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It cannot but be that I have often erred in the applica tion of the principles which I hold; but no one, I trust, will condemn the method till he has tested it by personal labour. A few hours spent in tracing out the use of a word or a form, in comparing phrases often held to be synonymous, in estimating the force of different tenses of the same verb in regard to the contexts in which they are found, will bring assurance which no acceptance of another's work can give. Several notes in which I have sought to bring together materials serviceable for such inquiries will at least, I hope, encourage some to make the trial for themselves.

The study of Scripture is, I believe, for us the way by which God will enable us to understand His present revelation through history and nature. When once we can feel the divine power of human words, which gather in themselves the results of cycles of intellectual discipline, we shall be pre pared to pass from the study of one book to the study of 'the Divine Library And the inquiries which thus comebefore us are not mere literary speculations. The fulness of the Bible, apprehended in its historical development, answers to the fulness of life. If we can come to see in it the variety, the breadth, the patience of the past dealings of God with humanity, we shall gain that courageous faith from a view of the whole world which is commonly sought by confining our attention to a little fragment of it.

The Bible is indeed the symbol and the pledge of the Catholicity of our Faith; and the real understanding of the Bible rests upon the acknowledgment of its Catholicity, of the universal range in which it includes in its records typical examples of the dealings of God with men under every variety of circumstance and being, social and personal. We are all so familiar with certain lessons which the Bible contains that we come to regard them, perhaps unconsciously, as the complete sum of its teaching. Special words, phrases, incidents, inspire our own souls and mould our own faith, and we forget that we are not the measure of the wants and powers of man. So it is that we pass over large sections of Scripture unstudied, or force them into unison with what we hear most easily. We neglect to take account of periods of silence in revelation scarcely less eloquent with instruction than the messages of prophets. We lose just those helps to knowing how God disciplines races, classes, individuals, who are most unlike ourselves, which we need sorest when we look on the sad spectacle of a. Disordered and divided world.

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