what is very remarkable, he communicated the Holy Ghost to his disciples under the outward sign of breathing upon them.

In the invisible kingdom of God, there is a sun of righteousness which rises upon a world that lieth in darkness; raising up the dead to a new life, and restoring all that sin and death had destroyed. So doth the visible world present to us the great luminary of the day, whose operations are in all respects like to those of the sun of righteousness. In the morning it prevails over darkness, and in the spring it restores the face of Nature.

When the scriptures say that the powers of the word and spirit of God are necessary to the souls of men; they say no more than what the most scrupulous philosophy must admit in regard to their bodies: for certainly mankind cannot subsist without the sun and the air. They must have light, to live by as well as to see by; and they must have breath, without which they can neither live, nor ́speak, nor hear.

We are to argue farther; that as we must suppose a sun to shine before we can suppose a man to exist upon earth: so, by parity of reason, the divine light was pre-existent to all those who are saved by it: and to presume

that

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that Jesus Christ, who is that light, is only a man like ourselves, is as false in divinity, as it would be false in philosophy to report the sun in the heavens as a thing of yesterday, and formed like ourselves put of the dust of the ground. Doth not philosophy teach us, that the elementary powers of light and air are in nature supreme and sovereign? for, is there any thing above them? Is there a sun above the sun that rules the day; and is there a spirit above the wind that gives us breath? therefore, so are the persons of Christ and the Holy Ghost supreme and divine in the invisible kingdom of God. If not, it must lead us into idolatry and blasphemy, when we see them represented to us in the scripture by these sovereign powers in nature. God is Light, and God is a Spirit; therefore, that person who is called the Spirit must be divine; and Jesus Christ who is the true Light must be the true God.

Wheresoever we go in divinity, thither will philosophy still follow us as a faithful witness.. For if we are assured by revelation, that there is a power of divine justice to execute vengeance on the enemies of God, and which shall destroy with a fearful destruction the ungodly and impenitent whenever it shall

reach

Sacrifices

reach them: we find in nature the irresistible power of fire, which dissipates and destroys what it acts upon, and which in many instances hath been applied as the instrument of vengeance upon wicked men. were consumed by fire, to signify that wrath from heaven is due to sin, and would fall upon the sinful offerer himself, if the victim did not receive it for him by substitution. When the law was given on Mount Sinai, the heavens flamed with fire, and the mountain burned below, to give the people a sense of the terrors of divine judgment. With allusion to which exhibition, and other examples of the actual effects of his wrath, God is said to be a consuming fire: and happy are they who regard the power of it, and flee from it, as Lot and his family fled from the flames of Sodom.

IV. Another doctrine, peculiar to the scripture, is, the danger to which we are exposed in our religious capacity from the malignity and power of the Devil; whose works are manifest, though he himself is invisible. But -the natural creation bears witness to his existence, and to all his evil properties; where the wisdom of God hath set before us that creature the Serpent, a singular phænomenon

of

of the same kind; whose bite diffuses death so suddenly and miraculously through the body, that he may be said, in comparison of all other creatures, to have the power of death. He is double tongued and insidious; often undiscovered till he has given the fatal wound. In a word, he is such a pattern of the invisible adversary of mankind, who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, that the hieroglyphical language of the Bible speaks of him in the history of the first temptation, under the name of the Serpent. The wicked who are related to him as his seed or children, are called a generation of vipers; by which figurative phrase it is literally meant, that they were of their father the Devil.

In the modern systems and schemes of those who affect the philosophical character, we are not always sure of finding a God: but we are sure never to find a Devil: for as the Heathens of old offered sacrifices to him without understanding that they did so; in like manner do some people of these days work under him without knowing him. Yet certainly, the scripture, by its application of the word Serpent to the Tempter who brought Sin and Death into the world, hath referred us to the natural creation for the properties

VOL. VI.

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of the Serpent-kind: and from those properties every naturalist may learn what the Devil is, and what we have to fear from him, more accurately and effectually than any words can teach. What he finds in the natural Serpent he must apply to another invisible Serpent, who can think and reason and dispute the veracity of God; which the common Serpent never could. How came so fearful and cursed a creature into the works of God? Certainly for the wisest end: that men might understand and abhor and avoid the enemy of their salvation. The world was made, as the Scriptures were written, for our learning; and unless the Serpent were found in it, there would be a blank in the creation, and we should have been to seek for some ideas, which are of the last importance to the mind of man.

Other ideas, nearly related, may indeed be collected from the contrariety between light and darkness; with their figurative alliance to moral good and evil. The power of Satan hath the like effect on men's souls as 'darkness hath upon their bodies; and the scripture calls it the power of darkness. If the enemies of God's religion are called the seed of the Serpent, in opposition to the sons of God; so

are