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