GOD to dispense our instruction, there will be always something to remind us of the awful moments when our heavenly life began, and when it received its chief seals and augmentations; of the holy regenerating Font whereby we were made members of CHRIST; of the sacred seal of Confirmation, which gave us more and more of the strengthening SPIRIT; of our first Communion, and of the awful question, whether we are now as worthy to receive those unspeakable gifts as we were then.

All these things the services of the Church, duly used, bring continually into our minds; and they will not fail also to deepen in a thoughtful person the impressions which he has received from God's Providence over himself; from the turns of sickness and health, disappointment and success; from the loss or acquisition of dear kinsmen and friends. The Church, all our life long, will be to us like a high mountain in a day's journey; we shall feel that it is the same great object to us in age as in youth, only contemplated from a different side; and that it is still the token of an unutterable, unchangeable Presence. Old parental and pastoral sayings will recur perpetually with newer and fuller meanings, and our first impressions of the most holy words of Scripture will be very often brought to mind, in that deeper and graver sense, which the approach of death and judgment shows to be contained in them. Till at last,-when, we know not,Death and Judgment, will themselves arrive: the veil will be drawn up for ever, and the whole scheme of providential mercy, which we have been living under, shall be made known to us, to be looked into, loved, and adored, more and more, eternally.

This, we may humbly say, was what the ALL-MERCIFUL designed for us, when He caused us to be grafted into His holy Church. May it please HIM that the gracious design may not be made void by our sins, nor marred in any degree by our substituting personal and human preferences, choices of our own, for that one great and saving choice which He made for us before we could know! He chose us, we read, "from the beginning, unto salvation, through sanctification of the SPIRIT and belief of the truth." Can we choose better for ourselves? Nay, Christian brethren, let His choice be ours, both now and for

evermore.

SERMON CCLXI.

THE SHINING OF MOSES' FACE.

FOR THE TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

2 COR. iii. 16.

"When it shall turn to the LORD, the vail shall be taken away."

THIS verse relates to a very remarkable manifestation of the glory of GoD by Moses to the children of Israel, which first began at Mount Sinai, when they were waiting to receive the Two Tables of the Covenant at his hands, but seems to have continued afterwards, as long as he was alive to go in and out among them. You will find it in the latter part of the thirtyfourth chapter of Exodus.

When he came down from the Mount the second time, with the Two Tables of the Covenant in his hands, he "wist not that the skin of his face shone," or, as St. Paul writes it, "had become glorified," while God was talking with him. Forty days and forty nights he had been gazing upon the glory of the LORD: and as the mountains, and woods, and waters, and all the things that we see, receive brightness from the sun when he shines out upon them, and give back his rays, so that even those who have their backs to the sun, beholding the reflection of him from the things which are naturally dark, may form some notion how brightly and gloriously he is rising; so those who saw Moses when he came down from that unspeakable Presence, seeing the rays which streamed from his brow:-(it seems to have been a

kind of horned light, a token of the blessed Cross, wherewith all Christians are sealed in body and spirit:)-Aaron, I say, and the rest of the nobles of Israel, seeing the glory of that light, were amazed, somewhat in the same way as the people who saw our LORD after His Transfiguration: and they were afraid to come near Moses: whereupon he, till he had done speaking with them, put a veil over his face. And so the custom continued ever afterwards, that when he had been inquiring of the LORD for them, and had to report His messages to them, he put a veil over his face: but when he had again to draw near the LORD, to receive His commands for the people, then he took the veil away. "Till Moses had done speaking with them, he put a vail on his face; but when Moses went in before the LORD to speak with HIM, he took the vail off until he came out."

Now this is the very circumstance which St. Paul refers to in the text. He says that Moses, thus speaking to the Jews, was a figure of the Law or the Old Testament, speaking to those who have carnal or Jewish hearts. It has, as it were, a veil on its face: they cannot look to the end of it, that is, they cannot see JESUS CHRIST, who is the End of the Law, to whom every thing in the Old Testament points. Hiм they cannot see through the types and shadows, with which His holy Name is for a time wrapped up.

But when Moses turned to the LORD again, he took the veil off his face; and so says St. Paul in the text: when any one turns to the LORD JESUS CHRIST, presently "the vail is taken away:" when a Jew comes to have faith in CHRIST, and to read the Bible by the light of His glorious Gospel, the mist and darkness rolls off in great measure, which before wrapped up the old Prophecies. At present," even unto this day, remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament."

