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LECTURE III. THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. MATTHEW XIV. 20. i They did all eat, and were filled. It was the aim of my preceding Lecture to trace the unity which reigns in Scripture, that it has a law to which each part of it may be referred, a root out of which it all grows. It will be .my purpose in the present, to bring out before you how this Book, which is one, is also manifold; a fact which we may not be so ready to recognise the instant that it is presented to us, as the other. For the truth which occupied us last Sunday, of the Bible as one Book, not merely one because bound together in the covers of a single volume, but as being truly one, while it testifies in every part of one and the same Lord, while it is every where the utterance of one Spirit; this, whether consciously or unconsciously, has strong possession of men's minds in this our land. We feel, and rightly, that every attempt to consider any of its parts in absolute isolation from the other, rent away from the connexion in which it stands is false, and can lead to no profitable result; and it is hardly possible to estimate too highly the blessing of this, that the band which binds for us theparts of this volume together is unbroken even in thought; that we still feel ourselves to have, not a number of sacred books, but one sacred Book, which, not merely for convenience sake, but out of a far deeper feeling, we comprehend under one name. Yet, on the other hand, there are other truths which, if we mean to enter into fullpossession of our treasures, we need also to make thoroughly our own. This idea of the oneness of Holy Scripture is incomplete and imperfect, till it pass into the higher idea of its unity; till we acknowledge that it is not sameness which reigns there; that, besides being one, ...