On theological, Biblical, and other subjects /

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Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. ADVICE TO STUDENTS OP DIVINITY -

§§ I. AND II. WORK OP THE DIVINITY

I. Wokk Of The Divinity Hall

Gentlemen, — We have been brought to the begin¬ ning of another session. Some of you are about to commence, and others of you are about to resume and continue, the studies of the Divinity Hall, and it is my task again to endeavour to fulfil the duties of this chair. It is assuredly to be desired that we all enter on our work with the conviction that it is most important work; that an ill-spent session here must be a very precious time of opportunity wasted ; that a serious responsibility lies on each of us to make the very most we can of the session before us.

My own responsibility I feel, and I know that I cannot too deeply feel it. But your responsibility is also very manifest. You aspire to an office which is of the utmost importance, and therefore due preparation for it must be of the utmost importance. Since the Christian ministry is a solemn and difficult service, and most momentous issues depend on how it is performed, no one can have a right to enter on it who is indolent or superficial in the studies which qualify for it.

Indifference and negligence are particularly inexcusable in any one who is studying for the ministry. No one who is not in earnest in his preparations — no one whose heart is not in his work — should be here at all. No wise person would wish such a one to be here. If any one here is in his right place — if any one here has his heart right as regards the work to which he looks forward — he will not find his work other than pleasant and profitable. There are no subjects taught in the Divinity Hall which ought not to be attractive and of interest to any student of Divinity of thoughtful and earnest mind ; and only men so minded are wanted in the Church. Only such men can be reasonably expected to be successful in extending the Kingdom of God, which is the real work of the Church.

All the subjects you are required to study in the Divinity Hall are of a kind which a clergyman is naturally and properly expected to be more conversant with than educated men in general. He ought to have the same sort of knowledge of them as a physician ought to have of medical, and a lawyer of legal, studies. They are all of a kind which have a direct and helpful bearing on his work. They are also all of a kind which are at present exciting the interest of a great many persons other than clergymen ; which have, in fact, probably never received more attention from the educated public. It is dangerous to the reputation of a clergyman not to be well-informed in regard to them.

The studies in which you will be engaged in the Divinity Hall are of their very nature intimately connected with those in which you have been engaged in the Faculty of Arts. That you ought to bear in mind, and act on. Do not imagine that you may now have done with what you have been doing as students of Arts. Take care, on the contrary, that what you have learned be not forgotten but followed up and extended.

You have studied, for example, with more or less success, Latin and Greek, and you have also at least begun the study of Hebrew. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, however, — the three sacred languages, as they have been called, — are of immense value to the theological student. There is no language in which so much theology has been written as in Latin. One who has learned to read the Latin classics with ease has thereby not merely attained the means of acquaintanceship with a wonderful literature, and through it the means also of an adequate appreciation of a most wonderful history and civilisation, but he has in his hands the key to an easy mastery of the writings of all the Latin Fathers, of all the medieval chronicles and scholastics, and of far the greater number of foreign Protestant and Catholic divines who wrote during the period of the Eeformation and in the two follow¬ ing centuries.

Greek has been well said to be “the most beautiful, rich, and harmonious language ever spoken or written.” It is the most finished medium for the expression of thought and feeling ever devised even by an Indo-Germanic people. For vigour and beauty, naturalness and precision, the language of Homer, of Aeschylus and Sophocles, of Plato, Thucydides, and Demosthenes, is excelled by no other. It is, par excellence, the language of culture, with strong claims on those who are in quest of the highest attainable intellectual culture. But it is also the language of the LXX. Old Testament, the language of the New Testament, the language also of the Apostolic Fathers, of such theologians as Origen and Athanasius, and of the creeds and councils of the undivided Church.

WOEK OF THE DIVINITY HALL

Without adequate knowledge of it a clergyman must be incapable of forming a satisfactory judgment of those questions as to the text, the textual criticism, and the higher criticism of the Greek Bible which are now so much discussed.

