Let There Be Light

And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved (R.V. m. was brooding) upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.—Genesis 1:2-3.

This is the second stage in the history of the Creation. After the first verse, it is of the earth, and of the earth only, that the narrative speaks. The earth did now exist, but in the form of chaos. This expression does not mean a state of disorder and confusion, but that state of primitive matter in which no creature had as yet a distinctive existence, and no one element stood out in distinction from others, but all the forces and properties of matter existed, as it were, undivided. The materials were indeed all there, but not as such—they were only latent. However, the creative spirit, the principle of order and life, brooded over this matter, which, like a rich organic cell, comprehended in itself the conditions, and up to a certain point the elementary principles, of all future forms of existence. This Spirit was the efficient cause, not of matter itself, but of its Organization, which was then to begin. He was the executant of each of those Divine commands, which from this time were to succeed each other, stroke after stroke, till this chaos should be transformed into a world of wonders.

We cannot tell how the Spirit of God brooded over that vast watery mass. It is a mystery, but it is also a fact, and it is here revealed as having happened at the very commencement of the Creation, even before God had said, “Let there be light.” The first Divine act in fitting up this planet for the habitation of man was for the Spirit of God to move upon the face of the waters. Till that time, all was formless, empty, out of order, and in confusion. In a word, it was chaos; and to make it into that thing of beauty which the world is at the present moment, even though it is a fallen world, it was needful that the movement of the Spirit of God should take place upon it. How the Spirit works upon matter, we do not know; but we do know that God, who is a Spirit, created matter, and fashioned matter, and sustained matter, and that He will yet deliver matter from the stain of sin which is upon it. We shall see new heavens and a new earth in which materialism itself shall be lifted up from its present state of ruin, and shall glorify God; but without the Spirit of God the materialism of this world must have remained for ever in chaos. Only as the Spirit came did the work of creation begin.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

We have first chaos, then order (or cosmos); we have also first darkness, then light. It is the Spirit of God that out of chaos brings cosmos; it is the Word of God that out of darkness brings light. Accordingly, the text is easily divided in this way—

I.  Cosmos out of Chaos.

  i.  Chaos.

    ii.  The Spirit of God.

    iii.  Cosmos.

II.  Light out of Darkness.

  i.  Darkness.

    ii.  God’s Word.

    iii.  Light.

I

Cosmos out of Chaos

i. Chaos

“The earth was without form (R.V. waste) and void.” The Hebrew (tôhû wâ-bôhû) is an alliterative description of a chaos, in which nothing can be distinguished or defined. Tôhû is a word which it is difficult to express consistently in English; but it denotes mostly something unsubstantial, or (figuratively) unreal; cf. Isaiah 45:18 (of the earth), “He created it not a tôhû, he fashioned it to be inhabited,” Genesis 1:19, “I said not, Seek ye me as a tôhû (i.e. in vain).” Bôhû, as Arabic shows, is rightly rendered empty or void. Compare the same combination of words to suggest the idea of a return to primeval chaos in Jeremiah 4:23 and Isaiah 34:11 (“the line of tôhû and the plummet of bôhû”).

Who seeketh finds: what shall be his relief

Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray,

No sense of God, but bears as best he may,

A lonely incommunicable grief?

What shall he do? One only thing he knows,

That his life flits a frail uneasy spark

In the great vast of universal dark,

And that the grave may not be all repose.

Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry,

But spread the desert of thy being bare

To the full searching of the All-seeing Eye:

Wait—and through dark misgiving, blank despair,

God will come down in pity, and fill the dry

Dead place with light, and life, and vernal air.1 [Note: J. C. Shairp.]

ii. The Spirit of God

1. In the Old Testament the spirit of man is the principle of life, viewed especially as the seat of the stronger and more active energies of life; and the “spirit” of God is analogously the Divine force or agency, to the operation of which are attributed various extraordinary powers and activities of men, as well as supernatural gifts. In the later books of the Old Testament, it appears also as the power which creates and sustains life. It is in the last-named capacity that it is mentioned here. The chaos of Genesis 1:2 was not left in hopeless gloom and death; already, even before God “spake,” the Spirit of God, with its life-giving energy, was “brooding” over the waters, like a bird upon its nest, and (so it seems to be implied) fitting them in some way to generate and maintain life, when the Divine fiat should be pronounced.