When Moses spoke of old to their Fathers, the veil was upon his face; but now when he is read to them, the veil is upon their hearts. In old time it was God's doing; the Scriptures were made obscure for a time on purpose, the Types and Prophecies could not be understood till their fulfilment: but it is now the Jews' own doing; it is their own perverseness, refusing to see CHRIST in their Scriptures. And as then Moses' face, so now

their hearts, must be turned towards the LORD CHRIST, before the veil can be taken away.

Thus St. Paul speaks; thinking, most likely, as in many other places, of his own history, and of God's dealings with him in particular. You know, in his early days, he was a sort of figure and type of the whole Jewish nation, in his great and bitter enmity to JESUS CHRIST: "how beyond measure he persecuted the Church of GoD and wasted it." Why? Because his face was not towards the Lord. When he read the Law, he saw only the outward sign; he knew nothing as yet of its end and hidden meaning.

But when our SAVIOUR, in compassion to his well-meaning but blind zeal, called to him from Heaven, and touched his heart by His grace; when he had embraced CHRIST's service, not for any earthly or visible reward, but with the earnest hope and certain expectation of suffering great things for His Name's sake: when St. Paul's heart had thus turned to the LORD, when he had embraced the Cross, and begun to taste its sweetness, then the scales fell from his eyes; then he saw the purpose and drift of the ceremonies and sacrifices, the Temple and Tabernacle, the crown on David's head, and the anointing oil on Aaron's; then he understood what that Zion is, which is to endure for ever, and how God might have an universal Church, and yet every promise to Israel, as His own peculiar people, be fulfilled: all this and more St. Paul understood, when he had turned to the LORD JESUS: till then, he could no more understand it than the children of Israel could see through the veil which Moses had put upon his face: they might see that there was something glorious, and so might he; but how glorious, and what in particular it signified, and how near it brought them to GOD, they could not yet know, for they could not yet know CHRIST; no more could St. Paul, nor the Jews of his time, as long as they refused to know HIм.

And here we must observe well, what " knowing CHRIST," and turning to HIM," mean in such places as these. It was not simply knowing that there was such a person, attending to what they heard and saw of HIM; in such a way they might and did know Him, as St. Paul himself says, only after the flesh: but to

know Him here means knowing HIM after His SPIRIT: “knowing HIM, and the Power of His Resurrection, and the Fellowship of His Sufferings, being made conformable unto His death;" and turning to HIM," means turning to His Cross; taking it up and following HIM. When a person had done this sincerely, he would find quite a new light break in upon places in the Old Testament, which before he had no true knowledge of.

He would learn what was meant by a lamb without spot or blemish, to be eaten with bitter herbs, having been first sacrificed to deliver the people by the sprinkling of its blood.

Again, he would understand the meaning of Circumcision; how it marked men as belonging to HIM, whom if we would serve, we must mortify all worldly and carnal lusts, and not think too much to cut off a right hand, or pluck out a right eye, if the good of our souls so require.

He would see why the people were fed with Manna, to signify the true Bread from Heaven, that is, the Body of CHRIST crucified, which only can maintain our spiritual life as we journey through the wilderness of this world.

He would understand why the Tabernacle and Temple had two parts, the Holy Place and the Most Holy, and why the Most Holy could only be entered once a year, and then not without blood: this, I say, St. Paul would understand when his heart came to be set on Heaven, on that Heaven which was purchased for us with Blood, and for which we must be prepared by tribulation. These are a few out of many instances which may help us to understand how the veil was taken away from the face of Moses, that is, from the Old Testament, when St. Paul, or any other Jew, was converted, and turned to the LORD CHRIST.

But does this saying apply to Jews only, and to the reading of the Old Testament only? or is it so, that we also, though we have been Christians many years, may have a veil upon our hearts, and that, in the reading of the New Testament as well as the Old, of the Gospel as well as of the Law, of St. Paul and the Epistles as well as of Moses and the Prophets? Surely it may be our case too; after all that has been done for us, we may but too easily, if we will, yet go on in stumbling and in ignorance; if we do not quite grope like the blind at noon-day, we may yet be but in a half waking sort of condition, like those who

VOL. VIII.