The Light of God’s Word

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet,

And light unto my path.—Psalm 119:1051. This psalm is a hymn in praise of the Mosaic Law, which, either as God’s law, or His statutes, or His commandments, or His testimonies, or His precepts, or His ceremonies, or His truth, or His way, or His righteousness, is referred to in every single verse of it except two. There is not much reason for doubting that it was written quite at the close of the Jewish Captivity in Babylon by some pious Jew who had felt all the unspeakable bitterness of the Exile, the insults and persecution of the heathen, the shame, the loss of heart, the “trouble above measure” which that compulsory sojourn in the centre of debased Eastern heathendom must have meant for him. The writer was a man for whom sorrow did its intended work, by throwing him back upon God, His ways, and His will; and so in this trouble, when all was dark around, and hope was still dim and distant, and the heathen insolent and oppressive, and the temptations to religious laxity or apostasy neither few nor slight, he still could say, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and light unto my path.”

2. The witness of the captive Jew who wrote the psalm, thinking only of the Mosaic Law, has been echoed again and again by Christians, with reference to the whole Bible—both the Old Testament and the New—and in a deeper sense. They have found this book a lamp unto their feet, and light unto their path. They have found that the two parts of the verse are not different ways of saying the same thing. The Word of God is a lamp or lantern to the feet by night; it is a light, as that of the sun, by day. It makes provision for the whole of life; it is the secret of life’s true sunshine; it is the guide when all around is dark. It thus throws light on the “path” and the “feet,” on the true course which thought and conduct should follow, and on the efforts which are necessary to that end. With the Word of God at hand, we should be in no doubt about the greatest practical question with which man has to deal: the true road to everlasting happiness in another life.

I

The Function of the Bible

1. The text aptly describes the true function of the Holy Scriptures for the Christian soul. Their use in the first instance is practical, not speculative. It is in the earnest, devotional study of the Bible that we may look to obtain light. This is the use of it which all alike must make, whether child or peasant or philosopher, if they will become “wise unto salvation.” The Bible was designed to be to us in our journey through life what a lantern is to a wayfarer who would pass in safety along a dangerous pathway during a dark night. He wants the light to fall upon the ground over which he must walk at each successive step. The illustration is simple enough, but not so the carrying out of the principle with which it deals. The ease or difficulty will vary with the disposition of those who use the Bible. They who seek to know the truth that they may walk in it, who would know the will of God that they may do it, shall never lack the light; they will both perceive and know what things they ought to do. On the other hand, those who do not strive by God’s help to live up to the light which they have, those who know what they ought to do and do not make the honest effort to do it, those who shrink from knowing their duty, or wish to get it altered—to such the sacred oracles give no message; no light from God’s Word will fall upon their path. Such persons are like Saul, whom the Lord would not answer by Urim and Thummim. Let us but will to do God’s will, and we shall never lack guidance in the way of duty.

The Society of Illuminating Engineers and others too have long sought for a light which would, by excluding the ultraviolet rays, become fog-penetrating. An inventor has just made the desired discovery, and produced an electric lamp which can penetrate the densest fog. The Bible in the world of the soul is such a lamp. It is effective alike by what it includes and by what it excludes. The sincere, prayerful student of the sacred page will find his way through black and blinding illusions and delusions. Let me use it as “a lamp to my feet” for practical, personal uses; not as a Chinese lantern, engaging the fancy by virtue of its artistry and imagery, but as a signal lamp on the railway, a Davy lamp in the mine, an electric lamp in the fog. And the more we apply the sacred truths to action and experience, the more precious and luminous do they become. “The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he acts never acts,” writes Amiel; but, bringing the statutes, commandments, and promises to bear on life, they become ever clearer, and more fully evince their divinity.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