The study of a strange language is to most persons a rather dry and disagreeable kind of exercise, but even the roots and rudiments of Hebrew have in them more human interest than any other language I know. It is a calumny on the study of them to say that it flourishes best on barren ground. The distinctness of type which differentiates Hebrew from every Komanic or Teutonic language is so marked as to make it richly suggestive and instructive to a thoughtful mind. Its perfect regularity — its, one may say, mathematical yet not mechanical uniformity — its freedom from exceptions which in some languages are so numerous as to be like the proverbial trees which prevent the wood from being visible — are striking and delightful features of Biblical Hebrew. But what above all gives it its value to students for the ministry is that it is the original language of the Old Testament — that sacred Book which is also a national literature, which is a large and essential portion of those Scriptures which have been given by inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life, and which have had an incomparable influence on the spiritual history of humanity. A multitude of questions as to the Old Testament, which are at present keenly disputed, can only be intelligently judged of by those who have a fairly good acquaintance with Hebrew and its cognate tongues.

All your studies in the Divinity Hall should be intimately connected with the study of Scripture.

You have to study other subjects indeed, but without losing sight of their relations to the revelation contained in Scripture. The Bible should have always a central place in the studies of aspirants to the ministry, as well as in the labours of their teachers. The eyes of their minds and hearts should be steadily directed to the truth contained in it for their guidance. It will be

your duty, therefore, your wisdom, and, I hope, your joy, to read and meditate habitually on it in all right ways, and with earnestness and

expectation.

You should read it regularly with a practical and devotional aim — that is, for your spiritual improvement and growth in grace. It is not now your duty to preach the Word of God, but it is

your duty to read it, and you will never learn to

preach it aright unless you learn to read it aright, and there is no right reading of it which has not its origin, its foundation, in a high and reverent esteem of it, in a sincere sense of personal need of it. Probably the Bible was never more studied than it is now; certainly in some ways it has never been more studied than it is now ; but I fear that it may once have been more studied than now as a guide and help to holy living. If you neglect that sort of study of it, however, no other sort of study of it, however assiduous, will make you truly good preachers of it. How can a man expect to apply aright the Scriptures to the conversion, edification, and salvation of the souls of others if he has not accustomed himself to try the power of them on his own heart and life ?

But you should also study the Bible critically ; not only with a humble and pious but also a critical and free spirit. You must let yourselves be initiated into the critical study of the Scriptures — must learn what conclusions Biblical scholars have come to as to the canon of Scripture, the text of Scripture, the formation of Scripture, and the interpretation of Scripture ; and on what grounds and by what methods they have come to their conclusions. You are expected to become students of Biblical Criticism in the widest sense of the term; not, of course, in order that you should become critical experts, but that you should have an intelligent acquaintance as to what is certain, probable, and doubtful in the sphere of Biblical Criticism. And in order to satisfy this reasonable requirement, this legitimate expectation, you must have a considerable amount of intellectual work to go through, and will require to combine courage with caution, candour with prudence, earnestness in the search of truth with avoidance of all extremes. Bibiolatry is certainly not in the present day the most prevalent of erroneous tendencies, but it is still not uncommon, and you should strive to keep free from idolatry of every kind. You will only do harm to the cause of Biblical authority and truth if you assert its entire inerrancy, and hold by the old hypotheses of plenary inspiration which were once so prevalent. At the same time, receive rashly no new hypotheses as to Scripture, for the vast majority of them are born only to die. It is not wise for you at your stage of education to spend much of your time on the consideration of the mere guesses that swarm in the pages of the critical and theological journals. Learn to mortify your love of such novelties, for it is just now far too easily gratified, and you are sure to find the indulgence of it far too wasteful.

Further, you should read and study the Bible as a chief source of knowledge regarding Christian Doctrine. It is not the only source of such knowledge, but it is the richest and clearest source. It throws a bright and guiding light on the other sources — nature, mind, and history. The position of Systematic (Dogmatic) Theology was once universally recognised as the regal one within the whole territory of theology. It may now seem to be that of a fallen monarch, a discrowned king. It is not so. All theological studies are still as much as they ever were contributory to it. Did they not lead, indeed, to positive truths — such truths as when formulated are just doctrines — they would end in negative results, in barren labours. There may be less activity at the present time in the department of Dogmatic Theology than in some former ages, but there is very great activity, — as much, if not more, than in any age since the Eeformation period. Far more earnestness and independence in doctrinal investigation are shown in Britain now than at the commence¬ ment of the nineteenth century. At all points in the dogmatic field there are to be found energetic and independent labourers. New questions are raised, new solutions are proposed. Everywhere there are manifestations of an earnest and hopeful spirit and of a fresh and vigorous life. The old faith is retained in essentials although the forms of doctrine have changed and are changing. The new forms are, on the whole, in most cases improvements on the old. What is being let go is mainly the crude and imperfect. The general tendency of the course of change is towards simplicity, clearness, self-consistency, and perfec¬ tion. Thus the study of theology is becoming less theoretical and technical and more practical and natural. Knowledge divorced from experience is more adequately recognised to be futile; theology apart from religion to be empty and worthless even as science. Theology is the science of religion, and just for that reason it is the religion, not the theology, which is of prime importance, the main concern, much the more real and vital. The worth of the theology consists entirely in its reflection and expression of the truth contained in the religion and its sources.

