rude and rough
beginnings high up in wild and remote fastnesses of our human history.
Such books of the Old Testament as those of Judges and Samuel and Kings
represent the turbid and turbulent running of this human nature of
ours, divinely directed indeed, but still unpurified and unregenerate.
But in the great lake of the humanity of Jesus all its acquired
pollution is cut off. In Him, virgin-born, our manhood is seen as
indeed the pure mirror of the divine glory; and when at Pentecost the
Church of God issues anew, by a second birth of that glorified manhood,
for its second course in this world, it issues unmixed with alien
influences, substantially {3} pure and unsullied. After a time its
history gains in complexity but its character loses in purity, so that
there are epochs of the history of the Church when its moral level is
possibly not higher than that which is represented in the roughest
books of the Old Testament: and through the whole of its later history
the Church is strangely fused with the world again, until they issue
both together into eternity.

Men from all parts of the world visit Constance and Geneva, and delight
to look at the two famous rivers issuing pure and abundant from the
quiet lakes. An analogous pleasure belongs to the study of such books
of the New Testament as the Acts of the Apostles and St. Paul's Epistle
to the Ephesians, which give us respectively the fortunes and the
theory of the Church at its origin. Later epochs of Church history
have possibly more richly diversified interests--such as the period of
the Councils, or the Middle Ages, or the Reformation. But the interest
of the earliest Church unmixed with the world, its principles fresh,
its inspirations strong, its native hue free from discolouring
elements, preoccupies us with a fascination which is unrivalled. The
divine society is young and inexperienced, but what it is and is meant
{4} to be we can see there better than anywhere else. We return, when
our minds are aching and our eyes are dim with the complexity and
obscurity of our latter-day problem, to learn insight and simplicity
again at those pure sources.

And to the Christian believer these books are not only documents of
great historical importance as illustrative of a unique period: they
also represent to us in different forms the highest level of that
action of the divine Spirit upon the mind of man which we call
inspiration. St. Paul for instance, in this