Let no man confound the voice of God in His Works with the voice of God in His Word; they are utterances of the same infinite heart and will; they are in absolute harmony; together they make up “that undisturbèd song of pure concent”; one “perfect diapason”; but they are distinct; they are meant to be so. A poor traveller, “weary and waysore,” is stumbling in unknown places through the darkness of a night of fear, with no light near him, the everlasting stars twinkling far off in their depths, and the yet unrisen sun, or the waning moon, sending up their pale beams into the upper heavens, but all this is distant and bewildering for his feet, doubtless better much than outer darkness, beautiful and full of God, if he could have the heart to look up, and the eyes to make use of its vague light; but he is miserable, and afraid, his next step is what he is thinking of; a lamp secured against all winds of doctrine is put into his hands, it may in some respects widen the circle of darkness, but it will cheer his feet, it will tell them what to do next. What a silly fool he would be to throw away that lantern, or draw down the shutters, and make it dark to him, while it sits, “i’ the centre and enjoys bright day,” and all upon the philosophical ground that its light was of the same kind as the stars, and that it was beneath the dignity of human nature to do anything but struggle on and be lost in the attempt to get through the wilderness and the night by the guidance of those “natural” lights, which, though they are from heaven, have so often led the wanderer astray. The dignity of human nature indeed! Let him keep his lantern till the glad sun is up, with healing under his wings. Let him take good heed to the “sure” λόγον while in this αὐχμηρῷ τοπῷ—this dark, damp, unwholesome place, “till the day dawn and φωσφόρος—the day-star—arise.”2 [Note: Dr. John Brown, Horæ Subsecivœ, ii. 470.]

2. If it be the case that, in a great proportion of cases, the Bible fails of its true purpose, and men read it, if at all, without securing the gift which it is meant to bestow, what is the reason? The answer is, that certain conditions are attached to the guiding and illuminating office of the Bible, and that, if it fails to guide and enlighten, these conditions are not complied with. What are they? One important condition is that the Bible should be diligently searched for those truths, those precepts, those examples, which will directly guide us through life to our eternal home. But, in order to succeed in this search for the true import of Scripture, we need method, order, regularity, purpose in reading it. Just as a single purpose in life, steadily pursued, lights up surrounding interests, and quickens energy for a hundred objects besides itself, so, in reading the Bible, the mental intentness which is necessary to the steady pursuit of one truth sheds rays of intelligence on other truths which sparkle around it. The keen searcher for diamonds tells us that he often finds, over and above that for which he is looking, crystals and precious stones which intrude themselves on his gaze in the course of his search.

In joy and sorrow, in health and in sickness, in poverty and in riches, in every condition of life, God has a promise stored up in His Word for you. If you are impatient, sit down quietly and commune with Job. If you are strong-headed, read of Moses and Peter. If you are weak-kneed, look at Elijah. If there is no song in your heart, listen to David. If you are a politician, read Daniel. If you are getting sordid, read Isaiah. If you are chilly, read of the beloved disciple. If your faith is low, read Paul. If you are getting lazy, study James. If you are losing sight of the future, read in Revelation of the promised land.1 [Note: D. L. Moody.]

3. The Word of God is a light to us, not because we say so, but when we carefully observe everything on which its rays are falling—the path we tread, the objects we pass, the companions of our journey, the view it gives us of ourselves—and when we forthwith rouse ourselves into action. An example which we have striven to follow, a precept which we have honestly endeavoured to obey, and which is by the effort indented on the soul, means much more than it could have meant if we had read it with cheap admiration and passed on. Just so far as the will is exerted in order to make truth practically our own, does truth become to us present and real; not merely a light without, but a light within us; a light transferred from the pages of the Bible to the inner sanctuary in which conscience treasures up its guiding principles; a light which illuminates the humblest path with the radiance of the just, “shining more and more unto the perfect day.” The clearest evidence of the divinity of the Book is to be derived from personal experience, the inward sense of its power—a kind of witness that admits of daily renewal and lies within the reach of any thoughtful and devout reader. Only let Holy Scripture have its assigned place in the regulation of conduct and life, and the supernatural element in its composition will for certain come to light. Christ made the experimental to be the supreme test or line of proof: “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself” (John 7:17).

