SERMON XXII.

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD

AND EVIL.

(SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY, 1870.)

"The tree of knowledge of good and evil.”—GEN. ii. 9.

SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY again comes roundhow quickly and again it finds us reading the opening chapters of that ancient book which forms the prologue to the long drama of Scripture-that book which, whatever be the questions to which it has given rise, perplexing our later years, is still that one with which our earliest conceptions of God are most closely connectedthat book which we read and found delight in as children, when the stories of Abraham and Isaac, of the bereaved Jacob, of Joseph and his brethren, gave us a joy unsuspecting and unalloyed, one not the less worthy because it was the leaping up of a child's heart as it found in what claimed to be God's own book the

joys and sorrows of family life, crowned by a divine aureole, and beheld in their eternal relation "the kindred points of heaven and home.” The peculiar affection for the Book of Genesis which many of us share is due, I believe, to these recollections of childhood. Let us, my brethren, not lightly estimate such ties as these. They are not valueless, if they but teach us that the Bible has lessons which we can appreciate without other commentary than a mother's or a sister's love; and that if advancing years and the acquisition of knowledge have brought much that we should be thankful for, they have also brought their own dangers and temptations. Other voices have mingled with the interpretation of the Old Testament. Battles have swept over its pages, and left them marked with the prints of foemen, and we cannot read therein what once we read. The melody which once spoke from these pages is blended with other and discordant cries, and the Lord whom once we knew in the still small voice is heard no longer for the tempest. Can we not recall our early impressions of these first chapters which we have read yet again to-day? They were a revelation to us indeed; an unveiling, not of astronomy, or geology, or natural history, but of

Him who had designed and created all the glowing wonders of heaven and earth, and saw that · they were good — who disposed and gave all things for the use of man, His creature made in His image, and appeared to us in the two primary characters of righteousness and love. It was of Him, I say, that these chapters taught us, of His power and beneficence; and this was the Revelation we needed, and which was a blessedness to us. The question is, my brethren, whether this is not the Revelation, which God designed the Scriptures to be to us, and whether this consideration would not save us from much perplexity, and deliver us from many of those painful apprehensions which recent criticisms upon this book have brought-it is of no use to feign ignorance of it-to many who would gladly have never known them.

It is not easy, my brethren,-I feel it very keenly, to deal with these early records without giving offence to many on either side of the main question at issue. But it is certainly not politic-nay, it is worse than impolitic, it is cowardly to ignore the subject altogether, especially on occasions when, as to-day, the appointed lessons bring it prominently before

us.

And I wish to-day in no way to approach

the question as a partisan, nor to lead you through troubled waters, but rather to apply the principle which I have just now indicated, and to inquire whether much of our difficulty has not arisen from a mistaken view of the purpose for which God put it into the heart of His servant to tell the story of His creation of the world. We call the Scriptures a Revelation; in other words, an unveiling. The Bible-records (that is to say) were given to us, to take away the veil which hung between heaven and earth-between God and man. Their purpose is to reveal God. But a survey of the whole field which Scripture covers, enables us to make this definition more exact. The actual revelation which has been made to us is of God in His relation to the soul of man. are not to demand, we are not to expect, any further revelation. Of the secrets of God's power and origin we are not told a word. Such knowledge is not for us. But it does concern us to know of God's moral nature; to know that He is all-powerful, all-good, allloving; and of His power, goodness, and love, the Bible is one long and continuous revelation. does concern us to know in whose image we were created, and for what destiny: in what

We

It

happiness consists, and in what misery; what is the secret of our strength and health and peace ; how we have lost them, and how they are to be regained and from first to last, the Bible is the setting forth of these things. For all else that we are told, we are thankful. But the selfdeclared object of the Scriptures is that men should know God and know themselves.

But the conditions on which such an object may be accomplished are these that the Book of God should appeal to men in a form not dependent for its appreciation upon any other knowledge which they may have attained; independent, that is, of the science of any particular age or country. For, as our discovery of the laws of nature, and the facts of nature, is progressive, it is quite evident that any precise setting forth of scientific truth in the pages of the Bible would have been as much a difficulty and stumbling-block to some former ages of the Church, as what we call its unscientific account of natural phenomena has been to some in the present age.1 We are too apt to forget that the Old Testament was meant for

1 I do not claim novelty for this argument. It has been urged before, but has never, I think, obtained the notice and consideration it deserves.