222 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



intelligible only through sensible truth. Metaphor is, 

 therefore, necessary and useful, and though all truths are 

 somewhere given in the literal sense, the main use of 

 Scripture lies in those figures through which the ray of 

 Divine revelation elevates us ad cognitionem intelligi- 

 bilium. It is plain, indeed, that this argument is not 

 satisfactory to Thomas s own mind. He devises or 

 collects many subsidiary reasons for the allegorical form 

 of Scripture. But it was not possible to him to suppose 

 that the literal sense is everywhere that which is truly 

 profitable and truly fitted to awake and nourish faith, 

 so long as faith was conceived as an intellectual assent 

 to the prima veritas, not as personal trust on God in 

 Christ. 



A personal trust on God in Christ L In these words 

 lies the key-note of the great Reformation. It was from 

 this conception of faith, not merely adopted as a theo- 

 logumenon, but realised as that by which the believer 

 must live, that the Reformers drew all their strength, 

 and not least the strength to wield the Bible as it had 

 never been wielded before. Let us look at this point a 

 little more closely. All must have observed in how 

 great a measure the history of the beginnings of the 

 Reformation is just the story of the inner religious life 

 of one man, who, agonized by a deep sense of sin, finding 

 no rest in the habits and feelings prescribed by the 

 traditional ascetic, at length gained peace when he was 

 able to feel for himself through personal experience, 

 through the witness of the Holy Spirit in his heart, the 

 meaning of Paul s great doctrine of justifying faith. In 

 Luther s personal experience of sin and grace, an experi 

 ence that had gone through all its stages long before he 

 entered into any antagonism to the Roman Church, lay 

 implicitly all that was new in the Reformation, while, 

 in the explicit development that ended in the great 

 division of the Church, Luther and his followers were 

 rather borne on in spite of themselves by the self-asserting 