In another letter to an old pupil, full of profound ethical and spiritual counsel, Miss Pipe writes: “Do thy work, and leave sorrow and joy to come of themselves. Do not limit the work to the outward activities of life. By work I mean not these only, though these certainly, but also the regulation of our moral feelings,—strive against pride, vanity, ostentation, self-righteousness, self-satisfaction and dissatisfaction, resentment, impatience, alienation, discontent, indolence, peevishness, hatred or dislike, inconstancy, cowardice,—untiring, hopeful effort after obedience to the will of God, and resolute, believing war with every temper contrary to the mind of Christ. It can be done, and it must be done. It is promised: it is commanded: it is possible. If you wish for something that you may not lawfully grasp, or cannot grasp, begin to fight, and never leave off until the wish is mastered and annihilated as completely as if it had never been once felt. This must be done not by desperate struggling so much as by calm, resolved, fixed faith. Do thus thy work, and leave sorrow and joy to come of themselves.… You see to obedience, faith and righteousness. God will give you peace and joy in such measure as He pleases, and in increasing measure as the years go by. Until I was five or six and twenty, I think I had no peace or joy at all. Indeed, I never found any until I had given up caring for, praying for, hoping for, or in any way seeking after, comfort and feeling. I took up with just an historical faith in the Bible and said: He will not make me glad, but He shall not find me, therefore, swerve from following Him. I will do His holy will so far as I can, I will serve Him as well as I can, though not perhaps so well as others to whom the joy of the Lord gives strength. I will be content to do without these inward rewards, but with or without such wages I will do my best work for the Master. With this resolve, arrived at after years of weary strife, rest began for me, and deepened afterwards into peace, and heightened eventually into joy, and now from year to year, almost from week to week, an ever greatening blessedness.”1 [Note: A. M. Stoddart, Life and Letters of Hannah E. Pipe, 119.]

II

The Right Use of the Bible

1. If the Bible, then, is to do its work, we must be careful to act upon each truth which it teaches us as we learn it. For there is one great difference between moral or religious knowledge on the one hand and purely secular knowledge on the other, a difference which we cannot lay too closely to heart. It is that, while secular knowledge is, as a rule, remembered until the memory decays, moral and religious knowledge is soon forgotten if it is not acted on. The reason for this is that in the one case the will is interested, and in the other it is not. The will is interested in our losing sight, as soon as may be, of a precept which we disobey, or of a doctrine which we have professed, but which we feel condemns us; and so the will exerts a steady, secret pressure upon the intellect, a pressure which anticipates the ordinary decomposition and failure of memory, and extrudes the unwelcome precept or doctrine, gradually but surely, from among the subjects which are present to thought.

When the Duke of Wellington accepted the commission to form a Government in 1834, it was resolved to prorogue Parliament, and Lord Lyndhurst was desired by the King to go to Lord Grey and tell him such was his pleasure. Lyndhurst forgot it! In after-times, those who write the history of these days will probably discuss the conduct of the great actors, and it will not fail to be matter of surprise that such an obvious expedient was not resorted to in order to suspend violent discussions. Among the various reasons that will be imagined and suggested, I doubt if it will occur to anybody that the real reason was that it was forgotten.1 [Note: The Greville Memoirs, iii. 50.]

2. The many-sidedness of the Bible, its immense resources, the great diversity of its contents and character, its relations with ages so wide apart as are the age of Moses and the age of St. Paul, its vast stores of purely antiquarian lore, its intimate bearings upon the histories of great peoples in antiquity, of which independently we know not a little, such as the Egyptians and the Assyrians, the splendour and the pathos of its sublime poetry—all these bristle with interest for an educated man, whether he be a good man or not. The Bible is a storehouse of literary beauties, of historical problems, of materials for refined scholarship and the scientific treatment of language, of different aspects of social theories or of the philosophy of life. A man may easily occupy himself with one of these subjects for a whole lifetime and never approach the one subject which makes the Bible what it is. And, indeed, much of the modern literature about the Bible is no more distinctly related to religion than if it had been written about Homer, or Herodotus, or Shakespeare. It deals only with those elements of the Bible which the Bible has in common with other and purely human literature; it treats the Bible as literature simply, and not as the vehicle of something which distinguishes it altogether from all merely human books. And, therefore, a serious effort is needed to set these lower aspects and interests of the Bible sufficiently aside in order to study its true and deepest meaning—the message which it conveys from God to the soul of man.