I must add that you should throughout your course here read and study the Bible with reference to your future work as Christian ministers and preachers of the Gospel. When reading it with the other aims to which I have referred, you can and ought to have in view how what you read of it is capable of being utilised in the service of those among whom it may be your lot to labour. You read, let us say, a passage of Scripture thought¬ fully, carefully, inquiringly, with mind fully awake, and some portion of it specially arrests your attention, and your consideration of it gives rise to various conclusions and reflections of a directly edifying, spiritual, and practical character. Why

WOEK OF THE DIVINITY HALL should you lose such thoughts which might be of benefit both to yourselves and to others through simply taking no permanent note of them ? Why not have a note-book in which you may jot down in the briefest, readiest way, and rapidly arrange them — so briefly and rapidly that you may not have a single fully flnished sentence in what you write, and that you may not spend many minutes in the mere process of writing. Enough has been done as regards the writing of your notes to suffice to indicate to yourself what your thoughts have been, and to enable you at any time to recall, revise, correct, extend, and add to them when you please. Were you to accustom yourselves to do that throughout your course in the Hall, would you not have by the time your course in it comes to a close, and you are called on to be constantly occupied in preaching, a mass of material drawn from or suggested by Scripture far more useful for you and easily useable by you than can be found in the volumes of “ Skeleton Sermons,” “ Helps for Preachers,” and the like, which some preachers, and especially young preachers, are under the degrading necessity of becoming indebted to ?

The advice which I give to you I wish had occurred to myself when I was in your position. It would have made the work of my first charge much easier to me. I would not advise you, however.

to spend time in writing sermons themselves so long as you are in the Hall. You should not have time to do that. As a rule, sermons to be effective must be written with a view to the particular kind of audience to which they are to be addressed. The most useful sermons are often those which have been written most rapidly, when the writer of them had appropriate thoughts enough to express ; but to be under the necessity of writing them in haste when one has not appropriate thoughts is a sort of Egyptian bondage, like making bricks without straw.

I must not forget that you have also as students in the Divinity Hall to occupy yourselves with the study of history. A knowledge of Biblical and Ecclesiastical History is especially expected of you. And you really cannot have too much acquaintance with History. There is no study richer in spiritual instruction than history. History is a far wider and fuller revelation of God to man than creation or nature is. The creation of the physical world may have been the work of an instant, but only the history of that world can show that there was any meaning in its creation, and the history is besides a revelation of God through the sustentation and evolution of the whole universe during countless leons of time. The creation of man, however effected, cannot

WOEK OF THE DIVINITY HALL compare in significance with the history of humanity, and derives most of what significance it has from its connection with the history of humanity.

All history may he regarded as sacred history. All history is a revelation of the power, providence, and character of God — of His omniscience and omnipotence, of His wisdom and goodness, righteous¬ ness and holiness. All history is pervaded and controlled, overruled and guided by God. The division of history into sacred and secular, ecclesias¬ tical and civil, is apt greatly to mislead young or unthoughtful minds. The history of a nation is as much religious history as the history of the Church or Churches of that nation. God the Father of all men pervades the one as much as the other. Christ is the only true source and centre of the life of the one not less than of the other. It is not clergymen merely, but men of all ranks, trades, and professions, who are dependent on the Holy Spirit for guidance and power to do even an honest day’s work.

The Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Cambridge once said to me that he regarded the title of his chair as quite unaffected in meaning by the word Ecclesiastical ; that he understood it to mean just what it would have meant if it had been simply history. And from the religious point of view he was, I think, quite right. The Old

Testament is throughout historical. But history is certainly not represented there as divisible into sacred and secular, religious and political. The New Testament eccUsia never means an ecclesias¬ tical denomination. There were no ecclesiastical denominations in apostolic times.

