;$8 
 

 LIBEAEY 
 
 
 OP THE 
 
 Theological Seminary, 
 
 < 
 
 PRINCETON, N.J. 
 
 BR 45 .H84 1832 
 Blunt, John J. 1794-1855 
 Principles for the proper- 
 understanding of the Mosaic 
 
 2 
 
 
HULSEAN LECTURES 
 
 FOR THE YEAR 1832. 
 PRINCIPLES 
 
 FOR. 
 
 THE PROPER UNDERSTANDING 
 
 OF 
 
 THE MOSAIC WRITINGS 
 
 STATED AND APPLIED ; 
 
 TOGETHER WITH 
 
 AN INCIDENTAL ARGUMENT 
 
 FOR THE TRUTH OF 
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD. 
 
 / 
 
 BY THE REV. J. J. BLUNT, 
 
 FELLOW OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 LONDON: 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1833. 
 
G. WOODFALL, angei. court, skinner strket, londox. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The first seven of the following Lectures 
 are upon questions arising out of the Mosaic 
 writings. They are treated upon their own 
 merits, though with a reference to a popular 
 " History of the Jews " which appeared no 
 long time ago, and of which I thought the 
 views on these points erroneous. Probably 
 the remaining Lecture would have applied 
 to the same portion of scripture ; but as one 
 of the Sundays on which the Lectures were 
 delivered happened to be Easter Sunday, it 
 appeared to be due to that great festival to 
 choose a subject appropriate to it, and ac- 
 cordingly the eighth Lecture is an argument 
 
IV PREFACE. 
 
 for the truth of the Resurrection of our Lord, 
 as a matter of fact. 
 
 On the resignation of the office of Lecturer 
 I have to repeat my acknowledgements to 
 the Trustees under Mr. Hulse's will for their 
 acceptance of my services a second year. 
 
SUBSTANCE OF CERTAIN CLAUSES IN THE WILL 
 OF THE REV. J. HULSE, M.A. 
 
 [Dated July 21, 17770 
 
 He founds a Lectureship in the University of Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 The Lecturer to be a ' Clergyman in the University 
 of Cambridge, of the degree of Master of Arts, and 
 under the age of forty years.' He is to be elected 
 annually ' on Christmas-day, or within seven days 
 after, by the Vice-Chancellor for the time being, and 
 by the Master of Trinity College, and the Master of 
 St. John's College, or any two of them.' In case the 
 Master of Trinity, or the Master of St. John's, be the 
 Vice-Chancellor, the Greek Professor is to be the third 
 Trustee. 
 
 The duty of the said Lecturer is, by the Will, ' to 
 preach twenty Sermons in the whole year,' at ' Saint 
 Mary Great Church in Cambridge ;' but the number 
 having been found inconvenient, application was made 
 to the Court of Chancery for leave to reduce it, and 
 eight Sermons only are now required. These are to 
 be printed at the Preacher's expense, within twelve 
 months after the delivery of the last Sermon ; and the 
 present volume is the second that has appeared under 
 the new regulations. 
 
 The subject of the Lectures is to be ' the Evidence 
 
VI CERTAIN CLAUSES. 
 
 for Revealed Religion ; the Truth and Excellence of 
 Christianity ; Prophecies and Miracles ; direct or col- 
 lateral Proofs of the Christian Religion, especially the 
 collateral arguments ; the more difficult texts, or ob- 
 scure parts of the Holy Scriptures ;' or any one, or 
 more of these topics, at the discretion of the Preacher. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 GENERAL EXPECTATION OF THE MESSIAH. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Ll t ke xxiv. 27. — And beginning at Moses and all 
 the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the 
 Scriptures the things concerning himself. 1 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE CASE OF ABRAHAM CONSIDERED. 
 
 John viii. 56. — Your Father Abraham rejoiced to 
 see my day, and he saw it and was glad 32 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE CASE OF JACOB AND ESAU CONSIDERED. 
 
 Hebrews xi. 20. — By faith Isaac blessed Jacob 
 and Esau concerning things to come 65 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 Jacob's prophecy concerning simeon and levi 
 considered. 
 
 Genesis xlix. 7. — Cursed be their anger for it 
 was fierce, and their wrath for it was cruel. I will 
 divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel... 94 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE PATRIARCHS VINDICATED. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Exodus hi. 6. — I am the God of thy Father, the 
 God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God 
 of Jacob 119 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF THE MOSAICAL LAW. 
 
 Psalm i. 2. — His delight is in the law of the Lord, 
 and in his law doth he meditate day and night. ... 147 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 CREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES. 
 
 Psalm cxi. 2. — The works of the Lord are great, 
 sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. 177 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 INCIDENTAL EVIDENCE OF THE RESURRECTION OF OUR 
 LORD. 
 
 1 Cor. xv. 14. — If Christ be not risen, then is our 
 preaching vain, and your faith is also vain 212 
 
HULSEAN LECTURES 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 general expectation of the messiah. 
 
 Luke xxiv. 27. 
 And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he ex- 
 pounded unto them in all the /Scriptures the things 
 concerning himself. 
 
 The true key to the writings of the Old 
 Testament, as well as of the New, is the 
 doctrine of a Redeemer ; a principle which, 
 as I shall apply it in several of my future 
 sermons, I will now endeavour to establish 
 once for all. Not that I hereby affect to 
 propound any new thing, for it is a doctrine 
 which was scarcely disputed in the best ages 
 of the Church, and in some ages was carried 
 even to a fanciful excess, but the abandon- 
 ment or at least the unworthy suppression of 
 
 B 
 
2 LECTURE I. 
 
 which has marked and injured some of the 
 theological literature of these latter days, and 
 more particularly a popular work of our own 
 time which has professed to be a history of 
 the Jews. In treating this subject however, 
 at present, I shall not merely produce an array 
 of texts selected from the books of Scripture 
 in their order, adapted to illustrate the prin- 
 ciple of which I have spoken, though neither 
 shall I decline so doing altogether, but I shall 
 rather gather together a few scattered argu- 
 ments, such as the reason of the thing, and 
 history sacred or profane, may furnish, to 
 prove that it did enter very largely into the 
 faith and hopes of the earlier generations of 
 mankind, and must be distinctly recognised 
 by any man more especially, who undertakes 
 to put his readers in possession of the annals 
 of the chosen race. 
 
 Now, arguing a priori only, it is impossible 
 
LECTURE I. 3 
 
 to believe that our first parents, born in Pa- 
 radise, compassed on every side by objects 
 pleasant to the sense, erect in their spirits, 
 conscious of no ill, apprehensive of no mis- 
 fortune, blessed with mental faculties as yet 
 unclouded by prejudice or passion, the glorious 
 image of God, — it is impossible, I say, to be- 
 lieve that creatures born to such a lot, should 
 not have had their fall, a fall from so perni- 
 cious a height, in everlasting remembrance, 
 or that the appalling spectacle of death, 
 brought into the world by their transgression, 
 when first it presented itself, should have 
 failed to make their hearts sink within them 
 for the abyss into which they had cast them- 
 selves down. The contrast of what they were 
 with what they had been, would be the bur- 
 den of their sleeping and waking thoughts ; 
 and their children would hear and transmit 
 
 b 2 
 
4 LECTURE I. 
 
 to their children in turn, the woeful history 
 of the inheritance which they had lost. It 
 is not in human nature that it should be 
 otherwise. It is matter of common experi- 
 ence that the posterity of a decayed family 
 are peculiarly alive to the departed honours 
 of their race; that the lands which once knew 
 them, but which now know them no more, 
 are still watched by them with a jealous eye; 
 the offence by which they were forfeited, 
 however remotely, remembered; and if a 
 hope even against hope, of a recovery re- 
 main, it is the reed on which they habitually 
 repose. But if the estate be a crown or a 
 kingdom, when can the memory of it be ex- 
 tinguished then? Still the empty title de- 
 scends ; still the visionary expectation of 
 brighter days is indulged ; still the pageant 
 of a name, or the superscription of a coin be- 
 
LECTURE I. 5 
 
 speaks the possession which is gone, and the 
 pang which it costs to relinquish the dream 
 of its restitution. 
 
 But when mankind fell from their high 
 estate, a sure and certain hope was held out 
 to them, that the day would come when it 
 should be again their own. The serpent had 
 beguiled the woman of it, and 'the seed of 
 the woman \ it was promised, should in due 
 season 'bruise the serpent's head.' It is 
 probable that much more than this hint was 
 communicated to our first parents, for the ex- 
 pectation of this Deliverer forthwith begins 
 and continues to heave and ferment in the 
 patriarchal history in a manner corresponding 
 to more ample information than this single 
 word of encouragement might seem to con- 
 vey ; and nobody can read attentively the 
 writings of Moses without constantly per- 
 ceiving that they are records in very brief; 
 
6 LECTUKE I. 
 
 perpetually opening a glimpse of some region 
 of knowledge which we should fervently 
 desire to explore ; dropping some casual allu- 
 sion to events such as baffle investigation ; 
 and presenting some expression or other in 
 the midst of a narrative of unrivalled sim- 
 plicity, in which far more is evidently meant 
 than meets the ear. I will not stay to pro- 
 duce proofs of this fact, feeling that it can be 
 called in question by none to whom the Mo- 
 saic writings are in any degree familiar. I 
 say then that this communication, of a future 
 Redeemer from the curse of the fall, which 
 God in pity to his poor creatures hastened to 
 make, lest, as it should seem, they should be 
 utterly broken-hearted, works very actively 
 in all the story of the patriarchs. It may be 
 suspected to dictate the ejaculation of Eve on 
 the birth of her first-born, ' I have gotten a 
 man, even Jehovah ', (for so it has been trans- 
 
LECTURE I. 7 
 
 lated,) even the promised seed, the God in 
 man. It suggested to Lamech the name of 
 Noah for his son, a figure of Christ, he, St. 
 Peter, being our authority a , seeing that 'this 
 same should comfort them ', as he hoped, 
 6 concerning the work and toil of their hands, 
 because of the ground which the Lord had 
 cursed ' ; possibly take the curse off. It 
 guided Abraham in his course still more 
 manifestly, as I shall hereafter attempt to 
 shew more at large ; for to him the promise 
 was renewed, and in terms limiting it to his 
 line, and yet more significant and definite in 
 their meaning than before; so that the history 
 of that patriarch, interpreted as it is by pas- 
 sages in the New Testament, argues in him 
 a very circumstantial acquaintance with the 
 Redeemer to be born. Isaac, a figure of 
 Christ the least to be mistaken, becomes the 
 
 a 1 Pet. iii. 20, 21. 
 
8 LECTURE I. 
 
 next transmitter of the 'Desire of the Nations'; 
 to whom Jacob succeeds, but not without 
 much contrivance and contention and for- 
 feiture of family peace, so stirring was this 
 hope of giving Him birth ; and Jacob, when 
 he was dying, still bare it in prospect, and 
 prophesied of which of his sons Shiloh should 
 spring. And under Moses, who himself ' es- 
 teemed the reproach of Christ ', we are told, 
 ' greater riches than the treasures of Egypt ' % 
 the coming event cast its shadow before still 
 more distinctly; and the types of it were 
 more frequent, and the scape-goat and the 
 paschal lamb, with all the peculiarities an- 
 nexed to either, narrowed more and more the 
 latitude of conjecture as to the mode of re- 
 demption; and thus was the rumour sped 
 onward, echoing still more and more loudly 
 through the interval that preceded the fulness 
 a Heb. xi. 26. 
 
LECTURE I. 9 
 
 of time. Accordingly, though it may seem 
 to have slept in the mean season, still in 
 David we find the doctrine of a Redeemer to 
 come, bursting out afresh with a clearness for 
 which we are not prepared, so that in the 
 Psalms we have Him, — shadowed forth ? — 
 that were a faint word ; vividly expressed, I 
 would rather say, in the language of history 
 more than of prophecy; and his godhead and 
 his manhood, his glory at his Father's right 
 hand, and his humiliation upon earth as the 
 very outcast of the people; his betrayal; his 
 sufferings ; the piercing of his side; the bone 
 unbroken ; the bitter draught ; the raffle for 
 his garment; the scoff of the by-stander; the 
 tomb of the rich man made his own; the 
 triumphant resurrection of his body ere it 
 should see corruption ; these and many other 
 particulars, of a minuteness quite extraordi- 
 nary, though known but in part and under- 
 
10 LECTURE I. 
 
 stood but in part, still serve to swell the cry 
 which rolls beneath the vault of time, that 
 the Emmanuel is on his way. Generations 
 pass on, and then come the prophets, properly 
 so called, and they took up their parables, 
 and again spake what had been uttered of 
 old, and added many other like words, such 
 as were yet wanting to complete the deve- 
 lopment of this great mystery ; and the mi- 
 raculous conception of the Redeemer ; and the 
 village that was to be his birth-place ; and 
 the bitter tears to be shed in Bethlehem for 
 the children that were to perish at his com- 
 ing; and the voice of the forerunner who was 
 to prepare his path; and his own habitual 
 walking by the way of the sea of Galilee ; 
 and his being rejected of men; and the tidings 
 which he should preach, and the very manner 
 in which he should deliver them, nor that 
 the manner of the times ; and the deafness of 
 
LECTURE I. 11 
 
 his hearers ; and the miracles which he was 
 to work ; and his triumphant entrance into 
 Jerusalem, and the animal on which he 
 should ride ; and the dispersion of his disciples 
 when the master should be smitten; and the 
 blows and the spitting of his merciless 
 mockers ; and the number of silver pieces for 
 which he should be sold ; and the potter unto 
 whom they should afterwards be cast; and 
 the term of years that should elapse before 
 Messiah should be cut off a ; — all these pro- 
 phetic details of the mighty restorer of a 
 ruined race at length to arrive, accumulate, 
 and give an impulse to the fame of the great 
 event, enough to push it through the dark 
 and desolate period of the Jewish annals 
 
 a Isa. vii. 4.; Micah v. 2.; Jerem. xxxi. 15.; 
 Isa. xl. 3. ; ix. 1, 2. ; liii. 3. ; xi. 2, 3. ; xlii. 1. ; vi. 9.; 
 xxxv. 5, 6. ; Zech. ix. 9. ; xiii. 7. ; Isa. 1. 6. ; Jerem. 
 xi. 13. ; Dan. ix. 
 
12 LECTURE I. 
 
 which now succeeded, a period pregnant with 
 the distresses of Israel, and cheered by no 
 voice from God. 
 
 But the sound was gone out into all lands, 
 and the word unto the ends of the world, 
 God having fashioned from the first, and still 
 continuing to fashion secret channels of his 
 own for its propagation. And the early se- 
 paration of patriarchal households in search 
 of pasture or of a well ; and the sojourn of the 
 chosen people in strange lands ; and the in- 
 ternal commotions of their country which pro- 
 moted emigration ; and the individual thirst 
 for merchandise and gain which beset the 
 Israelites from the most primitive period of 
 their history ; were all second causes which 
 ministered to the diffusion of this nation of 
 priests, of whom the world was the vast con- 
 gregation. For we find the sons of Abraham 
 scattered wide and far, how far, who can 
 
LECTURE I. 13 
 
 say, when even the Lacedemonians, we are 
 told in a passage of the Maccabees a , declared 
 themselves to be ' of the stock of Abraham,' 
 — and the land of Goshen, settled as it was 
 with Israelites, was a light to lighten the 
 Gentiles of Egypt ; and the wonders wrought 
 in Egypt are expressly said to have been for 
 this purpose, that ' the Egyptians may know 
 that I am the Lord ;' and the two nations in- 
 termarried, and perhaps ' the mixed multi- 
 tude' which went up with Israel out of 
 Egypt, was in a great measure the offspring 
 of such alliances b ; and the Ten Tribes, after 
 their captivity by Shalmaneser were absorbed 
 together with the knowledge they possessed, 
 among the nations of the East ; and the tribes 
 of Judah and Benjamin, as they sat beside 
 the waters of Babylon and thought upon 
 Zion, helped to leaven that heathen city; 
 a 1 Mace. xii. 21. b Lev. xxiv. 10. Exod. xii. 38. 
 
