language, human facts and personality, in giving the inner Bible form, and so shaping the outer Bible. The former, the ideal parts, however, were no more truly chosen by him than the latter, the formal, by which they were expressed. In every portion of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, we find timemarks, race-marks, human personality-marks, betraying its human relationship; but none the less there are God-marks there also, showing that in both elements, the formal and the vital, it is the Book of God. He chose to give it through man, and in a way to put it in a living union with man at the time. His thought seemed to lay itself down on an elect mind, here and there, now and then, during the inspirational ages, grasp it, qualify it, co-work with it, enter into vital oneness with it; and so these two agencies, the divine and the human, took together the desired step in advance in giving that section of revelation to mankind. Thus man is in the inner and outer Bible; God also is there, from center to circumference. Dual as the book is in its nature, its duality is not mechanical but vital, like that of other vital things. The two portions are not joined together like dead branches and a living tree, but more as soul and body. You can not travel through it, and mechanically toss asunder the two interblended elements, any more than you can pass through it and say these portions are put here by inspiration and those without it. We like that view of inspiration according to which two spirits are regarded as having been present and active when all the parts, all the sentences and words, too, if you please, were born into the record, -God's and man's,-in dynamic union, each in its freedom and integrity, neither overlaid and crushed nor crowded out by the other. So, in the blending of the formal and the vital in Scripture, each in a sense rests on the other, yet neither overcrowds the other, and neither can be spared from the other. They hold each other up, and so constitute the indivisible and imperishable Word to mankind-the letter and the spirit. Such is the intimacy of the union in the one creative work that the problem of their exact demarcation, analytically and critically, is one of great delicacy and difficulty, perhaps never to be fully solved,-needful as it is to recognize the distinction in thought, and hold the book on this basis theoretically.

This difficulty is greatly increased by the fact that God had in view, in giving all the Scriptures but the later portions, a double object, to give mankind religious instruction suitable to their wants at the time, and prepare their successors for higher instruction. He was sighting at the same moment the existing good and the future education of the race. He blended ends and means. He was giving man a revelation and getting him ready to receive a revelation. And these two processes went on simultaneously. The Bible, in form, in one view of it, may be regarded as a record of the educational system God adopted for the religious instruction of the race, beginning at the alphabet and going on to the end of the course, embracing the temporary illustrations and applications and rough sketches adapted to rude learners, as well as the interblended or supplementary principles, ideas, and fundamental facts, designed for permanent use. Of course, it can be no easy matter to feel out and detect the permanent thus running in a sliding scale for many centuries through such an educational course, to disentangle the living and authoritative from the structural and transient, to raise the Bible out of the Bible. Indeed, this never can be perfectly done; and though it is important to have the conception and to hold and defend Scripture on this basis, it is doubtful whether, for educational and moral reasons, its author would ever have it actually done.

But while, from the nature of the case, the boundaries of these two elements are subtle and evasive, there is something in experience that points, in a general way, to the reality of this distinction. A large part of the living truths of the word seem to have a special fitness for the conscience, moral nature, and spirit of man, so that when welcomed and practiced they maintain their position in the faith by a self-evidencing light and authority. The vital in them and the vital in the soul recognize each other, in the act of spiritual experience, as if they were old acquaintances, and the two consent together in a divine wedlock. The living things from above have come to their own, and their own received them. They who do the will of God know of the doctrine. They inwardly test it, measure it, feel it, and know it to be of God. Thus in experience the soul recognizes portions of the higher elements of

Scripture as many as it comes in actual spiritual contact with and can appropriate,—and holds them; as quicksilver agitated among crushed ore seeks out the particles of gold, seizes and holds them, till the limit of its capacity is reached or there is no more gold accessible.

The formal, on the other hand, finds no such inward recognition. It remains something outside and foreign. It may be a support around which spiritual experience crystallizes; it is not a part of it. It may furnish the arena of the race, not the elements which enter into the spirit and mettle of the race itself. The soul can not test the formal by its own powers and know it to be true or divine, or feel, if it were varied, it would itself suffer by the change.

