LECTURES ON THE ROMANS. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. IT is possible to conceive the face of our be a twofold process begun and carried world overspread with a thick and midnight darkness, and without so much as a particle of light to alleviate it, from any one quarter of the firmament around us. In this case, it were of no avail to the people who live in it, that all of them were in possession of sound and perfect eyes. The organ of sight may be entire, and yet nothing be seen from the total absence of external light among the objects on every side of us. Or in other words, to bring forward, and at length brought to its full and perfect termination. Light must be poured upon the earth, and the faculty of seeing must be conferred upon its inhabitants. One can imagine, that, instead of the light being made instantaneously to burst upon us in its highest splendour, and, instead of the faculty being immediately bestowed upon us in full vigour to meet and to encounter so strong a tide of effulgency-that both these processes were about the perception of that which is with- conducted in a way that was altogether soul, and a renovation of its vitiated and disordered faculties, ere it could be effectually dissipated. out, it is not enough that we have the power of vision among men; but, in addition to this, there must be a visibility in the trees, and the houses. and the mountains, and the living creatures, which are Low in the ordinary discernment of men. But, on the other hand, we may reverse the supposition. We may conceive an entire luminousness to be extended over the face of nature-while the faculty of sight was wanting among all the individuals of our species. In this case, the external light would be of as little avail towards our perception of any object at a distance from us, as the mere possession of the sense of seeing was in the former instance. Both must conspire to the effect of our being rendered conversant with the external world through the medium of the eye. And if the power of vision was not enough, without a visibility on the part of the things which are around as, by God saying let there be light-as little is their visibility enough, without the power of vision stamped as an endowment by the hand of God, on the creatures whom He has formed. Now we can conceive that both these defccts or disabilities, in the way of vision, may exist at the same time-or that all the world was dark, and that all the people in the world were blind. To emerge out of this condition-there must gradual that the light, for example, had its first weak glimmering; and that the eye, in the feebleness of its infancy, was not overcome by it that the light advanced with morning step to a clearer brilliancy; and that the eye, rendered able to bear it, multiplied the objects of its sight, and took in a wider range of perception-that the light shone at length unto the perfect day; and that the eye, with the last finish upon its properties and its powers, embraced the whole of that variety which lies within the present compass of human contemplation. We must see that if one of these processes be gradual, the other should be gradual also By shedding too strong a light upon weak eyes, we may overpower and extinguish them. By granting too weak a light to him who has strong eyes, we make the faculty outstrip the object of its exercise, and thus incur a waste of endowment. By attempering the one process to the other, we maintain, throughout all the stages, that harmony which is so abundantly manifested in the works of Nature and Providence, between man as he ac. tually is, and the circumstances by which man is actually surrounded. These preliminary statements will we trust be of some use for illustrating the progress, not of natural, but of spiritual light, along that vath which forms the suc. From this point then, the restoration of spiritual light to our benighted world takes its commencement-when Adam was utterly blind; and the canopy over his head, was palled in impenetrable darkness. To remove the one disability, was in itself to do nothing to remove the other disability was in itself to do nothing. Both must be removed, ere Adam could again see. Both may have been removed instantaneously; and by one fiat of Omnipotence, such a perfection of spiritual discernment may have been conferred on our first parents, and such a number of spiritual truths have been made by a direct communication from heaven to stand around him, as in a single moment would have ushered him into all the splendours of a full and finished revelation. But this has not been God's method in His dealings with a sinful world. Spiritual light and spiritual discernment, were not called forth to meet each other, in all the plenitude of an unclouded brilliancy, at the bidding of His immediate voice. The outward truth has been dealt out by a gradual process of revelation and the inward perception of it has been made to maintain a corresponding pace through a process equally gradual. A greater nurnber of spiritual objects has been introduced, from one time to another, into the field of visibility and the power of spiritual vision has from one age to another been made to vary and to increase along with them. cessive history of our world. Whatever | est character lay upon the first moments discernment Adam had of the things of in the history of sinful man; and which God in Paradise, the fall which he expe- required both light from Heaven upon his rienced was a fall into the very depths of the obscurity of midnight. The faculties he had in a state of innocence, made him able to perceive, that the Creator, who formed him, took pleasure in all that He had formed; and rejoiced over them so long as he saw that they were good. But when they ceased