14 LECTURE I. 
 
 for certain of them stood by the king's com- 
 mand in the king's palace expressly that they 
 might ' be taught the learning and the 
 tongue of the Chaldeans ' a ; and it was soon 
 perceived that they were wiser than their 
 teachers ; and God interposed by visions, 
 whereof the interpretation served to make 
 these his prophets known ; and through this 
 channel, it is probable, Cyrus might derive 
 his knowledge of Jehovah, for Him he 
 owned b ; and many converts appear to have 
 returned with the Jews to their own land, 
 after the captivity, ' a mixed multitude ' once 
 more c ; and on one occasion we find the 
 queen of this same country a Jewess, and its 
 minister describing to his royal master the 
 Jews as ' a people scattered abroad and dis- 
 persed among the people in all the provinces 
 of the kingdom ', and as ' having laws di- 
 
 a Dan. i. 4. b Ezra i. 2. c Is. xiv. I. 
 
LECTURE I. 15 
 
 verse from all people ', and as ( refusing to 
 keep the king's laws ' ; and he, be it remem- 
 bered, whose territories are thus overrun with 
 these strangers, a monarch who reigned from 
 India even to yEthiopia over a hundred, twen- 
 ty and seven provinces a . And the number of 
 incidents appertaining to patriarchal and Is- 
 raelitish history, mutilated indeed by tra- 
 dition, which circulated amongst the heathens, 
 conspire to prove the almost universal inter- 
 course of the Jews with the nations of the 
 earth, particularly when we consider how 
 much more the diffusion of knowledge in 
 those days was the * fruit of the lips ' than in 
 these. And the creation of the world out of 
 chaos ; and the formation of man out of the 
 dust of the earth ; and the vast stature of 
 the primitive generations of our race ; and 
 the sabbatical rest ; and the bow in the cloud; 
 
 a Esther i. 1. 
 
16 LECTURE I. 
 
 and the bees and honey in the carcass of the 
 lion which Sampson slew ; and the foxes and 
 firebrands ; and the locks of hair which were 
 the secret of that strong man's strength and 
 of Israel's safety ; and the fall of Dagon on 
 the ' grunsel-edge ', and the forbearance of 
 his worshippers ever after to tread upon the 
 threshold ; and the letter which Uriah bare 
 to Joab, being his own death-warrant ; these 
 and a multitude of other coincidences be- 
 tween sacred and profane literature, which 
 might be alleged, but which it is needless to 
 suggest to this congregation, all argue the in- 
 timate intercourse which subsisted between 
 Israel and the heathen inhabitants of the 
 world with whom they were mixed up. 
 
 Accordingly, we discover without surprise 
 in the history of the Acts of the Apostles 
 that the earth was at that time literally full 
 of Israelites, persons of that race from every 
 
LECTURE I. 17 
 
 region under heaven being assembled at Je- 
 rusalem at Pentecost; and St. Paul touching 
 at no city in his wide wanderings where he 
 did not encounter a colony of his countrymen. 
 Virtue went out of these sojourners; and 
 through them the nations drank a corrupted 
 draught indeed, but still they drank in a de- 
 gree of the Spiritual Rock that followed them, 
 and that Rock was Christ. For, to take up 
 the review of events from earlier times, I 
 meet with Balaam, a prophet indeed he, but 
 no dweller in the tents or in the territory of 
 the patriarch to whom the promise was con- 
 fined; no disciple again of Moses or follower 
 of the camp of Israel; but a stranger from 
 Aram, from the mountains of the East; yet 
 stranger as he was to the commonwealth of 
 Israel, still lifting up his voice and saying, 
 ' I shall see Him but not now, I shall behold 
 
 c 
 
18 LECTURE I. 
 
 Him but not nigh ' \ And if I turn to the 
 deserts of Arabia, again I hear the glad 
 tidings ringing in my ears, and the patient 
 man of sorrows takes comfort to himself in 
 this, even in the assurance he feels that ' his 
 Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at 
 the latter day upon the earth.' And frag- 
 ments of the faith perhaps remained in that 
 thirsty land to be gathered up (independently 
 of his direct access to Scripture) by the arch- 
 impostor after many days, whose success 
 is, in some measure, to be imputed to the 
 many revealed truths with which his many 
 fabricated falsehoods were combined, and by 
 which they were qualified and sublimed. 
 But if to the region of Javan we turn, to 
 Chittim and the Isles, still do we detect traces 
 of the same expectation there also ; and we 
 * Numb. xxiv. 17. 
 
LECTURE I. 19 
 
 read of a God who first takes part with his 
 leader in the wars of heaven, assisting him 
 to drive the refractory spirits to the bottom- 
 less pit; and then, touched with pity for the 
 human race of whom the Supreme has de- 
 creed the extinction by withdrawing from 
 them the breath of life, unspheres himself and 
 descends and imparts to them fire from hea- 
 ven and saves their souls alive: not, however, 
 with impunity, but the cost he has counted, 
 and is prepared to pay it down whatever it 
 might be, such was his love for man 1 ; and 
 he is riveted to the rock nothing loth, a spec- 
 tacle of intense suffering, and is mocked by 
 his executioner, who cries, ' having foresight 
 for others, hast thou none for thyself, where- 
 with to speed thine own deliverance' b ; and 
 still he hangs, confident that however rigor- 
 ous may be the king of heaven then in the 
 
 a Prom. Vine. 101. b 85. 
 
 C 2 
 
20 LECTURE L 
 
 infliction of the bitter sentence, the time 
 would come when he would lay his anger to 
 sleep, and challenge and receive his love a . 
 A singular story assuredly and inexplicable, 
 as it should seem, but upon the supposition 
 that a certain, nay that a considerable know- 
 ledge of the fall of man, and of the scheme 
 of his future recovery by a Saviour's cross 
 and passion, was abroad in the world by 
 some means or other, disfigured and overlaid 
 though it might be, and that such knowledge 
 was the basis of this— fable shall I call it? — 
 of which the scene too, it may be remarked, 
 is laid in the mountains of the East. Or, if 
 I travel still further toward the setting sun, 
 and seek of Rome, whether any herald of his 
 distant approach had reached even unto her, 
 I find the greatest of her poets working up 
 the images of Prophecy transmitted to him 
 a Prom. Vine. 195—200. 
 
LECTURE I. 21 
 
 through the mysterious leaves of the sibyl, or 
 by whatever other means, images, of which 
 he knew not indeed the worth, into a birth- 
 day compliment; and the child of his friend, 
 who saw the light probably about that very 
 season when ' unto us a child was born, unto 
 us a son was given,' is arrayed in glories not 
 his own, strangely misapplied and out of all 
 proportion to him; and with him, the pro- 
 geny of heaven, (such he is represented a ) 
 old things are to pass away, and all things 
 to become new; and the months are to march 
 on with unwonted majesty; and an age of 
 iron to cease, and a golden age to dawn upon 
 the universal world; and the air to dispense 
 its incense; and the fields to teem with flow- 
 ers and flow with milk ; and the lion to be at 
 peace with the herd; and the serpent and 
 the venomous herb to die; and all nature to 
 
 a Virg. Eclog. iv. 7. 
 
22 LECTURE I. 
 
 be jubilant in the prospect of the good things 
 that were coming upon the earth. But, in- 
 deed, for the strength which this rumour 
 of the Messiah to come, had gathered, and 
 the extent of the world over which it had 
 swept, we have a voucher, of whom I need 
 scarcely remind you, in a heathen biographer, 
 a voucher not the less exceptionable because 
 he interprets it of an emperor of Rome; and 
 who tells us that ' an expectation prevailed 
 throughout all the east, both ancient and unin- 
 terrupted, (these two features are remarkable,) 
 that about this period, Judea was to give 
 birth to such as should govern the world 2 : 
 and in conformity with this account, no sooner 
 did the unusual star show itself in the hea- 
 vens, than the wise men from that region, 
 alive to the signs of the times which this uni- 
 versal hope had taught them to watch, sped 
 
 a Sueton. Vesp. § 4. 
 
LECTURE I. 23 
 
 to Jerusalem; and great was the consterna- 
 tion of Herod at hearing of their errand, for 
 the foreboding was upon him too, and the 
 priests and scribes are sent for in haste, and 
 the question of the Messiah's birth-place is 
 propounded to them; but neither are they 
 taken by surprise, for they also shared in the 
 feverish feeling of the times, that the burden 
 of the prophecies of ages past was at length 
 about to have its issue; and in Bethlehem is 
 he to be born, they answer at a word. And 
 the age-stricken Israelites, trembling upon the 
 limits of life but unwilling to quit it till their 
 eyes had seen their salvation, are now de- 
 scribed as ' waiting for the consolation of Is- 
 rael;' as lingering in the purlieus of the Tem- 
 ple, * looking for the redemption ' that drew 
 nigh — a Simeon and an Anna; and whilst 
 the infant Messiah was yet subject to his pa- 
 rents' and his fame slept, or waked but to a 
 
24 LECTURE I. 
 
 favoured few, the people impatient of longer 
 delay, are ready to rush into the wilderness 
 at the first call of every enterprising stranger 
 who might take advantage of the sentiment 
 of the times ; and out would they speed whe- 
 ther to see in him the reed shaken with the 
 wind or the man clothed in soft raiment, the 
 faltering or the fearless adventurer, the Theu- 
 das and the Judas of the day a . And when 
 John at last appeared, proclaiming himself 
 not indeed the light, but still the witness of 
 the light, and administering a baptism pecu- 
 liar to himself, ' the baptism of John,' so it is 
 emphatically called, neither that of the law 
 which preceded nor that of the Gospel which 
 followed, but a baptism which demanded as 
 its preliminary condition a readiness ' to be- 
 lieve in him which should come after him ' b ; 
 when John, I say, exacted this avowal of 
 
 a Acts v. 36, 37. b Acts xix. 4. 
 
LECTURE I. 25 
 
 his disciples before their initiation, how was 
 he met? — there actually went out to him 
 Jerusalem, (the whole city,) and all Judea, 
 and all the region round about Jordan a ; so 
 that the kingdom of heaven was said to suffer 
 violence, to be taken as it were by force, 
 such were the numbers and such was the zeal 
 of those who thronged about him to make 
 open confession of this popular article of their 
 faith, and enrol themselves in the ranks of 
 the Messiah. And when Jesus began his 
 ministry he found in Samaria, where the 
 people must have grounded their know- 
 ledge on the Books of Moses, not only 
 a lively anticipation of his coming, but an 
 extraordinary acquaintance with his true cha- 
 racter, as a great teacher, as an universal 
 redeemer; and 'I know,' said the woman at 
 a Matt. iii. 5. 
 
26 LECTURE I. 
 
 the well, 'that Messias cometh, which is 
 called Christ, and when he is come, he will 
 tell us all things;' and her fellow-citizens 
 having in their turn, listened to the words 
 which he spake, at once declared, 6 now we 
 believe, not because of thy saying, for we 
 have heard him ourselves, and know that 
 this is indeed the Christ the Saviour of the 
 World ' a . And the vast conflux of Israelites 
 at the Feast of Pentecost, of which I have 
 already spoken, is probably to be regarded 
 as a testimony of the Jews of all countries to 
 their belief that the weeks of Daniel were 
 expired, and that the Messiah was at hand. 
 And the Greeks that came up at the Feast of 
 the Passover, not to sacrifice with the Jews, 
 as if members of the church of Moses, but to 
 
 a John iv. 25. 42. See Horsley's Sermons, xxiv., 
 xxv., xxvi. 
 
LECTURE I. 27 
 
 worship, give token by the curiosity they dis- 
 cover to see Jesus, that they too were smit 
 by the hope of Israel. a 
 
 Now such being the progressive working 
 of this expectation of the Christ to come, how- 
 ever confounded and embarrassed (for so it 
 undoubtedly was) by the blindness of ambi- 
 tious men, by the misunderstanding of pro- 
 phecies apparently though not really con- 
 flicting, and by the alloy which it had con- 
 tracted in its laborious struggle through Jewish 
 traditions and gentile idolatries; to refuse it 
 a very prominent position in any scheme of 
 scripture history or interpretation, much more 
 to pass it over almost or altogether as an in- 
 considerable and subordinate feature in it, 
 seems to be, to run counter to the whole 
 current of antiquity, which, as we have seen, 
 sets in towards it strongly and steadily; so 
 
 a John xii. 20. 
 
28 LECTURE I. 
 
 strongly and so steadily as to bear him down, 
 I think, who shall venture to stand across 
 its course. For, let the wise man, if he will, 
 attempt to explain the writings of the Old 
 Testament without this master-key, and soon 
 will he find himself in the condition of one 
 who is taught to confess by the mere multi- 
 plication of difficulties which impede his 
 advance, that he must have missed his road 
 at the outset; whilst on the other hand let 
 the wayfaring man, though but a fool, take 
 along with him this principle and apply it, 
 and he finds the harmony of the Old and New 
 Testament complete; a Redeemer the pre- 
 siding spirit of both ; and if the glory of the 
 latter house be greater than of the other 3 , 
 it is mainly in this, that the Voice of the Lord 
 God in the flesh, was actually heard walking 
 within its walls. 
 
 » Hag. ii. 9. 
 
LECTURE I. 29 
 
 A Being then, whose nature, character, 
 purpose in visiting this lower world, are de- 
 clared with an emphasis so extraordinary; 
 whose advent appears to be the great crisis 
 with which the womb of time was labouring 
 for four thousand years ; the desire of the 
 patriarch ; the substance of the law ; the 
 burden of prophecy ; the framework of my- 
 thology itself ; could be no common being; 
 his work nothing less than a strange work a ; 
 and the force of this argument, the cumu- 
 lative testimony of so many ages as it were, 
 the comprehensive testimony of so many in- 
 cidents, to the majesty of a Saviour, may 
 well arrest the attention of those who choose 
 to see in Jesus nothing but a created being, 
 a wise teacher, a spotless example, an heroic 
 martyr ; and induce them to review a con- 
 clusion which seems so ill to correspond with 
 
 a Isaiah xxviii. 21. 
 
30 LECTURE I. 
 
 the long and loud note of preparation with 
 which his coming was announced ; and this 
 the more, seeing that when the day of specu- 
 lation is gone by, and the pride of disputation 
 clone with, and such persons feel themselves 
 entering in earnest into the valley of the 
 shadow, and look about them for their staff 
 on which to lean, they will not find it, I fear, 
 in such a Messiah as they have fashioned 
 for themselves ; but rather in one, who 
 was with God before the world was and 
 was God, and who nevertheless made him- 
 self lower than the angels, and for their sake 
 took upon himself the form of a servant, and 
 was obedient unto death, even the death of 
 the cross. Upon such a Being may they 
 lean with confidence ; upon Him may they 
 call with full assurance of faith, even then 
 when the remembrance of sin past and the 
 apprehension of judgment to come overwhelm 
 
LECTURE I. 31 
 
 them, and Him entreat by his agony and 
 bloody sweat, by his cross and passion, by 
 his precious death and burial, by his glorious 
 resurrection and ascension, to forgive and to 
 forget. 
 
