My purpose is, if the Lord enable me, to reach the Old Testament by way of the New, reversing thus the order in which our Bibles present them to us. The object I have in this is simply that we may first of all have before us what is best known to us; in which the principles already now put forth may be best tested, both as to their truth and practical value. But to begin with, let us look at the Old and New Testaments in their character as God's twofold witness to men. And here we see at once how thorough is the contrast they present to one another, and how thus they the more completely and surely testify to the various wisdom of their blessed Author.

Taken by itself, the Old Testament, however plainly bearing the divine imprint, is stamped, at the same time, with the characters of narrowness and imperfection. "The law made nothing perfect" is the inspired comment upon it. As the introduction to the full "perfection!' (Heb. 6:i) of Christianity, it was necessarily so. Even as to its moral standard our Lord could say, "Moses for the hardness of your heart gave you this precept; " and in contrast with what was said to them of old time, present His own commandments as the full-ness of the law.* *" I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matt. 5:17):which means "to complete," "give the fullness of."* Nor was man's conscience satisfied, nor his heart set at rest, nor grace manifested, nor God declared. The Old Testament looks forward to the coming of One who alone could accomplish this,-without whom it could not be. Its contrast with the New Testament is its witness to it. In matter, style, and even language is this contrast found.

Let us first look at that which would first strike any one who held the original in his hand-the language.

Difference of language began at Babel. The tongues of fire at Pentecost declared, as others have remarked, the grace which was now surmounting the effects of man's sin. The language of the Old Testament is Hebrew;* of the New, Greek, – or, as the Jew might have called it, Gentile. *Ezra 4:8-6:18, 7:12-26, Jer. x 11, Dan. 2:4-7:28, are in what is ordinarily called Chaldee; in Scripture, Syrian, or Aramaic. And this, like Greek, is a Gentile language, used for a special purpose in each place. But I cannot enter upon it here*."Greek" and "Gentile" are, in the New Testament itself, synonymous terms. God was now going outside the narrow limits of Judaism, to those who had no promise or claim. The apostle Paul is thus at once the apostle of the Gentiles, and the minister of the gospel in the fullest character of it.

This use of the Greek is clearly seen in the first chapter of John's gospel,-that in which, all through, we find Judaism set aside-where the words "Rabbi," "Messiah," "Cephas," are all significantly interpreted for Gentile use. A Jew could not for a moment doubt the significance of the fact of a revelation from God in the Greek language.

But the language of the Gentile world-power it was not. Greece had for some time already passed away as the representative of that before the New Testament was written. Not the mighty, as such, does the gospel call. The Scripture-characteristic of the Greeks the apostle gives us where, speaking too of the ministry of the gospel, to them, he says, "The Greeks seek after wisdom." So late in the history of the world, they were seeking still,-had not found, but sought. And on this, in the same passage, he lays special emphasis:"When in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe." The Greeks were they in whom this character of the world's trial had reached its appointed, necessary end in the discovery of utter ruin. With them, culture had done its best when, amid the myriad deities of Athens, Paul could yet preach a God unknown. There God's wisdom met and displaced in grace to men the proved vanity of human wisdom.

But the use of Greek had also another significance. The revelation now to be made required for its conveyance to men all the power of human speech. In the Greek, the providence of God had formed a language able to express as no other could, with the most delicate precision, all the possibilities of human thought. God was going to speak no longer from the distance, or with reserve, but fully, intimately, of all that was in His heart. The simplicity of Hebrew, as all scholars know, favors a certain ambiguity, which is one of the great difficulties in the translation of the Old Testament. The translator must be in measure the interpreter also. He must, to some considerable extent at least, find elsewhere the key with which he unlocks its treasures.* *And this is true in measure of the New Testament, and of the Greek also. It is he who knows nest, and is most penetrated with, the truth of Scripture who will be able best to penetrate its meaning. Great scholars may nevertheless be utterly incompetent as translators because they know not in their own souls the divine realities with which they deal. Yet the comparative estimate of the two languages as given above remains unaffected.* But Greek is known for its faculty of clear and full expression. And this answers exactly to the different character of the communications which are given in these languages. The New Testament open, luminous, sun-like, with the glory of God revealed there; and which when we bring to the Old Testament, its lineaments become defined, and shine with a new expression.

For the medium of divine revelation, it is no wonder if every natural language should be inadequate, however, and in this respect Greek is no exception. The classic speech, with all its beauty, needs the creative breath of God to inspire it for His use. Its natural poverty betrays the bankruptcy of moral ruin unto which man is fallen. Christianity had to transform, mold, adapt, supplement, impregnate, to make, after all, a fitting instrument for that which in its inner essence was "spirit and life" for the recipient of it.

If we look at the style of these two parts of God's one Word, we shall find a corresponding difference. In the Old Testament we have history, prophecy, and those psalm-books, full of the exercises, experiences, and sorrows of human life. These indeed, poured out before God, find their answer from Him, and are mingled with strains of most fervent adoration. The New Testament begins with the record of one Life, in contrast with all else,-Life, indeed, the light of men,-of one
death, by which alone the Life could be communicated as light in the soul of man. The history after this is the history of the power and effect of this, the springing up of the corn of wheat which has fallen into the ground and died, that it might not abide alone. Then we have epistles, the tender, familiar ministry to the redeemed of the Spirit of Christ now come. Lastly, one book of prophecy plants us where we in the light of eternity and of the cross may read the .history of the Church and of the world on to its consummation in eternal life or no less eternal judgment.

