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[206] ignorant that the poet-king, putting the concrete for the principle involved, meant only to emphasize the truth that the training of a child must include subjection,--by what method obtained each case and each child's nature must decide. And thus many a brute and ignoramus has complacently fathered his absurd blindness and passionate temper on Solomon and the Bible.

Had not the lecturer of last week, Dr. Crooks, so ably and eloquently pointed out this characteristic of Christianity, its opening to the moral and spiritual need of each age, its ready and complete adaptation of itself to the most unforeseen and immense changes in the moral life of succeeding ages,--one of the proofs of its divine origin,--furnishing the principles needed for each larger development of civilization, and giving its sanction to the new methods which keener temptations and more threatening dangers demanded, I might have troubled you with something on this point. You will allow me to quote what will show you that even the old divines, and those whose Orthodoxy will not be suspected, have again and again affirmed that a moral agency's being new was no evidence at all that Christianity did not include and intend it. Robinson, in “Address to the Pilgrim fathers,” says:--

If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded — I am very confident — the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word.

The Hon. Robert Boyle (1680) says:--

As the Bible was not written for any one particular time or people, . . . so there are many passages very useful which will not l)be found so these many ages; being possibly

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