in various prophets, with Jesus Christ, as if the latter had not changed, exalted and purified the Messianic idea to suit his sublime purposes of human regeneration. The times and circumstances in which the Old Testament Scriptures appeared, the manners, usages, civilization, intellectual and moral stage of the Semitic race combine to give them a lower position than that of the New Testament books which arose out of a more developed perception of the relations between God and men. Spiritual apprehension had got beyond Jewish particularism, especially in the case of the apostle Paul, who gave the new religion a distinct vitality by severing it from its Jewish predecessor. The agreement of the New Testament books with themselves must be modified by the same doctrine of development. Jewish and Pauline christianity appear in different works, necessarily imparting a difference of views and expression; or they are blended in various degrees, as in the epistles to the Hebrews and the first of Peter. Hence, absolute harmony cannot be looked for. If the standpoints of the writers were so diverse, how can their productions coincide? The alleged coincidence can only be intersected with varieties proportioned to the measures in which the authors possessed the Spirit of God. These varieties affect the matter as well as the manner of the writings. It is therefore unphilosophical to treat the Bible as a whole which was dictated by the Spirit and directed to one end. Its uniformity is chequered with variety; its harmony with disagreement. It is a bundle of books; a selection from a wider literature, reflecting many diversities of religious apprehension. After the two Testaments have been rightly estimated according to their respective merits, the contents of each should be duly apportioned—internal evidence being the test of their relative importance, irrespective of _a priori_ assumptions. Their traditional origin and authority must be subordinated to the inherent value they bear, or the conformity of the ideas to the will of God. The gradual formation of both canons suggests an analysis of the classes into which they came to be put; for the same canonical dignity was not attributed by the Jews to the books contained in the three divisions; and the controverted writings of the New Testament found gradual recognition very slowly. Luther made important distinctions between the canonical books;(387) and Carlstadt put the Antilegomena of the New Testament on a par with the Hagiographa of the Old.