With these few preliminary remarks, we may apply our Lord’s words immediately to ourselves. The Christian Church throughout the world is now the guardian of the Holy Scriptures. All that the Jews had, we have, with the inestimably precious addition of the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ. These Scriptures all Christians regard as the revelation of God to man. Other works rise and are built up from below: this alone we receive as let down upon us from above. All art, all science, all theology, which is but a system built up by inferences from Scripture, these are of man, and constructed on earth. They may rise higher, and become truer, as one race is advanced in skill or in knowledge; but they began below, and will ever carry with them the infirmity of all that is born on earth. Whereas the sayings and the lessons of this book are not of man, nor did they take their beginnings here. They have come to us indeed through human words, and by means of human action; but they did not arise originally in the breasts of men; they came from Him who is Himself the first spring of morals and the highest fountain of truth. Between philosophy reared up from below, and the facts, and rules, and motives, which they disclose, there is always a gap which our reason cannot bridge over. God’s sovereignty, man’s free will—God’s creative agency, man’s inductions of science—God’s interference with physical order, man’s establishment of physical law—one member of each of these pairs will ever remain discontinuous from, and in the estimate of human reason irreconcileable with, the other. And because this Book is unlike all other books, because its voice comes to us from another place, and is heard in deeper and more secret chambers of our being than all other voices, because its sayings have for our humanity a searching and conserving and healing power which none other possess, therefore it is that to keep these Holy Scriptures in all their integrity as delivered down to her is the solemn trust of the Church throughout the world: a trust simple, direct, indefeasible. Now when I say the Church throughout the world, and in all I shall say in these or like terms to-night, I am using the words in their very widest sense. I mean by the Church no less than our Article defines it to be, “the great congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments are duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance.” I mean the whole body, wherever dwelling, however ordered and denominated, who take the Scriptures for their rule of life and for their ultimate appeal. On the whole of this body rests this trust, to preserve the purity and integrity of Holy Scripture.