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THE RECEPTION OF CHRIST CONSEQUENT UPON BELIEF IN

MOSES.

REV. H. MELVILL, A.M.

CAMDEN CHAPEL, CAMBERWELL, JUNE 15, 1834.

"Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, ever Moses in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?"— JOHN, v. 45-47.

THE transactions of the day of judgment, as well as the joys and pains of the invisible world, can only be delineated to us under imagery, and by expressions, derived from our present state of being. We do not therefore feel bound to give a literal interpretation to the various statements of Scripture concerning it, though we are sure that the figures employed approach as nearly as consists with our condition whilst on earth, to realities overpassing description. It is thus in reference to the details of trial, when the whole human race shall be congregated at the tribunal of God. There is set before us all the ceremonial of one of our own courts of judicature: the judge is represented as taking his seat, and books are opened, out of which the indictment may be read; and witnesses are summoned, and the prisoners plead, and verdicts are pronounced, and then execution goes forward.

How far this judicial process shall be literally enacted we are not competent to decide but the great truth which we gather from such representations is, that in the awardments of the future there shall be a most rigid observance of justice; so that no sentence shall be given without the very nicest investigation, and none but on the principles of righteous impartiality. This indeed is the main thing pourtrayed by these sketches: and whether or no there will be any thing analagous to the proceedings of a human tribunal, is a point of little moment. But since these proceedings are made to furnish the imagery by which the transactions of the last day are depicted, we learn assuredly, that the retributive economy under which we are placed, will be wound up with an awful solemnity; and that with every verdict there will be given reasons which shall satisfy the intelligent creation.

But we learn yet more than this general truth, seeing that some important information must be conveyed by the minutest particulars. If we read of the opening of books and of the standing forth of witnesses, we may be sure there will be some testimony against the sinner, which he shall not himself be able to contradict; and that whether by the external evidence, or internal consciousness, he shall be forced to confess the sentence most equitable. It seems to us far enough from improbable, that the conscience of the sinner will be at the last

In the most extreme cases of recklessness and

his great and resistless accuser. hardihood, we have no right to speak of conscience as dead, but only as torpid. There is a state of suspended animation; but there is not a state of utter extinction. If you observe any thing of your own minds, you must know how singularly memory is often revived, so that words and occurrences which have been forgotten for years, will flash back upon you with all their first vividness. We are only stating a mental phenomenon, of which every one must have had some experience. It must I think have happened to all to observe, how some trifling incident, or some casual expression dropped in conversation, has awakened a train of recollections, so that things of which the remembrance seemed utterly to have perished, have crowded forward from the mind's chambers, and we have passed again through long forgotten scenes. It would seem as though a vast monitor slept in the cells of memory, however it may appear altogether obliterated; and that even a word or look may often have power to enter these cells, and awaken the slumbering images. And with this awakening of memory, there will be frequently an awakening of conscience; so that while actions, banished from the remembrance, force themselves again into notice, the monitor which God has placed in the breast, and clothed with power as his own vicegerent, will make a representation of the violence done to himself when the things thus suddenly remembered were committed. There would seem to be clear proof from experience, that conscience, as well as memory, may be thus resuscitated: for often a bold rebuke, or any mark of reprobation which is set upon him by the mass of his fellows, produces a sense of agony in the most hardened and abandoned; and thus, though he might overcome and put down the emotion, he is a witness to the residence of a principle in him, which may be paralyzed, and which may be deadened, but which cannot be extinguished by a long course of resistance. And if we can prove that memory and conscience may be both awakened, what an overwhelming thought is it that God may hereafter turn upon the sinner a resuscitating power, and so cause memory to reproduce every action, and conscience at the same time to determine its character. We can imagine no more formidable volume, than this of memory unfolding page after page of most accurate register, and thus presenting countless misdoings which have passed from the recollection of the perpretrator himself. And if conscience also be revived, so that it have all that power of remonstrance and reproach which belongs to it, till seared and wearied out, why there will be little need of any other accuser and judge: for as memory revives the forgotten offences, conscience will charge home their guilt on the offender.