This, then, is the first lesson of the Bible; that at the root and origin of all this vast material universe, before whose laws we are crushed as the moth, there abides a living conscious Spirit, who wills and knows and fashions all things. The belief of this changes for us the whole face of nature, and instead of a chill, impersonal world of forces to which no appeal can be made, and in which matter is supreme, gives us the home of a Father.

In speaking of Divine perfection, we mean to say that God is just and true and loving—the Author of order and not of disorder, of good and not of evil. Or rather, that He is justice, that He is truth, that He is love, that He is order; … and that wherever these qualities are present, whether in the human soul or in the order of nature, there is God. We might still see Him everywhere if we had not been mistakenly seeking Him apart from us, instead of in us; away from the laws of nature, instead of in them. And we become united to Him not by mystical absorption, but by partaking, whether consciously or unconsciously of that truth and justice and love which He Himself is.1 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.]

I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains.2 [Note: Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey.]

2. The doctrine of the all-pervading action of the Spirit of God, and the living Power underlying all the energies of Nature, occupies a wider space in the pages of Divine revelation than it holds in popular Christian theology, or in the hymns, the teaching, and the daily thoughts of modern Christendom. In these the doctrine of the Spirit of God is, if we judge by Scripture, too much restricted to His work in Redemption and Salvation, to His wonder-working and inspiring energy in the early Church, and to His secret regenerating and sanctifying energy in the renewal of souls for life everlasting. And in this work of redemption He is spoken of by the special appellation of the Holy Ghost, even by the revisers of the Authorized Version; although there seems to be not the slightest reason for the retention of that equivocal old English word, full of unfortunate associations, more than there would be in so translating the same word as it occurs in our Lord’s discourse at the well of Jacob—“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth”—where the insertion of this ancient Saxon word for spirit would create a painful shock by its irreverence. All these redeeming and sanctifying operations of the Spirit of God in the soul of man have been treated with great fulness in our own language, in scores of valuable writings, from the days of John Owen, the Puritan Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, down to the present time, when Bishop Moule has given us his excellent work entitled Veni Creator, a most delightful exposition of Scripture doctrine on the Holy Spirit in His dealings with the souls of men. In few of these works, however, appears any representation of the Scripture doctrine of the Spirit of God, as working in Nature, as the direct agent of the Eternal Will in the creation and everlasting government of the physical and intellectual universe.

It has been the fault of religious teachers, and it is also the fault of much of what prevails in the tone of the religious world—to draw an unwarrantably harsh contrast between the natural and the spiritual. A violent schism has thereby been created between the sacred and the secular, and, consequently, many disasters have ensued. Good people have done infinite mischief by placing the sacred in opposition to the secular. They have thus denied God’s presence and God’s glory in things where His presence should have been gladly acknowledged, and have thereby cast a certain dishonour on matters which should have been recognized as religious in the truest sense. The result has been that others, carefully studying the things thus handed over to godlessness, and discovering therein rich mines of truth, and beauty, and goodness, have too frequently accepted the false position assigned to them, and have preached, in the name of Agnosticism or Atheism, a gospel of natural law, in opposition to the exclusive and narrow gospel of the religionists I have described.1 [Note: Donald Macleod, Christ and Society, 243.]

3. It is an ennobling thought that all this fair world we see, all those healthful and strong laws in ceaseless operation around us, all that long history of change and progress which we have been taught to trace, can be linked on to what we behold at Pentecost. It is the same Spirit who filled St. Peter and St. John with the life and power and love of Christ, who also “dwells in the light of setting suns, in the round ocean, and the living air.” There is no opposition. All are diverse operations of the same Spirit, who baptized St. Paul with his glowing power, and St. John with his heavenly love, and who once moved over the face of the waters, and evoked order out of chaos. The Bible calls nothing secular, all things are sacred, and only sin and wickedness are excluded from the domain which is claimed for God. But if we believe that He has never left Himself without a witness, and that the very rain and sunshine and fruitful seasons are the gifts of Him whose Spirit once moved over the waters and brought order out of confusion, then are we entitled to go further and to say that in the love of parent and child, in the heroic self-sacrifice of patriots, in the thoughts of wisdom and truth uttered by wise men, by Sakyamuni or Confucius, Socrates or Seneca, we must see nothing less than the strivings of that same Divine Spirit who spake by the prophets, and was shed forth in fulness upon the Church at Pentecost.