There is a story told of a man crossing a mountain in Carnarvonshire one stormy night. It was so cold that in order to shelter his hands from the biting wind, he put the lantern under his cloak, and as the moon shone dimly through the clouds he thought he could trace his way without the lantern. All at once a gust of wind blew aside his cloak; the light shone forth, and suddenly revealed the edge of a large slate quarry, over which, in another moment, he would have fallen and have been dashed to pieces. He soon retraced his steps, but he did not hide the lantern under his cloak that night again. There are many who think that they can go through life—dark and dangerous as the way often is—without this lamp of God’s truth; they therefore hide it out of sight, or neglect to trim it by constant and prayerful study. In many instances they do not find out their mistake and folly until it is too late. Others have had this light unexpectedly cast upon their path, to reveal to them some great danger; thus their steps have been suddenly arrested, and they have learnt never to try to do without that light again.1 [Note: D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women and Children, i. 114.]

3. God hides Himself from those who would saunter with easy off-handedness through the pages of the Bible, as though they were taking a stroll up and down a back garden, and languidly noting the Immensities as if they were daisies or dandelions growing on either side of the path; as though, forsooth, nothing was so easy of comprehension at a glance as the Self-unveiling of the Eternal Mind! No, we find in the Bible what we seek in it: we find that which we can find as well in other literatures if that is all for which we search; but we find depths and heights, glories and abysses, which language can but suggest, and thought can but dimly perceive, if we are indeed, and with earnest prayer, seeking Him whose Word the Bible is. Only to those who sincerely desire and labour to have it so, is the Bible a lamp unto the feet, and light unto the path. The Bible was given us by God to shed light on the purity and vileness of our souls, to brace our wills in the hour of temptation, to elevate our thoughts amid the strife for bread, to lift our drowsy eyes to the sunlit summits of faith and prayer, and to send a thrill of Divine aspiration through lives that are ever becoming stupefied amid the murky damps of life’s low levels. If we seek for a spirit of uncompromising and ringing righteousness that shall keep us from making a truce with wrong, we find it in the pages of Jeremiah. If we look for a valuation of life that puts first things first, we follow St. Paul over mountains and seas, and hear him say, “Neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy.” If we look for a pattern of a life truly Divine, and wish to see what God would do if He were a man, we walk with Christ around the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, it is in the light of His character that we interpret the whole Book.

When a man holds out his lantern, and asks you if there is a light in it, you may be able to convince him that there is; but the very circumstance of his asking such a question makes you fear that he is blind; and at all events five minutes of clear vision would be worth a world of your arguments. When a man asks, Do you think the Bible is inspired? Is it really the light of God which is shining there? you may prove it by unanswerable argument, and yet you cannot help regretting that he should need to appeal to others; nor can you help remembering how it stands written, “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” To any one who finds himself in this predicament, the best advice we can give is, Read and pray. Pray, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” And as you pray this prayer, read the Book, and ponder its sayings; and better feelings will spring up in your mind—holy thoughts and loving, grateful thoughts towards Christ, kind thoughts towards your fellows, devout and contrite thoughts towards God. “The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes”; and it opens the eyes by rejoicing the heart.1 [Note: J. Hamilton, Works, ii. 17.]

III

The Uniqueness of the Bible

1. Do we value, as we ought, the priceless heritage that we have received in the Word of God? As a rule we value things just in proportion to their rarity. Many people will give fabulous sums of money for a book, a picture, a piece of china, an old article of furniture, and even a postage stamp, if it happens to be rare. But what is common, and can be purchased anywhere for a few pence, is, generally speaking, but little valued. This, it is to be feared, is too often the case with regard to the value that we put on the Bible. When copies of the Holy Scriptures were few in number and very costly, when the Bible was chained to the desk in our churches for fear that it might be stolen, people were much more eager to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the teaching of God’s Word than they are to-day.

I have been seriously perplexed to know how the religious feeling which is the essential base of conduct can be kept up without the Bible. By the study of what other book could children be so humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills like themselves but a momentary interspace between the two eternities, and earns the blessings or curses of all time according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also earn it by their works?1 [Note: T. H. Huxley.]