32 LECTURE If. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 the case of abraham considered. 
 
 John viii. 56. 
 
 Your Father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he 
 saw it and was glad. 
 
 ' The Old Testament is not contrary to the 
 New, for both in the Old and New Testa- 
 ment, everlasting life is offered to mankind 
 by Christ, who is the only mediator between 
 God and man, being both God and man. 
 Wherefore they are not to be heard which 
 feign that the old fathers did look only for 
 transitory promises.' 
 
 Such is the language of the Seventh Ar- 
 ticle of our Church, and Scripture confirms it. 
 I will confine what I have to say upon this 
 subject on the present occasion to the single 
 case of Abraham; and I think it will appear 
 that his character and conduct cannot be ex- 
 
LECTURE II. 33 
 
 plained satisfactorily on any other prin- 
 ciple, than upon the prospect of the Messiah 
 to come greatly influencing him — that this 
 promise seen afar off was a very leading mo- 
 tive with him — that the me#e worldly and 
 temporal advantages held out to him, for 
 such were held out, were by no means his 
 first object — that an object they were, but 
 not the principal and paramount object which 
 some have thought proper to make them — 
 that as the end of our faith is, Christ who 
 is come, so the end of the faith of the 
 patriarchs was, Christ who was to come ; 
 our faith having a reference to things past, 
 theirs to things future — that either dispens- 
 ation was calculated to prove the dispositions 
 of men equally well — that either would pre- 
 sent the same hopes, the same difficulties, the 
 same opportunities for the display and exer- 
 cise of patience, of trust, of humility, — and 
 
 D 
 
34 LECTUEE II. 
 
 that under both dispensations were to be 
 found infidels and sceptics, and under both, 
 firm and faithful believers in Christ. 
 
 I. The whole world was sinking fast into 
 idolatry, and there was a danger that all 
 knowledge of the true God should expire, 
 when God raised up for Himself a great re- 
 former, as he has done several times since, 
 who should still keep his name alive, and 
 spread it again amongst the inhabitants of 
 the earth. Abraham was the man of the 
 Almighty's choice. In order therefore to 
 estrange him at once from the contamination 
 of idolatrous relations, He was pleased to give 
 him a command to remove himself from 
 amongst them. I say from idolatrous re- 
 lations, for in the Book of Joshua we read, 
 ' And Joshua said unto all the people, thus 
 saith the Lord God of Israel, your fathers 
 dwelt on the other side of the flood, in old 
 
LECTURE IT. 35 
 
 time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and 
 the father of Nachor, and they served other 
 gods*. God therefore determined to take 
 Abraham from amongst them to be a servant 
 of his own. The very ontset stamps the 
 whole transaction as the beginning not of a 
 civil, but of a religious reformation of the 
 world. 
 
 II. The inducements proposed to Abraham, 
 in order to lead him away from this danger- 
 ous neighbourhood, correspond with such an 
 object : they are temporal inducements in 
 part, but subordinate to others of a higher 
 and more heavenly nature. ' Get thee out 
 of thy country ' (such are the words of the 
 Almighty,) ' and from thy kindred, and from 
 thy father's house, unto a land that I will 
 shew thee ; and I will make of thee a great 
 nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy 
 
 a Josh. xxiv. 2. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 LECTURE II. 
 
 name great, and thou shalt be a blessing; 
 and I will bless them that bless thee, and 
 curse them that curse thee, and in thee shall 
 all the families of the earth be blessed'*. The 
 terms are repeated in another passage of 
 Abraham's life, rather more at full ; ' by my- 
 self have I sworn, saith the Lord, that in 
 blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying 
 I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the 
 heaven, and as the sand which is upon the 
 sea-shore, and thy seed shall possess the gate 
 of his enemies, and in thy seed shall all the 
 nations of the earth be blessed ' b . That a nu- 
 merous progeny, and the possession of a por- 
 tion of the earth wherein they were to dwell, 
 was a part of this promise, is clear ; it was 
 the temporal part ; for godliness was then, 
 as it is still, made profitable for the life which 
 now is, as well as for that which is to come; 
 
 a Gen. xii. 3. b Gen. xxii. 16—18. 
 
LECTURE II. 37 
 
 though neither was such profit then, nor 
 ought it to be now, the leading principle. 
 But it is no less clear, that there was another 
 and a greater promise behind ; even that in 
 Abraham ' all the families of the earth were to 
 he blessed ', or, as it is again expressed, that, 
 * in his seed all the nations of the earth were to 
 he hlessed '; — not one family, as his own, for 
 instance ; not one nation, as the nation that 
 might spring from him ; but all the families, 
 and all the nations of the earth, — a blessing 
 co-extensive with mankind itself; co-extensive 
 with the curse under which the world lay ; 
 and of which Abraham must have been 
 aware, as well as of the gracious intentions 
 which God had intimated when it was in- 
 flicted, of one day taking it off by means of 
 the seed of the woman, — a blessing therefore 
 which Abraham might well suppose had a 
 
38 LECTURE II. 
 
 reference to that curse. Nor is this a gra- 
 tuitous presumption of my own. The nar- 
 rative in this part of the Bible is indeed very 
 brief, consisting rather of hints than of ex- 
 planations in detail ; and therefore the extent 
 of the communications which the Almighty 
 made to Abraham or to the other patriarchs, 
 is not perhaps to be collected from the literal 
 history, or be collected from it but very im- 
 perfectly ; but what is the commentary upon 
 the terms of this promise to Abraham of those 
 who are the safest commentators of all ? I 
 mean, of the saints, of the apostles, of Christ 
 himself? Let these be our critics. When 
 Mary, convinced by the angel that she was 
 about to become the mother of the Messiah, 
 uttered her jubilant hymn, these were the 
 words ; ' He hath holpen his servant Israel, 
 in remembrance of his mercy, as he spake to 
 
LECTURE II. 39 
 
 our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed for 
 ever ' a ; and shortly after, Zacharias, in his 
 hymn to the nativity, for such it may be 
 reckoned, again alludes to the fulfilment of 
 the ' oath which God sware to our father, 
 Abraham ' b . * Your father, Abraham ', says 
 Jesus to the Jews, 6 rejoiced to see my day, 
 and he saw it and was glad ' c . At this the 
 Jews stumbled, as others have stumbled at 
 the same supposition since, namely, that the 
 patriarchs possessed a knowledge of the 
 Messiah to come ; but Jesus is nevertheless 
 true to his first asseveration, and repeats (and 
 with those emphatic words which so often 
 usher in his weightiest sayings,) * Verily, 
 verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, 
 I am? Here then we have Jesus himself for 
 a witness that he had existed before the 
 foundation of the world, and that of his 
 
 a Luke i. 54. b lb. v. 73. c John viii. 56. 
 
40 LECTURE II. 
 
 existence and office Abraham had been told, 
 and rejoiced at the tidings. They therefore 
 are not to be heard, again I exclaim, who 
 feign that the old fathers did look only or 
 chiefly for transitory promises. 
 
 III. But St. Paul, that chosen vessel of 
 God who spake or explained his lively 
 oracles, — St. Paul is an interpreter of the 
 terms of the promise made by God to Abra- 
 ham, still more in point, if possible, because 
 he actually is engaged in discussing those 
 terms with his blinded countrymen, who 
 could not or would not see their spiritual 
 nature and meaning. ' The scripture ', saith 
 he, 'foreseeing that God would justify the 
 heathen through faith, preached before the 
 Gospel unto Abraham, saying in thee shall 
 all nations be blessed ' " . The expression is 
 very remarkable, and such as nothing can 
 
 a Gal. jii. 8. —poevrr/ytXto-cno ra Afi^ockp. 
 
LECTURE II. 41 
 
 evade. God preaches, it seems, not the mere 
 possession of a kingdom which is of this 
 world, but the Gospel unto Abraham, when 
 he imparts to him the promises, — the Gospel, 
 — the good tidings of great joy that shall be 
 to all mankind, that unto them shall be born 
 a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. It is 
 not upon a single phrase, however remark- 
 able, that I build, though indeed it again 
 occurs in the fourth chapter of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, (v. 2.) and in the same sense. 
 I catch not at a word ; such reasoning in 
 such a cause I disdain : but the drift of the 
 Apostle's argument admits of no interpretation 
 but one. The Galatians had been seduced 
 from a faith in Christ to a reliance upon the 
 law for salvation. Ye know not the law, 
 says the Apostle : the law only serves to 
 condemn, and by its condemnation to drive 
 you to that faith in a Redeemer which was 
 
42 LECTURE II. 
 
 imparted to Abraham; he himself being saved 
 by faith, before the law ; and his followers 
 since the law being saved by it too ; for the 
 publication of the law in the mean season did 
 not supersede this faith, but rather confirmed 
 it, by opening men's eyes to their need of 
 such a refuge. Neither does the Apostle 
 rest here, but still proceeds to argue the 
 point, — the import of this very promise we 
 are considering, — in yet more ample detail. 
 ( To Abraham and to his seed,' he continues, 
 * were the promises made ' ; the terms being, 
 6 in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth 
 be blessed.' And who might this seed be? 
 Was it in general the progeny of Abraham 
 who should multiply exceedingly and settle 
 and possess a country: was this, the pros- 
 perity of that favoured people, the blessing 
 announced ? That, argues the Apostle, would 
 be a strange interpretation of the divine co- 
 
LECTURE II. 43 
 
 venant, for he saith not in seeds, as of many, 
 6 but in thy seed, which is Christ? Christ 
 therefore was the blessing. And on whom 
 was it to be conferred ? On the children of 
 Abraham according to the flesh, the settlers 
 in Canaan? That, contends the Apostle, is 
 much too narrow a limit for its operation, 
 seeing that the terms of the promise were, 
 ? in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth 
 be blessed.' No, he continues, * the blessing 
 of Abraham was to come on the Gentiles 
 through Jesus Christ,' ' all that were of faith 
 being the children of Abraham ', whether of 
 the circumcision or uncircumcision. 
 
 IV. Thus far has my argument been built 
 on the Epistle to the Galatians. The same 
 view of this great question is presented to us 
 again in the Epistle to the Hebrews a ; for 
 there was some difficulty in disabusing the 
 
 a Hebr. xi. 
 
44 LECTUltE II. 
 
 Jews of the low and inadequate notions 
 which they entertained of the meaning of 
 their own Scriptures, — the veil was upon 
 their hearts when Moses was read — ' had ye 
 believed Moses ye would have believed me, 
 for he ivrote of me ', is our Lord's own testi- 
 mony 3 . In the Epistle to the Hebrews, I 
 say, Abraham is in like manner set forth as 
 aware of the great part he was playing in 
 the destinies of the world, the religious de- 
 stinies ; as aware, that he was not migrating 
 from the east, a hardy and enterprising ad- 
 venturer, his ambition earthly, his prospect 
 pent within the hills of Canaan ; but as lift- 
 ing up his eyes above those hills from whence 
 came his help ; as dwelling contentedly in 
 tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, not so much 
 as caring to build a city which had found- 
 ations, leaving that to those who might come 
 
 a John v. 46. 
 
LECTURE II. 45 
 
 after him, but for his part confessing that he 
 was — the aspiring leader of a ' nomadic tribe ' 
 upon the earth a ? I read not so, but ' a 
 stranger and pilgrim upon it' b — a stranger 
 and pilgrim stedfastly looking for a city whose 
 builder was God. With these happy hopes 
 he died, an old man and full of years, not 
 * having received the promises ', not having 
 been permitted to wait in the flesh for the 
 consolation of Israel ; but still having been 
 permitted to see those promises afar off, and 
 to be persuaded of them, and to embrace 
 them ; in faith he was gathered to his people c ; 
 gathered to them, not his bones to their bones, 
 as the low system of interpretation against 
 which I am contending, would have it d ; for 
 the bones of his fathers were far away be- 
 
 a Hist, of the Jews, vol. I. p. 8. b Hebr. xi. 1,5, 
 
 c Gen. xxv. 8. Hebr. xi. 13. 
 
 d Hist, of the Jews, vol. I. p. 21. 
 
46 LECTURE II. 
 
 yond the river Euphrates, whilst his own 
 were to repose in the cave which he had 
 bought at Machpelah ; gathered to them, as 
 Moses at his death was said to ' sleep with 
 his fathers ', howbeit he was actually buried 
 in a valley of Moab, nobody knowing where 3 ; 
 gathered to them, as David was said at his 
 death to 'sleep with his fathers' 5 , though it 
 was in Jerusalem and not in Bethlehem that 
 his sepulchre was made ; his spirit therefore 
 gathered to the spirits of his kindred who 
 had gone before him, to rejoice with them that 
 their pilgrimage was done. * They then are 
 not to be heard who feign that the old fathers 
 did look only for transitory promises.' 
 
 V. Now supported by such authority, even 
 that of St. Paul and of Jesus himself, for the 
 sense in which Abraham understood the pro- 
 mises of God, let us consider a few of the cir- 
 
 a Dent. xxxi. 16. xxxiv. 6. b 1 Kin^s ii. 10. 
 
LECTURE II. 47 
 
 cumstances of his actual history, and see 
 whether they do not afford internal evidence 
 for such a sense. 
 
 Abraham left his country, his kindred, and 
 his father's house, to go to a distant and un- 
 known land. Surely this was a sacrifice and 
 a great one, which the prospect of temporal 
 blessings for his posterity, and that a very 
 remote prospect, was scarcely inducement 
 enough to make him submit to with cheer- 
 fulness. The country where he dwelt al- 
 ready was fat and fertile ; as the condition of 
 Laban's family in later days proves ; abund- 
 ant in pasturage, in water, in cattle, in ca- 
 mels, and in sheep. Had it been a more 
 barren land, it must by this time have been 
 regarded, though not the original settlement, 
 as the land of his fathers. He had spent in 
 it the best part of his life ; and at the age of 
 seventy-five, even at a period when men 
 
48 LECTURE II. 
 
 were more robust, the spirit of adventure in 
 Abraham must have been waxing feeble. 
 To leave it therefore, under the circumstances 
 in which he left it, the temporal circum- 
 stances I mean, was a sacrifice. It is repre- 
 sented as such in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 and is there numbered amongst other in- 
 stances of the triumph of faith over nature, — ■ 
 ' By faith, Abraham when he was called to 
 go out into a place which he should after re- 
 ceive for an inheritance obeyed, and he went 
 out not knowing whither he went'*. He goes 
 from a scene of plenty. He is ushered into 
 Canaan and finds a grievous famine in the 
 land, so that he is compelled to betake him- 
 self with his family to Egypt. This is an 
 unpropitious outset. But his purposes are 
 not hereby shaken, for we find in him no 
 longing after the flesh pots of Haran, no hint 
 a Hebr. xi. 8. 
 
LECTURE II. 49 
 
 of a return to the land he had left. Nay in 
 later times when it was actually proposed by 
 his steward with a view to Isaac's marriage, 
 he expressly says, ' beware that thou bring- 
 not my son thither again ' a . The proposal 
 was natural enough on the part of the ser- 
 vant, a stranger of Damascus, who was 
 guided by temporal considerations only, and 
 saw that his master had no property in this 
 land of his sojourn, nor prospect of property 
 in it, and where in fact his descendants could 
 not call one rood their own, except the field 
 of Hebron, for four hundred years to come b . 
 . It was natural for him to start such a pro- 
 posal ; but Abraham was guided by other 
 and higher considerations than his. He felt 
 indeed that by returning he should injure 
 the earthly prosperity of his remote descend- 
 ants who were still, he was convinced, one 
 a Gen. xxiv. 6. b Acts vii. 5. 
 