In the Life of Sir E. Burne-Jones, there is an account by his wife of the effect first made upon her by coming into contact with him and his artist friends, Morris and Rossetti. She says, “I wish it were possible to explain the Impression made upon me as a young girl, whose experience so far had been quite remote from art, by sudden and close intercourse with those to whom it was the breath of life. The only approach I can make to describing it is by saying that I felt in the presence of a new religion. Their love of beauty did not seem to me unbalanced, but as if it included the whole world and raised the point from which they regarded everything. Human beauty especially was in a way sacred to them, I thought; and a young lady who was much with them, and sat for them as a model, said to me, ‘It was being in a new world to be with them. I sat to them and I was there with them. And I was a holy thing to them—I was a holy thing to them.’ ”

Wherever through the ages rise

The altars of self-sacrifice,

Where love its arms has opened wide,

Or man for man has calmly died,

I see the same white wings outspread,

That hovered o’er the Master’s head!

Up from undated time they come,

The martyr souls of heathendom;

And to His cross and passion bring

Their fellowship of suffering.

So welcome I from every source

The tokens of that primal Force,

Older than heaven itself, yet new

As the young heart it reaches to,

Beneath whose steady impulse rolls

The tidal wave of human souls;

Guide, comforter, and inward word,

The eternal spirit of the Lord!1 [Note: Whittier.]

iii. Cosmos

1. The Spirit of God was brooding upon the face of the waters. The word rendered “brooded” (or “was brooding,” R.V.m.) occurs elsewhere only in Deuteronomy 32:11, where it is used of an eagle (properly, a griffon-vulture) hovering over its young. It is used similarly in Syriac. It is possible that its use here may be a survival, or echo, of the old belief, found among the Phœnicians, as well as elsewhere, of a world-egg, out of which, as it split, the earth, sky, and heavenly bodies emerged; the crude, material representation appearing here transformed into a beautiful and suggestive figure.

2. The hope of the chaotic world, and the hope of the sinning soul, is all in the brooding Spirit of God seeking to bring order out of chaos, to bring life out of death, light out of darkness, and beauty out of barrenness and ruin. It was God’s Spirit brooding over the formless world that put the sun in the heavens, that filled the world with warmth and light, that made the earth green with herbage, that caused forests to grow upon the hillsides, with birds to sing in them, and planted flowers to exhale their perfume in the Valleys. So God’s Spirit broods over the heart of man that has fallen into darkness and chaos through sin.

(1) As the movement of the Holy Spirit upon the waters was the first act in the six days’ work, so the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul is the first work of grace in that soul. It is a very humbling truth, but it is a truth notwithstanding its humiliating form, that the best man that mere morality ever produced is still “waste and void” if the Spirit of God has not come upon him. All the efforts of men which they make by nature, when stirred up by the example of others or by godly precepts, produce nothing but chaos in another shape; some of the mountains may have been levelled, but valleys have been elevated into other mountains; some vices have been discarded, but only to be replaced by other vices that are, perhaps, even worse; or certain transgressions have been forsaken for a while, only to be followed by a return to the selfsame sins, so that it has happened unto them, “According to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (2 Peter 2:22). Unless the Spirit of God has been at work within him, the man is still, in the sight of God, “without form and void” as to everything which God can look upon with pleasure.

(2) To this work nothing whatever is contributed by the man himself. “The earth was waste and void,” so it could not do anything to help the Spirit. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The Spirit found no light there; it had to be created. The heart of man promises help, but “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” The will has great influence over the man, but the will is itself depraved, so it tries to play the tyrant over all the other powers of the man, and it refuses to become the servant of the eternal Spirit of truth.

