Heathens to be broken down at last, and is the true religion to be carried out amongst all nations? So was our tabernacle brought from the solitary wilderness under Joshua, whom the Greeks call Jesus, into the possession of the Gentiles. Numberless other questións might be asked, shocking to the prejudices of a Jew, which would bring their own answers with them out of the law of Moses: and such was the use the Jew ought to have made of it. From the various applications, of particular passages from the law, previous to the revelation of the gospel, it appears that the law was in itself a spiritual as well as a figurative system, for the forming of the heart, and the purifying of the mind; yet conveying its precepts in parables and signs which wanted an interpretation: and that interpretation is occasionally dropped in so many parts of the scripture, especially in the Psalms, that the prophets and masters of Israel appear to have understood the law in a spiritual sense. If the bulk of the people did not understand it so, we must not impute this to any uncertainty or obscurity in Moses and the prophets, but to that carnal affection which naturally chuses the form of religion without the spirit of it. Their pride, their affectation of false wisdom, their avarice, their adultery, blinded them, them, and made them as averse to the sense of a miracle wrought before their eyes, as to the sense of the darkest verse in the Pentateuch. The world always has been, and now is, to those that are shut up under its laws, a schoolmaster to turn men away from Christ; and a conceited worldly-minded Christian, proud of the powers of reason without grace, is at this hour as blind to the spirit of the gospel as the Jew ever was to that of the law. For ignorance of the true spirit of Christianity, and the design of its doctrines, I would match the modern philosophising Socinian with the blindest Jew: for the one has made the gospel as void as the other made the law. Read the writings of some whose books have made a great noise in the present century, and you will know no more of the Christian church and the Christian sacraments, than the wandering Jew, who now travels about to cheat Christians with his wares, knows of the priesthood and sacrifices in the books of Moses. The law is of use to us Christians for the illustration of the new testament, whose language and mysteries are so founded upon it, that the language of the gospels and epistles is unintelligible without a particular attention to the law; and in proportion as our knowledge of it en creases, 1 creases, our faith will grow stronger. Thus the law serves for evidence both to the Jew and Gentile; and the same schoolmaster, which should have brought them to Christ, will keep us with him. For, did the apostle in his preaching say nothing but what Moses had said? And did the gospel teach nothing but what the law had signified long before? Then must the gospel be that very salvation, which was known to God from the beginning, and in reserve to be made manifest to the world in the latter days. This argument, clear and irresistible as it certainly is, will one day appear to the Jews as it does to us; when the scales of blindness shall fall from their eyes: and then it may be thought the greatest wonder of all, that they who had the old testament in their hands for eighteen hundred years, should never have seen the use of it before. LECT. LECTURE VI. ON THE FIGURES OF THE SCRIPTURES WHICH ARE BORROWED FROM THE EVENTS OF THE SACRED HISTORY. THE Scripture is the authentic history of God's Providence ever since man had a being; and in the conduct of God's Providence toward man, there is an uniformity of design, which hath proceeded according to the same laws of eternal justice and wisdom in all ages of the world: from which consideration it follows, that what God did in times past was an earnest, a pattern, and a sign, of what he might be expected to do in times to come. The godly were delivered, the wicked punished, the proud abased, the humble exalted, under like circumstances and after like forms at different periods periods of time. Thus it hath been, and thus it will be therefore things past are referred to in the scripture as figures of things to come, and so the history of the bible becomes a chain of prophecy, and is actually applied as such by the scripture itself; as we shall see from a variety of examples. I reckon 'two sorts of historical figures, the one general, the other particular; the former being references to the history of places, and of such events as related to a people at large, or even to the whole world; the latter referring us to the lives, actions, sufferings and successes of individual persons. Thus the saints of old were prophetical in their actions as well as in. their words of which some striking examples will occur to us as we proceed. : One of the most early and memorable events of the Scripture is that of the destruction of the world by the Flood; from which Noah and his family were saved in an Ark, supported by those same waters which destroyed the world of the ungodly. This history of the Salvation of Noah is applied by St. Peter as a figure of that Salvation which we now obtain as the family of Jesus Christ in the Ark of the Church by the waters of Baptism: the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was |