 E 
 
50 LECTURE II. 
 
 day to have that land in possession, but he 
 had higher views than even this ; he felt 
 that by so doing he should also forfeit the 
 Blessing, the more than earthly Blessing, in 
 store for him and his, for that he would be 
 flinching from the orders of his God. This 
 too I speak with that same Epistle for my 
 warrant — ' Truly if they, the Fathers of 
 Israel, had been mindful of the country from 
 whence they came out, they might have had 
 oppwiunity to have returned; but now they 
 desire a better country, that is, an heavenly, 
 wherefore God is not ashamed to be called 
 their God, for he hath prepared for them a 
 city ' a . The hopes of the father of the faith- 
 ful therefore were not to be destroyed by 
 earthly disappointments because they were 
 not set on earth. 
 
 VI. Five and twenty years pass away, 
 
 a Hebr. xi. 16. 
 
LECTURE II. 51 
 
 and still Abraham has no child, at least none 
 on whom the promise is settled ; and to swell 
 his numbers by such as did not inherit the 
 promise, though it might have answered the 
 ends of a mere worldly-minded leader, was 
 no object with him. Such persons indeed 
 he dismissed from him a . Five and twenty 
 years had passed away, and Sarah is old and 
 he is old also. What would have been the 
 feelings, what the vexation and disquietude 
 of an ambitious chieftain, had such he been, 
 had the mere headship of a clan been his 
 heart's desire, to see the best of his days thus 
 gone, and he still alone ! The promise which 
 had brought him forth from his country 
 broken, as he might think, or so tardily ful- 
 filled as to be too late to yield any satis- 
 faction to him ! Yet clear as it now was 
 that he was never to be the actual leader of 
 
 a Gen. xxv. 4, 5, 6. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 LECTURE II. 
 
 a powerful tribe, he was not cast down; 
 nay, when the son, the single child was born 
 to him in his old age, he was more than con- 
 tent with the immediate fulfilment of God's 
 promise, because in that son he beheld the 
 transmitter of the blessing of all the nations 
 of the earth ; the father, it might be, of the 
 inheritors of Canaan, but much more the 
 father of Him by whom the heavenly Canaan 
 was to be peopled with souls, who but for 
 him would have been lost ; of Him, concern- 
 ing whom Sarah prophesied, however under 
 a figure, saying, * God hath made me to laugh] 
 so that all that hear will laugh with me '; 
 and in the repeated allusions which we find 
 to the laughter of Abraham, and to the 
 laughter of Sarah, trivial as the incident 
 seems, and the conspicuous position assigned 
 to it in the history of an event otherwise 
 brief enough ; we are taught to seek for that 
 
LECTURE II. 53 
 
 figure : and accordingly in the very name of 
 Isaac, imposed as it was by God himself, 
 which is, being interpreted, he, or it, shall 
 laugh, the family of Abraham beheld the joy 
 of the whole earth advancing, and so the pa- 
 triarch we are told ' rejoiced to see that day, 
 and he saw it and was glad '. From all this 
 history I discover more in Abraham than the 
 ambitious chieftain of a wandering clan, other 
 hopes and other consolations than such as 
 were bounded by the land-marks of Ca- 
 naan. 
 
 VII. But this son, this only son is to be 
 slain. What did Abraham read in this com- 
 mand ? The downfal of his earthly hopes ? 
 The great nation strangled in the cradle? 
 And did he resist ? So might the ambitious 
 leader have read, and so done. Or, did he 
 decipher in it more or less distinctly, the 
 Saviour to be offered up in the fulness of 
 
54 LECTURE II. 
 
 time ; Mount Calvary in Mount Moriah (for 
 they were the same) ; the Cross borne by 
 that Saviour in the wood borne by that son, 
 that only son ; the true paschal Lamb of God 
 which He would provide for Himself in due 
 season, in that Lamb which God (as Abra- 
 ham said) was providing for Himself then; 
 the spontaneous sacrifice of himself which 
 Jesus made none compelling, in the like sa- 
 crifice to which Isaac was prepared to sub- 
 mit, none being at hand who had power to 
 exact it, (for he was a youth able to bear his 
 burden up the mountain, perhaps of the very 
 age of our Lord at his passion, in his three 
 and thirtieth year*; his father who bound 
 him an aged man, being an hundred years 
 old when Isaac was born ;) the substitution 
 for a while of animal sacrifices, for that of 
 
 a Lightfoot, Vol. I. p. 13. fol. ed. Josephus how- 
 ever makes Isaac then five and twenty. 
 
LECTURE II. 55 
 
 the great victim himself, in the substitution 
 of the ram caught by the horns, for the child 
 of his body ? Did he trace, however faintly, 
 the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, in 
 the assurance he felt that though he should 
 slay Isaac, God would raise him from the 
 dead, seeing that he had given him to him 
 as it were from the dead at first ? a Did he 
 know in part and prophesy in part, even as 
 David did at a later period, (howbeit there 
 is no express revelation of this great mystery 
 upon record between the time of Abraham 
 and of David,) that God ( would not leave 
 His soul in hell, neither suffer his Holy One 
 to see corruption'? How much or how 
 little of this the patriarch could read in the 
 picture before him, it is not possible to say ; 
 but the transaction is too singular ; too full 
 of close and lively reference to the great 
 a Hebr. xi. 19. 
 
56 LECTURE II. 
 
 scene afterwards enacted on this selfsame 
 spot; and I will add, too much in accord- 
 ance with the method of communicating his 
 revelations to the world which the Almighty 
 was wont to adopt in those days, to allow 
 us to believe that he saw in it no meaning 
 at all beyond the literal one. It was too 
 much of a piece with the work of that super- 
 intending hand which caused the skirt of 
 Samuel's mantle to rend when it was to be 
 signified to Saul that his kingdom was to be 
 rent from him a ; which directed the prophet 
 Ahijah to catch the new garment on Jero- 
 boam and ' rend it in twelve pieces, and give 
 ten pieces to him', when he meant to tell 
 him that God would * rend the kingdom out 
 of the hand of Solomon and give ten tribes 
 to him' b ; which in later times wrought on 
 Agabus, when he took Paul's girdle and 
 a 1 Sam. xv. 27. b 1 Kings xi. 31. 
 
LECTURE II. 57 
 
 bound his own hands and feet with it, and 
 said, 'Thus saith the Holy Ghost, so shall 
 the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that 
 owneth this girdle ' a . Like these, the sacri- 
 fice of Isaac seems to have been a prophetic 
 action, designed by God to unfold his pur- 
 poses more fully ; a living book in which his 
 will was written ; a rehearsal, as it were, of 
 the atonement on the Cross ; so that I still 
 behold in Abraham the friend of God ; the 
 mortal man to whom, so to speak, the Al- 
 mighty gave his confidence ; from whom He 
 would not hide the thing that He would do ; 
 I see in him this, rather than the enterprising 
 wanderer who sought to establish a name 
 for himself among the nations, leaving be- 
 hind him a numerous and powerful posterity; 
 I see him in a position which relates more to 
 the next world than to this ; more to the 
 a Acts xxi. ll. 
 
58 LECTURE II. 
 
 heavenly than to the earthly Canaan ; more 
 to Jesus than to Joshua. 
 
 VIII. Nor is this all. Abraham, now- 
 stricken in age, is desirous of finding a wife 
 for Isaac before he dies. Now had he been 
 the ambitious chief, had he longed for the 
 possession of Canaan with any very intense 
 desire, — nay, had he been the worldling only, 
 — it would have been natural for him to seek a 
 match for his son in some daughter of a prince 
 of that country, as the profane Esau did in 
 the next generation, and thus secure to him- 
 self a better footing there by a politic alliance. 
 A numerous posterity, if that were all, might 
 have sprung from such a marriage, as well 
 as from any other ; Esau had a very nu- 
 merous posterity, and was a very powerful 
 leader : but, on the contrary, a wife of the 
 daughters of Canaan for Isaac is what Abra- 
 ham cannot away with. He feels on this 
 
LECTURE II. 59 
 
 subject as Rebekah felt after him, on an oc- 
 casion very similar, that if such a calamity 
 befel him, what good would his life do him ? 
 his heart's desire and prayer was, that his 
 blood might not be mixed with that of ido- 
 laters ; that he might run no risk of forfeiting 
 the promise of his giving birth to the Messiah, 
 by polluting the channel through which he 
 was to come. This was at the bottom of the 
 solemn oath which he took of Eliezer his 
 servant, 'an oath by the Lord, the God of 
 heaven and the God of earth, that he would 
 not take a wife unto his son of the daughters 
 of the Canaanites ' a , but that he would go 
 for one unto his country and to his kindred ; 
 not because he should thereby strengthen his 
 hands, far from it, but because it was a 
 country and kindred where, if the worship 
 of the true God was not pure, it was not 
 
 a Gen. xxiv. 3. 
 
60 LECTURE II. 
 
 utterly polluted. For this great promise, 
 like most of God's promises, was probably 
 conditional, and so understood; and might 
 have been revoked if the family of Abraham 
 had lapsed into idolatry ; even as the priest- 
 hood, though given by God to the house of 
 Eli, as it seemed, for ever, was nevertheless 
 transferred to another house, when Eli's sons 
 became too wicked to admit of its continuing 
 any longer in their line a . And as much as 
 this may indeed be thought implied in the 
 reason which God is pleased to assign on 
 another occasion for giving Abraham a reve- 
 lation of his will, 'for I know him,' saith 
 the Lord, ' that he will command his chil- 
 dren and his household after him, and they 
 shall keep the way of the Lord to do justice 
 and judgment, that the Lord may bring upon 
 Abraham that which he hath spoken of him 9b ; 
 
 a 1 Sam. ii. 30. b Gen. xviii. 19. 
 
LECTURE II. 61 
 
 as though, under other circumstances, the 
 promise might even yet be forfeited. Upon 
 this point, therefore, Abraham was more than 
 usually alive, when he felt his end approach- 
 ing, and thought the care of his family and 
 the nursing of his high hopes were about to 
 devolve upon Eliezer his steward. 
 
 Now surely this is not the conduct of an 
 ambitious but of a religious man ; of a man 
 who, though he was living in a country 
 where he had no inheritance, 'no not so 
 much as to set his foot on'; a sojourner only, 
 and a dweller in tents ; the Canaanite being 
 then in the land; who would have been glad, 
 no doubt, to set up his rest there with all 
 convenient speed, had it been lawful ; took 
 no steps to do so, when, as many might have 
 thought, a fair opportunity was offered, at 
 the hazard, however, of corrupting the religion 
 of his house, but counted it better to ally 
 
62 LECTURE II. 
 
 himself with the people of God, impolitic 
 though it might seem, than enjoy the pos- 
 sessions of Canaan, however prematurely. 
 Again then must I declare with our Articles, 
 that ' they are not to be heard which feign 
 that the old Fathers did look only for trans- 
 itory promises ', and with our Homilies, that 
 those Fathers ' had the Christian faith. And 
 although they were not named Christian men, 
 yet was it a Christian faith that they had ; 
 for they looked for all benefits of God the 
 Father through the merits of his Son, Jesus 
 Christ, as we do now ; this difference being 
 between them and us ; for they looked when 
 Christ should come, and we be in the time 
 when he is come. Therefore, saith Augustin, 
 the time is altered and changed, but not the 
 faith.' a 
 
 a Horn, of Faith, Part II. p. 42. See also Hooker's 
 Discourse on Justification, § 23. 
 
LECTURE II. 63 
 
 That Saviour, therefore, whom they bent 
 forward with an eager and anxious eye to 
 behold through the distant future, we on 
 whom the ends of the world are come, have 
 the privilege of turning back to contemplate 
 in the past, and of seeing still more clearly. 
 * That angel of God which went before them 
 hath removed, and is gone behind us ' a . If 
 they then who beheld Him but not nigh, 
 were thereby stirred up to heavenly hopes, 
 and reckoned the things of this world as 
 things having no foundation, and an inherit- 
 ance in this world as only a poor prize to 
 pursue, how much more ought we, who have 
 that Saviour very nigh to us, his example to 
 improve us, his precepts to guide us, his pro- 
 mises to encourage us, his Spirit to enlighten 
 and comfort us; how much more, I say, 
 ought we to have our affections drawn up to 
 
 a Exod. xiv. 19. 
 
64 LECTURE II. 
 
 that better and more enduring inheritance 
 whither He is gone before, to prepare for us, 
 if we will follow him, a joyful home. 
 
LECTURE III. 65 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 the case of jacob and esau considered. 
 
 Hebrews xi. 20. 
 
 By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things 
 
 to come. 
 
 The great principle for which I contended, 
 as affording the true solution of much of the 
 writings of the Old Testament, in my first 
 Lecture, and which I applied to the parti- 
 cular case of Abraham in my last, I again 
 advance, in explanation of another history 
 hard to be understood ; a history which, like 
 that of Abraham, has been placed in a false 
 position by reason of this principle having 
 been lost sight of, and which I will now en- 
 deavour to restore to its own. 
 
 I repeat, then, that in the early ages of 
 the world, the great thing to which all godly 
 families looked was the promise, and not so 
 
 F 
 
66 LECTURE III. 
 
 much to that part of it (for it was twofold) 
 which was temporal, ' I will make of thee a 
 great nation', as to that part of it which was 
 spiritual, ' in thy seed shall all the nations of 
 the earth be blessed ' ; that the prevalence of 
 this latter expectation furnishes the only sa- 
 tisfactory clue to much of the Mosaic records ; 
 and that he who rejects it, or denies to it its 
 proper place, making it wait upon that por- 
 tion of the promise which relates to a numer- 
 ous posterity and the possession of Canaan, 
 as the main hope of Israel, will eventually 
 find himself at a loss in his scheme of inter- 
 pretation ; his principle proving in the use 
 insufficient and impracticable ; and himself at 
 length constrained, if he be candid, to confess, 
 that, refusing what would have been ' a lan- 
 tern unto his feet ', he has lost his way. If 
 any passage in the whole patriarchal history 
 can extort such a confession, it is surely this 
 
LECTURE III. 67 
 
 of Jacob and Esau. Read it without a con- 
 stant reference to the prevailing expectation 
 of a Messiah, which has been of late at- 
 tempted 8 , and it is as an hedge of thorns, 
 full of embarrassments, from which there is 
 no escape. Read it with an eye intent upon 
 this object of Israel's desire and prayer, and 
 the way is made comparatively plain. Now, 
 as on the one hand, a scheme of interpret- 
 ation cannot be correct, which sets our own 
 moral instincts in opposition to God's decrees ; 
 which leads us to curse those whom He hath 
 not altogether cursed, and to bless him whom 
 He hath by no means blessed ; and such is 
 the case here under the one supposition : — so 
 has a principle, which serves to guide us 
 through this painful and perplexing labyrinth, 
 which is the case under the other supposition, 
 much to plead in its behalf; as that key can 
 
 a History of the Jews. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 LECTURE III. 
 
 scarcely fail of being the right, it may be 
 supposed, which serves to open a lock, 
 whereof the wards are more than commonly 
 intricate. 
 
