the true historic light. The chastened nation feels itself
called to a higher mission than that of political power. It is to teach
the other nations of the earth the knowledge of God. That knowledge it is
itself to learn in the school of sorrow. It is to save humanity through
the sacrifice of itself. Thus the secret of suffering is spelled out, not
for ancient Israel alone, but for all mankind; the secret which is
shrined, for ever sacred to us, in the story of our Lord Christ; from whom
you and I this day, through a simple symbol, are to learn anew that if we
sorrow it is that we may be made perfect through suffering, and thus be
fitted to lead our fellows up into the light and love of God.

V.

_These writings should be read critically, until we can decipher the
successive hands working upon them, and interpret them accordingly._

Few, if any, of the books of the Bible stand now as they came from their
original authors. Nearly all have been re-edited; most of them many
times. Some of them have been worked over by so many hands, and have
undergone such numerous and serious changes, that the original writer
would scarcely identify his work. The historical writings of the Old
Testament take up into them all sorts of materials, from all sorts of
sources. If the annals of the Venerable Bede, the father of English
history had been re-written again and again through the subsequent
centuries; abridged, enlarged, interpreted by each editor; the
accumulating knowledge and growing experience of the nation read into his
simple chronicles; we should appreciate the critical care needful in
studying our edition of Bede if we would know the real original. Very much
such care is necessary if we are to use the Old Testament histories aright
for information. It is as though there were several surfaces to the
parchment on which the histories were written, on each successive film of
which, in finest tracery, an older record was inscribed.

Genesis, for example, presents us, at every step of what seems a
consecutive story, with successive layers of tradition, through which we
must work our way most carefully if we would really understand the book.
We readily observe a twofold tradition of the Creation in the opening
chapters of Genesis, differing very materially: a sign to us, if we need
it, that there was no one authoritative account of the Creation current in
Israel. Little attention is required to note a double version of t