to be good, and became evil-when sin had crept into our world in the shape of a novelty as yet unheard, and as yet unprovided for-when the relation of man to his Maker was not merely altered, but utterly and diametrically reversed-when, from a loyal and affectionate friend, he had become at first a daring, and then a distrustful and affrighted rebel -Adam may, when a sense of integrity made all look bright and smiling and serene around him, have been visited from Heaven with the light of many high communications; nor could he feel at a loss to comprehend, how He, who was the Fountain of moral excellence, should cherish, with a Father's best and kindest regards, all those whom He had filled and beautified and blest with its unsullied emanations: But, after the gold had become dim, how He whose eye was an eye of unspotted holiness could look upon it with complacency-after the sentence had been incurred, how, while truth and unchangeableness were the attributes of God, it ever could be reversed by the lips of Him who pronounced it-after guilt with all its associated terrors had changed to the view of our first parents the aspect of the Divinity, how the light of His countenance should ever beam upon them again with an expression of love or tenderness-these were the mysteries which beset and closed and shrouded in thickest darkness, the understandings of those who had just passed out of innocence into sin. Till God made this first communication, there was no external light, to alleviate that despair and dreariness which followed the first visitation of a feeling so painful and so new as the consciousness of evil. And, if the agitations of the heart have any power to confuse and to unsettle the perceptions of the understanding if remorse and perplexity and fear, go to disturb the exercise of all our judging and all our discerning faculties-if, under the engrossment of one great and overwhelming apprehension, we can neither see with precision nor Those truths, which make up the body of our written revelation, may be regarded as so many objects, on which visibility has been conferred by so many successive communications of light from Heaven. They were at first few in number; and these few were offered to mankind, under the disguise of a rather vague and extended generality. The dawn of this external revelation, was marked by the solitary announcement, given to our outcast progenitors, that the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent. To this, other announcements were added in the progress of ages-and even the great truth, which lay enveloped in the very first of them, had a growing illumination cast upon it in the lapse of genebrightened into a more cheering and in contemplate with steadiness-above all, rations. The promise given to Adam, if, under the administration of a righteous God, there be a constant alliance between telligible hope, when renewed to Abraspiritual darkness and a sense of sin un- ham, in the shape of an assurance, that, pardoned or sin unexpiated-then may through one of his descendants, all the we be sure that an obscurity of the deep-families of the earth were to be blest; and dary lustre of types and of ceremonies- beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and and the constant accumulation of Prophe- the glory that should follow. Unto whom cy, with its visions every century becom- it was revealed, that not unto themselves, ing more distinct, and its veil becoming but unto us, they did minister the things more transparent and the personal com- which are now reported unto you, by to Jacob, that Shiloh was to be born, and that to Him the gathering of the people should be; and to Moses, that a great Prophet was to arise like unto himself; and to David, that one of his house was to sit upon his throne for ever; and to Isaiah, that one was to appear, who should be a light unto the Gentiles, and the salvation of all the ends of the earth; and to Daniel, that the Messiah was to be cut off, but not for himself, and that through Him reconciliation was to be made for iniquity, and an everlasting righteousness was to be brought in; and to John the Baptist, that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and the Prince of that kingdom was immediately to follow in the train of his own ministrations; and to the apostles in the days of our Saviour upon earth, that He with whom they companied was soon to be lifted up for the healing of the nations, and that all who looked to Him should live; and finally, to the apostles after the day of Pentecost, when, fraught with the full and explicit tidings of a world's atonement and a world's regeneration, they went forth with the doctrine of Christianity in its entire copiousness, and have transmitted it to future ages in a book, of which it has been said, that no man shall add thereto, and that no man shall take away from it. This forms but a faint and a feeble outline of that march, by which God's external revelation hath passed magnificently onwards, from the first days of our world, through the twilight of the patriarchal ages and the brightening of the Jewish dispensation, aided as it was by the secon blended with the truths of human experiencc-so solidly reared from the foundation of Jesus Christ and of Him crucified, into a superstructure at once firm and graceful and stately-so branching forth into all the utilities of moral and practical application-and, at length, from an argument bearing upon one great conclusion, so richly efflorescing into all the virtues and accomplishments which serve both to mark and to adorn the person of regenerated man-Such is the worth and the density and the copiousness of this epistle-that, did our power of vision keep pace at all with the number and the value of those spiritual lessons