Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOSPEL RECEIVED HISTORICALLY.
Say not in thine heart, Who shall descend into the deep, to bring up Christ again from the dead ?
? Romans x. 7. i HE Gospel is a history, inasmuch as it sets before us God manifested in the flesh; a power or Agency, inasmuch as it reveals to us God communicated by the Spirit; and the life-walk and triumph of Faith consists in maintaining these two points in their essential connection, and thus keeping God ? seen under one relation and felt under the other ? always before it. I think a certain deadness of the letter has crept over us, because, not being as a Christian people sufficiently at home in our own polity and constitution, we do not so fully as in the Primitive Age appreciate the vital connection which exists between the great facts which the Gospel records and the great principles which, through those facts, it communicates. We seem to have in some degree lost what the first builders so abundantly rejoiced in, a principle of cohesion between the work done and the work doing; and thus the events with which the Gospel narrative makes us acquainted, instead of being, every one of them,
very nigh
to us, bound up and interleaved within the volume of our personal experience, have to be fetched, as we want them, from the remote distance where they lie, like the bones in the Valley of prophetic Vision, dry and sapless, detached from each other, and from all connection with the life that we are now living upon earth. When we receive along with each of these facts the sign which was given unto Moses, and learn that it is I Am which hath sent it unto us, a breath oflife is infused within all that has been formal and historical: across the statements of the letter, of which, taken singly and apart, we may have said that
they …