the land of Canaan. These we have placed before you, and have endeavoured to draw your attention to them, not only as affording instances of the omnipotent power of God, but as illustrations of the spiritual care and provision which he manifests and makes for all his people. To them he also gave his divine law, the great standard of morality, of universal and perpetual obligation, the transcript of his own nature, and the foundation of man's duty to God and his neighbour. This also I have endeavoured to expound to you, and to enforce upon you, that you may ever make it the rule of your life and practice. Moreover, the Lord gave unto the Jews many special and peculiar ordinances, of which the most and the principal were appointments of sacrifices: and these were intended not merely as services and acts of religion, but as instructive intimations of the great truth of man's need of a propitiatory sacrifice, and shadowy representations of that atonement which it was in the mind and purpose of God to cause to be offered for the sins of the whole world. These I

have brought before you, and shewn you how they prefigured the various parts of the offices and work of the one great and glorious Redeemer. Among them the Lord was pleased also to raise up many extraordinary persons, who were not only distinguished in their own generation, and benefactors or examples to their countrymen, but were also typical, in their character and circumstances, of him, even the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom all their various excellencies are combined, and who is the great representative, prophet, high priest, and lawgiver of his chosen people. And thus through the wonders which were wrought for them, the law which was given them, the ordinances which were appointed to them, and the men of note who appeared among them, we have passed through the first four books of Moses, and have brought him, and the people whom he led, to the borders of the promised land. They are standing on the shores of the river Jordan, which was properly its boundary. They had conquered all that part of the country which lay on the eastern side of it,

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the side next to the wilderness, and there they now were, ready to pass over, and to take possession of the land which so many ages before had been given to their ancestors in promise. Their wanderings in the wilderness were about to cease, and they were on the point of entering into their expected rest. But Moses knew that it was not permitted to him to go into it: he was not to pass over Jordan, because in that rebellious murmuring of the people at Meribah in the desert of Zin, he sanctified not the Lord

God in their eyes. Knowing therefore that

his work was now ended, and that the future conducting of the people was confided to Joshua, he comes among them as it were to take his final leave of them, and to give them his last instructions, admonitions, and blessing. Here then the book of Deuteronomy begins. It is throughout, at least very nearly to the close, an address of this faithful servant of God to the children of Israel, to whom he had been the leader, lawgiver, and judge, through so many years. He recapitulates all the wonders, mercies, promises,

laws, precepts, and ordinances which God had given to them by him he goes over the whole of the preceding history in all its principal parts, from their exodus out of Egypt to the day on which he was speaking to them he reminds them of their various murmurings and rebellions; he exhorts them repeatedly, with the most pressing earnestness, and the strongest warnings, to keep the law which the Lord had given them, and to remain stedfast and faithful in his worship and service. From this circumstance the book has its name. It is called Deuteronomy, a word compounded of two Greek ones, which together signify the second law, because it contains a second declaration of the law by the mouth of Moses, and is in fact, as I have said, a repetition of the most important part of all that has preceded. At the end of the fortieth year from their coming out of Egypt Moses recounts, in the hearing of many who had not seen them with their own eyes, the great wonders which the Lord had done for them, the gracious covenant into which he had entered with them, the divine knowledge

of himself which he had taught them, the admirable precepts of the moral law which he had given them, and the various ordinances of the ceremonial law which he had enjoined upon them. The past had been indeed a most eventful period, every circumstance of which deserved to be kept by them in perpetual remembrance: and the present was a season both as respected the termination of their wanderings, and the close of his own life, which made the whole of his address most interesting and important to them. About to quit the charge which he had so long had over them, and to resign it to another, about to see them enter into the promised land of their rest, but not to enter into it with them, he impressively calls upon them to remember the Lord's doings, his promises, his laws, his precepts, his judgments, his mercies, and earnestly exhorts them to observe all the instructions which had been given them, to keep faithfully the law which God had appointed to him, to take warning by the rebellious spirit which their fathers and themselves had so often manifested and