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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 question-whether 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 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

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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 into 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 dif ference 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 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