Thus individual Christians in every age are unconsciously feeling out portions of these distinctive elements, the formal and the vital, and finding in the mass of Scripture the inlaid divine meanings specially adapted to them. They are ever seeking, under the guidance of the Divine Spirit, portions of the living waters needed by their souls, and are not content to linger at channels of revelation whose streams have dried up or whose waters are not now suited to their needs. This does not imply that some of the overlooked or neglected portions may not be equally significant in themselves or precious to others. By no means; but it shows that spiritual instincts lead them, the moment they begin to read and welcome Scripture, to discriminate between the portions which enter into their experience and become a part of it, and those which remain outside.

In like manner, the Church, acting on a larger scale and taking a broader survey, is ever feeling out, under the guidance of the Spirit, the special living truths, most needful for it in its time, about which its heart warms and its life crystallizes. It goes through the book, and leaves it with illuminated and unilluminated portions, just as it has an eye to see and a heart to feel the divine message. In different ages the volume lights up differently under its gaze and use. But it may require all the different ages, all the varied circumstances, conditions, and wants of the centuries, for the Church to slowly spell out all the vital meanings in the book. How absurd, then, for an individual to make his spiritual consciousness the test of all of it! Indi

vidual experience only points in the direction of the truth for which we plead, it does not exhaust it. How foolish for any class of Christians to presume on recognizing all of it! Their aggregated experience only goes a little farther. How foreign from the fact to suppose that even the whole Church of Christ in any one age can have an experience broad enough and deep enough to compass all the truth of revelation! We must look to the collective godly experience of all the ages, to overtake and use all the vital things stored away in the wondrous volume, capable of the test of experience.

Now this unconscious process, which goes on in the experi ence of individual Christians and of the Church, points to the deeper and more real and extended distinction between the formal and the vital, which exists in the very substance of the book itself. This does not depend on personal or ecclesiastical moods or wants, or on localities, circumstances, or ages. It enters into the very nature and structure of the word. It places on the side of the vital all the principles, truths, facts, instructions, requirements, and warnings, which are intended to abide through the Christian ages, whether they are all in any one age consciously felt out and welcomed, or not, or whether they are all ever grasped in experience, or not, and which are packed away in the word for the furnishing of the Church in the different exigencies of its history. Some of these may remain long unused, as a well-stocked locker may be thoughtfully supplied by a master mind with tools and articles for any emergency in the voyage, the use of some of which may not be known to those on board till the occasion arises when they are needed and are brought out. On the side of the formal it classes those elements which are simply structural, and those parts which, after the completion of the canon, fall into subordinate and relatively unimportant positions, and are valuable rather for their relation to the other parts than their own sake.

But the two are blended in a living inseparable union. The vital has grown up into the formal, and brings out its bloom and fruit from it; and the formal upholds and embodies the vital. The formal is for the sake of the vital, and the vital touches, hallows, glorifies, the formal. The Bible, made up of the two, is thus a vital whole-a creation of divine genius, in

which it is impossible to draw out the soul and have it live and command respect and authority, leaving the other a mass of worthless matter-as impossible as to tear asunder a statue and separate the idea from the marble, and yet retain the idea as an expressed fact. Both perish from the world of reality by the reckless attempt.

After this general survey of the two elements of revelation, -their necessity, nature, and interrelation,-let us now approach them more closely, as we find them side by side or blended, in the Bible.

Of course, as already stated, we do not expect to reach positive and final results. We do not expect to untwist the threads of light and shade which God has woven together, and place each color by itself. All we hope to do is to point in a general way to the direction in which they may be found and distinguished. And this we deem necessary, in order that the Scriptures may not be undervalued, on the one hand, by those who think that if they are of supernatural origin no apparently imperfect or unimportant matters shall have place in them; nor misvalued, on the other hand, by those who encumber their faith by overtaxing and misdirecting it in trying to honor equally all their contents.

Looking at the formal and beginning at the exterior of this, we find that human language itself, employed by the sacred writers, falls into this class. The words as words are not the revelation or the message. They are human; that floats around them, lies back of them, and comes out into them only more or less imperfectly. Christ says: "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." Back of the poor human words he was compelled to use was a wreath of spiritual truth and life which could only imperfectly be expressed in them, and he points to that as the real aim of his utterance. So human language in the Bible is extraneous to the ideas which God caused to be lodged in it for man's use, and is itself a part of the structural element.

Little significance, also, is to be attached to the rhetorical structure or the special tongue adopted. No spiritual importance lies in the fact that particular writers used words of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Chaldaic, Aramaic, or Persian; or wrote