understanding has assured them of their reality. We must
suppose, on any system, the existence of reason and spiritual affections
as indispensable to the understanding of the Scriptures; external
authority can do nothing for us without these, any more than the mere
faculties of the common understanding. But with these we apprehend the
view which St. John and St. Paul afford to us: it opens before us one
truth after another, one glory after another. St. John evidently
supposes that his readers were familiar with another account of our
Lord's life and teaching; and we find accordingly, another account
existing in the writings of the three other evangelists. One and the
same account is manifestly the substance of their three narratives, to
which they thus bear a triple testimony, because none of the three has
merely transcribed the others, and none of them apparently was the
original author of it. Thus having now the full record of our Lord's
teaching, we find that he everywhere refers to the Old Testament as to
the word of God, and the record of God's earlier manifestations of
himself to man. He has cleared up those especial points in it which
might have most perplexed us, as I shall notice more fully hereafter,
and he represents himself as the perpetual subject of its prophecies. We
thus receive the Old Testament, as it were, from his hand, and learn
while sitting at his feet to understand the lessons of the law and
the prophets.

Thus we make Christ the centre of both Testaments, and by so doing, we
cannot be blind to the divinity pervading both. For the amazing fact
that God should come into the world and be in the world cannot by
possibility stand alone; it hallows, as it were, the whole period of the
world's existence, from the beginning to the end, placing all time and
every place in relation to God; it disposes us at once to receive the
fact of the special call of the people of Israel;--it gives, I had
almost said, an _a priori_ reason why there must have been in earlier
times some shadows, at least, or images, to represent dimly to former
generations that great thing which they were not actually to witness; it
leads us to believe that there must have been some prophetic voices to
announce the future coming of the Lord, or else "The very stones must
have cried out."

But those writings of St. John and St. Paul which were our first lessons
in Christianity, and those other accounts of our Lord's life and
teaching t