(3) Not only was there nothing whatever that could help the Holy Spirit, but there seemed nothing at all congruous to the Spirit. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of order, but there was disorder. He is the Spirit of light, but there was darkness. Does it not seem a strange thing that the Spirit of God should have come there at all? Adored in His excellent glory in the heaven where all is order and all is light, why should He come to brood over that watery deep, and to begin the great work of bringing order out of chaos? Why should the Spirit of God ever have come into our hearts? What was there in us to induce the Spirit of God to begin a work of grace in us? We admire the condescension of Jesus in leaving Heaven to dwell upon earth; but do we equally admire the condescension of the Holy Spirit in coming to dwell in such poor hearts as ours? Jesus dwelt with sinners, but the Holy Ghost dwells in us.

(4) Where the Spirit came, the work was carried on to completion. The work of creation did not end with the first day, but went on till it was finished on the sixth day. God did not say, “I have made the light, and now I will leave the earth as it is”; and when He had begun to divide the waters, and to separate the land from the sea, He did not say, “Now I will have no more to do with the world.” He did not take the newly fashioned earth in His hands, and fling it back into chaos; but He went on with His work until, on the seventh day, when it was completed, He rested from all His work. He will not leave unfinished the work which He has commenced in our souls. Where the Spirit of God has begun to move, He continues to move until the work is done; and He will not fail or turn aside until all is accomplished.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

Burning our hearts out with longing

The daylight passed:

Millions and millions together,

The stars at last!

Purple the woods where the dewdrops,

Pearly and grey,

Wash in the cool from our faces

The flame of day.

Glory and shadow grow one in

The hazel wood:

Laughter and peace in the stillness

Together brood.

Hopes all unearthly are thronging

In hearts of earth:

Tongues of the starlight are calling

Our souls to birth.

Down from the heaven its secrets

Drop one by one;

Where time is for ever beginning

And time is done.

There light eternal is over

Chaos and night:

Singing with dawn lips for ever,

“Let there be light!”

There too for ever in twilight

Time slips away,

Closing in darkness and rapture

Its awful day.1 [Note: A. E., The Divine Vision, 20.]

II

Light out of Darkness

i. Darkness

“Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The deep (Heb. tehôm) is not here what the deep would denote to us, i.e. the sea, but the primitive undivided waters, the huge watery mass which the writer conceived as enveloping the chaotic earth. Milton (Paradise Lost, vii. 276 ff.) gives an excellent paraphrase—

The Earth was formed, but, in the womb as yet

Of waters, embryon, immature, involved,

Appeared not; over all the face of Earth

Main ocean flowed.

The darkness which was upon the face of the deep is a type of the natural darkness of the fallen intellect that is ignorant of God, and has not the light of faith. “Behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people.” Very often in Holy Scripture darkness is the symbol of sin, and the state of those who are separated from God. Satan is the prince of “the power of darkness,” while in God there “is no darkness at all.”

The intermixture in our life of the material and the spiritual has no more striking illustration than in the influence upon us of darkness. The “power of darkness” is a real power, and that apart from any theological considerations. The revolution of this planet on its axis, which for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four shuts from us the light of day, has had in every age the profoundest effect on man’s inner states. It has told enormously on his religion. It has created a vocabulary—a very sinister one. It lies at the origin of fear. It binds the reason and sets loose the Imagination. We are not the same at midnight as at midday. The child mind, and the savage mind, which is so closely akin to it, are reawakened in us. “I do not believe in ghosts,” said Fontenelle, “but I am afraid of them.” We can all feel with him there.1 [Note: J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 248.]

ii. God’s Word

1. And God said.—This gives the keynote to the narrative, the burden ten times repeated, of this magnificent poem. To say is both to think and to will. In this speaking of God there is both the legislative power of His intelligence, and the executive power of His will; this one word dispels all notion of blind matter, and of brute fatalism; it reveals an enlightened Power, an intelligent and benevolent Thought, underlying all that is.

Says Carlyle: “Man is properly an incarnated word; the word that he speaks is the man himself.” In like manner, and with still more truth, might it be said of God that His Word is Himself; only John’s assertion is not that the Word is God, but that it was God, implying is of course.2 [Note: J. W., Letters of Yesterday, 48.]

