212 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



superiority of the Christian standpoint, as that to which 

 the whole Old Testament pointed, the rights of the 

 Christian Church as the true Israel of God. But a true 

 historical sense of the organic connection between the 

 Old and New Testaments was altogether lacking. The 

 Apostles had lived under the Old Testament. Their own 

 experience witnessed to them the nature of the new 

 things brought in by Christianity. If not in the shape of 

 an explicit historical theory, yet in the form of deep 

 personal experience, they did understand how the New 

 Testament was rooted in the Old, and grew out of it by a 

 process of true development. The early post -apostolic 

 teachers had no such experience, and did not feel the need 

 of supplying its lack by a historical study of the Old 

 Testament. They approached the Old Testament (which 

 you must remember was, until the formation of the New 

 Testament Canon, Scripture in an exclusive sense) with 

 no further guide than the general principle that Christ 

 and Christian truth was everywhere the true substance 

 of what they read. Reading mainly with a view to 

 practical edification and purposes of exhortation, they 

 were content to believe that they had understood a 

 passage so soon as they could in any way detect in it a 

 meaning that bore on Christian truth or Christian life. 

 What the Scriptures had taught to the men of the old 

 covenant it was not necessary to ask ; God s meaning 

 at least is unchangeable, and that meaning is revealed 

 in Christ. 1 That in the Old Testament, for paedagogic 

 ends, the eternal truth was wrapped up in obscure forms, 

 seemed a matter of no special interest to Christians ; 

 their business was only to pierce through the letter to the 

 spirit that lay within, and which was precisely the same 

 as the spiritual truth of the New Testament, both in the 

 intention of the inspiring Spirit and in the apprehension 

 of the inspired writer. You see that this theory is 

 intelligible only on the supposition that the essence of 

 1 Cf. Justin. Dial. c. Tryph. cap. 90, 92, etc. 



