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 the 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 of God's oracles in the midst of a country, when, with the undoubted fact of the few who had been made holy on the one hand, and the many on whom they fastened a sorer condemnation upon the other, we are still told that the gain did preponderate-that the Jews who had the Scriptures had an advantage over the Gentiles who had them not-that any people are better of having among them the instrument which makes a man a child of light, even though in its operation it should stamp a deeper guilt upon ten men, and make them more the children of hell than before -that all the means therefore, which in their direct and rightful tendency have the effect to save and to enlighten human souls, should be set most strenuously agoing, even though these means should be resisted; and it is impossible but this offence must come, and a deadlier woe will be inflicted on all through whom such an offence cometh. Should the fishers of men rescue a few from the abyss of nature's guilt and nature's wretchedness, it would appear that in the work of doing

so, they may be the instruments of sinking many deeper into that abyss than if it had never been disturbed or entered upon with such an operation. We have not the means of instituting a comparison between the quantity of good that is rendered by a small number being entirely extricated from the gulph of perdition, and the quantity of evil that ensues from a large number being more profoundly immersed in it than before. This is a secret which still lies in the womb of eternity; yet we cannot but think that a partial disclosure has been made, and the veil is in part lifted away from it, by the deliverance of our apostle. At all events it clears away the practical difficulties which are attendant on a missionary or christianzing question, when we are here given to understand, that the Jews, with all the aggravations consequent on sin, when it is sin in the face of knowledge, were on the whole better 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 condition of those who reject it, it is doubtless the instrument of working out for each of them an increment of misery. But it does not change into wretchedness, that which before was enjoyment. It only makes the wretchedness more intense; and the whole amount of the evil that has been rendered, is only to be computed by the difference in degree between the suffering that is laid upon sin with, and sin without the knowledge of the Saviour. We do not know how great the difference of misery is, to those many whose guilt has been aggravated by the neglect of an offered gospel; and we do not know how to compare it arithmetically, with the change from positive misery to positive enjoy. ment, which is experienced by those few who have embraced the gospel. In the midst of all this uncertainty, there is room and place in our minds for the positive information of Scripture; and if we gather from it that it was better for the Jews, in spite of all the deeper responsibility and deeper consequent guilt which their possession of the Old Testament laid upon the perverse and disobedient of the nation, yet that a nett accession of gain was thus rendered to the whole-then may we infer that any enterprise by which the Bible is more extensively circulated, or more extensively taught, is of positive benefit to every neighbourhood which is the scene of such an operation.

But secondly.-Though in the Jewish history

that has already elapsed, they were the few to whom the oracles of God were a blessing, and the many to whom they were an additional condemnation—yet, on the whole, did the good so predominate in its amount over the evil, that it on the whole was for the better and not for the worse that they possessed these oracles. But the argument gathers in strength, as we look onward to futurity-as, aided by the light of prophecy, we take a glimpse, however faint and distant, of millennial days-as we dwell upon the fact of the universal prevalence that the gospel of 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 at-when we compute the generations of that millennium which is awaiting a peopled and a cultivated world-when we try to fancy the magnificent results, which a labouring and progressive Christianity will then land inwho would shrink from the work of hastening it forward, because of a spectre conjured up from the abyss of human ignorance? Even did the