2. And at the same time that this word, “And God said,” appears to us as the veritable truth of things, it also reveals to us their true value and legitimate use. Beautiful and beneficent as the work may be, its real worth is not in itself; it is in the thought and in the heart of the Author to whom it owes its existence. Whenever we stop short in the work itself, our enjoyment of it can only be superficial, and we are, through our ingratitude, on the road to an idolatry more or less gross. Our enjoyment is pure and perfect only when it results from the contact of our soul with the Author Himself. To form this bond is the true aim of Nature, as well as the proper destination of the life of man.

We read, “God created”; “God made”; “God saw”; “God divided”; “God called”; “God set”; “God blessed”; “God formed”; “God planted”; “God took”; “God commanded”; but the most frequent word here is “God said.” As elsewhere, “He spake and it was done”; “He commanded the light to shine out of darkness”; “the worlds were framed by the Word of God”; “upholding all things by the word of His power.” God’s “word” is then the one medium or link between Him and creation.… The frequency with which it is repeated shows what stress God lays on it.… Between the “nothing” and the “something”—non-existence and creation—there intervenes only the word—it needed only the word, no more; but after that many other agencies come in—second causes, natural laws and processes—all evolving the great original fiat. When the Son of God was here it was thus He acted. He spake: “Lazarus, come forth”; “Young man, arise”; “Damsel, arise”; “Be opened,” and it was done. The Word was still the medium. It is so now. He speaks to us (1) in Creation, (2) in the Word, (3) in Providence, (4) by His Sabbaths.1 [Note: Horatius Bonar.]

3. This word, “And God said,” further reveals the personality of God. Behind this veil of the visible universe which dazzles me, behind these blind forces of which the play at times terror-strikes me, behind this regularity of seasons and this fixedness of laws, which almost compel me to recognize in all things only the march of a fixed Fate, this word, “And God said,” unveils to me an Arm of might, an Eye which sees, a Heart full of benevolence which is seeking me, a Person who loves me. This ray of light which, as it strikes upon my retina, paints there with perfect accuracy, upon a surface of the size of a centime, a landscape of many miles in extent—He it is who commanded it to shine.

Be kind to our darkness, O Fashioner, dwelling in light,

And feeding the lamps of the sky;

Look down upon this one, and let it be sweet in Thy sight

I pray Thee, to-night.

O watch whom Thou madest to dwell on its soil, Thou Most High!

For this is a world full of sorrow (there may be but one);

Keep watch o’er its dust, else Thy children for aye are undone,

For this is a world where we die.2 [Note: Jean Ingelow.]

iii. Light

1. Let there be light.—The mention of this Divine command is sufficient to make the reader understand that this element, which was an object of worship to so many Oriental nations, is neither an eternal principle nor the product of blind force, but the work of a free and intelligent will. It is this same thought that is expressed in the division of the work of Creation into six days and six nights. The Creation is thus represented under the image of a week of work, during which an active and intelligent workman pursues his task, through a series of phases, graduated with skill and calculated with certainty, in view of an end definitely conceived from the first.

“Let there be light.” This is at once the motto and the condition of all progress that is worthy of the name. From chaos into order, from slumber into wakefulness, from torpor into the glow of life—yes, and “from strength to strength”; it has been a condition of progress that there should be light. God saw the light, that it was good.

2. The Bible is not a handbook of science, and it matters little to us whether its narrative concerning the origin of the world meets the approval of the learned or not. The truths which it enfolds are such as science can neither displace nor disprove, and which, despite the strides which we have made, are yet as important to mankind as on the day when first they were proclaimed. Over the portal that leads to the sanctuary of Israel’s faith is written, in characters that cannot be effaced, the truth which has been the hope and stay of the human race, the source of all its bliss and inspiration, “the fountain light of all our day, the master light of all our seeing”; it is the truth that there is a central light in the universe, a power that in the past has wrought with wisdom and purposive intelligence the order and harmony of this world of matter, and has shed abroad in the human heart the creative spark which shall some day make aglow this mundane sphere with the warmth and radiance of justice, truth, and loving-kindness. “Let there be light: and there was light.”