We may not be warranted in advancing this as an explanation of what is told us respecting the books out of which we shall be judged; but we may maintain that if, at any time, even during our present existence, God were to revive memory, and re-endow conscience with supremacy, there would be acted in the individual case, something of that dread process of trial which is hereafter to embrace the whole of human kind. We can now see, that it is enough for memory to pour forth a train of forgotten occurrences, and conscience to pronounce upon each its authoritative decisions; and the stoutest transgressors would be shaken, and own, at least for a moment, they have deserved, and must expect, the wrath of their Creator. And if we suppose this revival of memory and conscience carried to the highest possible point, and taking place simul

taneously in the myriads of the disobedient, as they gather to judgment, why we believe this will agree with what there is delineated by the opening of the book, and the calling of witnesses; so that throughout the hosts of the rebellious there will be the reading of their own guiltiness, and the pronouncing of their own condemnation.

Now there is much in our text to suggest and corroborate all our foregoing remarks. Addressing himself to the Jews, who, notwithstanding the clear testimony of his miracles, refused to admit his pretensions to the Messiahship, Christ declared, he would not himself be their accuser to the Father, but that there was one who would accuse them, even Moses, in whom they trusted. He thus brings into reference the final judgment, that kind of imagery of which we have spoken, and represents witnesses as coming forward to accuse. There would be no necessity (he states) that his own evidence should be given, in order that the Jews might be convicted of infidelity: there were so clear attestations to his mission in the writings of Moses-writings received by the nation as inspired, and professedly reverenced as containing God's law-that all who would not acknowledge him as Christ, pronounced clearly their own condemnation. So that Moses, while he is exhibited as the future accuser of the unbelieving Jews, would in some sense come forward at the judgment, and deliver the testimony by which their infidelity would be proved inexcusable. This testimony was in fact already being delivered, though we can conceive that the whole utterance could belong only to the future. And if you observe, that the accuser will be the lawgiver in whom they trusted, you will perceive that the representation is in harmony with our supposition of the opening of the books of memory and conscience. The Jews trusted in Moses; and yet, as Christ declared, did not really believe his writings: hence they depended on external privileges, though all the while their conduct proves they knew nothing of what was demanded of them as the people of God. There must have been great forgetfulness of the elements of their religion, and a great stifling of the pleadings of conscience, ere they could have brought themselves to have trusted in a lawgiver whose laws they set at nought. Let, then, memory be awakened, so that neglected precept and disregraded prophecy shall force themselves into remembrance, and let conscience be reinstated in its dominiou, so that, as the precept and the prophecy come back, there shall be a reproachful witness how they have been despised and overlooked, and nothing more can be needed to the making these Jews confess their own worthlessness. Thus memory and conscience are revived to give sentence; and yet the figurative delineation may be that of our text, that Moses would accuse the Jews to the Father.

But we waive further reference to the last judgment, and proceed to the truth which the verses before us expressly set forth. We will examine, in the first place, into the somewhat strange assertion, that the believing Moses would be necessarily followed by the believing Christ. "Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me." In the second place, we will inquire into the force of the reasoning, that if the writings of Moses were not believed, neither would the words of Christ be believed: "If ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?"

I think there never can be a stronger witness to the intimate connexion between the Law and the Gospel, than that which is here given by the Redeemer himself. He makes it, you observe, a necessary consequence on men's believing Moses, that they should believe in himself as the long-promised Messiah. The Law and the Gospel must therefore be closely associated, as parts of the same system; or, the one must be the other more fully developed; else it could not necessarily hold good, that the two must be believed or disbelieved together. May I not take into my hand the five books of Moses, and thoroughly satisfy myself that God speaks by their author, and thus believe whatsoever these announce, and yet when I turn to the records of Christianity, fail to assure myself that they are equally divine? It is evident that Christ will not admit the possibility of such a case; he denies that Moses may be believed, and he himself disbelieved. And we think it worth your best attention, that the legal and Christian dispensations do each bear witness to the other; that their intimate connexion demonstrates the divine origin of both. This is the fact to which, as we suppose, the Saviour refers; and which, if rightly surveyed, is inexhaustible in evidence. If you consider the law as a system of types, and compare it with the Gospel as the antetype, it seems impossible to avoid being struck with the correspondence between the two. We are not now assuming the divinity of the Law, or the divinity of the Gospel: we merely take up the two documents, anxious to ascertain whether or no they bear reference to each other: and we are sure that any unprejudiced mind will confess, that they correspond with a wonderful precision. Amongst the many and singular figures of the Law, there is not one which does not find something answering to it, and explanatory of it, in the Gospel. The Gospel, in short, furnishes us with the character in which the Law is written, and thus, enables us to decipher the hieroglyphics: or, to vary our illustration, the law is as a curious and complicated piece of mechanism, with a thousand parts of which we can discover no use; but when you bring the Law into contact with the Gospel, all these thousand parts of the one fit in, as it were, into corresponding parts of the other: and we have before us a complete and magnificent construction. And we want to know how it could come to pass, that there should be this surprising agreement, how the one writing should explain the hieroglyphics of the other; or the two pieces of mechanism combined into one grand and symmetrical system? It must overpass the credulity of scepticism to believe, that the agreement is merely a chance, and that no Intelligent Cause wrought out the correspondence. If there were only here and there a point of resemblance-if, that is, the Gospel answered to the Law in none but a few solitary particulars, there might be something plausible in the idea, that the likeness was accidental; and we might not be compelled to recognise design. But when the correspondence may be traced in the minutest particulars-when it is the business of a life time to find out all the reciprocities, and the impossibility of a life-time to detect one disagreement, we are forced, if we would not do violence to common sense, to suppose an intentional similitude, and to believe that whoever constructed the Gospel, formed it for the purpose of adapting it to the Law.

