of what is honest and what is unfair in the dealings of man with man. And just grant of any individual amongst them, that he is keenly alive to the injustice of others to himself, while, under the hurrying instigations of selfishness and passion, he works the very same injustice against them; and you make that individual a moral and an accountable being. We grant him to be sensible of what he ought to do, and thus make him the rightful subject of condemnation if he does it not. "For thinkest thou, O man, that judgest them who do these things, and doest them thyself, that thou wilt escape the judgment of God?" Even we therefore, unknowing as we are of the inward machinery of another's heart, can trace as it were an avenue by which the most unlettered barbarian might be approached in the way of judgment and retribution. And much more may we be sure, that God, who judgeth all things, will find a clear and open path to the fulfilment of the process that is here laid before us-summoning all to their account, without exception; and, from the farthest limits of the human territory, calling heathens to His jurisdiction, as well as Christian and Jews, and, under a law appropriate to each, dealing out the distributions of equity among the various families and denominations of the world. fact have been entitled to sit in judgment and superiority over him. It is observable, that, in this work of convincing the Jews of sin, the apostle fastens, in the first instance, on the more glaring and visible delinquencies from the law of righteousness as theft and adultery and sacrilege. He brings forth that which is fitted to strike conviction into the mind of a notorious transgressor; who, just because the evidence of his guilt is more palpable than that of others-just because the materials of his condemnation more immediately meet the eye of his own conscience-is, on that very account often more easily induced to take the first steps of that process which leads to reconciliation with the offended Lawgiver. And this is the reason, why it is said of publican and profligate persons, that they enter the kingdom of Heaven, before the Scribes and the Pharisees. But the apostle is not satisfied with convincing them only. Before he is done with his demonstration about the law, he enters into the very depths of it-even as the Saviour, in his sermon on the mount, did before him. It is possible to undergo the outward rite of circumcision, and not be circumcised in the spirit of our minds. And it is possible to maintain a conformity with all those requirements which bear on the external conduct, without having a heart touched by the love of God, or in any way animated by the principle of godliness. He does not end his demonstration of sinfulness, till he has completed it; and, while the first attack of his expostulation is directed against those who do the covert acts and wear the visible insignia of rebellion, he sends it with a penetrating force into the recesses of a more plausible and pleasing character-where, with nothing to deform or to shed a disgrace over the outward history, there may be a heart still uncircumcised out of all its affections to the creature, and utterly alive unto the world, and utterly dead unto God. In this passage, the apostle, after the gradual and skilful approaches which he had made for the purpose of finding his way to the Jewish understanding, at length breaks out into the warfare of open and proclaimed argument. He throws out his express challenge, and closes with his adversary-thus entering upon the main business of his Epistle, the great object of which was to bring over his own countrymen to the obedience of the faith. After affirming of the two great classes of mankind, that each was subject to a law of its own acknowledging; and after, upon this principle, having convicted the Gentile world of its being under sin-he addresses himself to the Israelite, and dexterously lays open the egregious folly of his confidence-a confidence resting, it would appear, not on his practice of the law, but barely on his possession of it-a satisfaction with himself, not for following the light, but simply for having the light -an arrogant sense of superiority to others, not in having obeyed the commandment, but just in having had the Now it is not merely true that your commandment delivered to him-thus sabbaths and your sacraments may be as turning into a matter of vanity, that which useless to you, as the rite of circumcision ought in fact to have aggravated his shame ever was to the Jews. It is not merely and condemnation; and bearing it proud-true that the whole ceremonial of Chrisly over others, who, had they acted up to tianity may be duly and regularly destheir more slender advantages, would incribed on your part, without praise or We conclude with two remarks, in the way of home and personal application, founded on the two senses given to the word letter as contrasted with the word spirit. The first sense that is given to the word letter, is the outward conformity to the law, which may be rendered apart from the inward principle of reverence regard for it. or without acceptance on the part of God. It is not merely true that worship may be held every day in your own houses, and your families be mustered at every recurring opportunity to close and unfailing attendance on the house of God. But it is also true, that all the moral honesties of life may be rendered; and, in the walks of honourable merchandise, there ever be attached to your name, the respect and confidence of all the righteous; and, foremost in the lists of philanthropy, every scheme connected with its cause may draw out from you the largest and most liberal ministrations: and even all this, so far from the mere facing of an outward exhibition, may emanate upon your visible doings, from the internal operation of a native regard for your brethren of the same species, and of a high-minded integrity in all your transactions with them. And yet one thing may be lacking. The circumcision of the heart may be that which you have no part in. All its longings may be towards the affairs and the enjoyments and the interests of mortality. Your taste is not to what is sordid, but to what is splendid in character; but still it is but an earthly and a perishable splendour. Your very virtues are but