230 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



Christ s historical work the face of the Eternal is fully 

 revealed, and we by faith can enter into the fullest and 

 freest fellowship with an incarnate God. 



With what power this principle bears on all those 

 parts of Scripture which, through the long ages before 

 the Reformation, were almost wholly sealed to the 

 Church, what a flood of fresh light it casts even on the 

 plainest parts of the Sacred Record, how it fills with fresh 

 and ever -varying interest the narratives that to the 

 ancient Church afforded only a dreary monotonous 

 round of allegory, how it enables the reader to enter 

 everywhere into a personal fellowship with the saints 

 and the church of bygone days, and, if God s Spirit go 

 with the reading, into fellowship also with the great 

 Revealer Himself these are things that can only be 

 learned by such a study of the Bible in its details, as we 

 must begin together in our meetings here, and carry out 

 each for himself in the prayerful labours of a whole life. 

 At this time it is only possible briefly to indicate a few of 

 the directions in which the new principle became fruitful 

 at the time of the Reformation, and may still be fruitful 

 to us. 



I. Firstly, then, the new conception of Scripture gave 

 a death-blow to the allegorical way of interpretation, the 

 theory of a fourfold sense, which by its half-contemptuous 

 &quot; liter a gesta docet &quot; made the history a dead history, 

 useless in teaching faith. 1 &quot; There is,&quot; says Luther, 

 &quot; one single, simple sense&quot; : and this is the principle of 

 the whole Reformation ; for, however far the overstrained 

 typology of some Protestant schools may re-open an 

 entrance for what is really sheer allegorical exposition, 

 the principle of allegory is effectually condemned by the 

 symbolical definition of all Protestant Churches, that the 

 interpretation of Scripture must be drawn from Scripture 

 itself, i.e. as Bullinger explains in the Helvetica Posterior, 

 from the genius of the original language, the due con- 



1 Cf. Luther on Ps. xxii., ut supra. 



