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evening; I mean the fact of the Old Law having been expressly a written law; while, at the same time, most essential doctrines existing among the Jews at the time of our Saviour, and often assumed by Him as the very basis of His preaching to them, had not been delivered in the law, nay, were scarcely clearly recorded in the prophets, and must, therefore, have been handed down by secret and unwritten tradition.

I proceed now to the first portion of my task, which forms the completion and development of that idea, by explaining the strong arguments of analogy which the Old Law gives us, for constructing the Church to be by Christ established. And you will bear with me if I first propose some preliminary observations.

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St Paul has described the glorious triad of virtues, whereby man is brought into union with God, when he says: now there remaineth faith, hope, charity, these are three."* And if you will reasonably consider this matter, you will, methinks, hardly fail to observe that threefold, according to the number of virtues here rehearsed, are the stages whereby it hath pleased Divine Providence to accomplish its designs in behalf of man, and to bring him to that sum of perfection, whereof he is capable.

The first state was that of hope, in the dispensation given to the fathers; wherein, as divided into its three eras of promise, of prophecy, and of silent expectation, all was referred to the future, and every other virtue was in some way embraced and comprehended in this one. For if they believed, their faith should seem to have been a disposition and readiness to believe one day the teacher whom God had promised, and in the fulness of time should give unto his people, after whose manifestation their just, did pant as the hart after the watersprings, rather than a clear apprehension of what we justly consider the great mysteries of salvation. And hence it is that St Paul, speaking of the peculiar faith of some among them, and how difficult it was, doth tell us in express words

* 1 Cor. xiii. 13.

that "against hope they believed in hope."* And so likewise in hope may they be said to have loved, inasmuch, as their love or charity was but a wistfulness and longing after God's coming to them in the flesh, that so they might stand in His blessed presence, a treasuring up and deep embosoming, as it were, of the affections for a future outburst of the same, when the sum of His mercies should be cast up in their behalf; and not a clear and distinct sense of His beauty and loveliness, or any anxious yearnings after union with Him, whose light inaccessible had hitherto rather dazzled and oppressed, than invited and cheered them. Thus it came to pass, that all the doctrines and rites proposed to them wore their looks, in a manner, towards the dawn and day-spring of a brighter season, that their teaching was all in prophecy, their history all in types, their worship all in symbols, and by a just analogy their righteousness all in hope.

Next came the ministration of faith, wherein it is our happiness to live, in which much of what then was future now is past, and most of what was then but hoped for, is now believed: and every other good gift, and virtue is, somehow, exercised through this one, which to us is the root and nourisher of them all. For, if great part of former hope hath been swallowed up in us by faith, that which remaineth unto us of this virtue consists no longer in dark adumbrations and mysterious images, but in objects proposed to us definitely, though dimly, by faith and in faith, with clear and express conditions, and subject to no farther varieties or distincter revelations.

And charity too in our regard reaches us in the same manner. For if the glorious things of God are seen by us, as St Paul saith, but darkly in the glass of faith, yet hath this glass a concentrating power which makes their rays converge nto one point, and play upon our innermost soul, with a warming, as well as a brightening, influence; and the difference between us and those of the older dispensation is briefly this,

*Rom. iv. 18.

that the revelation of a final state, wherein God should be the soul's full possession, shone to them as a distant light in a dark place towards which indeed they might direct their course, but by which they could hardly guide their steps; whereas to us it is a lamp, as well as a beacon, the cheerer, as well as the aim, of our toilsome pilgrimage.

And then at last will come that final state of blessedness. when faith and hope will be entirely swallowed up in boundless and endless charity; when the "light intellectual full of love" shall reabsorb and quench, in its peerless brightness, the scattered beams it had before suffered to wander upon earth; when every other good and holy thing shall melt and be transmuted in that one assimilating, unifying essence; and, like dew-drops which have refreshed us in the morning, and then have been caught up by some heaving swell of the ocean-tide, though small and imperfect, shall become the elements of the unlimited and eternal.