The ecclesia in its distinctively Scriptural sense is not a visible corporation at all, although it manifests itself wherever there is the working of spiritual life — in all spheres of human activity — in what is called State not less than in what is called Church. And the Kingdom of God, which is so prominent in the New Testament, is certainly not one in which Churchmen and their doings are described as having any exclusive or pre-eminent place. Church History may fairly be held to be history presented and studied not from the point of view of modern Churchmen but from the New Testament point of view of the Kingdom of God, and from that point of view it is as wide as history itself, because as wide as the whole providential and redemptive work of God as traceable in the history of mankind. Of course, I do not mean to say that Church History, and even Church History of a necessary and useful kind, may not be written from lower and narrower points of view. All history may be written from various points of view. Few sects or denominations are without histories of their own written from the sectarian or denomi¬ national point of view. It is fortunate, perhaps, that the literary mediocrity of these productions generally confines their influence within a narrow and already prejudiced community. Catholic and Protestant historians cannot be expected to see eye to eye in their study of many transactions, or to form the same estimates of many of those con¬ cerned in them, but it is deplorable, inexpressibly deplorable, that so many of them still show so much prejudice, injustice, and lack of Christian charity. It is happily true that on both sides — Catholic and Protestant — there has been of late considerable improvement, but there is ample room for more. Let us hope that it will extend and deepen. Let us hope that the fairness, the candour, of spirit which is still the exception will become the rule, and that the time may not be far off when even the greatest religious differences in opinion among us will not be felt to be incompatible with unity in Christ and the exercise of all Christian graces and duties towards those who differ from us in doctrinal views.

The kind of history, with the exception of Biblical history, in which you are most interested in this class is the history of doctrine. You can have only a very inadequate knowledge of any doctrine if you are ignorant of its history, and still less can you make yourselves acquainted with a system of doctrine without a study of its origins and development. All doctrines and doctrinal systems which are not deeply rooted in history are sure to pass speedily away. What has sprung up late will vanish soon. To be intellectually and spiritually rich with the treasures of Divine truth, we must not only be ready to accept whatever is new if it be also true, but must also serve our¬ selves heirs to the treasures of truth of many past ages.

Of course, it is essential that the student of Christian doctrinal theology should be of a reverent and religious spirit. The first condition of all right knowledge is a pre-existing sympathy with the object to be known. He who would know truth must himself stand in the truth. Only the philosophical mind can comprehend a philosophy. Only the aesthetic mind can appreciate aright beauty and art. Only the pious mind can do justice to religion, and without religion there can be no theology worthy of the name. Eeligious sympathy — religious experience — is essential to successful theological study.

The late Dr Hatch, in an Address delivered to our Edinburgh University Theological Society in 1884, very truly said : “ There are some branches of know¬ ledge which might be studied by a man without a heart. The mathematician sees new combinations and harmonies, of forms and quantities, and needs but the clear lamp of intellect, burning brightly upon his forehead, to venture into whatever paths he will. The anatomist dissects the fibres of what were once living organisms, and needs but the clear eye and the constructive imagination to trace the law of varying types, and build up again a vanished form from the faint resemblances of distant species. But Christian truth is no dead anatomy, whose fibres you can dissect with pitiless knife, and whose bones you can bury when you have done with them. To know it you must love it; to understand it you must be in sympathy with it ; you must feel it to be not outside you, but part of yourself ; the truths with which you have to deal are living, and living for you — life of your life, and soul of your soul: and day by day, as you try to find them out, you will have to realise in your own experience the depth and force of those words of our Master, ‘ If any man will do His will he shall know of the doctrine.’ ”

Those words of Dr Hatch are entirely true. The merely intellectual study of theology will always prove to be an unproductive and unprofit¬ able study of it. Mere intellectualism in that sphere necessarily leads to a dry and degenerate scholasticism.

B

The main part of your work in this Hall should be to arrive at a system of theology. You have no right to set up as religious teachers or preachers if you have only superficial, disconnected, discordant, fragmentary religious impressions and ideas. You are bound as a matter of conscience and of duty, of common-sense and common honesty, to arrive at what may be called a system of theology, before you undertake the spiritual charge of a congregation, and that system must be in your conviction the true system of theology. Your system of theology must be identical with your real confession of faith. It must be what you hold in soul and conscience to be the truth as to God and the truth revealed by God for the guidance and salvation of mankind. Your study of theology ought, therefore, to be earnest and sincere. There should be no makebelief or dishonesty in it. You ought to prefer nothing to truth, and value nothing which is not true. That is the spirit of true science. It is also that of true religion, but not of false religion. False religion always inculcates belief or obedience apart from truth, as equal to or higher than truth. True science inculcates belief only of the truth ; true morality obedience only to the truth ; true religion only acceptance of and obedience to the truth from love and obedience to God as the truth. You have to study, then, with a supreme desire to know wliat is true — Divine truth — saving truth — the truth which centres in Christ — the truth that God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.

