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sacred volume mutually furnish for each other. will not scruple to assert, that the most illiterate Christian, if he can but read his English Bible, and will take the pains to read it in this manner, will not only attain all that practical knowledge which is necessary to his salvation, but, by God's blessing, het will become learned in every thing relating to his religion in such a degree, that he will not be liable to be misled, either by the refined arguments, or by the false assertions of those who endeavour to engraft their own opinion upon the oracles of God. He may safely be ignorant of all philosophy, except what is to be learned from the sacred books; which, indeed, contain the highest philosophy adapted to the lowest apprehensions. He may safely remain ignorant of all history, except so much of the history of the first ages of the Jewish and of the Christian church, as is to be gathered from the canonical books of the Old and New Testament. Let him study these in the manner I recommend, and let him never cease to pray for the illumination of that Spirit, by which these books were dictated; and the whole compass of abstruse philosophy and recondite history, shall furnish no argument with which the perverse will of man shall be able to shake this learned Christian's faith. The Bible thus studied, will, indeed, prove to be what we Protestants esteem it, a certain and sufficient rule of faith and practice, a helmet of salvation, which alone may quench the fiery darts of the wicked. My text, I trust, will prove a striking instance of the truth of these assertions.

If, in argument with any of the false teachers of the present day, I were to allege this text of the Psalmist in proof of our Lord's divinity, my anta

gonist would probably reply, that our Lord is not once mentioned in the psalm; that the subject of the psalm is an assertion of the proper divinity of Jehovah, the God of the Israelites, as distinguished from the imaginary deities which the heathen worshipped. This psalm, therefore, which proposes Jehovah, the God of the Israelites, as the sole object of worship to men and angels, is alleged, he would say, to no purpose, in justification of worship paid to another person. And to any one, who might know nothing more of the true sense of this passage than may appear in the words taken by themselves, my adversary might seem to have the better in the argument. I think I should seem to myself to stand confuted, if I knew no more of the meaning of my text, or rather of the inspired song of which it makes a part, than an inattentive reader might collect from a hasty view of its general purport. But observe the references in the margin of the Bible, and you will find that a parallel passage occurs in the epistle to the Hebrews, in the first chapter at the sixth Turn to this passage of the epistle, and there you will find this text of the Psalmist cited by St. Paul to this very purpose; namely, to prove that adoration is due from the blessed angels of God to the onlybegotten Son; for thus he reasons: "When he bringeth in the First Begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the Angels of God worship him." The only passage in the Old Testament, as the Hebrew text now stands, is this seventh verse of the ninetyseventh psalm. The words of the Psalmist, indeed, are these: "Worship him, all ye gods." The apostle, that he might clearly exclude a plurality of gods, while he asserts the Godhead of the Son, thinks proper to explain the Psalmist's words, by substituting "all the

verse.

angels of God" for "all the gods." But it is very evident that the First Begotten was, in the apostle's judgment, the object of worship propounded by the Psalmist; otherwise, these words of the Psalmist, in which he calls upon the angels to worship Jehovah, were alleged to no purpose in proof of the Son's natural pre-eminence above the angels. For either the Son is the object of worship intended by the Psalmist, or the Son himself is to bear a part in the worship so universally enjoined.

But, further, the collation of the Psalmist's text with the apostle's citation, will not only enable the unlearned Christian to discover a sense of the Psalmist's words not very obvious in the words themselves, but it will also give him certain, although summary, information upon a point of ecclesiastical antiquity of great importance, upon which the illiterate cannot be informed by any other means. In the late attempts to revive the Ebionæan heresy, much stress has been laid, by the leaders of the impious confederacy, upon the opinions of the primitive church of Jerusalem. They tell you, with great confidence, that the Redeemer was never worshipped, nor his divinity acknowledged, by the members of that church. The assertion has, indeed, no other foundation but the ignorance of those who make it, who confound a miserable sect, which separated from the church of Jerusalem, with the church itself. But how is the truth of the fact to be proved to the illiterate Christian, unread in the history of the primitive ages, who yet must feel some alarm and disquietude when he is told, that he has been catechised in a faith never held by those first and best Christians, the converts of the apostles, among whom James, the brother of our Lord, was bishop.

Holy writ, if he is diligent in consulting it, will relieve his scruples, and remove his doubts, not only upon the principal matter in dispute, but upon this particular historical question. It must be obvious to every understanding, that when any passage of the Old Testament is cited by writers of the New, in confirmation of any particular doctrine, without any disquisition concerning the sense of the citation, or any attempt to fix a particular sense upon it which may suit the writer's purpose; it must be evident, I say, that a text thus cited, without any solicitude to settle its true meaning, was generally understood at the time by those to whom the argument was addressed. For a text alleged in any sense not generally admitted could be no proof to those who should be inclined to call in question the sense imposed. The Hebrews, therefore, to whom the apostle produces this text of the Psalmist in proof of the high dignity of the Redeemer's nature, agreed with the apostle concerning the sense of the Psalmist's words. They well understood that the Psalmist calls upon the angels to worship the only-begotten Son. And who were these Hebrews? The very name imports that they were Jews by birth: they were, indeed, the Jewish converts settled in Palestine. And since the epistle was written during St. Paul's first imprisonment at Rome, which might easily be made to appear from the epistle itself, and St. Paul's first imprisonment at Rome ended about the thirtieth year after our Lord's ascension, they were no other than the first race of Jewish Christians, who agreed with St. Paul that the Redeemer is the object of worship propounded to the angels by the Psalmist. And thus, by this plain remark, and by the authority of the sacred books, the

unlearned Christian may settle his own mind, and put to shame and silence the disturbers of his faith.

But this is not the whole of the information which the unlearned Christian may draw from the Psalmist's text, compared with the apostle's citation. The apostle cites the Psalmist's words as spoken when the First Begotten was introduced into the world, that is to say, to mankind; for the word, in the original, literally signifies not the universe, for in that world the First Begotten ever was from its first formation, but this globe, which is inhabited by men, to which the First Begotten was in these later ages introduced by the promulgation of the Gospel. Now, since the occasion upon which these words were spoken was an introduction of the First Begotten into the world, if these words are nowhere to be found but in the ninetyseventh psalm, it follows that this ninety-seventh psalm is that introduction of the First Begotten into the world of which the apostle speaks. -Hence the unlearned Christian may derive this useful information, that the true subject of the ninety-seventh psalm, as it was understood by St. Paul and by the church of Jerusalem, to which this epistle is addressed, within thirty years after our Lord's ascension, when that church must have been entirely composed of our Lord's own followers and the immediate converts of the apostles, was not, as it might seem to any one not deeply versed in the prophetic language, an assertion of God's natural dominion over the universe, but a prophecy of the establishment of the Messiah's kingdom by the preaching of the Gospel, and the general conversion of idolaters to the service of the true God. The First Begotten is the Lord, or rather the Jehovah, for that is the word used in the original, whose king