 I. Now in the first place, the circumstances 
 attending the birth of Jacob and Esau appear 
 to point to the principle of interpretation which 
 I maintain. Rebekah ' goes to inquire of the 
 Lord ' touching her future offspring. Having 
 been herself chosen by express token from 
 God for the wife of Isaac ; having abandoned 
 her own country at a word, rejoicing in the 
 hope that all generations were to call her 
 blessed; to God, who has so far sped her, 
 she repairs on this occasion, to learn his pur- 
 poses concerning the fruit of her womb. God 
 declares that she shall give birth to two 
 manner of people, and that the elder shall 
 serve the younger. But were the fortunes 
 of the two chiefly to differ in temporal pos- 
 
LECTURE III. 69 
 
 sessions and in temporal power ? were their 
 dispositions to be respectively marked by a 
 greater or less degree of ' fitness ' in the par- 
 ties for founding 'an united and settled 
 people ', and no more ? a St. Paul says not 
 so. He, when debating the call of the Gen- 
 tiles and the rejection of the Jews ; when 
 overthrowing all exclusive claim of his coun- 
 trymen to the gospel as the children of Abra- 
 ham ; and when ascribing the whole scheme 
 of election and reprobation to God's good 
 pleasure ; rests his argument very principally 
 upon the case of Jacob and Esau, — a case, 
 therefore, which he must have regarded as 
 analogous to the one before him ; and accord- 
 ingly a case of spiritual rather than of tem- 
 poral privilege. • When Rebekah ', says the 
 Apostle, * had conceived by one, even by our 
 father Isaac, — for the children, being not yet 
 
 a History of the Jews, Vol. I. p. 24. 
 
70 LECTURE III. 
 
 born, neither having clone any good or evil, 
 that the purpose of God according to election 
 might stand, not of works, but of him that 
 calleth, — it was said unto her, the elder shall 
 serve the younger : as it is written, Jacob 
 have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What 
 shall we say then ', he continues, * is there 
 unrighteousness in God ? God forbid. For 
 He saith to Moses, I will have mercy on 
 whom I will have mercy, and I will have 
 compassion on whom I will have compassion; 
 so that it is not of him that willeth ' (of 
 Isaac, who willed to bless Esau,) ' nor of him 
 that runneth', (of Esau, who ran to fetch 
 venison,) ' but of God that sheweth mercy.'' a 
 
 Now without pushing our inquiry to a 
 
 point of doubtful disputation, or presuming 
 
 to say what were the spiritual advantages 
 
 attendant upon giving birth to the Messiah, 
 
 a Rom. ix. 10. 
 
LECTURE III. 71 
 
 or what the spiritual draw-backs to which 
 they were subjected, whose line was excluded 
 from that office of high honour ; this we may 
 safely affirm, that whilst the promise to Jacob 
 is supposed to involve, as its main consider- 
 ation, the recovery of man from the effects of 
 the fall by a Redeemer to spring from him in 
 the flesh, we may understand the Apostle 
 when he calls it a promise of mercy; but that 
 the term would seem strangely misapplied, if 
 the matter in question had been merely an 
 affair of property, of population and acres, 
 and whether of the twain born of Rebekah 
 should have the good fortune to succeed 
 to it. 
 
 II. Again : — if the predominant idea with 
 respect to the blessing had been the temporal 
 advantages which were to accrue from it, 
 the numerous posterity, the fair possessions, 
 the cities built with hands, the act of be- 
 
72 LECTURE III. 
 
 queathing this prospective inheritance to a 
 child, would have been, one should imagine, 
 altogether a civil act ; the mere making of a 
 will ; a simple affair of contingent property, 
 such as of mines and minerals, which a tes- 
 tator transmits to his descendants, in the 
 hope that it will come to him after many- 
 days. But such is not the character of this 
 act, as we see it at the hands of the patri- 
 archs. The bequeathing of the promise is 
 with them not a civil, but strictly a religions 
 act. In the instance before us, Isaac was to 
 complete it ' before the Lord ' ; an expression 
 which, in the Levitical Law, has always a 
 reference (and it occurs very often) to a holy 
 place, usually to the tabernacle, and some 
 such signification must attach to it here. 
 Neither is it for a feast only, I apprehend, 
 that Esau is sent in search of venison, but 
 for a feast upon a sacrifice ; a peace-offering, 
 
LECTUKE III. 73 
 
 whereof part was given to God, and part was 
 consumed by the worshipper; a purpose, there- 
 fore, which God might well be supposed to 
 forward ; and so Jacob replies to Isaac's in- 
 quiry, ( How is it that thou hast found it so 
 quickly, my son ? ' ' because the Lord thy 
 God brought it to me ' : brought it to him, 
 even as God had provided for himself a ram 
 for an offering on another occasion. More- 
 over, Jacob is now arrayed in the goodly 
 raiment of the first-born, who was by right 
 of birth the priest ; raiment laid up ; kept in 
 the house; perhaps the house of God, the 
 Beth-el of the encampment ; fragrant with 
 the odour of incense, for the smell of it was 
 as the smell of a field which the Lord had 
 blessed, blessed with aromatic fruits and 
 flowers ; — raiment, in short, appropriated to 
 holy purposes and holy seasons. Nay more. 
 In the review of this part of the patriarchal 
 
74 LECTURE III. 
 
 story which is taken in the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, this act is represented as an act of 
 faith in Isaac : ' by faith Isaac blessed Jacob 
 and Esau concerning things to come.' And 
 the same act, in the case of Jacob, when it 
 became his turn to convey the blessing to 
 others after him, is expressly recorded as an 
 act of positive devotion, (the very thing which 
 I am endeavouring to prove,) for it is said, 
 that * when he was a dying, he blessed both 
 the sons of Joseph, and worshipped' a Now 
 I can understand all these circumstances; the 
 approach to the presence of the Lord; the 
 oblation ; the ministering priest ; the prostra- 
 tion of the patriarch ; when I consider him 
 as consigning to his son the hope of a re- 
 demption from the curse of the fatal fall : but 
 I do not see how they appertain with the 
 same propriety to the making of a will and 
 
 a Hebr. xi. 21. 
 
LECTURE III. 75 
 
 the conveyance of an estate. Hitherto, then, 
 the promise of a Messiah seems to be the 
 uppermost thought in the minds of all the 
 parties concerned in this remarkable trans- 
 action. 
 
 III. We have seen the preparation for the 
 blessing. What are the terms in which it is 
 conveyed ? ' Let people ' (the word is strictly 
 in the plural number, implying more than one 
 people,) * let people serve thee, and nations 
 bow down unto thee.' Not, surely, that the 
 world was to stoop before Jacob individually, 
 a plain man and a dweller in tents ; nor yet 
 that it was to stoop before him, as the type 
 of a powerful and populous empire ; for in 
 this sense Esau was destined to be far above 
 him ; his remote descendants extending their 
 name and dominion over regions vastly wider 
 than those which ever acknowledged the 
 sceptre of Judah : but to stoop before him, as 
 
76 LECTURE III. 
 
 having in his loins the Child hereafter to be 
 born among men, at whose name every knee 
 should bow, of things in heaven, and things 
 on earth, and things under the earth. This 
 blessing Isaac repeats in terms somewhat 
 different, when Jacob takes leave of him for 
 Padan-Aram: 'And God Almighty bless thee', 
 says the old man at parting, ' and make thee 
 fruitful, and multiply thee, that thou mayest 
 be a multitude of people' a , the word being- 
 still plural ; a phrase which, however it might 
 apply to Abraham, in whose loins were many 
 nations, did not apply to Jacob in its literal 
 sense, to whom none could trace but the single 
 nation of the Jews ; and for which, therefore, 
 as it must be taken in a figurative sense, it 
 would be better to substitute the translation 
 of the Septuagint, and read, as the text also 
 strictly authorizes, ' that thou mayest be for 
 a Gen. xxviii. 3, 
 
LECTURE III. 77 
 
 a gathering of the nations.' a Then are our 
 thoughts conducted instinctively, and in no 
 rabbinical spirit of interpretation beyond what 
 is meet, to Him who would have 'gathered 
 Jerusalem, even as a hen ga there th her 
 chickens under her wings ', — to Him, who 
 declared, (in words still more to our present 
 purpose,) 'he that gather eth not with me, 
 scattereth.' b The terms therefore of the bless- 
 ing, as delivered by Isaac, still imply the 
 expectation of the Messiah. 
 
 III. But were this doubtful, the precept of 
 that Patriarch to his son touching his mar- 
 riage, a precept which accompanies the bless- 
 ing would remove the doubt — the preserv- 
 ation of the promise in its due line seeming 
 to be contingent on the purity of such alli- 
 ance—for we read in Genesis, ' that as Isaac 
 
 a See Horsley, Serm. XXVI. 
 b Matt. xii. 30. 
 
78 LECTURE III. 
 
 blessed Jacob, he gave him a charge saying, 
 thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of 
 Canaan\ The blessing and the injunction 
 go together. And it may be further ob- 
 served that in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 where Esau is represented as a 'profane per- 
 son who forfeited the blessing, he is also re- 
 presented as a fornicator a , in reference pro- 
 bably to his connection with the heathen 
 daughters of Heth. Accordingly Jacob is 
 despatched to Padan-Aram not merely in 
 order that he may escape his brother's anger, 
 but also in order that he may take unto him- 
 self a wife of his father's house, and avoid 
 the danger of a match with an idolatress of 
 Canaan. Still I detect in every step of this 
 history as it advances, the predominance of a 
 reliaious principle ; a regard to keeping the 
 channel in which the Messiah is to pass 
 
 a Hebr. xii. 16. 
 
LECTURE III. 79 
 
 clean and undefined ; a principle, far higher 
 in its nature than a worldling's hope, his 
 being of the earth, earthy, this being from 
 above. 
 
 IV. I proceed, and accompany Jacob in 
 his flight, and forthwith I find Almighty 
 God vouchsafing him an open vision. Let 
 us see how this incident bears upon the ques- 
 tion before us. Let the intrigue of Rebekah 
 and her son have had for its object the pos- 
 session of Canaan only ; and here is that son, 
 a triumphant supplanter, a crafty and co- 
 vetous usurper, who had directed his wit to 
 the circumvention of his own twin brother, 
 reeking from his perfidy, actually favoured 
 by a friendly visit from the God of his 
 Fathers ! A strange anomaly ! Yet if the 
 principle which I adopt as the key to the 
 whole transaction be suppressed, I know not 
 where we are to look for that extenuation of 
 
80 LECTURE III. 
 
 Jacob's guilt which could account for such 
 an apparition of divine goodness at such a 
 moment. Yet such extenuation we seem to 
 want in order to reconcile the present inter- 
 position of God and the recent transgression 
 of Jacob together. But if I discover in Jacob 
 a person smit with the immense desire of the 
 Messiah — conscious that he was the channel 
 by which of right that Messiah was to come, 
 the oracle of God having so declared before 
 his birth, younger brother though he was ; 
 even as Seth had already been chosen for it 
 before Cain or Abel the elder, and Shem be- 
 fore Japhet again the elder, and Isaac before 
 Ishmael — if I discover in him a man so far 
 faithful to this high hope as to burn for its 
 fulfilment with a vehemence passing all bound 
 or barrier, and so far faithless in God's pro- 
 vidence as to fear that its fulfilment was in 
 jeopardy even in spite of God's assurance to 
 
LECTURE III. 81 
 
 the contrary — then I see in him a mixed 
 character, whom God, who discriminates and 
 dissects a case of morals however complicated, 
 might well both praise and punish ; praise 
 for his faith in Christ; punish for his un- 
 righteous manner of proving it ; comfort, in- 
 asmuch as he was a stedfast believer, Chris- 
 tian I had almost said, by a re-assurance of 
 that the first passion of his heart ; chastise, 
 by a sentence of present banishment and 
 continued hard labour for twice seven years, 
 inasmuch as he was a false deceiver, a doer 
 of evil that good indeed might come, but a 
 doer of evil still — and I find the dispensation 
 on the whole accord with that of later times, 
 when Jesus himself forgave the woman whose 
 sins were many because ' she loved much' 
 
 V. But if I turn to the vision itself I 
 find it confirm the view I have taken; 
 a view, be it remembered, of which the 
 
 G 
 
82 LECTURE III. 
 
 features are these, that the extenuation of 
 Jacob's guilt in God's eyes arose out of his 
 desire of the Messiah which impelled him to 
 it, and which now so far pleaded Jacob's 
 cause with God, not indeed as to induce Him 
 to remit the punishment which He had 
 awarded to it, but to set the heart of the 
 transgressor at ease that his sin should not 
 cut him off from his hope. Had the ladder 
 then no meaning, resting as it did upon the 
 earth and reaching unto the heaven, itself 
 the way between man and his Maker ? Was 
 there here no allegory, when our Lord actu- 
 ally takes it to himself, saying unto Natha- 
 nael, 6 Verily, verily, I say unto you, here- 
 after ye shall see heaven open, and the angels 
 of God ascending and descending upon the 
 Son of Man'*? Was this 'the Gate of 
 heaven', and yet spake it nothing of Him 
 
 a John i. 51. 
 
LECTURE III. 83 
 
 who said, * I am the Door" 1 ? There may 
 indeed be those who regard these coincidences 
 and others like to them as merely accidental, 
 puffed into importance by the dreamer of 
 dreams in theology; yet such coincidences 
 are far too numerous to be so explained 
 away; and a strong body of evidence for 
 the truth both of the Old Testament and of 
 the New might, I am persuaded, be con- 
 structed out of a subordinate class of types 
 and antitypes such as these here touched 
 upon, with which the Scriptures are thickly 
 strewed ; trivial apparently in themselves ; 
 not exhibited in any obvious relation to each 
 other ; subtle threads, as it were, by which 
 the two Revelations are knit together as a 
 whole, too delicate to be detected at first 
 sight ; so that in dealing carefully with the 
 sacred writings we cannot fail to be im- 
 pressed with a feeling that there is often ac- 
 
 G 2 
 
84 LECTURE III. 
 
 cording to Ezekiel's phrase ' a wheel in the 
 midst of a wheel' 3 , howbeit ours may not 
 be the gift to draw it out ; and that without 
 controversy great is the mystery of Godliness. 
 But whatever may be thought of the alle- 
 gory of this vision, though I know not how 
 there can be two opinions upon it, applied as 
 it is to himself by our Lord, still the words 
 sounded in the ears of Jacob as he rested his 
 head on the pillow of stone spake of the 
 Messiah in a manner not to be mistaken ; 
 and ' in thee and in thy seed ', it is once again 
 declared, ' shall all the families of the earth 
 be blessed' 5 . It saith not in seeds, as of 
 many, but in thy seed, which is Christ. It 
 has been ever a part of the Almighty's plan 
 to dress the wound with his own hand 
 which the sin of his creatures may have 
 compelled him to inflict, and so to prove that 
 a Ezek. x. 10, b Gen. xxviii. 14. 
 
LECTURE III. 85 
 
 he smote them friendly. Scarcely had Adam 
 fallen when he hastened to publish to him 
 the method he had provided for his recovery, 
 the ruin and the ransom entering Paradise 
 almost together — scarcely had Nathan given 
 utterance to the parable of reproach with 
 which he was charged, against David, when 
 his commission taught him to add, ' the Lord 
 hath put away thy sin ' — and scarcely had 
 Peter denied his Lord and wept bitterly for 
 his offence, ere Jesus, whose ways under 
 the New Testament are the ways of God 
 under the Old, sends him tokens of forgive- 
 ness, saying to the women by the mouth of 
 the angel, ' Go your way, tell the disciples 
 and Peter that He goeth before you into Ga- 
 lilee' a . And so in like manner, at this for- 
 lorn moment, even when Jacob, tenderly 
 nursed as he had been, was driven to face 
 a Mark xvi. 7. 
 
