PREFACE.

THIS little volume needs no word of introduction. The Addresses which it contains received a warm welcome from "the pupils and friends" for whom they were first written; and it is natural that those who felt that they met their own wants should desire to obtain for them a wider audience. The author has indeed a keen insight into the thoughts and feelings of the young men among whom she has laboured long with winning devotion, a living sympathy with their difficulties, and a directness of illustration and language which combine to give her counsels a peculiar force. At the same time, the mode of treatment which she has applied to familiar narratives discloses in them a fresh meaning. We are led to regard the records of the Old Testament as written in a most practical sense for our learning. We see how the heroes of the history of a Divine discipline were men of like passions with ourselves; how the essential power of great virtues

and great faults finds a place in our common life; how we can gain strength and guidance from past experience under temptations which only change their outward form as the world grows older; how from first to last God is fashioning men made in His image towards the realisation of His likeness.

In this aspect it is a gain to the breadth and vigour of our religious convictions to be taught (for example) that the choice of Lot (p. 16), and the love of Jacob (p. 43), and the patience and patriotism of Moses (pp. 83-86), and the sorrows of Samuel (pp. 143-145), and the self-denial of David (pp. 202-206), and the purity of Daniel (pp. 292, 293), and the noble shame of Ezra (p. 298), find applications in the circumstances of our own lives. So it is that, by the help of the prophetic interpretation of human experience which Scripture offers to us, we come to understand a little better than before that we too are engaged in a present spiritual conflict, struggling or yielding, consciously or unconsciously, in a far-reaching warfare of unseen forces of good and evil. The veil, as it were, is lifted from the surface of things, and we are allowed to gaze for a moment upon those divine realities which lend to the transitory storms of human sorrow and effort and suffering their solemn and beneficent significance.

For the patient and vital study of the Bible,

which these Addresses are designed to encourage, seems to me to have a special importance in the present trial of our faith. Such study brings home to us, as nothing else can do, the vastness of the scale on which God is pleased to work, the infinite long-suffering with which He trains His people, the marvellous unity which marks the fulfilment of His counsel in all its many parts and many fashions, the correspondences and fore-shadowings which present scenes and persons widely separated in time and place and circumstance as harmonious elements in one whole, and the majestic progress with which events move towards the presence of the Incarnate Lord. And he who has thus been enabled to feel that the Spirit of Christ spoke in old time and speaks still, will be able to win his soul in patience while he waits without anxiety for every result which criticism and observation can establish as to the records and the methods of the Divine teaching. In this way we recover with a calm certainty the experience of the childly ages of the world and of our own childhood. The eyes of our heart are opened, and we know that God can now hold converse with men. That is the lesson which we have to learn in this generation even through apparent losses. The WORD is indeed ever with His servants; but when the three children were cast into the furnace of fire, then, we read,

a fourth was seen with them like the Son of God. Our fiery trial will become a blessing if it brings us the clear vision of Him who was dead and is alive for evermore standing in the midst of His Churches.

We need, more perhaps than believers at any earlier time, to meditate with unhastening and unresting labour on the Scriptures of the Old Testament, on the training of men, and the training of

the people" which it reveals, that we may have hope. These things happened unto our fathers by way of example; and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come.

May these Addresses help those who read them to feel the presence of the Spirit sent in Christ's Name in the course of simple duties, and to obey His living Voice.

B. F. WESTCOTT.

CAMBRIDGE, Eve of the Annunciation, 1885.