SECOND DIVISION.

INTERPRETATION VIEWED ON THE DIVINE SIDE

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CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE UNITY OF REVELATION.

1.  “Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world;” and therefore they constitute together a self-consistent whole.  To receive the Holy Scriptures as containing a revelation from God is to acknowledge that they possess an essential and all-pervading unity.  Whoever speaks timidly and hesitatingly of the essential harmony between the Old Testament and the New, either refuses to acknowledge both as given by inspiration of God, or he apprehends this great fundamental truth only in a confused and imperfect manner.  If God spake by Moses and the prophets, as well as by Christ and his apostles, it is vain to allege any contradiction in doctrine or spirit between the former and the latter.  So absolutely certain is it that the Saviour and his apostles built on the foundation of the Old Testament, that to deny its divine authority is to deny that of the New Testament also.

2.  But the unity of revelation, like that which pervades all the other works of God, is a unity in the midst of diversity—­diversity in its contemporaneous parts, but especially in its progress.  Illustrations without number are at hand.  The history of a plant of wheat, from the time when the kernel is sown in the earth to the harvest, has perfect unity of plan.  But how unlike in outward form are the tender blade, the green stalk, and the ripened ear!  The year constitutes a self-consistent whole.  But can any thing be more dissimilar in form than spring and autumn?  Yet no one thinks of finding a want of harmony between the fragrant blossoms of the former, and the ripened fruit of the latter.  The path to the harvest lies through the blossoms.  Geologists dwell at great length on the varied conditions through which our planet has passed, and the wonderfully diversified forms of vegetable and animal life corresponding to these several conditions.  Yet in this endless diversity of outward form they recognize from first to last a deep underlying unity of plan.  We might, then, reasonably infer beforehand that if God should make a revelation of himself to men, it would have not only unity but diversity of outward form, especially diversity of progress.  The fact that the revelation contained in the Bible has such diversity is one of the seals of its genuineness.

3.  We may consider this unity in diversity in respect to the form of God’s kingdom.  From Adam to Abraham God administered the affairs of the human family as a whole, without any visible organization of a church as distinct from the world at large.  From Abraham to Moses his church—­using the term church in a general sense—­existed in a patriarchal form.  With the beginning