86 LECTURE III. 
 
 the howling wilderness, without servant, 
 without camel, without tent, to flee as a 
 thief with nothing wherewith to pass Jordan 
 but his staff, ' a Syrian and ready to perish ', 
 reaping the just retribution of his offence, 
 God did not forget to be gracious nor shut 
 up his loving kindness in displeasure ; he did 
 not break the bruised reed, but took pity on 
 the outcast, and assured him at this hour of 
 sorrow and sadness, that perverse as had 
 been his way before him, loudly as it cried 
 to heaven for chastisement, and severe as 
 was that with which it was even then vi- 
 sited, still it had not cancelled God's favour 
 towards him for ever ; it had not provoked 
 Him to withdraw the blessing which he had 
 originally meant for him ; but that his own 
 predeterminate counsel should still stand even 
 in spite of his unhallowed exertions to aid 
 and abet it ; and that he might still be of 
 
LECTURE III. 87 
 
 good cheer with respect to his final interest 
 in a Saviour to come, notwithstanding God's 
 just displeasure for a season. Again then, 
 does this principle of interpretation and no 
 other serve to vindicate in the present in- 
 stance the ways of God to man; to cause 
 mercy and truth to meet together, righteous- 
 ness and peace to kiss each other. 
 
 VI. Once more — adopt any other prin- 
 ciple of interpretation than the one I uphold 
 — annihilate the prospect of a Messiah as en- 
 tering largely into the Promise ; and what is 
 to be done with the character of Esau? 
 Here have we a man, kind apparently to his 
 blind and aged parent, for Isaac loved him ; 
 reverencing him so far as to check his fury 
 in mid-heat, and suspend his revenge upon 
 his father's son till at least the old man should 
 be no more ; composing his decent limbs ; 
 burying at last his brother's treachery and 
 
88 LECTURE III. 
 
 his own threats in his father's grave; enter- 
 prising and high-spirited ; on the whole a 
 man in whom the world, reading Holy Writ 
 with a veil on the heart, sees much to ap- 
 plaud, little to condemn, and every thing to 
 compassionate; and yet this same man re- 
 presented in Scripture as ' a 'profane person ', 
 emphatically so called; as one whom God 
 ' hated' \ Yet if the Promise had been un- 
 derstood to point to temporal things only, 
 what was there to awake the wrath of God 
 against him, in his selling his chance of such 
 inheritance, a remote chance, as he might 
 think, for a morsel of present food, and at a 
 moment, as seems probable, of intense dearth 
 — for though this latter fact is not asserted, 
 we find Isaac in the next chapter breaking 
 up his encampment and moving towards 
 Egypt, because ' there was a famine in the 
 • a Malachi i. 2, 3. Rom. ix. VS. 
 
LECTURE III. 89 
 
 land'*; a coincidence by the way of some 
 value as evidence. Why, I say, should God 
 resent this, foolish bargain, if you will, for 
 that seems all that can be said of it, so bit- 
 terly ; and visit it not only upon Esau, but 
 upon the kingdom that sprung from him — a 
 dispensation not unusual with God in the 
 days of old ; the tribe of Simeon ever seem- 
 ing to crawl through its history blasted by 
 the character of its first progenitor ; the peo- 
 ple of Moab and Ammon conceived in sin, 
 and bearing the features of it, the peculiar 
 features of their lustful origin, in their aspect 
 as nations — why, I repeat, should God thus 
 deal with the posterity of Esau? — for that 
 he does so is clear, the prophets ever labour- 
 ing with their burden of woes for Edom; 
 actually imputing to that people, this their 
 father's transgression, and fining them with 
 a Comp. Gen. xxv. 30. and xxvi. 1. 
 
90 LECTURE III. 
 
 the entail of their father's curse a . I know 
 not why, unless for this reason, that Esau in 
 despising the birth-right despised a Saviour 
 to whom it led ; and that the stone which 
 the builder rejected fell upon him and his, and 
 ground them to powder. 
 
 I have now pursued this history of Jacob 
 and Esau from its opening to its end ; a his- 
 tory perhaps as intricate as any in all Scrip- 
 ture, and one in which we should be as- 
 suredly entangled did we not make the An- 
 gel of the Covenant our guide to lead us on 
 our way ; did not that ' burning lamp pass 
 between the pieces ' of it, complicated as it 
 is, and separate the unclean from the clean. 
 But I have traced the promise of the Messiah 
 working actively throughout it, in the birth 
 of the children marked by a distinction of re- 
 
 a See Jeremiah xlix. 7—10.; Obadiah 0—9; Ma- 
 lachi i. 3, 4. 
 
LECTURE III. 91 
 
 ligious privilege; in the conveyance of the 
 blessing attended by religious rites ; in the 
 terms of the blessing, terms of religious im- 
 port ; in the caution which accompanied the 
 blessing, a caution against irreligious alli- 
 ances ; in the mitigated condemnation which 
 God passed on the offence, where a desire fm % 
 Christ constrained the offender; where the 
 light that led astray was light from heaven ; 
 where the sinner was more Christ's in his 
 sin, than the sufferer in his innocence. And 
 on a review of the whole argument, and an 
 estimate of the difficulties in which the op- 
 posite hypothesis involves us, I cannot but 
 once again exclaim with our Church, that 
 ' they are not to be heard who feign that the 
 old Fathers did look only for transitory pro- 
 mises \ 
 
 Now if the prospect of a Messiah to come 
 stirred the Patriarch so effectually, sometimes 
 
92 LECTURE III. 
 
 by its very lustre and by the illusion under 
 which he beheld it, driving him to deeds of 
 unholy enterprize — if again, those deeds, sin- 
 ful as they were in themselves, found mercy 
 at God's hands by reason of the Faith, how- 
 ever abused, under which they were wrought 
 being itself a thing so precious in his sight ; 
 what a spur shall it be to us, lazy as we 
 are ; what a comfort to us, conscience-stricken 
 as we ought to be ; to know of a surety that 
 the Christ is come ; that our eyes have seen 
 our Salvation ; that doctrine and duty are to 
 us plain. Our fathers walked sometimes in 
 a doubtful light, and stumbled and fell — we 
 have Life and Immortality shining before us 
 like the noon-day. The Promise on God's 
 part has been made good. The seed of 
 Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob hath blessed 
 the world. Of that multitude of nations 
 whereof they were to be the spiritual Fathers 
 
LECTURE III. 93 
 
 are we — we, the remotest of the Isles. And 
 God Almighty grant that being so, we allow 
 no evil lust to supplant us in our best pos- 
 session, lest, like Esau, when we would in- 
 herit it we be rejected and find no place for 
 repentance, though we seek it carefully with 
 tears. 
 
94 LECTURE IV 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 Jacob's prophecy concerning simeon and levi 
 considered. 
 
 Genesis xlix. 7. 
 
 Cursed be their anger for it was fierce, and their wrath 
 for it was cruel. I will divide them in Jacob, and 
 scatter them in Israel. 
 
 Jacob when he was a dying assembled his 
 children around him to give them his blessing; 
 and whilst he was thus musing the fire of 
 prophecy kindled, and at length he spake 
 with his tongue the future fortunes of his race. 
 What should befal them in the latter day, 
 them or the tribes that should spring from 
 them — for here, as is so commonly the case 
 in Scripture, the one is the representative of 
 the many — is severally set forth in splendid 
 imagery, and the portions of Canaan which 
 
LECTURE IV. 95' 
 
 they would respectively occupy in the fulness 
 of time are already declared when as yet the 
 nation was in the loins of these its fathers. 
 Waving however all consideration of the re- 
 mainder, I propose to examine the parable 
 of the patriarch touching Simeon and Levi, 
 because an observation has been hazarded 
 in the same popular work, of which I have 
 already spoken, upon this clause of the 
 blessing ; unguarded, as I think, in itself ; 
 and of a kind to disparage the prophecy and 
 to shake its authority — ' One curious point,' 
 it is said, ' proves the antiquity of this Poem ' 
 (such is the phrase). — f The most splendid 
 destiny is awarded to Judah and the sons of 
 Joseph, but Jacob had never forgotten the 
 barbarity of Simeon and Levi. These two 
 families are condemned to the same inferior 
 and degraded lot, as divided and scattered 
 among their brethren. Yet how different 
 
96 LECTURE IV. 
 
 their fate ! The tribe of Levi attained the 
 highest rank among their brethren, scattered 
 indeed they were, but in stations of the first 
 distinction, while the feeble tribe of Simeon 
 soon dwindled into insignificance, and became 
 almost extinct. A later poet,' (it is added,) 
 ' certainly Moses himself would not have 
 united these two tribes under the same 
 destiny.' a 
 
 The ancient date of this prophetic address, 
 for such I shall still venture to consider it, 
 may indeed be thus argued; but the proof 
 of its antiquity will be thought dearly bought 
 at the price of its inspiration, and its date 
 will be a matter of comparative indifference 
 when its authority is gone. But I apprehend 
 that if we take the proper view of this 
 remarkable passage, neither its antiquity nor 
 its inspiration will suffer at our hands ; and 
 a Hist, of the Jews, v. I. p. 55. 
 
LECTURE IV. 97 
 
 that whilst the indistinctness with which it 
 speaks of events that are coming, argues it 
 to be antecedent to the events themselves, 
 its close application to them when they are 
 come, proves it to be prophetical. The 
 question will compel us to investigate the 
 progress of Simeon and Levi, through the 
 individual to the tribe. 
 
 6 Simeon and Levi are brethren,' says 
 Jacob in the opening of this part of his vision ; 
 and whilst he speaks of all his other sons 
 separately and in order, these two he classes 
 together, and blesses or curses together. I 
 say blesses or curses, for out of the same 
 mouth both blessing and cursing proceed, 
 however unwittingly in the speaker. But 
 why are they brethren more than others; 
 more for instance than Reuben and Judah, 
 or Issachar and Zebulon? They were all 
 six children of one and the same mother 
 
 H 
 
98 LECTURE IV. 
 
 even Leah, and of one and the same father 
 even Isaac \ Yet Simeon and Levi only 
 are brethren — Simeon and Levi only are yoked 
 together in Jacob's catalogue of his children 
 and of their portions. Brethren then they 
 must be in some other sense than mere 
 relation of blood. Companions they must 
 have been above the rest ; confederates in 
 whatever they put their hands unto; this 
 must have been their brotherhood; a sym- 
 pathy probably arising out of years nearly 
 the same, for Levi was next in succession of 
 birth to Simeon, and tempers nearly the 
 same too, for both were fierce and furious. 
 Symptoms of such confederacy between them 
 are to be detected in their history. Dinah 
 their sister had been humbled by the Prince 
 of Shechem ; her disgrace was to be avenged ; 
 her brethren are very wroth when they hear 
 a Gen. xxix. 32—35. xxx. 18—20. 
 
LECTURE IV. 99 
 
 of it ; but the two of them all to devise the 
 stratagem by which the wrong was to be 
 repaid, and to execute it too with a merciless 
 severity, were Simeon and Levi — yet she had 
 other brothers. And it may be suspected 
 perhaps that when Joseph introduced to 
 Pharoah * five men'' only of his brethren*, 
 whilst the sons of his father's wives, for to 
 these probably the introduction would be 
 confined, were seven in number besides him- 
 self, there was some reason for the exclusion 
 of the other two ; some reason possibly 
 founded in this recollection of the signal 
 cruelty of the other two ' when he besought 
 them and they would not hear;' the two 
 being (it might seem) Simeon and Levi ; for 
 with respect to Simeon at least such is 
 actually the Jewish tradition ; and Joseph's 
 a Gen. xlvii. 2. 
 
 H 2 
 
100 LECTURE IV. 
 
 severe treatment of him when he detained 
 him and bound him before the eyes of the 
 rest, gives it countenance. This however, 
 it must be confessed, is a conjecture, the other 
 was a fact. Now it is to such habitual 
 confederacy between Simeon and Levi that 
 Jacob alludes, when he speaks of them above 
 all his other children as brethren, and unites 
 them in the blessing. And this confederacy 
 must be taken as the key to the prophecy 
 concerning them. * Simeon and Levi,' says 
 their father, * are brethren, instruments of 
 cruelty are in their habitations,' or their 
 consultations are instrumental to cruelty. ' 
 my soul, come not thou into their secret', unto 
 their assembly, mine honour, be not thou 
 united ; for in their anger they slew a man, 
 and in their self-will they digged down a 
 wall.' The private meeting; the dark 
 
LECTURE IV. 101 
 
 debate ; confidence given and received ; such 
 are the leading features of this picture of 
 Simeon and Levi ; the whole phraseology in- 
 dicating, as I have said, the close confederacy 
 which subsisted between them. Accordingly 
 it is to this peculiarity in their circumstances 
 that Jacob addresses himself; it is this which 
 furnishes him with the text of his harangue ; 
 and lifting up his voice in prophecy he 
 exclaims, ' I will divide them in Jacob, and 
 scatter them in Israel.' This confederacy, 
 close as it now is, I pronounce dissolved — 
 brethren they shall be no more. I will sow 
 division between them by bringing them into 
 mutual conflict. This is the first disruption 
 of a union which they have abused a . More- 
 
 a It has been objected that the word ' divide ' (p/^) 
 will scarcely bear the sense I assign to it. That it 
 means to divide with a view to disperse, as to ' divide 
 the spoil.' But it is not confined to this meaning. 
 
102 LECTURE IV. 
 
 over I will scatter them in Israel, by dispersing 
 their dwellings over the face of the land. 
 This is the next. The separation two-fold 
 and complete ; a severance of each from the 
 other; a dissolution of each in itself. The 
 schism wide, in proportion as the previous 
 communication was intimate. The latter 
 estate a contrast to the first. Such was the 
 leading idea in Jacob's mind when he uttered 
 his prophecy. 
 
 Let us now see in what manner the two 
 clauses of it were severally brought to pass. 
 
 And first, as to the means which Provi- 
 dence employed to effect the separation of 
 
 Thus ' their heart is divided ' (Hos. x. 2.) i. e. half to 
 God and half to idols. And ' divide the hair ' (Ezek. 
 v. 1.) i. e. into three parts. Moreover according to 
 the usual interpretation of the passage, the two 
 clauses are merely tautological ; I will divide them in 
 Jacob, signifying precisely the same thing as I will 
 scatter them in Israel. 
 
LECTURE IV. 103 
 
 Simeon and Levi from each other as tribes — 
 their separation, I mean, in a degree which 
 should be the reverse of the forefather's union, 
 so that instead of being as at the first brothers 
 above all, they should be above all, adversaries. 
 In the march through the wilderness, the 
 tribes, for to tribes the sons of Jacob had now 
 grown, turn to the sin of idolatry, and in the 
 absence of Moses fall to the licentious worship 
 of a molten calf. When the Law-giver comes 
 down from the Mount, and finds the people 
 in their sin, in the very act, he stands in the 
 gate of the camp and cries, ' who is on the 
 Lord's side ? Let him come unto me. And 
 all the sons of Levi gathered themselves 
 together unto him.' a He commands them to 
 go through the camp from gate to gate and 
 slay every man his brother, and every man 
 his companion, and every man his neighbour. 
 a Exod. xxxii. 26. 
 