2. Other books are for special times or separate races; the Bible has been for every clime. Other books are for the poor or for the rich, the great or the obscure; this Book, ignoring the inch-high distinction of rank and wealth, regards men solely in their relationship to God as heirs of the common mysteries of life and death, of corruption and immortality. Other books are for the mature or the youthful; this Book alone neither wearies the aged nor repels the child. Other books are for the learned or the ignorant; this Book, in the sweetest and simplest elements of its revelation, is not more dear to the German philosopher than to the child. In it mind becomes spontaneously luminous, heart flashes to heart with electric thrill. The North American Indian reads it in his rude wigwam on the icy coasts of Hudson’s Bay; the Kaffir in his kraal, the savage of the Pacific in his coral isle, the poor old woman in the squalid slum, no less than the emperor in his royal chamber and the scholar in his college-room. And, as St. Augustine said, we shall find here what we shall not find in Plato or in Aristotle, in Seneca or Marcus Aurelius: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” This Book it was that fired the eloquence of Chrysostom and St. Augustine, that inspired the immortal song of Dante and of Milton; Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Tennyson are full of it; it kindled the genius of Luther, the burning zeal of Whitefield, the bright imagination of Bunyan. With the hermits it made the wilderness blossom as the rose, with the martyrs it was as the whistling wind amidst the torturing flames; it sent the missionaries to plant the Rose of Sharon alike in the burning wastes of Africa and amid the icy hills of Nova Zembla; it inspired the pictures of Angelico and Raphael, the music of Handel and of Mendelssohn.

I grant you that the Bible will have no power over my life if ever it ceases to command my conscience, or appeal to my judgment. It may contain passages of transcendent beauty that touch my æsthetic sense. It may arouse my curiosity by the light it sheds on the customs of strange people in the far-distant past. It may even start the tears, like the memories aroused by the sweet echoes of the prayer of a child. But its grip on my life will be gone. Of what use is a “lamp unto my feet” that goes out on the edge of the first precipice I meet? If the Bible deserves to be called “the Word of God,” ought not its message to be so plain, and clear, and reliable, that all honest and earnest men who turn to its pages shall be in substantial agreement as to its teachings? I answer that it ought. I say more, it is. In all ages men have been in substantial agreement that in the pages of the Bible, if read with discrimination, we can find the true ideal of human life and character. I do not know one critic who would deny the power of its pages to quicken faith, to renew hope, to start the impulses of prayer, to thaw the frozen fountains of the affections, and to help the man of God to be “furnished unto every good work.” But when men have gone to it to discover an authoritative account of the making of the mountains and the birth of the stars; when men have gone to it to cover a complete and infallible system of church polity that would lock up the Kingdom of God in a first-century mausoleum; when men have gone to it to mine out proof-texts, to bolster up a system of metaphysics and settle for ever the question between nominalism and realism, between evolution and transcendence—then they have been in a hopeless tangle of disagreement and strife.1 [Note: G. H. Ferris, in The Homiletic Review, lx. 237.]

3. The lamp spoken of in the text has often been found fault with. Complaint has been made of its shape, of the media through which the light shines, of the materials of which the reflectors are made, and of the manner in which the light is supplied. The answer that the lamp gives is to shine. No modern invention has caused this lamp to be cast aside among old lumber. It is sometimes covered over with dust, but its light is so great that it pierces every obstruction, and is always sufficient to guide heavenward. An American writer tells us that, going two miles to read to a company, and at the close being about to return through a narrow path in the woods where paths diverged, he was provided with a torch of light wood or pitch pine. He objected that it was too small, weighing not over half a pound. “It will light you home,” answered the host. And to all objections came, “It will light you home.” So if the Bible be taken, it will be found sufficient to light us home. Some may object to this part of the Bible and others to another part; but the answer of the Bible to all objectors is, “It will light you home.” This is our practical, everyday need—a light to guide us home. The stars are sublime, meteors are dazzling; but a lamp shining in a dark place is close to our practical needs. Such is the Word of God.

It is the darkness which makes the lantern so welcome. And it is the darkness of the sick-room or the house of mourning in which this “Night-lamp” emits such a soft and heavenly radiance. You will find it so. Fond as you are of books, there is only one that you will value at last; with your head on the pillow you will hardly care to be told that a new history is published, or a marvellous epic. “No; read me the Twenty-third Psalm. Let me hear the fourteenth of John.” When your strength sinks yet lower it will for a moment rally the worn faculties to hear the whisper, “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.” “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”1 [Note: J. Hamilton, Works, ii. 30.]