We, thus, are placed in a middle state, between one past and one that is yet to come, a state necessarily intended as the completion of the former, and as a preparation for the latter, whereof the type is shadowed forth in that which hath preceded, while itself is the emblem and fair image of that which shall follow. Now, this position must give rise to many interesting analogies; forasmuch, as all things being thus in un-. broken progress from the beginning to the end of God's dispensations, without violent shocks or sudden changes, we must expect to find, in the present order or state, such qualities and dispositions, as may suit this its twofold character, that is to say, perfective of a former, and initiatory of a future state. And even as a skilful geometer shall, by the accurate measurement of a shadow, under certain conditions, tell you exactly the height and proportions of the object which projects it, and, again, from the survey of this, shall define what the other should at any time be, so may we by a diligent study of those two other dispensations as well as of our own, the one whereof we are the fulfilment, the other whereof we are the figure,

arrive at much important knowledge regarding the condition of our present estate. For the present, my theme confines me to the evidences of the past; how the present dispensation may be the image of the future state, I may yet find a fitting occasion to declare.

A promise of redemption was the first good word spoken to man by God, after his original sentence of punishment; and this word of hope fell as a seed upon a soil that craved it, and it grew therein and brought forth fruits, the only ones which could remind the exile of his lost paradise, fruits of holy knowledge and restored life, to be one day tasted without further danger. And as the different families of the human race did separate from their first dwelling place after the flood, and disperse into distant lands, each took with it some graft or seedling of this precious plant, as a memorial of its lost, and of its hoped-for destinies, and bequeathed it to its descendants as a sacred and priceless trust. In fact, there is no mythology so dark as not to promise the restoration of some forfeited golden age; and a heathen fable has recorded to us the belief, that of all the treasures which heaven bestowed upon him at his formation, hope was alone left to forlorn man, when he lost them by his folly. But how soon were all these divine promises disfigured and corrupted; how soon was their true purport clean forgotten; how completely did they degenerate into the fond inventions of men, and fall into the wicked subserviency of all their worst desires! And, hence, whatever were the benefits intended by God's goodness in giving this entailed blessing to the human race, all those benefits would have been inevitably lost, the goodness which designed them would have been thrown away, and the blessing itself would have been but as a prodigal's gift, if God's infinite wisdom had not provided an expedient against such a sad misfortune.

For this purpose, He chose out of all the nations of the earth, one people whom He made the keeper of His great deposit; He separated them from among the rest, He made them the sacerdotal caste of the human race, He surrounded them

with badges of His protection, and of His special watchfulness over them, He gave into their hands documents of their authority to teach; and then, placing the rest of mankind, no matter how learned or how polished, in the rank of untaught scholars, He left them to receive from those alone, all accurate knowledge of what concerned holier truths and purer revelations. Then, as all those organs in animate or inanimate nature, which have to perform notable functions, are themselves composite, being made up of smaller organs like themselves, and these again involving within them an ever decreasing compound series, so here also, out of this people he chose one tribe, and out of that tribe one family, and from that family one man and his line; that each should respectively stand towards the class whence chosen in the same superior relationship: and so the connecting band should be drawn spirally round from mankind to the sanctuary, and the saving influences which blessed God's promises past, through still widening channels, upon the world.

From this it would appear, that the means taken by God's wisdom for preserving those doctrines of hope which He had communicated unto mankind, was to institute a visible and compact society within which He, virtually, guaranteed their perseverance, and over which He watched with tender solicitude: and we see that His action upon this body was not detailed upon each individual, but was through a more select order of men, constituting a graduated hierarchy, whose duty it was to edify by example, to purify by sacrifice, to instruct by explanations of the law, to stand in fine between God and His people, ministering unto both, as His chosen servants, and their appointed teachers. The objects of this internal organization could only be the preservation of essential unity of worship and of heart. Reuben was obliged yearly to come from beyond the Jordan, and Zabulon from over the mountains, and both to worship with their brethren, at one altar, in Jerusalem; lest new opinions or rites should creep in among them,

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