the virtues of the world. They have not upon them the impress of that saintliness which will bear to be transplanted into heaven. The present and the peopled region of sense on which you expatiate, you deck, it is true, with the lustre of many fine accomplishments; but they have neither the stamp nor the endurance of eternity: And, difficult as it was to convict the Hebrew of sin, robed in the sanctities of a revered and imposing ceremonial, it is at least a task of as great strenuousness to lay the humiliation of the gospel spirit upon him, who lives surrounded by the smiles and the applauses of society-or so to awaken the blindness, and circumcise the vanity of his heart, as to bring him down a humble supplicant at the footstool of mercy. to the righteousness of Christ, as that alone which is commensurate to the demands, and congenial with the holy character of the Lawgiver-not till, in the attitude of one whose breast is humbled out of all its proud complacencies, he receives the atonement of the gospel, and along with it receives a clean heart and a right spirit from the hand of his accepted Mediator-it is not till the period of such a transformation, when he is made the workmanship of God in Christ Jesus, that the true image of moral excellence which was obliterated from our species at the fall, comes to be restored to him, or that he is put in the way of attaining a resemblance to his Maker in righteousness and in true holiness. We meant to have added another remark founded on another sense of the word letter, which is the word of God as opposed to the Spirit of God. But we have no time to expatiate any further. Let us only observe that the apostle speaks both of the letter and Spirit of the New Testament. And certain it is, that, were we asked to fix on a living counterpart in the present day to the Jew of the passage now under consideration-it would be on him, who, thoroughly versant in all the phrases and dexterous in all the arguments of orthodoxy, is, without one affection of the old man circumcised and without one sanctified affection to mark him the new man in Christ Jesus our Lord, withal, a zealous and staunch and sturdy controversialist. He too rests in the form of sound words, and is confident that he is a light of the blind, and founds a complacency on knowledge though it be knowledge without love and without regeneration-nor can we think of any delusion more hazardous, and at the same time more humbling, than that by which a literal acquaintance with the gospel, and a literal adherence on the part of the understanding to all its truths and all its articles, may be confounded with the faith which is unto salvation. Faith is What turns the virtues of earth into an inlet to holy affections. Its primary splendid sins, is that nothing of God is office is to admit truth into the mind, but there. It is the want of this animating it is truth which impresses as well as breath, which impresses upon them all informs, The kingdom of God is neither the worthlessness of materialism. It is in word alone, nor in argument alone-it this which makes all the native loveliness is also in power; and while we bid you of our moral world of as little account, in look unto Jesus and be saved, it is such a the pure and spiritual reckoning of the look as will cause you to mourn and to upper sanctuary, as is a mere efflores- be in heaviness-it is such a look as will cence of beauty on the face of the vegeta-liken you to His image, and import into ble creation. It serves to adorn and even your own character the graces and the to sustain the interests of a fleeting gene- affections which adorn His. It is here ration. Verily it hath its reward. But that man finds himself at the limits of his not till, under a sense of nothingness and helplessness. He cannot summon into his of guilt, man hies him to the cross of breast that influence which will either expiation-not till, renouncing all right-circumcise its old tendencies, or plant eousness of his own, he flees for shelter new ones in its room. But the doctrine of Jesus Christ and of him crucified is the grand instrument for such a renovation; and he is at his post, and on the likely way of obtaining the clean heart and the right spirit, when, looking humbly and desirously to Jesus as all his salvation, he may at length experience the operation of faith working by love and yielding all manner of obedience. LECTURE VIII. ROMANS iii, 1, 2. "What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision? Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God." OUR reason for stopping at this part of our ordinary course, and coming forward with a dissertation on these verses, is that the subject of them seems to guide us to a decision, in a matter that has been somewhat obscured with the difficulties of a hidden speculation. You are aware that to whom much is given, of them much will be required; and the question then comes to be, whether is it better that that thing shall be given or withheld. The Jew, who sinned against the light of his revelation, will have a severer measure of retribution dealt out to him-than the Gentile who only sinned against the light of his own conscience; and the nations of Christendom who have been plied with the offers of the gospel, and put them needlessly and contemptuously away, will incur a darker doom throughout eternity -than the native of China, whose remoteness, while it shelters him from the light of the New Testament in this world, shelters him from the pain of its fulfilled denunciations in another; and he who sits a hearer under the most pure and faithful ministrations of the word of God, has more to answer for-than he who languishes under the lack either of arousing sermons, or of solemn and impressive ordinances; and neither will a righteous God deal so hardly with the members of a population, where reading is unknown, and the Bible remains an inaccessible rarity among the families-as of a population where schools have been multiplied for the behoof of all, and scholarship has descended and is diffused among the poorest of the commonwealth. And with these considerations, a shade of uncertainty appears to pass over the questionwhether the Christianization of a people ought at all to be meddled with. If the gospel of Jesus Christ only serve to exalt the moral and