However mingled with mystery which we are not required to unravel, or difficulties which we should be insolent in desiring to solve, the Bible contains plain teaching for men of every rank of soul and state in life, which so far as they honestly and implicitly obey, they will be happy and innocent to the utmost powers of their nature, and capable of victory over all adversities, whether of temptation or pain. Indeed, the Psalter alone, which practically was the service book of the Church for many ages, contains merely in the first half of it the sum of personal and social wisdom. The 1st, 8th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 24th psalms, well learned and believed, are enough for all personal guidance; the 48th, 72nd, and 75th have in them the law and prophecy of all righteous government; and every real triumph of natural science is anticipated in the 104th. For the contents of the entire volume, consider what other group of historic and didactic literature has a range comparable with it. There are—

i. The stories of the Fall and of the Flood, the grandest human traditions founded on a true horror of sin.

ii. The story of the Patriarchs, of which the effective truth is visible to this day in the polity of the Jewish and Arab races.

iii. The story of Moses, with the results of that tradition in the moral law of all the civilized world.

iv. The story of the Kings—virtually that of all Kinghood, in David, and of all Philosophy, in Solomon: culminating in the Psalms and Proverbs, with the still more close and practical wisdom of Ecclesiasticus and the Son of Sirach.

v. The story of the Prophets—virtually that of the deepest mystery, tragedy, and permanent fate, of national existence.

vi. The story of Christ.

vii. The moral law of St. John, and his closing Apocalypse of its fulfilment.

Think if you can match that table of contents in any other—I do not say “book” but “literature.” Think, so far as it is possible for any of us—either adversary or defender of the faith—to extricate his intelligence from the habit and the association of moral sentiment based upon the Bible, what literature could have taken its place, or fulfilled its function, though every library in the world had remained, unravaged, and every teacher’s truest words had been written down.1 [Note: Ruskin, Our Fathers Have Told Us, chap. iii. § 37.]

No metal can compare with gold, which is of small volume, and of even quality, and easy of transport, and readily guarded, and steady in value, and divisible without loss—besides being beautiful, brilliant, and durable almost to eternity. This is why all civilized nations have adopted it as the standard by which they measure the value of every other kind of merchandise. We habitually think and speak of wealth in terms of gold. Naturally, the name of this standard metal comes to be used as a symbol or metaphor to stand for whatever we prize as most precious of its kind. There is a special sense in which the Bible deserves to be called more golden than gold, because it remains the supreme standard for the Christian Church, by comparison with which we measure and test all spiritual values. “The Bible,” said Newman, “is the record of the whole revealed faith; so far all parties agree.” It is the one book which preserves for us all that we certainly know about the life and words and character of Christ Himself. The teaching of the great Reformers on this matter has been summed up by a profound modern scholar, whose verdict we may venture to quote: “If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of God and as the only perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant Church, Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to man in Christ Jesus, and declaring to us in Him His will for our salvation. And this record I know to be true by the witness of His Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God Himself is able to speak such words to my soul.”1 [Note: T. H. Darlow, More Golden than Gold, 9.]

Literature

Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 21.

Armstrong (W.), Five-Minute Sermons to Children, 20, 32.

Beecher (H. W.), Sunday Evening Sermons, 31.

Bevan (S. P.), Talks to Boys and Girls, 75.

Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, i. 113.

Fleming (A. G.), Silver Wings, 116.

Griffiths (W.), Onward and Upward, 13.

Hamilton (J.), Works, ii. 5.

Hodgson (A. P.), Thoughts for the King’s Children, 10.

Lamb (R.), In the Twilight, 76.

Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 471.

Macmillan (H.), The Spring of the Day, 197.

Norton (J. N.), Old Paths, 18.

Phillips (S.), The Heavenward Way, 39.

Christian World Pulpit, xlix. 312 (F. W. Farrar).

Church of England Pulpit, lii. 38 (J. B. Crozier).

Church Pulpit Year Book, 1913, p. 249.

Churchman’s Pulpit: Sermons to the Young, xvi. 77 (J. R. Macduff).

Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., xiv. 331 (W. Burrows).

Homiletic Review, liii. 377 (H. Anstadt); lx. 237 (G. H. Ferris).

Preacher’s Magazine, iv. 127 (R. Brewin).

Record, Dec. 11, 1908 (E. S. Talbot).