1.01. Introductory

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY IN this book I shall set forth, as correctly and fully as I can, the teaching of the Bible about Holiness ; the broad principles of essential truth underlying this teaching ; and its practical bearing on the thought and life of our own day. In order to do this, it will be needful to determine what the Sacred Writers meant by the word HOLY. For, unless we understand it in the sense intended by them, we shall be in danger of putting into their writings a meaning far from the writers intention, a meaning derived unconsciously from modern religious thought and life ; and we shall certainly lose much of the truth which their words were designed to convey. This need to determine the meaning of Bible words marks a broad difference between Theology and the Natural Sciences. In these last, modern teachers may choose the sense of their own terms : and, if these are clearly defined and main tained throughout, no confusion arises. But Christian theology rests, in great part, on ancient documents recording the thoughts of a by-gone day. Of these documents, words are the component parts : and only so far as we understand the meaning of these words can we spell out and grasp the truths which find permanent expression in the documents. The words of the Bible are the alphabet of Christian theology. The meaning of these sacred words, we must determine as in childhood we learnt the meaning of the words of our mother tongue. We observed the various concrete objects to which they were applied : we noticed the qualities common to objects called by the same name : and thus, by the inborn faculty of abstraction, we formed a conception of the idea conveyed by the word. In this way, the conception of Holiness must have grown up in the mind of ancient Israel. And thus, as we pass along through the pages of the Bible, shall we learn, from the various objects called holy and from the various connections of thought in which the word holy occurs, the one idea embodied in these various objects and conveyed by the one word used to designate them all. This method has another advantage. As we pass from the Old Testament to the New, we shall notice that the conception of Holiness, while retaining its essential meaning as embodied in the ancient ritual, receives in the New Testament an immense development, and a much wider practical bearing on the everyday thought of men. This marvellous development in the meaning of a word will reveal the change wrought by Christ in the religious thought of mankind ; and marks a new era in the development of the Kingdom of God. In both Testaments, the words holy and hallow correspond exactly to saint and sanctify : and holiness is the state resulting from the act of sanctiftcation. That we have two families of words expressing one idea, results from the composite structure of our language, in which a Latin superstructure is built on a German foundation. From each of these languages we derive words conveying the idea of Holiness.