which abound in it, then indeed should we become the children of light, be rich in a wisdom that the world knoweth not, in a wisdom which is unto salvation. But the outward light by which an object is rendered visible is one thing-and the power of vision is another. That these two are not only distinct in respect of theoretical conception, but were also experimentally dist distinct from each other in the actual history of God's communications to the world, will, we trust, be made to appear from several passages of that revealed history in the Bible; and from one single appeal which we shall make to the experience of our hearers. The first passage is in 1 Peter i. 10-12. "Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you. Searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified munications of God manifest in the flesh, who opened His mouth amongst us, but still opened it in parables-insomuch that when He ascended from His disciples, He still left them in wonder and dimness and mystery-till, by the pouring forth of the Holy Spirit from the place which He had gone to occupy, the evidence of inspiration received its last and its mightiest enlargement, which is now open to all for the purpose of perusal, but so shut against every purpose of augmentation, that in this respect it may be said, its words are closed up and sealed to the time of the them that have preached the gospel unto you, with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into." This passage sets the old prophets before us in a very striking attitude. They positively did not know the meaning of their own prophecies. They were like men of dim and imperfect sight, whose hand was guided by some foreign power to the execution of a picture-and who, after it was finished, vainly attempted, by straining their eyes, to explain and to ascertain the subject of it. They were the transmitters of a light, which, at the same time, did not illuminate themselves. They uttered the word, or they put it down in writing, as it was given to them and then they searched by their own power, but searched in vain for the signification of it. They enquired diligently what the meaning of the Spirit could be, when it testified of the sufferings of Christ and the glory of Christ. But till that Spirit gave the which had arisen on the outward page of tration of the Holy Ghost-whose office it is to put into the mouths of prophets the things which are to be looked to and believed, and whose office also it is to put into the hearts of others the power of seeing and believing these things. And it serves clearly to mark the distinction between these two offices, that the prophets, alluded to in this passage, presented to the world a set of truths which they themselves did not understand-and that again the private disciples of Peter, who were not so learned as to be made the original and inspired authors of such a communication, were honoured with the far more valuable privilege of being made to understand it. This we think will appear still more clearly from another passage of the same apostle in 2 Peter i. 19-21. "We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day-star arise in your hearts. Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were noved by the Holy Ghost." No prophecy is of private interpretation. It was not suggested by the natural sense of him who uttered it and as little is it understood, or can it be explained, by the natural powers of the same person. He was the mere recipient of a higher influence; and he conveyed what he had thus received to the world-speaking not of his own will but just as he was moved by the Holy Ghost-and enabled to discern or to expound the meaning of what he had thus spoken, not of his own power, but just as the same Holy Ghost who gave him the materials of contemplation, gave him also the faculty of a just and true contemplaThe light of which he was barely the organ of transmission, shone in a dark place, so long as it shone upon the blind; and, not till the blind was made to see tion. not till the eyes of those, who were taking heed to the letter of the prophecy, were opened to perceive the life and meaning and spirit of the prophecy-not till that day which has dawned, and that day-star We cannot take leave of this passage, without adverting to the importance of that practical injunction which is contained in it. They who are still in darkness are called upon to look, and with earnestness too, to a particular quarter; and that is the word of God-and to do so until the power of vision was granted to them. If a blind man were desirous of beholding a landscape, and had the hope at the same time of having his sight miraculously restored to him, he might, even when blind, go to the right post of observation, and turn his face to the right direction, and thus wait for the recovery of that power which was extinguished. And, in like manner, we are all at the right post, when we are giving heed to our Bibles. We are all going through a right exercise, when, with the strenuous application of our natural powers, we are reading and pondering and comparing and remembering the words of the testimony and if asked, how long we should persevere in this employment, let us persevere in it with patience and prayer until, as Peter says, the day dawn and the day-star arise in our hearts. That John the Baptist should not know himself to have been he who was to come in the spirit and power of Elijah; and hence, in reply to the question Art thou Elias? should say that I am not-whereas our Saviour affirmed of him, that he was the Elias who should come-this ignorance of his may be as much due to the want of outward information about the point, as to any lack in the faculty of discernment. The same thing however can scarcely be