Your aim should not be to find arguments for any creed merely because already adopted, support for any belief beyond what the truth gives it. You must be willing to work so as to find truth ; faithfully to labour so as to be able to speak only truth. Clergymen cannot be expected to know the truth on all religious questions which are under discussion in days like the present; but they ought to strive to know at least enough not to speak what is beyond or contrary to the truth ; enough to know when and where to be silent.

An honest Christian faith and a good Christian heart are indispensable qualifications for the Chris¬ tian ministry. But they are not sufficient quali¬ fications. There are needed besides special aptitudes and faculties. A man may be a most sincere and excellent Christian and yet be the wrong man in the wrong place, both in the Divinity Hall and in the charge of a parish. Probably the faculties required for ministerial efficiency are widely dis¬ tributed ; probably ministerial failure is more frequently due to want of zeal and diligence in the culture of the faculties given than to an absolute want of appropriate faculties themselves ;

but there can be little doubt that want of the needful natural endowments is not rare; and that there are many men capable of doing excellent Christian service in the avocations for which their abilities fit them, who are incapable of being useful clergymen. And this is a most serious consideration. For a minister does not require to be insincere or indolent, but only unqualified, in order to be a greater hindrance to the progress of the Gospel in his parish than, perhaps, any other person in it. Who of us has not known men who would in all likelihood have done a great deal of nearly unmixed good in a parish had they been almost anything else in it but its pastors, yet who in that capacity, notwithstanding the best intentions and dispositions, exercised a most depressing and blighting influence ?

Let me add that he who aspires to the great work of the ministry ought to strive assiduously to make himself as worthy of it in all ways as he, with God’s help, can. He ought to be a man who longs and labours to reach the Divine goal of life ; a man not merely anxious to know the truth in all its fulness and purity but also anxious to conform to it, to realise and embody it in his dispositions and actions ; one who rejoices to contemplate and aspires to imitate all that was admirable in the saintly and heroic men

WOEK OF THE DIVINITY HALL whose sacrifices and achievements are recorded in the pages of Scripture and the annals of the Church. Above all, he ought to be one whose eye is fixed with loving adoration on the author and finisher of his faith, the express image of God, the perfect pattern of man ; one whose deepest desire, whose governing principle, is the ambition of following humbly and faithfully in His footsteps. The worthy student of theology — the worthy candidate for the stewardship of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven — can never be content with the mere culture of the head and growth in knowledge, but must crave still more ardently purification of heart and growth in grace.

Apart from personal qualifications, clergymen need not expect to exercise much influence or receive much deference in the present day. Mere ministerial status now carries little weight with it. The divine right of ministers and the divine right of kings were both seriously believed in once, but faith in both tenets alike is now dead in Protestant lands. All faith in mere authority — all faith in any authority which does not rest on truth and reason — has been undermined, and he is an unwise man who would even wish to build upon it. It was thought a bold thing in Cromwell when he declared that if he met the king in battle he would shoot at him as at another man. Now, the humblest contributor to an evening halfpenny journal does not feel his courage unequal to attack any ecclesiastical dignitary, or any ecclesiastical conclave, in the world. The professional influence of the clergy must rest henceforth on no sacerdotal idea, or corporate authority, or class distinction, but be in¬ separable from, yea, identical with, personal influence. The success of the minister must be dependent on the worth of the man as aided by the grace of God. He, therefore, who would possess and exert spiritual influence as a teacher and guide of his fellow-men must secure it through his intellectual, moral, and religious attainments ; through vigour of mind and largeness of heart ; through the clearness and accuracy of his acquaintance with religious truth and the manifold phases of spiritual experience ; through having carefully meditated on the most serious problems which are perplexing individuals and agitating society ; and through having ability enough to meet any kind of heresy, infidelity, or hostile criticism in a fair and rational manner, and being an example of candour, self-restraint, and self-denial, interested in all good works, and sincerely devoted to the great cause in which he is engaged.