Let me recall to your remembrance the solemnity and magnificence with which the power of God in the creation of the universe is depicted; and here I cannot possibly overlook that passage of the sacred historian, which has been so frequently commended, in which the importance of the circumstance and the greatness of the idea (the human mind cannot, indeed, well conceive a greater) are no less remarkable than the expressive brevity and simplicity of the language:—“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The more words you would accumulate upon this thought, the more you would detract from the sublimity of it; for the understanding quickly comprehends the Divine Power from the effect, and perhaps most completely when it is not attempted to be explained; the perception in that case is the more vivid, inasmuch as it seems to proceed from the proper action and energy of the mind itself. The prophets have also depicted the same conception in poetical language, and with no less force and magnificence of expression. The whole creation is summoned forth to celebrate the praise of the Almighty—

Let them praise the name of Jehovah;

For He commanded, and they were created.

And in another place—

For He spoke, and it was;

He commanded, and it stood fast.1 [Note: R. Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 176.]

3. In creation it was the drawing near of God, and the utterance of His word, that dispersed the darkness. In the Incarnation, the Eternal Word, without whom “was not anything made that was made,” drew nigh to the fallen world darkened by sin. He came as the Light of the world, and His coming dispersed the darkness. On the first Christmas night this effect of the Incarnation was symbolized when to the “shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night … the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them.” The message to the shepherds was a call to them and to the world, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.”

Thirty years ago last December I went to a place where they practised cannibalism, and before I left those people to go to New Guinea, and start a mission there, so completely were idolatry and cannibalism swept away that a gentleman who tried to get an idol to bring as a curiosity to this country could not find one; they had all been burnt, or disposed of to other travellers. I saw these people myself leaving their cannibalism and their idolatry, and building themselves tolerably good houses. We had our institutions among them, and I had the honour of training a number of young men as native pastors and pioneer teachers. What is the use of talking to me of failure? I have myself baptized more than five thousand of these young people—does that look like failure? In thirteen or fourteen years these men were building houses and churches for themselves, and attending schools, and, if you have read the mission reports, you will know that some of them have gone forth as teachers to New Guinea, and across New Caledonia, and some of the islands of the New Hebrides. The people, too, have been contributing handsomely to the support of the London Missionary Society, for the purpose of sending the Gospel, as they say, to the people beyond. They have seen what a blessing it has been, and their grand idea is to hand it on to those who are still in heathen darkness.1 [Note: S. McFarlane.]

Meet is the gift we offer here to Thee,

Father of all, as falls the dewy night;

Thine own most precious gift we bring—the light

Whereby mankind Thy other bounties see.

Thou art the Light indeed; on our dull eyes

And on our inmost souls Thy rays are poured;

To Thee we light our lamps: receive them, Lord,

Filled with the oil of peace and sacrifice.2 [Note: Prudentius, translated by R. Martin Pope.]

Literature

Banks (L. A.), The World’s Childhood, 13, 25.

Bellew (J. C. M.), Sermons, iii. 241.

Burrell (D. J.), The Golden Passional, 110.

Cohen (O. J.), in Sermons by American Rabbis, 158.

Evans (R. W.), Parochial Sermons, 237.

Fuller (M.), The Lord’s Day, 1.

Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, i. 445.

John (Griffith), A Voice from China, 123.

Jowett (B.), Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, 282.

Kemble (C.), Memorials of a Closed Ministry, i. 1.

M‘Cheyne (R. M.), Additional Remains, 88.

Macleod (D.), Christ and Society, 243.

Matheson (G.), Leaves for Quiet Hours, 159.

Matheson (G.), Voices of the Spirit, 1.

Sale (S.), in Sermons by American Rabbis, 114.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, lv. No. 3134.

Stanley (A. P.), Church Sermons, i. 171.

Thomas (J.), Sermons (Myrtle Street Pulpit), ii. 293.

Thorne (H.), Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 246.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xix. (1881) No. 1166.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxviii. 331 (White); lxv. 145 (Davidson)

Church Pulpit Year Book, vi. (1909) 42.