But the historical truth being once warranted by the understanding, other faculties of our nature now come in to enjoy it, and develop it; the highest reason and the moral and spiritual affections find respectively their proper field and objects, which, whenever presented to them in vision or in theory, they must instinctively cling to, but to which they now abandon themselves without fear of disappointment, because the understanding has assured them of their reality.  We must suppose, on any system, the existence of reason and spiritual affections as indispensable to the understanding of the Scriptures; external authority can do nothing for us without these, any more than the mere faculties of the common understanding.  But with these we apprehend the view which St. John and St. Paul afford to us:  it opens before us one truth after another, one glory after another.  St. John evidently supposes that his readers were familiar with another account of our Lord’s life and teaching; and we find accordingly, another account existing in the writings of the three other evangelists.  One and the same account is manifestly the substance of their three narratives, to which they thus bear a triple testimony, because none of the three has merely transcribed the others, and none of them apparently was the original author of it.  Thus having now the full record of our Lord’s teaching, we find that he everywhere refers to the Old Testament as to the word of God, and the record of God’s earlier manifestations of himself to man.  He has cleared up those especial points in it which might have most perplexed us, as I shall notice more fully hereafter, and he represents himself as the perpetual subject of its prophecies.  We thus receive the Old Testament, as it were, from his hand, and learn while sitting at his feet to understand the lessons of the law and the prophets.

Thus we make Christ the centre of both Testaments, and by so doing, we cannot be blind to the divinity pervading both.  For the amazing fact that God should come into the world and be in the world cannot by possibility stand alone; it hallows, as it were, the whole period of the world’s existence, from the beginning to the end, placing all time and every place in relation to God; it disposes us at once to receive the fact of the special call of the people of Israel;—­it gives, I had almost said, an a priori reason why there must have been in earlier times some shadows, at least, or images, to represent dimly to former generations that great thing which they were not actually to witness; it leads us to believe that there must have been some prophetic voices to announce the future coming of the Lord, or else “The very stones must have cried out.”