Jew. No one could practice with greater skill or delicacy than he did, the art of conciliating those whom he addressed—though, of course, he carried this only so far as truth and principle would let him. Nothing could be more sturdy and determined than his resistance, as we may see in his whole Epistle to the Galatians, when any great or cardinal doctrine of the gospel was trenched upon, though by ever so little. Yet when it possibly could be avoided, none more sensitively fearful of giving offence than he was; and when unavoidable, which it very generally was, he was always at the greatest pains to soften it to the uttermost. Even in the verses which we have just quitted, and in which he had to pronounce an awful sentence of abandonment and utter degradation upon his countrymen the Jews, still he does it as a Jew-interposing their own writers as a sort of screen between him and them; and, as if more effectually to secure their conviction though not their acquiescence and consent, speaking to them not in his own person, but in the persons of their most revered prophets and holy men of old. And in the succeeding verses we can very obviously see, with what congeniality, as if to redeem and compensate the severities which he had just uttered, he breaks forth on the coming enlargement of the children of Israel; and with what exquisite wisdom he manages, if I may so speak, between them and the Gentiles, with both of whom he at the time is jointly holding converse-claiming kindred with the one because of his office, and with

the other because of his relationship. In short, unlike to the polemics of our modern day, and yet as uncompromising and bold as any of them-whenever an agreeable thing can be said, he says it-So that while, in truth and substance, he had the stern integrity of an old prophet when dealing with principles-he, in manner, had the pliancy and nice perception of an accomplished courtier when dealing with persons-and all this for the sake of the gospel, all for the purpose of gaining some.

Ver. 11. I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.' And so in this verse he hastens to inform them, and that with all promptitude and decision, that theirs was but a temporary stumble-what the stumbling-block was he had before told them1—not an irrecoverable fall. After laying his rebuke on the perversities of men, he looks onward with the eye of a prophet to the yet unfulfilled purposes of God, in whose hand men are but the instruments of His policy: and who causes even their very sins redound to His own glory, and subserve the accomplishment of all His pleasure. When as a preacher he views them morally, he connects these sins with the wickedness of manWhen as a prophet he views them historically, (for prophecy is but history in anticipation, or the history of the future,) he looks to them in connection with the sovereign power of God-first put forth at election by Him who ordains all, afterwards carried 1 Romans, ix, 32; x, 3.

into effect by Him who worketh all in all throughout the successions of nature and providence. One of these successions he distinctly announces in the verse now before us, when he affirms the fall of the Jews to have been the salvation of the Gentilesas if these two events stood related to each other in the way of cause and effect, or of antecedent and consequent. The same connection he reasserts several times in certain clauses of the verses which follow, and which we may now single out, and thus save the necessity of our again adverting to them -as in the 12th verse, where we are told that the fall of the Jews was the riches of the world, and the diminution of them the riches of the Gentiles; and in the 15th verse, where we read that the casting away of them was the reconciling of the world; and in the 28th verse, where we learn, that by their treatment of the gospel they became the enemies of God for the sake of the Gentiles, to whose benefit therefore this rejection of the Jews was in some way subservient; and finally, in the 30th verse, which gives us expressly to understand, that through the unbelief of the Jews mercy was obtained by the Gentiles-All suggesting the idea of a metaphysical sequence, or of a connection between these two events in the order of cause and consequence; and this again has set curiosity on edge to discover what the ligament could be which so bound together the infidelity of the Jews with the faith of the Gentiles, or what the operating influences were in the first which could bring the second in its train.

Now if God affirm that the two are thus linked together, it is our part so to believe it, whether all the cementing links and influences have or have not been submitted to our observation. We hold it the more necessary to premise this, because we think that with all men's powers of exploration, they have not been able thoroughly to unravel the process which intervenes between the rejection of the gospel by the Jews, and either the diffusion or acceptance of the same gospel among the other nations of the earth. It may have been partially but not fully explained, either in regard to the efficient or the final causes which are concerned in it-so that it remains in great part still a mystery in the counsels of God, of which the most we have to say is, that such is the will and the appointment of Him our Almighty Sovereign. We must not expect, that, at least in our present state, we shall ever so master the philosophy of the question, as to leave no room for the exclamation of the apostle, O the depth and unsearchableness of God's judgments, and how past finding out! Yet let us not forget that, in the language of Job, there are parts of His ways which do lie open to our observation, though it be indeed a little portion that we know of Him. And of His ways as of His works, it is well that they should be sought out of all them who have pleasure therein1-as far as -as far as they are they are shone upon by the lights, whether of Scripture or of experience. Let us attend then a little to what these enquirers

1 Psalm cxi, 2.

have got to say about this question, and what the fruit of the consideration which they have bestowed on it. There are certain palpable things which lie on the surface, as it were, of this hidden mystery; and which it were quite legitimate to notice.

Had Christianity been received by the great bulk of the Jewish nation, and had they in consequence been animated by that spirit of proselytism which essentially characterised it—a spirit heretofore new to them, though under its influence now they might have laboured for the diffusion of their new faith over the whole earth-still it might well be imagined, that coming as it would with one mind and by one effort, from the whole people, it was but a development of their old Judaism, still unchanged, or changed only in this, that, whereas it used to be tolerant though unsocial, it had now become restless and aggressive,—making inroads on all other countries which they had hitherto let alone. It might have been most plausibly conceived, that such a national enterprise, sanctioned by all the authorities of their state, as well as by the enthusiasm of a unanimous population, would have provoked a national resistance every where; and far more readily awakened the suspicion of those ambitious designs, which would array every community whom they invaded, in an attitude of all the more resolute and prepared hostility against them. Nothing, it might with all seeming fairness be reasoned, nothing could more effectually disarm this adverse imagination, than that the new religion