which it objects to. If with others b we attempt to resolve the whole into one system of accommodation, we certainly do not a little shake the credibility of those witnesses who could rest so much upon so sandy a foundation. But the writers of the New Testament in no place appear either to confess or to suspect that the secondary or allegorical sense, which they attach to the Law and the Prophets, are thus arbitrary and unreal. That we

a This is the hypothesis of Sykes in his answer to Collins.

b See the first Lecture, p. 27. This hypothesis the theologians of modern Germany have derived chiefly from the school of Le Clerc.

are content to regard some few instances. of obscure application as thus accommodated, (and the lists usually given of such accommodations might indeed be much reduced,) does not, any more than the exceptions in various other cases, invalidate the general rule.

And here I would venture even to submit, whether, as we consent, both from their own internal evidence, and from the acknowledged inspiration of those who adduce them, to receive the great bulk of the scriptural quotations so adduced in the New Testament as truly and originally typical and prophetical, it may not be the part of Christian humility and sober criticism rather to suspend the judgment as to those few which present real difficulties, than to attempt the accounting for or reconciling them by any hypothesis of accommodation, or partial and individual арplication; by conceding that they are no more than ornaments of diction, or at best argumenta ad hominem.

Upon the whole then it must be granted, that the writers of the New Testament did

regard the Old as exhibiting in many of its leading features a real and intentional adumbration of those foreknown counsels of God, which were to receive their completion in the gift of a Saviour and the preaching of his Gospel. And this is all with which we are at present concerned; for our time would not permit, nor indeed does it come within the scope of the present Lectures, to examine even cursorily into the import and bearings of every passage thus adduced from the Old Testament by the evangelists and apostles: but it may be useful briefly to call to mind that they are uniformly adduced with reference either to the personal history and mediatorial office of our blessed Redeemer, to the spiritual character of the kingdom which he established upon earth, or to the future destiny of his universal church; and that with respect to the latter they are rather applied to its great and general outlines than to any minuter circumstances of detail; a point in which the expositors of after-times but too often and too unwisely deviated from their example.

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