Let us see, then, how this argument stands. We have assumed nothing as to the divine origin, either of the Law or the Gospel: we simply insist upon this incontrovertible fact, that the Law and the Gospel answer to each other with a

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most surprising and unvarying accuracy; so that they wear an appearance, which cannot be accidental, of having been formed for mutual illustration. It is this connexion between the two on which we fasten, and of which we seek some account. Those who founded the Christian dispensation, must, if impostors, have laboured to give plausibility to their system by assimilating it to the legal but in order to success, they must have possessed a most thorough acquaintance with every type and every figure of the Mosaic institution, and a most unbounded skill in giving substance to shadows: and of all the miracles which are proposed to our belief, this would, we think, be most difficult of admission. Treat Christianity as a cunningly-devised fable, and the great mystery is, how comes it to correspond so wondrously with the law. Even had the Apostles been the most learned Rabbis, we cannot believe that they would have attached a definite idea to every jot and tittle of the mysterious and Lurdensome ceremonies; or that if they had the idea, they would have been able to embody it into a new simple system. But when, in place of being the most learned Rabbis, it is matter of historical fact, that the Apostles were taken out of the lowest of the population, the difficulty of supposing Christianity f) be of human invention increases so immeasurably, that we know not how a reflecting mind can give it one moment's entertainment. We should like, for example, to see, a company of acute and scientific reasoners, but ignorant of Christianity, sit down to the study of the books of Leviticus and Exodus: they shall be told, "These books are full of types and emblems, and figures, and ceremonies, and you must strive to devise a simple religious system, which shall give significance to every item of this symbolic array: there are mysterious intimations," we will tell them, " in every page, couched in parabolic language, or under sacrificial institutions, and your endeavour must be to invent a scheme of theology which shall afford a plausible and rational explanation of all that is thus obscure." Now do you honestly think, that our company of ingenious and intelligent writers would make much way with their task? Can you believe that, as the result of their joint labours, there would be sent into the world any scheme of religion which should fix the plain meaning, or, at least, afford a clue to all the mysteries of the books of Exodus and Leviticus?

Yet this is precisely what is done by the system of Christianity; done with so unvarying a carefulness, that you cannot find a point to which there is nothing corresponding. The men, moreover, who effected this, were ignorant and illiterate, so that the books were compiled when there was none of those human appliances, which at best would but ensure the most limited success, What alternative, then, have we, but that of admitting a supernatural interference, and ascribing to God the whole system of Christianity? For our own part, we ask no clearer evidence of the truth of Christianity, than that derived from the correspondence between the Law and the Gospel. There is something so palpably hopeless in the attempt of constructing a religion, which shall be explanatory of all that is mysterious, illustrative of all that is obscure, expository of all that is figurative, in the Mosaic dispensation, that when I find such a religion proposed to my acceptance, there seems no option but that I hail it as divine. Neither is it necessary that I have a firm assurance that the Law is divine. It may facilitate my conclusion as to the divinity of the Gospel, that I bring such an assurance with me to the inquiry; but it is not indispensable,