, applying
tests and private canons of interpretation which are purely arbitrary"
(_Ibid._, p. 28).

* * * * *

PREDICTION.

The analysis of prophetic _consciousness_ may be, and in a great measure
is, impossible. But the facts of prediction remain. It remains that our
Lord Himself predicted. He foretold minutely His own death, and the end
of the City and the Temple, and the circumstances of the close of this
aeon. Was He "soothsaying"? It remains that He perpetually and most
emphatically claimed to be the exact Fulfilment of predictions which,
on any hypothesis, were then ages old. Was He mistaken in their
character and quality?

CHRIST'S WITNESS TO THE BIBLE.

In those last words I step, as I well know, upon a field of the most
urgent controversy. What is the weight to be assigned to our ever
blessed Lord's verdict upon the Old Testament as history and prophecy?
It is now asserted, and by Christian men, that that verdict is not
final; that He in the days of His flesh so submitted to human
limitations that He was liable to mistakes of fact just as His best
contemporaries were; that we adore Christ, and rely absolutely on Him,
but it is on Christ not as He was but as He is, the glorified Christ.
Here is an unspeakably overawing subject. I would not treat of it as if
the question could be swept away in a sentence. But I do, as in our
living Master's presence, venture to say that His witness to the nature
and character of the Old Scriptures claims definitely to be _ex
cathedra_. True, He doubtless spoke in this matter, as elsewhere, not in
what may be called the technical style; not every reference of His to
"Moses" need necessarily mean to assert precisely that Moses wrote
every clause of the Pentateuch. But the present question goes, as we
have remembered, much deeper. It asks whether or no the Lord Jesus was
altogether and in principle mistaken. He treated the Law, Prophets, and
Psalms as a solid structure of historic fact and supernatural promise,
divinely planned all through, divinely carried out and up from the
foundation, and leading straight up to Himself. Was it all the time true
that large parts of them were no more historical than the False
Decretals on which the high Papal claims were built?[7]

[7] I may remind the reader that about the middle of the ninth century
there were published, by one Isidore, a collection of decisions and
decrees, purporting to be by the earlies