104 LECTURE IV. 
 
 They do so. They cut their way through 
 the camp, sparing none ; those of Simeon 
 falling before their sword, as did others. For 
 Moses in reviewing the transaction evidently 
 considers it as a great sacrifice of personal 
 and private feeling on the part of Levi to his 
 zeal for the service of God. ' He said unto 
 his father and to his mother, I have not seen 
 him, neither did he acknowledge his brethren, 
 nor know his own children.' a The kindred 
 here spoken of whom he thus hewed down 
 could scarcely be persons of his own tribe, 
 for his own tribe were unanimous on God's 
 side, ' all the sons of Levi gathered themselves 
 together.' The expression therefore of father 
 and mother and brethren and children must 
 be figurative, and relate to those in the closest 
 alliance with Levi, those whom his heart 
 would bleed to slay by reason of such alliance ; 
 
 a Deut. xxxiii. 9. 
 
LECTURE IV. 105 
 
 and who could they be but the sons of 
 Simeon ? Then began Simeon and Levi to 
 be divided in Jacob. Again Israel sin after 
 the similitude of the former transgression, and 
 join themselves to Baal-Peor — Simeon was 
 on this occasion, there is good reason to 
 think, as very probably he was before, the 
 most offending of the tribes. For the sudden 
 and singular reduction in the numbers of that 
 tribe, as compared before and after the pesti- 
 lence which was the visitation of that sin, 
 points with great likelihood to Simeon as the 
 chief transgressor a . Once more the avenger 
 appears in the tribe of Levi. Zimri, the son 
 of Salu, a prince of a chief house among the 
 Simeonites, is the representative of the trans- 
 gressors. Phinehas the son of Eleazar the 
 son of Aaron the Priest, he therefore a Levite, 
 the representative of the cause of God, the 
 
 a Comp. Numb. i. 23, and Numb. xxvi. 14. 
 
106 LECTURE IV. 
 
 slayer of Zimri and the stayer of the Plague. 
 Again therefore upon this second high and 
 critical occasion Levi stands up against Simeon 
 - — and thus once again are Simeon and Levi 
 divided in Jacob. And as the quarrels of 
 former friends are usually the most lasting of 
 any, and religious quarrels of all the most 
 rancorous, so does it seem to have been here. 
 For it is remarkable that when Levi gained 
 the ascendancy in the religious commonwealth 
 of Israel, Simeon, as if suffering under an 
 adverse influence, declined, till it became the 
 least and the least distinguished of the tribes. 
 So were Simeon and Levi effectually divided 
 one from the other in Jacob ; the ancient but 
 often guilty amity of the founders of their 
 race interrupted ; events arising under God's 
 controlling hand to dissolve the banns. 
 
 But they were also to be scattered in Israel. 
 This too was accomplished. In Levi, by 
 
LECTURE IV. 107 
 
 God's adoption of that tribe for his own, 
 instead of the first-born of Israel who were 
 his of right ever since their miraculous pre- 
 servation in Egypt when all the first-born of 
 the Egyptians were smitten. The tribe of 
 Levi, I say, God adopted. The Levites 
 became his ministers for holy things ; the 
 officers of his government ; dispersed for the 
 purpose of maintaining it throughout his terri- 
 tory in cities set apart for them. They were 
 scattered in Israel. In Simeon too the pro- 
 phecy was fulfilled, but after another sort. 
 Though in the division of Canaan the lot of 
 Simeon was the second to come forth, such 
 had been his conduct in the wilderness that 
 he was lightly esteemed, and it was thought 
 enough to assign to this reprobate body a 
 portion ' within the inheritance of Judah,' a 
 mere remnant of land which was left over 
 and above to that powerful clan ; and soon 
 
108 LECTURE IV. 
 
 by reason of the straitness of his borders was 
 Simeon distressed, few as were his numbers ; 
 and one colony he despatched to Mount Seir, 
 once the possession of the Amalekites a ; and 
 another to the entrance of Gedor where were 
 fat pastures formerly the dwelling-place of 
 the sons of Ham b . And it seems probable 
 that discomfort at home which in these 
 instances drove the men of that tribe far 
 a-field, a discomfort which was experienced 
 by Simeon in a degree quite peculiar to him- 
 self, did not fully find its relief even here, 
 but that besides these bodies of emigrants, 
 many individuals also were constrained by 
 the same untoward circumstances to be 
 strangers and sojourners among other tribes. 
 And so was Simeon scattered in Israel. 
 
 Thus the confederacy which Simeon and 
 Levi had maintained and which Jacob their 
 a 1 Chron. iv. 42. b Ibid. 39. 
 
LECTURE IV. 109 
 
 father had denounced, was utterly brought 
 to nought ; the burden of Jacob's prophecy 
 accomplished ; and the alliance of these his 
 sons which had been a grief unto him, turned 
 into the judicial division and dispersion of 
 their posterity. 
 
 But it will be said that the real difficulty 
 of the question has not yet been approached ; 
 that the prophecy of Jacob ought to apply 
 both to Simeon and Levi alike ; and yet that 
 according to my own shewing nothing can 
 be more dissimilar than the lots which befel 
 them. — I reply that however dissimilar the 
 fortunes of the two tribes proved in the event, 
 the language of Jacob is strictly appropriate to 
 both. And I further remark that a most 
 singular developement of the workings of 
 God's providence, and of the ductility of 
 events under his hands, is furnished by the 
 fulfilment of this prediction. Here was the 
 
110 LECTURE IV. 
 
 language of the prophet, for such I maintain 
 it to be, and not of the poet, fixed as the 
 foundation of the hills; God whose Spirit 
 prompted it, pledged to bring it to pass; 
 language which no doubt the by-stander at 
 the time would have interpreted as bespeaking 
 the future fortunes of Simeon and Levi to be 
 identical. Both are comprehended under it. 
 No exception or qualification occurs in the 
 terms in favour of the one or the other. Yet 
 we find that whilst this language is literally 
 fulfilled in the histories of Simeon and Levi, 
 nothing can be more unlike than the two 
 histories themselves. That whilst Jacob in 
 the sorrow of his heart, contemplates these 
 his two sons as confederates, and pronounces 
 the dissolution of the confederacy and dis- 
 persion of the parties, in general terms, God 
 confirms his words, (for thus far Jacob was 
 allowed to look into futurity,) and does make 
 
LECTURE IV. Ill 
 
 events minister to such dissolution and such 
 dispersion ; but then He reserves to himself 
 the prerogative of over-ruling those events at 
 a point beyond that which Jacob's eye was 
 allowed to reach, so as to make the issue still 
 not absolute but respective. The prophecy 
 was to stand fast; and fast it stood, being 
 strictly accomplished in the posterity of the 
 brothers ; this I have already shown ; but 
 still God did not so tie up His hands by it 
 as to put himself out of a condition to discri- 
 minate afterwards, if through any contingency, 
 the necessity for discrimination should arise. 
 God permitted Jacob in spirit to make a rude 
 sketch of the future, which might serve for 
 either of his two sons, but he reserved it to 
 himself to fill up the details and complete the 
 portraits; and whilst the outline was still 
 faithfully preserved one and the same, the 
 colouring and complexion which were to be 
 
112 LECTURE IV. 
 
 the work of the master-hand, afforded ample 
 opportunity for making the one picture to 
 honour and the other to dishonour. And ac- 
 cordingly events so worked together, that the 
 words of Jacob which were the same both 
 for Simeon and Levi, in Simeon and Levi did 
 actually find their completion ; yet under the 
 form of a curse to the one, and to the other of 
 a blessing. Jacob had said, they shall be di- 
 vided; divided they were, wide asunder as 
 the poles, the one becoming God's ministers, 
 the other God's tempters. Jacob had said, 
 they shall be dispersed; dispersed they were, 
 the one by the conditions of an honourable 
 office ; the other by the constraints of a con- 
 temptible territory ; but in both instances the 
 frame-work of the prophecy was the same at 
 first and remained the same at last, though 
 the bodies which were clothed upon it were 
 altogether different. 
 
LECTURE IV. 113 
 
 Nor is it hard to discover the grounds of 
 the distinction which God was pleased to 
 take in the two cases. Simeon and Levi 
 were both as individuals and as tribes, of ' a 
 strong blood ', children of the sun, fervent in 
 their temperament, dispositions apt to nourish 
 virtues or vices on a luxuriant scale. It came 
 to pass that in the case of Levi, as in the 
 cases of David and of Paul, the current of his 
 passion eventually took a right direction ; it 
 became zeal for the honour of God ; he kind- 
 led at the insult offered to the glorious ma- 
 jesty of God ; he smote the foul idolater 
 though his friend and brother ; and for this, 
 as it should seem from the words of Moses a , 
 had the Urim and Thummim committed to 
 his charge; God proposing to take a spirit 
 so intrepid into His own peculiar service; and 
 so He directed the course of Jacob's prophecy 
 
 a Deut. xxxiii. 9. 
 
114 LECTURE IV. 
 
 as far as it regarded Levi, to a prosperous 
 issue. It might be conceived as a curse, it 
 was completed as a blessing ; such being no 
 unusual dispensation of God, for Caiaphas 
 meant it in malice that 'one man shall die 
 for the people', but God took up his words, 
 and turned them to mercy ; and though the 
 Almighty imposed it upon man when he fell, 
 as a curse, that he should eat his bread in 
 the sweat of his brow, yet that curse was 
 so ordered that to man when he was fallen 
 it became a good and a gracious ordinance, 
 his innocence being best secured by his toil. 
 The current of Simeon's passion, on the other 
 hand, equally strong perhaps in itself, took an 
 ill direction, it became a lust after idols and 
 the abominations which attended them, and 
 so God directed the course of Jacob's pro- 
 phecy, as far as regarded him, to have an 
 evil issue ; and as it was originally imagined 
 
LECTURE IV. 115 
 
 in wrath, so in wrath was it, in this instance, 
 suffered to spend itself, and Simeon sunk into 
 dishonour. 
 
 Thus the language of Jacob, though in 
 terms one and the same for all, was set for the 
 rise and for the fall of many in Israel. And 
 whilst our interpretation of it serves to show 
 the necessity in all speculations upon pro- 
 phecy to look below the surface before we 
 pronounce, particularly where to pronounce 
 is to depreciate, it serves also to display the 
 glory of God in His government of the uni- 
 verse. For does it not argue in Him fathom- 
 less resources ; a treasury of means affluent 
 beyond all we can conceive or think ; when 
 He can thus bind Himself down to accom- 
 plish certain objects in the dim and distant 
 future, and yet can afford to vary his line of 
 march towards those objects according to the 
 contingent conduct of parties concerned, and 
 
 i 2 
 
116 LECTURE IV. 
 
 those parties not necessary but free agents? 
 — Must not His controul over events be as 
 absolute as that of a potter over the clay, 
 when He can thus mould them at once to fit 
 a definite prediction to which He stands com- 
 mitted, (I would speak with all reverence, 
 but I would fain make myself understood,) 
 and to fit also each and all of those moral 
 beings who are the subjects of the prediction, 
 standing perhaps as they do, in direct con- 
 trast to one another ; and the justice of God 
 requiring that to such contrast due consider- 
 ation should be had ? Does it not demand a 
 hand of more than common cunning to strike 
 at once, not one mark but many, and those 
 not contiguous in their positions, but rather 
 confronted ? 
 
 Wherefore seeing the ease with which 
 Providence can impart to events the most 
 refractory a bias of its own — seeing how 
 
LECTURE IV. 117 
 
 opportunely it can interpose to break the fall 
 of those who take warning and wax wise in 
 time, and save them from dashing their foot 
 against a stone, great as may be their danger 
 — seeing how often the end of things, (so 
 plastic are circumstances to the finger of 
 God,) corresponds but little to the outset, 
 nay many a time contradicts it altogether — . 
 seeing all this, let us be careful to make God 
 our friend, and for the rest, be of good cheer; 
 be of good cheer, not indeed suffering our- 
 selves to drift passively on with the tide, 
 and lie where it leaves us aground, for Pro- 
 vidence will not befriend him who will not 
 bestir himself as duty calls, and ' except these 
 abide in the ship ', said St. Paul when the 
 sailors would have abandoned her, 'ye can- 
 not be saved ', insured as they were by the 
 promise of an angel ; but actually and reso- 
 lutely striving and struggling as best we may, 
 
118 LECTURE IV. 
 
 however little may be our encouragement to 
 persevere, let us take comfort in this, even in 
 the full assurance that whatever curse may 
 seem to overhang us or ours, an arm there is 
 on high that can direct it, though our own 
 cannot of itself, nay that can actually trans- 
 form it into an exceeding great good; and 
 that our God is the same God of Simeon and 
 Levi, who had a respect, we find, unto their 
 several ways as they became pleasing or per- 
 verse before Him, even when the prophecy 
 which He had permitted to go forth might 
 seem to have circumscribed the sphere in 
 which His Providence could act, by a pledge; 
 and that whilst this pledge He faithfully re- 
 deemed, He redeemed it in such a manner as 
 not to confound the two parties who had 
 once indeed been grinding at the same mill, 
 though they did so no longer ; but so as that 
 one should be taken and the other left. 
 
LECTURE V. 119 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 religious character of the patriarchs vindicated. 
 
 Exodus hi. 6. 
 
 / am the God of thy Father, the God of Abraham, the 
 God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 
 
 It is my intention in this Lecture to endea- 
 vour to set the ' mixed character ' of the Pa- 
 triarchs, as it has been called, in its true 
 light ; a subject which has given occasion to 
 the scoffs of the infidel, and has been cum- 
 bered not a little by the indiscreet help of 
 the friends of religion. The question indeed 
 is not without its difficulties ; nor do I think 
 that those difficulties * are entirely of our own 
 making ', as the recent historian of the Jews 
 asserts, or that ' having chosen without war- 
 rant,' as he says, ' from reason or revelation 
 to conclude that the instruments must neces- 
 
120 LECTURE V. 
 
 sarily be the favourites of the Almighty, we 
 embarrass ourselves with the necessity of 
 vindicating all their actions.' 4 
 
 Certainly it is a great mistake to suppose 
 that God approves whatever he uses ; his 
 enemies perpetually serve him for tools. Ne- 
 buchadnezzar himself is several times called 
 • His servant % just as David is so called b — 
 Assyria destroys the nations of his own 
 heart, as he imagines, but he is therein ' the 
 rod of God's anger ' c ; and the wicked are 
 spoken of in the Psalms as ' the sword of the 
 Lord.' d But in the case before us is it clear 
 that the Scripture itself does not represent 
 the parties as favourites of God ? ' I am the 
 God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and 
 the God of Jacob ', is language which would 
 
 a Hist, of the Jews. Appendix p. 6. 
 
 b Jerem. xxv. 9. et alibi. 
 
 c Isaiah x. .5. 7. xlvii. 6. d Ps. xvii. 13. 
 
LECTURE V. 121 
 
 undoubtedly seem to imply on the part of 
 God some approbation of those whom He 
 thus acknowledges. Abraham is said in a 
 peculiar manner to be ' the friend of God' a . 
 God ' blessed Isaac ' b . God < loved Jacob ' c . 
 Terms which surely must be taken as testi- 
 monials of the favour which God bore to 
 these patriarchs. Yet, it may be asked, was 
 Abraham acting in that simplicity which is 
 well pleasing to God when he equivocated 
 to Pharaoh respecting Sarah, desiring her to 
 tell him that she was his sister, (though there 
 was no positive falsehood in this,) when she 
 actually was his wife d ? And again when 
 he did the same thing by Abimelech, though 
 he had seen the will and the power of God 
 to protect both himself and her, displayed on 
 that former occasion when he plagued Pha- 
 
 a James ii. 23. b Gen. xxv. 11. 
 
 c Rom. ix. 13. d Gen. xii. 13. 
 
