It will of course be asked,—Then does Mr. Jowett take no notice at all of this vast and complicated problem? How does he treat of the relation between the Old Testament and the New?... He despatches the entire subject in the following passage:—"The question," (he says,) "runs up into a more general one, 'the relation between the Old and New Testaments.' For the Old Testament will receive a different meaning accordingly as it is explained from itself, or from the New." (Very different certainly!) "In the first case,—a careful and conscientious study of each one for itself is all that is required." (That is to say, it will not be explained at all!) "In the second case,—the types and ceremonies of the Law, perhaps the very facts and persons of the history, WILL BE ASSUMED (!) to be predestined or made after a pattern corresponding to the things that were to be in the latter days." (p. 370.) (And why not "will be found to be replete with Christian meaning,—full of lofty spiritual significancy?"—the proved marvellousness of their texture, the revealed mysteriousness of their purpose, being an effectual refutation of all Mr. Jowett's à priori notions!)
"And this question," (he proceeds,) "stirs up another question respecting the Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New. Is such Interpretation to be regarded as the meaning of the original text, or an accommodation of it to the thoughts of other times?" (Nay, but Reverend and learned Sir: "nothing so plain," as you justly observe, "that it may not be explained away;" (p. 359;) yet we cannot consent to have the sense of plain words thus clouded over at your mere bidding. It is now our turn to declare that the Interpreter's "object is to read Scripture like any other book, with a real interest and not merely a conventional one." It is now we who "want to be able to open our eyes, and see things as they truly are." (p. 338.) We simply petition for leave to "interpret Scripture like any other book, by the same rules of evidence and the same canons of criticism." (p. 375.) And if this freedom be but conceded to us, there will be found to be no imaginable reason why the Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New,—(Christ Himself being the Majestic Speaker! our present edification and everlasting welfare being His gracious purpose!)—should not be strictly "regarded as the meaning of the original text." ... But let us hear the Professor out:—)
"Our object," (he says, and with this he dismisses the problem!)—"Our object is not to attempt here the determination of these questions; but to point out that they must be determined before any real progress can be made, or any agreement arrived at in the Interpretation of Scripture." (p. 370.) ... They must indeed. But can it be right in this slovenly, slippery style to shirk a discussion on the issue of which the whole question may be said to turn? especially on the part of one who scruples not to prejudge that issue, and straightway to apply it, (in a manner fatal to the Truth,) throughout all his hundred pages. Mr. Jowett's method is ever to assume what he ought to prove, and then either to be plaintive, or to sneer. "It is a heathenish or Rabbinical fancy:"—"Such complexity would place the Scriptures below human compositions in general; for it would deprive them of the ordinary intelligibleness of human language" (p. 382):—&c.
"Is the Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New to be regarded as the meaning of the original text; or an accommodation of it to the thoughts of other times?" (p. 370.) This is Mr. Jowett's question; the question which it is "not his object to attempt to determine;" but which I, on the contrary, have made it my object to discuss in my VIth Sermon,—p. 183 to p. 220. Without troubling the reader however now to wade through those many pages, let me at least explain to him in a few words what Mr. Jowett's question really amounts to: namely this,—Do the Apostles and Evangelists, does our Blessed Lord Himself, when He professes to explain the mysterious significancy of the Old Testament,—invariably,—in every instance,—misrepresent "the meaning of the original text?" And the answer to this question I am content to await from any candid person of plain unsophisticated understanding. Is it credible, concerning the Divine expositions found in St. Matth. xxii. 31, 32,—xxii. 43-5,—xii. 39, 40,—xi. 10,—St. John viii. 17,18,—i. 52,—vi. 31, &c.,—x. 34-5:—the Apostolic interpretations found in 1 Cor. ix. 9-11,—x. 1-6,—xv. 20,—Heb. ii. 5-9,—vii. 1-10,—Gal. iv. 21-31:—is it conceivable, I ask, that not one of all these places should exhibit the actual 'meaning of the original text?' And yet, (as Mr. Jowett himself is forced to admit,)—"If we attribute to the details of the Mosaical ritual a reference to the New Testament, or suppose the passage of the Red Sea to be regarded not merely as a figure of Baptism, but as a preordained type;—the principle is conceded!" (p. 369.) "A little more or a little less of the method does not make the difference." (Ibid.) In a word,—in such case, Mr. Jowett's Essay falls to the ground!... To proceed however.
3. The case of Interpretation has not yet been fully set before the reader. Hitherto, we have merely traced the problem back to the fountain-head, and dealt with it simply as a Scriptural question. We have shewn what light is thrown upon Interpretation by the volume of Inspiration. The subject has been treated in the same way in the Vth and VIth of my Sermons. But it will not be improper, in this place,—it is even indispensable,—to develope the problem a little more fully; and to explain that it is of much larger extent.
Now, there is a family resemblance in the method of all ancient expositions of Holy Scripture which vindicates for them, however remotely, a common origin. There is a resemblance in the general way of handling the Inspired Word which can only be satisfactorily explained by supposing that the remote type of all was the oral teaching of the Apostles themselves. In truth, is it credible that the early Christians would have been so forgetful of the discourses of the men who had seen the Lord, that no trace of it,—no tradition of so much as the manner of it,—should have lingered on for a hundred years after the death of the last of the Apostles; down to the time when Origen, for example, was a young man?... It cannot possibly be!
