to be
vitalised throughout by the eternal Spirit of God, and leading forward
steadily to His final revelation in Christ, then its parts will be
symmetrical, proportionate and well designed. If it be a universal
book, there must be a better reason for the space devoted to preliminary
and half secular stories, which is a greater bulk than the whole of the
New Testament, than that these histories chance to belong to the nation
whence Christ came. If no such reason can be found, the failure may not
perhaps outweigh the great evidences of the faith, but it will score for
something on the side of infidelity. But if upon examination it becomes
plain that all has its part in one great movement, and that none can be
omitted without marring the design, and if moreover this design has
become visible only since the fulness of the time is come, the discovery
will go far to establish the claim of Scripture to reveal throughout a
purpose truly divine, dealing with man for ages, and consummated in the
gift of Christ.

Now, it is to St. Paul that we turn for light upon the connection
between the Old Testament and the New. And he distinctly lays down two
great principles. The first is that the Old Testament is meant to
educate men for the New; and especially that the sense of failure,
impressed upon men's consciences by the stern demands of the Law, was
necessary to make them accept the Gospel.

The law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ: it entered that sin
might abound. And it is worth notice that this effect was actually
wrought, not only upon the gross transgressor by the menace of its
broken precepts, but even more perhaps upon the high-minded and pure, by
the creation in their breasts of an ideal, inaccessible in its
loftiness. He who says, All these things have I kept from my youth up,
is the same who feels the torturing misgiving, What good thing must I do
to attain life?... What lack I yet? He who was blameless as touching
the righteousness of the law, feels that such superficial innocence is
worthless, that the law is spiritual and he is carnal, sold under sin.

Now, this principle need by no means be restricted to the Mosaic
institutions. If this were the object of the law, it would probably
explain much more. And when we return to the Old Testament with this
clue, we find every condition in life examined, every social and
political experiment exhausted, a series of demonstrations made with
scientific precision, to