In the letter of it, the Old Testament is the heritage of a nation; the New, of a family. The first is the word of God enthroned, the Eternal, the Almighty; the second, the word of the Father, whom the Son has manifested to those in the place and endowed with the Spirit of sonship. Here the throne is not removed, but clouds and darkness are no longer about it; or if they remain, faith pierces through them to the presence of the unchanged, unchangeable God. Exercises and experiences there yet may be; but for him who has learned the open secret of Christianity, their character is henceforth altered. Man-the flesh-is known:object simply of divine judgment, but of a judgment for faith passed, and beyond which he stands in the untroubled peace which Christ has made. The cross has unvailed at the same time God and man, and it has brought us to God. In this sense, exercise is over.

The world too is passed away, and there is no preacher-king to lament over it. It is crucified in the cross, and we glory in that in which it is crucified to us. The writers of the New Testament are no longer the leaders of nations, kings, and great ones of the earth. The later prophets already show us God choosing men of another class; and here we find manifest God's call of the poor. Even the towns and villages chosen to have revealed in them the light from heaven are those which for the most part have otherwise no name or history ; and Jerusalem itself is only an apparent exception to this. It is John, mainly, who speaks of the Lord's sojourn there; and he is the one, of all the evangelists, who most insists upon the doing away of Judaism. His chapters are but a series of pictures in which the Jewish rites and ordinances are only the background upon which to display the glory of Him who has taken the place of all the shadows of the past dispensation. In Rome, the capital of the world, the apostle of the Gentiles finds a prison; and from that Roman prison the word of God, which is not bound, goes forth with the sweetest, fullest disclosures of divine grace ever made to man.

But let us look more closely still at the difference in matter between these two parts of that one blessed whole, the Word of God. The word "'Testament" should be rather (according to the usual meaning of διαθηκη, which it translates) " Covenant" as a glance at 2 Corinthians 3:will show. Israel's covenant, written upon the tables of stone, was the old covenant, with which the apostle contrasts that which he ministers:"Who hath made us competent ministers of the new covenant, not of letter, but of spirit." It is from such passages that the appellation has arisen for the books which contain this ministry, while, in contrast, the books of Scripture previously written are the books of the old covenant-that is, of the law.

We must guard against a common misapprehension here. The apostle expressly says, in Romans 9:3, that to Israel,-his "kindred after the flesh," which excludes all possibility of spiritualizing,- belong the covenants; not the old covenant merely, but all of them. And in Hebrews 8:he quotes Jeremiah's prophecy, which in plain terms declares the new covenant to be made, in a day still future, with Israel and with Judah,-words which again absolutely refuse any so-called spiritualization. It is all-important for our souls to deal uprightly with the Word of God; and it would seem impossible to read the passage in Jeremiah, and its context, without owning that to Israel it belongs. What, then, of our part in the new covenant? for the passage in Corinthians affirms with equal clearness that we have one.

The answer is to be found in the character of the new covenant and its blessings. The ministry of it is a ministration of life, of righteousness, and of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:6, 9),-in a word, of all that a guilty soul needs, and that grace alone can bestow. But if grace, then, bestows this, and. upon those, therefore, without claim or merit, it may bestow it when and where it will. Israel, nationally, has rejected Christ, and remains for the present shut 'up in unbelief. The new covenant will yet be theirs, for God has declared it; but meanwhile, He is pleased to minister its blessings freely to faith any where. Who can deny His right? Thus, then, they are ours; but I may add that more also than new-covenant blessings are ours; and that when the apostle speaks of Christian ministers as "stewards of the mysteries of God," he speaks of what is not to be found in the new covenant at all. The new-covenant character of absolute grace indeed attaches to them all; but that grace to us abounds over all promised blessings. But the time to speak of this will be found more fittingly a little further on.

The books of the old covenant were, without controversy, addressed to Israel, a nation in the flesh, with whom it pleased God in a special way to connect Himself as their God. With His purpose in so doing we are not now concerned, but with the fact alone. " You only have I known of all the families of the earth," He says by Amos (3:2); "I am a Father to Israel," by Jeremiah (31:9). And in a passage in the New Testament already referred to, the apostle of the Gentiles himself distinctly affirms that to them belong " the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises." The last is a decisive word as to the interpretation, of Old-Testament prophets, which accordingly show us, ever in the forefront of the picture of predicted blessing for the earth, the people who, if now "enemies as touching the gospel," are none the less still "beloved for the fathers' sakes, because the gifts and calling of God are without repentance." (Rom. 11:28, 29.)

The prophetic outlook is of blessing for the earth, ' which the one book of New-Testament prophecy supplements with the heavenly portion for the heavenly people to whom it is given. The heavenly city here replaces the earthly:the Morning Star is the closing promise of the New-Testament prophecy, as the Sun of Righteousness is of the Old. But the renewed earth shines as the reflection and type of the opened heavens, and the paradise of God exhibits the fullness of that to which the garden dressed by God's hand for man at first points across the whole interval. The wonderful series of types indeed link the Old Testament with a clasp, impossible to be sundered, to their fulfillment in the New. Of all these Christ is the key; to Him all ages minister; the old creation passes to give Him place; of the new He is the foundation and the Head alike; from the glory from which He descended to the cross, from eternity to eternity, He fills all things.