(i.) "The things which thou hast heard of me among many witnesses," (writes the great Apostle to his son Timothy,) "the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also[192]." Provision is thus made by the aged Saint,—in the last of his Epistles,—for the transmission of his inspired teaching[193] to a second and a third generation. Now the words just quoted were written about the year 65, at which time Timothy was a young man. Unless we suppose that Almighty God curtailed the lives of the chief depositaries of His Word, Timothy will have lived on till a.d. 100; so that "faithful men" who died in the middle of the next century might have been trained and taught by him for many years. It follows, that the "faithful men" last spoken of will have been "able to teach others also," whose writings (if they wrote at all) would range from a.d. 190 to a.d. 210. Now, just such a writer is Hippolytus,—who is known to have been taught by that "faithful man" Irenæus[194],—to whom, as it happens, the deposit was "committed" by Polycarp,—who stood to St. John in the self-same relation as Timothy to St. Paul!
(ii.) Our Saviour is repeatedly declared to have interpreted the Old Testament to His Disciples. For instance, to the two going to Emmaus, "beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself[195]." Moreover, before He left the world, He solemnly promised His Apostles that the Holy Ghost, whom the Father should send in His Name, "should teach them all things, and bring to their remembrance all things which He had spoken to them[196]." Shall we believe that the Treasury of Divine Inspiration thus opened by Christ Himself was straightway closed up by its human guardians, and at once forgotten? Shall we not rather believe that Cleopas and his companion, (for instance,) forthwith repeated their Lord's words to every member of the Apostolic body, and to others also; that they were questioned again and again by adoring listeners, even to their extremest age; aye, and that they taxed their memories to the utmost in order to recal every little word, every particular of our Saviour's Divine utterance? It must be so! And the echo, the remote echo of that exposition, depend upon it! descended to a second, aye and to a third generation; yea, and has come down, faintly, and feebly it may be, but yet essentially and truly, even to ourselves!
(iii.) And yet,—(for we would not willingly incur the charge of being fanciful in so solemn and important a matter,)—the great fact to be borne in mind, (and it is the great fact which nothing can ever set aside or weaken,) is, that for the first century at least of our æra, there existed within the Christian Church the gift of Prophecy; that is, of Inspired Interpretation[197]. The minds of the Apostles, Christ Himself "opened, to understand the Scriptures[198]." Can it be any matter of surprise that men so enlightened, when they had been miraculously endowed with the gift of tongues[199], and scattered over the face of the ancient civilized World, should have disseminated the same principles of Catholic Interpretation, as well as the same elements of Saving Truth? When this miraculous gift ceased, its results did not also come to an end. The fountain dried up, but the streams which it had sent forth yet "made glad the City of God." And by what possible logic can the teaching of the early Church be severed from its source? It cannot be supposed for an instant that such a severance ever took place. The teaching of the Apostolic age was the immediate parent of the teaching of the earliest of the Fathers,—in whose Schools it is matter of history that those Patristic writers with whom we are most familiar, studied and became famous. Accordingly, we discover a method of Interpreting Holy Scripture strictly resembling that employed by our Saviour and His Apostles, in all the earliest Patristic writings. As documents increase, the evidence is multiplied; and at the end of two or three centuries after the death of St. John the Evangelist, voices are heard from Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine; from Antioch and from other parts of Syria; from the Eastern and the Western extremities of North Africa; from many regions of Asia Minor; from Constantinople and from Greece; from Rome, from Milan, and from other parts of Italy; from Cyprus and from Gaul;—all singing in unison; all singing the same heavenly song!... In what way but one is so extraordinary a phenomenon to be accounted for? Are we to believe that there was a general conspiracy of the East and the West, the North and the South, to interpret Holy Scripture in a certain way; and that way, the wrong way?
Enough has been said, it is thought, to shew that many of Mr. Jowett's remarks about the value of Patristic evidence are either futile or incorrect; or that they betray an entire misapprehension of the whole question, not to say a thorough want of appreciation of the claims of Antiquity. We do not yield to the 'Essayist and Reviewer' in veneration for the Inspired page; and trust that enough has been said to shew it. Our eye, when we read Scripture, (like his,) "is fixed on the form of One like the Son of Man; or of the Prophet who was girded with a garment of camel's hair; or of the Apostle who had a thorn in the flesh." (p. 338.) We are only unlike Mr. Jowett we fear in this,—that we believe ex animo that the first-named was the Eternal Son, "equal to the Father," and "of one substance with the Father[200]:" and further that St. Paul's fourteen Epistles are all inspired writings, in an entirely different sense from the Dialogues of Plato or the Tragedies of Sophocles. It follows, that however riveted our mental gaze may be on the awful forms which come before us in Holy Scripture,—as often as we con the inspired record of the actions and of the sayings of those men, we are constrained many a time to look upward, and to exclaim with the Psalmist, "Thy thoughts are very deep[201]!" And often if asked, "Understandest thou what thou readest?"—we must still answer with the Ethiopian, "How can I, except some man should guide me[202]?"