Yet this great Apostle expected that the world would come to an end in the generation then existing. When he wrote to the Thessalonians some years before his first imprisonment at Rome, he warned them, no doubt, against expecting the end immediately: but he appears still to have supposed that it would come in the lifetime of men then living. At a later period, when writing to the Corinthians, his dissuasion of marriage seems to rest mainly upon this impression; it is good not to marry, "on account of the distress which is close at hand;" ([Greek: dia taen enestosan anankaen]; compare 2 Thess. ii. 2, [Greek: hos hoti enestaeken hae haemera tou Kyriou].) "The time is short," he adds; "the fashion of this world is passing away." And again, when speaking of the resurrection, he says emphatically, "the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed;" where the pronoun being expressed in the original, [Greek: chai haemeis allagaesometha], shows that by the term "we," he does not mean the dead, but those who were to be alive at Christ's coming. So again, still later, when writing from Rome to the Philippians, he tells them "the Lord is at hand;" and later still, even in his first epistle to Timothy, he charges Timothy "to keep his commandment without spot, unrebukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ." These and other passages cannot without violence be interpreted even singly in any other sense; but taking them together, their meaning seems absolutely certain. Shall we say, then, that St. Paul entertained and expressed a belief which the event did not verify? We may say so, safely and reverently, in this instance; for here he was most certainly speaking as a man, and not by revelation; as it has been providentially ordered that our Lord's express words on this point have been recorded--"Of that day and hour knoweth no man; no, not the angels in heaven." Or again, shall we say, that St. Paul advised the Corinthians not to marry, chiefly on this ground; and that this throws a suspicion over his directions in other points? But again it has been ordered, that in this very place, and no where else in all his writing, St. Paul has expressly said that he was only giving his judgment as a Christian, and not speaking with divine authority;--the concluding words of the chapter, [Greek: doko de kago pneuma theou echein] do not signify, as our Version renders them, "And I think also that I have the Spirit of God," as if he were confirming his own judgment by an assertion of his inspiration in a sense beyond that of common Christians; but the words say, "And I think that I too have the Spirit of God," "I too as well as others whom you might consult, so that my judgment is no less worthy of attention than theirs." But it is his Christian judgment only that he is giving, as he expressly declares, and not his apostolical command or revelation; a distinction which he never makes elsewhere, and which is in itself so striking, that we seem to recognise in it God's especial mercy to us, that our faith in St. Paul's general declarations of divine truth might not be shaken, because in one particular point he was permitted to speak as a man, giving express notice at the same time that he was doing so.
Now it is at least remarkable, that in the only two instances in which the existence of any absence of divine authority is to be discerned in St. Paul's epistles, provision is actually made by God's fondness to prevent them from prejudicing our faith in St. Paul's divine authority generally. And so in whatever points any error may be discoverable in Scripture, we shall find either that the errors are of a kind wholly unconnected with the revelation of what God has done to us, and of what we are to do towards Him; and therefore are perfectly consistent with the inspiration of the writer, unless we take that unwarranted notion of inspiration which considers it as equivalent to a communication of God's attributes perfectly; (and of this kind are any errors that may exist either in points of physical science, or of chronology, or of history;) or if there be any thing else which appears inconsistent with inspiration, in the sense in which we really may and do apply it to the Scriptures, namely, that they are a perfect guide and rule in all matters concerning our relations with God, then we shall find that God has made some special provision for the case, to remove what it otherwise might have had of real difficulty.
This merciful care is above all to be recognised with regard to one point, which otherwise would, I think, have been a difficulty actually insuperable: I mean the manifestly imperfect moral standard, which in some cases is displayed in the characters of good men in the Old Testament. Put the gospel by the side of the law and history of the Israelites; observe what the law permitted, and public opinion under the law did not condemn; observe the actions recorded of persons who are declared to have been eminently good, and to have received God's especial blessing; and it is manifest that had not our Lord himself vouchsafed his help, one of two things must have happened--either that we must have followed the old heresy of rejecting the Old Testament altogether, or else that our respect for the Old Testament must have impeded the growth of the more perfect law of Christ. The true solution I do not think that we could have discovered, or ventured to admit on less authority than our Lord's. But his express declaration, that some things in the law itself were permitted, because nothing higher could then have been borne, and his stating in detail that in several points what was accounted good or allowable in the former dispensation was not so really, while at the same time he constantly refers to the Old Testament as divine, and confirms its language of blessing with respect to its most eminent characters, has completely cleared to us the whole question, and enables us to recognize the divinity of the Old Testament and the holiness of its characters, without lying against our consciences and our more perfect revelation, by justifying the actions of those characters as right, essentially and abstractedly, although they were excusable, or in some cases actually virtuous, according to the standard of right and wrong which prevailed under the law.
After observing God's gracious care for us in this instance, as well as in those which I have noticed before, I cannot but feel that we may safely trust Him for every other similar case, if any such there be, and that he will not permit our faith either in him or in his holy word to be shaken, because we do not attempt to close our eyes against truth, nor seek to support our faith by sophistry and falsehood. Feeling what the Scriptures are, I would not give unnecessary pain to any one by an enumeration of those points in which the literal historical statement of an inspired writer has been vainly defended. Some instances will probably occur to most readers; others are perhaps not known, and never will be known to many, nor is it at all needful or desirable that they should know them. But if ever they are brought before them, let them not try to put them aside unfairly, from a fear that they will injure our faith. Let us not do evil that evil may be escaped from; and it is an evil, and the fruitful parent of evils innumerable, to do violence to our understanding or to our reason in their own appointed fields; to maintain falsehood in their despite, and reject the truth which they sanction. If writers of Mr. Newman's school will persist in displaying the difficulties of the Scripture before the eyes of those who had not been before aware of them, let those who are so cruelly tempted be conjured not to be dismayed; to refuse utterly to surrender up their sense of truth,--to persist in rejecting the unchristian falsehoods which they are called upon to worship; sure that after all that can be said, that system will remain false to the end; and their Christian faith, if they do not faithlessly attempt to strengthen it by unlawful means, will stand no less unshaken.
In conclusion, Christian faith rests upon Scripture; and as it is in itself agreeable to the highest reason, so the authenticity of the Scriptures on which it rests is assured to us by the deliberate conclusions of the understanding; nor is any "mortal leap" necessary at any part of the process: nor any rejection of one truth, in order to retain our hold on another. And if it should happen, as in all probability it will, that we shall be called upon to correct in some respects our notions as to the Scriptures, and so far to hold views different from those of our fathers, we should consider that our fathers did not, and could not stand in our circumstances; that the knowledge which may call upon us to relinquish some of their opinions, was a knowledge which they had not. Till this knowledge comes to us, let us hold our fathers' opinions as they held them; but when it does come, it will come by God's will, and to do his work: and that work will, assuredly, not be our separation from our father's faith; but if we follow God's guidance humbly and cheerfully, clinging to God the while in personal devotion and obedience, we may be made aware of what to them would have been an inexplicable difficulty, and which was, therefore, hidden from their knowledge; and yet, "through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, we believe that we shall be saved even as they."
THE END.