everlasting condition of the few who receive it, because to them it is the savour of life unto life; but serve also to aggravate the condition of those who reject it, because to them the savour of death unto death-whether should a nation now sitting in the darkness of Paganism, be approached with the overtures of the gospel? This is a doubt which has often been advanced, for the purpose of throwing discouragement and discredit on the enterprise of the missionaries; and though not on exactly the same principle, are there many still, who hesitate on the measure of spreading education among the peasantry. Altogether, it were desirable, in this age of benevolent enterprise, to know whether it is the part of benevolence to move in this matter, or to sit still and let the world remain stationary-leaving it to that milder treatment, and those gentler chastisements, which the guilt of man, when associated with the ignorance of man, will call down on the great day from the hand of Him who both judgeth and administers righteously. We think it must be obvious, to those whose minds have been at all disciplined into the soberness of wisdom and true philosophy, that, without an authoritative solution of this question from God Himself, we are really not in circumstances to determine it. We have not all the materials of the question before us. We know not how to state with the precision of arithmetic, what the addition is which knowledge confers upon the sufferings of disobedience; or how far an accepted gospel exalts the condition of him, who was before a stranger to it. We cannot balance the one against the other, or render to you any computation of the difference that there is between them. We cannot descend into hell; and there take the dimensions of that fiercer wrath and tribulation and anguish, which are laid on those who have incurred the guilt of a rejected Christianity-and neither can we ascend to heaven; and there calculate the heights of blessedness and joy, to which Christianity has raised the condition of those who have embraced it. It is all a matter of revelation on which side the difference lies; and he who is satisfied to be wise up to that which is written, and feels no wayward restlessness of ambition after the wisdom that is beyond it, will quietly repose upon the deliverance of Scripture on this subject; and never will the surmises or the speculations of an uninformed world, lay an obstacle on him, as he moves along the path of his plainly bidden obedience nor will all the hazards and uncertainties, which the human imagination shall conjure up from the brooding abyss of human ignorance, embarrass him in the execution of an obviously prescribed task. So that if in any way Christ must be preached; and if in the face of consequences, known or unknown, the knowledge of Him must be spread abroad to the uttermost; and if he be required, at this employment, to be instant in season and out of season, declaring unto all the way of salvation as he has opportunity-if these be the positive requirements of the Bible, then, whatever be the proportion which the blessings bear to the curses that he is the instrument of scattering on every side of him, enough for him that the authority of Heaven is the warrant of his exertions; and that, in making manifest the savour of the knowledge of the gospel in every place, he is unto God a sweet savour of Christ, both in them that are saved and in them that perish. "Go and preach the gospel to every creature under heaven," and "go unto all the world, and teach all nations." These parting words of our Saviour, ere He ascended to His Father, may not be enough to quell the anxieties of the speculative Christian; but they are quite enough to decide the course and the conduct of the practical Christian. To his mind, it sets the question of missions abroad, and also the question of schools and bibles and christianizing processes at home, most thoroughly at rest. And though the revelation of the New Testament had not advanced one step farther, on that else untrodden field, where all that misery and all that enjoyment which are the attendant results upon a declared gospel in the world might be surveyed and confronted together-yet would he count it his obligation simply to do the bidding of the word, though it had not met the whole of his appetite for information. But in the verses before us, we think it does advance this one step farther. It does appear to us, to enter on the question of profit and loss attendant on the possession of the oracles of God; and to decide, on the part of the former, that the advantage was much every way. And it is not for those individuals alone who reaped the benefit, that the apostle makes the calculation. He makes an abatement for the unbelief of all the others; and, balancing the difference, does he land us in a computation of clear gain to the whole people. And it bears importantly on this question, when we are thus told of a nation with whom we are historically acquainted, that it was better for them on the whole that they possessed the oracles of God. We may well venture to circulate these precious words among all people, when told of the most stiff-necked and rebellious people on earth, that, with all the abuse they made of their scriptures, these scriptures conferred not merely a glory, but a positive advantage on their nation. And yet what a fearful deduction from this advantage must have been made, by the wickedness that grew and gathered, and was handed down from one generation to another. If it be true of the majority of their kings, that they did evil in the sight of the Lord exceedingly; and if it be true that, with the light of revelation and amongst the warnings of prophecy, they often rioted amongst the abominations of idolatry beyond even all the nations that were around them; and if it be true that the page of Jewish history is far more blackened by the recorded atrocity and guilt of the nation, than ever it is illumed by the memorials of worth or of piety; and if it be true that, throughout the series of many centuries which rolled over the heads of the children of Israel, while they kept the name and existence of a community, there was an almost incessant combat between the anger of an offended God and the perverseness of a stout-hearted and rebellious people-insomuch