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THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY WITHIN.

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divine message was expressed through the halting forms of human speech. Discrimination was neces

sary. In the passionate righteousness of Elijah the righteousness had to be separated from the passion. In the Law of Moses, what was allowed in order to prevent worse evils had to be distinguished from the creative thought of God. The ultimate authority, therefore, must be within; and he who would draw forth the grandest lessons of the Old Testament must go to it with "spiritual discernment," and bring its various thoughts into the presence of God, to be tested by the fire of his Spirit. It was thus that Jesus dealt with the Scriptures; and it was through this reverent freedom that he drew down on himself the wrath of the blind guides who knew that God had spoken to Moses, but who had neither eyes nor ears for his living word among themselves.

We have been obliged to infer Christ's view of the Old Testament from the use which he actually makes of it, as, owing to the occasional and unsystematic character of his teaching, he did not find it necessary to reduce his thoughts on the subject to a precise form. To a certain extent, the same remark is true of Paul; but he was compelled by the exigencies of

controversy to frame a theory of the relation which the Old Testament bore to the new teaching, and to present this theory to his own thought in a shape sufficiently definite for argumentative purposes. Revolutionary, and even blasphemous, as his views appeared to his fellow-countrymen, he retained his veneration for the ancient Scriptures, and looked upon the manifestation of the spirit of sonship in Christ as the full revelation of the idea which had guided the providential history of the Jewish race. The intentions of God were not carried out by spasmodic and irrational methods. One determining thought had been guiding the education of mankind; and it was only when the fulness of the time came, and men were ready to pass out of the immaturity and subjection of childhood, that the Son of God appeared in order to lead the world into its spiritual manhood.1 This being so, the Gospel furnished a new key to the Old Testament; for it was now possible to detect the underlying idea beneath the temporary forms and imperfect hints by which it sought to manifest itself amid the lower conditions of spiritual culture, while the grander passages flashed forth with a new brilliancy as they seemed to

1 See especially Rom. vii. and viii., and Gal. iii. and iv.

PAUL'S VIEW OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

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issue from the very spirit which Christ had brought into the world. But without this inward illumination it was impossible to understand the old words aright. A veil lay upon the heart, and the more diligently the letter was studied, and the more vehemently it was defended, the more impenetrable the veil became.1

Paul, therefore, accepted in a certain sense the authority of the Old Testament. He constantly appealed to it in argument. He regarded incidents recorded in it as "our examples . . . written for our admonition." 2 He looked upon Jesus as the Messiah, sprung from the seed of David, and foretold by the Prophets in "Holy Scriptures."3 He thought of the Jews as the chosen olive, into which the Gentiles were only grafted. He believed in the promise made to Abraham, and saw in the Gospel the final realization of that faith which had marked the founder of the Hebrew race.5 Yet, on the other hand, his great and characteristic contention was that the old covenant had been superseded by a new, and that the very portion of the Old Testament which in Judaism had been considered fundamental had sunk

1 See especially Rom. x., 1 Cor. ii., 2 Cor. iii.
2 1 Cor. x. 6, 11.

4 Rom. xi. 16 sqq.

3 Rom. i. 1 sqq.

5 Rom. iv.; Gal. iii.

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away, and become a useless or mischievous relic of an outgrown past. He dismisses some of its injunctions as weak and beggarly elements," and treats with withering scorn those who placed any reliance on its ceremonial requirements.1 It appears, therefore, that he accepted the Old Testament just so far as it approved itself to the new Christian spirit, and whatever ran counter to that spirit he rejected without hesitation. As we have seen, he followed his Master in interpreting the essence of the Law, which he found in the commandment to love one's neighbour; and for the one thing which is of avail under the Gospel he selected, not obedience to or belief in the Scriptures, "but faith working through love," a "new creation" in the heart, an inward detachment from the world, and selfsurrender to God in the spirit of Christ.2

How, then, were these two positions reconciled in the mind of Paul? By his doctrine of the letter and the spirit. He had died to the Law, so that he served "in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter."3 His ministry was "not of the letter, but of

1 Gal. iii. 1 sqq., v. 6 sqq.

2 See especially Gal. v. 6, vi. 14 sqq.; Rom. vi. 1 sqq.

3 Rom. vii. 6. .

THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT.

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the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life;" and for the Law written on tables of stone he would substitute a more glorious and permanent ministration, written on the heart "with the Spirit of the living God." The distinction of the letter and the spirit reminds us of the system of allegorical interpretation which had been already brought to such perfection by Philo, and which was subsequently adopted by Christian commentators. Was this what Paul meant? I think not; for he seems to refer, not to two kinds of interpretation, but to the contrast between a written word and the word of the spirit within the heart. "Faith working through love" is not a mode of interpreting, but of living; and Paul believed that Christians were emancipated from all dependence on an authoritative Scripture, and were committed to the free leading of the Spirit of God. The Scriptures seen in the light of that Spirit might be of the highest value; treated as an authority by which the Spirit was to be quenched, they could produce nothing but spiritual death.

This last remark suggests the possibility of carrying over the distinction between the letter and the spirit

1 2 Cor. iii.

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