Moral Difficulties Connected with the Bible; Being the Boyle Lectures for 1871 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871. Excerpt: ... LECTURE VIII. John viii. 46. Which of you couvinceth Me of sin T There is no authentic delineation of the outward form and appearance of our Blessed Lord. There is not even such an historical description of Him as might serve to suggest what His physical semblance was. Why this should have been so, --why in this matter " the instincts of earthly affection seem to have been mysteriously overruled,"--we know not. It may be, because He who sympathised with every blameless phase of the character and career of man, his hopes, his fears, bis joys, his sorrows, would have been represented inadequately and unsatisfyingly by any one fixed expression of countenance. He looked about Him with anger at His accusers' hardness in the synagogue. He glanced reproval on Peter's weakness in the hall of Caiaphas. His eye dwelt with love on the young man who asked, though with a divided heart, how eternal life was to be obtained. His cheerful presence adorned and beautified the marriage at Cana. He shed tears at the anguish of the" mourners over Lazarus, and at His own thoughts on Jerusalem's approaching ruin. He was sorrowful, even unto death, in Gethsemane. He was transfigured on the holy mount to a most excellent glory. Under which of these aspects, in which of these attitudes, was He to be set forth to us by painter or sculptor? If one of them was to be selected in especial, and to be placed in our hands for ever, might it not have been inferred that the others, in which He was no less a type to the Christian, were, by the very fact of such selection, of less moment, and to be rejected? It may be, that the tendency to dwell exclusively upon what was specially human, and local in Him, which He more than once rebuked, was intended to be tacitly discouraged, by the withholdin...