said of his ignorance of the true character of the very Messiah whom he himself foretold-insomuch, that, though he had baptized him and attested him to be the Lamb of God, and had seen the Spirit descending upon him like a dove-yet he seems afterwards to have been so much startled by the obscurity of his circumstances, and by the style of his companionship which looked unsuitable to the character of a great Prince and Deliverer, that, in perplexity about the matter, he sent his disciples to Jesus to ask whether he was the person who should come or they had to look for another He laboured under such a disadvantage, | He made them see old things more clearly whether of darkness or of blindness about than before; and that, by a direct work the whole nature of the new dispensation, on the power of mental perception, He that though, in respect of light, he was greater than the greatest of the prophets, who had gone before him-yet, in the very same respect, he was less than the least in the kingdom of heaven; or less than the least enlightened of the Christian disciples who should come after him. The constant misapprehension of our Saviour's own immediate disciples, of which we read so much in the Gospels, was certainly due as much to their being blind as to their being in the dark to their defect in the power of seeing, as to any defect in the visibility of what was actually set before them. We read of our Saviour's sayings being hid from them, that they perceived notand of His dealing out the light of external truth to them, as their eyes were able to bear it and of His averring, in spite of all he had dealt out in the course of his personal ministrations upon earth, of His averring, at the close of these ministrations, that as yet they knew nothing, though if they had had the power of discernment, they might surely have learned much from what is now before us in the Gospels, and of which they were both the eye and the ear witnesses. We further read, that after the resurrection, when He met two of his disciples, and the eyes of their body were holden that they should not know Him, just as the eyes of their mind were holden that they should not know the things which were said in Moses and the prophets and all the Scriptures concerning Himself, they at length came to recognize His person-not by any additional light thrown upon the external object, but simply by their eyes being opened; and they also came to recognize Him in the Scriptures-not by any change or any addition to the word of their testimony, but simply by their understandings being opened to understand them. We also read of the descent of the Holy Ghost in the day of Pentecost-that event on which our Saviour set such an importance, as to make it more than an equivalent for His own presence in the way of teaching and enlightening the minds of his apostles. "If I go not away, He will not come unto you but if I depart, then Him who is not yet given, because I am not yet glorified, I will send unto you. And He will guide you into all truth, and take of my things, and show them unto you." There is no doubt that He showed them new things, which we have in the Epistles; and so made the light of external revelation shine more fully and brightly upon them. But there is as little doubt, that, in His office as a Revealer, brought them to their remembrance; and He made them skilful in the discernment of Scripture-a term applied exclusively at that time to the writings of the Old Testament; and He, not only cleared away the external darkness which rested on that part of Christian doctrine that was still unpromulgated, but He strengthened and purified that organ of discernment through which the light both of things new and old finds its way into the heart-insomuch that we know not two states of understanding which stand more decidedly contrasted with each other, than that of the apostles before, and of the same apostles after the resurrection-so that from being timid irresolute, confused, and altogether doubting and unsatisfied inquirers, they became the brave unshrinking and consistent ministers of a spiritual faith-looking back both on the writings of the Old Testament, and on our Saviour's conversations with other eyes than they had formerly, and enabled so to harmonize them all with their subsequent revelations, as to make them perceive an evangelical spirit and an evangelical meaning even in those earlier communications, which, of themselves, shed so dim and so feeble a lustre over the patriarchal and the prophetic ages. So that the office of the Holy Ghost with the apostles, was, not merely to show them things new respecting Christ, but to make them see things both new and old. The former of His functions, as we said before, has now ceased-nor have we reason to believe, that, during the whole currency of our present world, there will another article of doctrine or information be given to us, than what is already treasured up in the written and unalterable word of God's communications. But the latter function is still in full exercise. It did not cease with the apostolic age. The external revelation is completed. But, for the power of beholding aright the truths which it sets before us, we are just as dependent on the Holy Ghost as the apostles of old were. His miraculous gifts and His conveyances of additional doctrine are now over. But His whole work in the church of Christ is not nearly over. He has shed all the light that He ever will do over the field of revelation. But He has still to open the eyes of the blind; and, with every individual of the human race, has He to turn him from a natural man who cannot receive the things of the Spirit to a spiritual man by whom alone these things can be spiritually discerned. There is with many amongst us, an un |