that, after the varied discipline of famine and invasion and captivity had been tried for ages and found to be fruitless, the whole fabric of the Hebrew commonwealth had by one tremendous discharge of fury to be utterly swept away-It were hard to tell, what is the amount of aggravation upon all this sin, in that it was sin against the light of the oracles of God; but the apostle in the text has told us, that, let the amount be what it may, it was more than countervailed by the positive good done through these oracles: and comparatively few as the righteous men were who walked in the ordinances and commandments of the Lord blameless; and however thinly sown were those worthies of old dispensation, on whom the light that beamed from. Heaven shed the exalting influences of faith and godliness; and though the upright of the land were counted but in minorities and in remnants, throughout almost every period of the nation's progress from its beginning to its overthrow yet it serves to guide our estimate of comparison between the gain and the loss | dition of those who reject it, it is doubtof God's oracles in the midst of a country, less the instrument of working out for each when, with the undoubted fact of the few of them an increment of misery. But it who had been made holy on the one hand, does not change into wretchedness, that and the many on whom they fastened a which before was enjoyment. It only sorer condemnation upon the other, we makes the wretchedness more intense; are still told that the gain did preponde- and the whole amount of the evil that has rate that the Jews who had the Scrip- been rendered, is only to be computed by tures had an advantage over the Gentiles the difference in degree between the sufwho had them not-that any people are fering that is laid upon sin with, and sin better of having among them the instru- without the knowledge of the Saviour. ment which makes a man a child of light, We do not know how great the difference even though in its operation it should of misery is, to those many whose guil. stamp a deeper guilt upon ten men, and has been aggravated by the neglect of an make them more the children of hell than offered gospel; and we do not know how before-that all the means therefore, which to compare it arithmetically, with the in their direct and rightful tendency have change from positive misery to positive the effect to save and to enlighten human enjoyment, which is experienced by those souls, should be set most strenuously ago- few who have embraced the gospel. In ing, even though these means should be the midst of all this uncertainty, there is resisted; and it is impossible but this of- room and place in our minds for the posifence must come, and a deadlier woe will tive information of Scripture; and if we be inflicted on all through whom such an gather from it that it was better for the offence cometh. Should the fishers of Jews, in spite of all the deeper responsimen rescue a few from the abyss of na- bility and deeper consequent guilt which ture's guilt and nature's wretchedness, it their possession of the Old Testament laid would appear that in the work of doing so, upon the perverse and disobedient of the they may be the instruments of sinking nation, yet that a nett accession of gain many deeper into that abyss than if it had was thus rendered to the whole-then may never been disturbed or entered upon with we infer that any enterprise by which the such an operation. We have not the means Bible is more extensively circulated, or of instituting a comparison between the more extensively taught, is of positive quantity of good that is rendered by a small benefit to every neighbourhood which is number being entirely extricated from the the scene of such an operation. gulph of perdition, and the quantity of evil But secondly.-Though in the Jewish that ensues from a large number being history that has already elapsed, they were more profoundly immersed in it than be- the few to whom the oracles of God were fore. This is a secret which still lies in the a blessing, and the many to whom they womb of eternity; yet we cannot but were an additional condemnation—yet, on think that a partial disclosure has been the whole, did the good so predominate in made, and the veil is in part lifted away its amount over the evil, that it on the from it, by the deliverance of our apos- whole was for the better and not for the tle. At all events it clears away the worse that they possessed these oracles. practical difficulties which are attendant But the argument gathers in strength, as on a missionary or christianizing question, we look onward to futurity-as, aided by when we are here given to understand, the light of prophecy, we take a glimpse, that the Jews, with all the aggravations however faint and distant, of millennial consequent on sin, when it is sin in the days as we dwell upon the fact of the face of knowledge, were on the whole bet-universal prevalence that the gospel of ter in that they had the oracles of God. Let us now follow up these introductory views, with a few brief remarks both on the speculative and on the practical part of this question. First, then, as to the speculative part of it. The Bible, when brought into a new country, may be instrumental in saving the some who submit to its doctrine; and, in so doing, it saves them from an absolute condition of misery in which they were previously involved. It makes good to each of them, the difference that there is, between a state of great positive wretchedness and a state of great positive enjoyment. If along with this advantage to the few who receive it, it aggravates the con Jesus Christ is at length to reach to all the countries of the world-when we consider that all our present proportions shall at length be reversed; and that if Christians now be the few to the many, Christians then will be the many to the few. Even in this day of small things, the direct blessing which follows in the train of a circulated Bible and a proclaimed gospel, overbalances the incidental evil; and when we think of the latter-day glory which it ushers in-when we think of that secure and lasting establishment which in all likelihood it will at length arrive atwhen we compute the generations of that millennium which is awaiting a peopled and a cultivated world-when we try to |