122 LECTUKE V. 
 
 raoh till he released Sarah a ? Was Isaac 
 acting agreeably to God, when he adopted 
 the same stratagem on Rebekah's account at 
 Gerar, asserting that she too was his sister b ? 
 Or when he would willingly have diverted 
 the course of God's blessing from the younger 
 to the elder ; express declaration having been 
 made by God himself, (of which he must 
 have been aware,) that the elder was to 
 serve the younger ? Was the mere eating 
 of his son Esau's venison a sufficient reason 
 or any reason for endeavouring to frustrate 
 God's purposes towards Jacob whom He had 
 chosen ? Was Jacob again on his part act- 
 ing agreeably to God when he obtained the 
 blessing, (however his due,) from a blind 
 parent by a succession of frauds ? How can 
 these things be ? What answer have we to 
 give to those who call our faith in this mat- 
 
 a Gen. xx. 2. b xxvi. 7. c xxv. 23. 
 
LECTURE V. 123 
 
 ter in question ? How are the scoffers who 
 object these offences against men who are 
 spoken of as the friends of God, to be put to 
 silence ? For the answer which I have al- 
 ready quoted is evidently no answer at all — 
 it is an abandonment not a defence of the 
 patriarchs, who in this instance, as in others, 
 have met with hard measure at the hands of 
 their critic, owing as appears to me to a ra- 
 dical misconception of the spirit of their his- 
 tory, which must be regarded as a religious 
 history in order to be understood ; ' the ge- 
 neral design of Scripture being,' says Bishop 
 Butler, ' to give us an account of the world 
 in this single view, as God's world ; by which/ 
 he continues, * it appears essentially distin- 
 guished from all other books' 3 . Keeping 
 such distinction steadily before us, a dis- 
 tinction which can never be lost sight of with 
 a Analogy, p. 377. 
 
124 LECTURE V. 
 
 safety, I will approach the case of the Pa- 
 triarchs, and endeavour to reconcile their ma- 
 nifest frailties with God's no less manifest 
 favour. And in order to this we must once 
 more advert to the religions condition of the 
 world at the time when these distinguished 
 characters lived, and the peculiar force of the 
 language of Scripture as applied to them. 
 
 The earth then having become again cor- 
 rupt before God, idolatry prevailing over the 
 face of it ; it was necessary that some means 
 should be taken for a great revival of religion 
 amongst mankind, and the knowledge of God 
 be again quickened. Abraham was the man 
 chosen by Providence for its instrument on 
 this occasion. Through him the worship of 
 the true God, now all but expiring, was to 
 be restored ; and accordingly to him both 
 the prophets and apostles usually trace up 
 and not beyond him, as the rock whence the 
 
LECTURE V. 125 
 
 Church of God was hewn, and the hole of 
 the pit whence it was digged a . He there- 
 fore was commanded to get him away from 
 his kindred in Haran — they too devoted to 
 other gods — to a distant country, where em- 
 barrassed by no local ties, nor warped by 
 the contagious influence of his own race, he 
 might walk the world upright and alone. 
 Forth therefore he went to the land of Ca- 
 naan, the depository of the doctrine of the Unity 
 of the Godhead; I mean his unity as opposed 
 to any notion of a rival ; of the doctrine that 
 there was none other besides his God that 
 ruled in heaven or in earth. It was upon 
 this understanding that the covenant between 
 the Almighty and Abraham was founded; 
 that covenant by which God undertook on 
 his part to give the posterity of Abraham the 
 
 a Is. li. 2. ; Malach. ii. 10.; Acts vii. 2.; Rom. iv. 
 16.; Hebr. xi. 12. 
 
126 LECTURE V. 
 
 land of Canaan, and to raise up among them 
 Him in whom all the nations should be 
 blessed; Abraham and his children under- 
 taking on their part to serve the Lord their 
 God and none else — ( I will make thee ex- 
 ceeding fruitful ', such are the terms of the 
 covenant, ' and I will make nations of thee 
 and kings shall come out of thee. And I will 
 establish my covenant between me and thee, 
 and thy seed after thee in their generations 
 for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto 
 thee and to thy seed after thee. And I will 
 give unto thee and to thy seed after thee the 
 land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land 
 of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and 
 I will be their God' % . And when many years 
 afterwards the Almighty threatened the 
 Israelites under Moses, how that if they 
 went astray he would destroy their high 
 
 a Gen. xvii. 7, 8. 
 
LECTURE V. 127 
 
 places and cut down their images, and cast 
 their carcases upon the carcases of their idols, 
 he adds, in case of their true allegiance, that 
 he would * remember his covenant with Jacob 
 and his covenant with Isaac and his cove- 
 nant with Abraham' a ; as though that cove- 
 nant was still considered to rest on the wor- 
 ship of Him single and undivided. 
 
 Now this great principle was the ground- 
 work of all religion. No superstructure could 
 be reared till this foundation was laid. When 
 mankind had no assurance of the fit object of 
 their worship, how could due worship be 
 paid? The matter at issue was, whether 
 faith should be found on the earth or no. — A 
 vast trust therefore was placed in the keep- 
 ing of Abraham, and he was true to it. — He 
 was true to it, and he also caused his children 
 after him to be true to it, even as God had 
 
 a Levit. xxvi. 30. 42. 
 
128 LECTURE V. 
 
 said ; and in the midst of a multitude of pre- 
 tended gods of the nations with which both 
 he and they were surrounded, whether in the 
 country where they dwelt, or in the country 
 where they sojourned, the gods of Canaan 
 and the gods of Egypt ; seducing as many of 
 their rites were, and hard as it was to stand 
 out against universal example, Abraham and 
 Isaac and Jacob were all true and faithful to 
 the one God who had revealed Himself to 
 them ; never forfeited, no not for once, their 
 loyalty to Him; neither joining Him with 
 other gods, nor forsaking Him altogether. I 
 say never once forfeited ; for the only passage 
 which may seem to imply the contrary ad- 
 mits of an easy explanation and requires it- 
 Jacob, it is true, 'commands his household 
 and all that are with him to put away the 
 strange gods that were among them a . — But 
 
 a Gen. xxxv. 2. 
 
LECTURE V. 129 
 
 the moment of the command bespeaks the 
 nature of it. His camp was then full of 
 idolatrous Shechemites, whose city he had 
 just sacked, and taken its citizens captive. 
 And ' the strange gods ' and ' the ear-rings ' 
 of this Canaanitish multitude were they that 
 the patriarch forthwith took and buried under 
 the oak at Shechem, not permitting them to pass 
 the precincts of the place they had polluted; 
 much less profane Beth-El whither he was 
 going, the house of God, and gate of heaven. — 
 This is the interpretation of those orders of 
 Jacob, who is actually held up to his idol- 
 atrous descendants as an example of exclusive 
 devotion to God, not without an allusion per- 
 haps to this very transaction, by the prophet 
 Hosea a ; and this is the only passage in the 
 whole history of the three patriarchs that 
 contains a suspicion of idolatry as tarnishing 
 
 a Hos. xii. 4, 5. See Pole in loc. 
 
 K 
 
130 LECTURE V. 
 
 their fair fame. — God therefore was the God 
 of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the 
 God of Jacob, in an emphatic sense ; He and 
 He only was their God. This was their 
 great glory ; and it is in reference to such 
 consideration, I apprehend, that God's pecu- 
 liar regard for them is so often and so strongly 
 expressed ; and not that such expressions are 
 to be received as pledges of the Almighty's 
 unreserved approbation of all their moral 
 conduct. 
 
 Why indeed should they be so received ? 
 Take a parallel case. Our Lord Jesus Christ 
 was pleased to call his disciples 'his ser- 
 vants', 'his friends'; he blessed them for 
 believing in him ; he commended them for 
 forsaking all other things and following him ; 
 he chose them out of the world as rocks upon 
 which to build his church ; but is he there- 
 fore to be understood as sanctioning the oaths 
 
LECTURE V. 131 
 
 and denial of Peter ? the incredulity of Tho- 
 mas? the persecuting spirit of James and John? 
 or the treachery of all at the trying hour ? — 
 In like manner God was pleased to acknow- 
 ledge the patriarchs as his servants, as his 
 friends; to bless them for their faith in Him; 
 to praise them for their giving up country 
 and kindred at his call ; to select them from 
 mankind at large as the foundations of his 
 first temple, his primitive church ; but He 
 did not hereby set his seal of approval to all 
 their follies and faults. They like other good 
 men were free to fall, and sometimes fell ; 
 but how wide was the distinction between 
 them with all their frailties, and the idolaters. 
 They might sometimes choose the evil and 
 refuse the good ; but still they were not, like 
 the idolater, lending themselves to a princi- 
 ple which confounded the evil with the good. 
 For what would be thought of murder by 
 
 K 2 
 
132 LECTURE V. 
 
 him who made his seed pass through the 
 fire to Moloch ? Or of adultery, by him who 
 fell down before Baal-Peor ? The sin being 
 in either case the sacrifice? The effect of 
 idolatry was neither more nor less than to dis- 
 turb all moral distinctions ; to put bitter for 
 sweet, and sweet for bitter. Of such inesti- 
 mable value was the preservation of the wor- 
 ship of the one true God, pure and unmixed. 
 Accordingly we cannot read the five Books 
 of Moses without being struck with the ear- 
 nest and reiterated terms in which the wor- 
 ship, the single worship of the one God is 
 enforced. We have little notion of idolatry 
 or its effects at this time of day and in this 
 country, and are therefore scarcely capable 
 of entering fully into the spirit of those parts 
 of Holy Writ which relate to it; but whilst 
 many moral injunctions, which may seem to 
 us of the first importance, are not expressly 
 
LECTUltE V. 133 
 
 named, or not more than once or twice in 
 the writings of Moses, thou shalt not go after 
 other Gods is proclaimed in one shape or other 
 no less than four and forty times in the course 
 of the law, short as it is a ; as if this one of- 
 fence, in the eye of God, eclipsed in its mag- 
 nitude every other; which, it may be added, 
 should seem to be indeed the case, for Jere- 
 boam is ever represented as the king 'who 
 made Israel to sin, ' corrupt as Israel was in 
 morals even before Jeroboam; and Isaiah 
 very often speaks of the * iniquity ' of Israel, 
 where he appears to mean principally if not 
 solely their idolatry. And to purge out this 
 dross chiefly and above all was the Baby- 
 lonish captivity prepared as a furnace. Nor 
 in vain; since, however depraved in morals 
 Israel continued after this bondage, it was 
 idolatrous no more. Nay, even all the pro- 
 
 a See Patrick on Exod. xxiii. 13. 
 
134 LECTURE V. 
 
 visions of the law seem to have a reference 
 to it more or less direct. No image was to 
 be made, whether for worship or ornament, 
 as all the latter Jews, if not the earlier, un- 
 derstood the prohibition, lest the beauty of 
 the object should lead them to follow the ex- 
 ample of the heathens and do it homage. 
 Nor was any grove to be planted near an 
 altar, though the altar were built to God 
 himself 3 , lest the grove should be devoted 
 to the abominations for which such places 
 among the Gentiles were famous, who ' in- 
 flamed themselves with idols under every 
 green tree.' Nor were horses to be multi- 
 plied 5 , which might bring the people into 
 communication with Egypt, at once a land 
 of horses and idolatry. If fury, anger, in- 
 dignation be ascribed to God, in the lan- 
 guage of the law it is invariably with 
 a Deut. xvi. 21. ° lb. xvii. 16. 
 
LECTU11E V. 135 
 
 a respect unto idolatry a . It is with an eye 
 to idolatry that God assumes i Jealous ' for 
 one of his names b . Such a leading idea in 
 the law strongly supports the interpretation 
 I have given of God being the God of Abra- 
 ham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of 
 Jacob; of his being peculiarly the ' friend' 
 of those patriarchs ; not as though such terms 
 implied them to be in their morals altogether 
 blameless, but rather to be men stedfast to 
 the covenant; exclusive and zealous wor- 
 shippers of Jehovah themselves; and repre- 
 sentatives of the nation as yet in their loins 
 who were to be his own also ; righteous men, 
 no doubt, but subject withal, like other good 
 men, to human weakness; in general, exam- 
 ples of stedfast faith to be reverenced and 
 followed; occasionally, examples of singular 
 frailty to be lamented and shunned. 
 
 a See Patrick. Exod. xx. 5. b Exod. xxxiv. 14. 
 
136 LECTURE V. 
 
 And in the correctness of this view, I feel 
 further confirmed by an expression in the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews a . There the faith 
 of these very Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, 
 and Jacob, is under discussion b ; the sound- 
 ness of it is asserted, and the proofs are given. 
 
 * Wherefore,' says the author of that Epistle, 
 
 * God is not ashamed to be called their God,' 
 or, as it might run more literally, ' is not 
 ashamed of them, to be called their God;' as 
 if anticipating the very objection we have 
 been considering, that the characters of these 
 Patriarchs were not exempt from serious 
 flaws, such as might well make God ashamed 
 of them; and still for all that affirming that 
 God was nevertheless contented to overlook 
 those flaws so far as to bestow on them a 
 high and honourable title in consideration of 
 their singular fidelity to him. 
 
 a Heb. xi. 16. b v. 8, 9. 
 
LECTURE V. 137 
 
 Nor will the interpretation which I have 
 been giving of the terms in question, fail to 
 derive support from the signification of such 
 terms in Scripture as are opposed to them 
 — their antagonists — for the sense in which a 
 Father of Israel was called a ' friend of 
 God,' will be more nearly determined, if we 
 can determine what was meant by an enemy 
 of God. 
 
 Now the second commandment in the 
 twentieth chapter of Exodus has for its ob- 
 ject the prohibition of idolatry; and accord- 
 ingly the idolater is there described under the 
 name of one who ' hates ' God : — ' Rise up, 
 Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered, and 
 let them that hate thee flee before thee ' a , 
 is the language of Moses when the ark set 
 forward to win its way through the idola- 
 trous nations who opposed its advance. So 
 
 a Numb. x. 35. 
 
138 LECTURE V. 
 
 that in the vocabulary of the Old Testament 
 by the ' haters ' or 6 enemies ' of God, were 
 understood especially and above all others, 
 idolaters. And as enemies they were treated 
 beyond all others. Whoever it might be 
 that enticed another to idolatry, even though 
 the nearest and dearest kinsman, no eye was 
 to pity him, he was on no account to be 
 spared, he was not to be concealed, he was 
 surely to be killed, to be stoned with stones 
 till he died. The idolatrous city was to be 
 smitten with the edge of the sword; all in it 
 was to be destroyed utterly; no exception 
 was to be made even of the cattle ; it was to 
 be left for an heap for ever. And how loudly 
 these severities were called for, and how in- 
 adequately even these preserved the people 
 of Israel from the worship of false gods is 
 seen by all their subsequent history. For 
 they suffered the Canaanites to remain in the 
 
LECTURE V. 139 
 
 land as tributaries, contrary to God's com- 
 mand; and that people became (what God 
 foretold they would become) scourges in their 
 sides and thorns in their eyes; seducing them 
 by degress to a defection from God almost 
 universal; so that by the time of Elijah, 
 when he was the only prophet of the true 
 God to be found in all the country, of Baal's 
 prophets there were readily produced four 
 hundred and fifty, and of the prophets of the 
 Groves four hundred; and though the Israel- 
 ites had entered the land of Canaan six hun- 
 dred thousand men, there were now to be 
 counted seven thousand only amongst the 
 whole nation that had not bowed the knee 
 to Baal; and it should seem from the one 
 burden of the later prophets, their single, 
 ceaseless, terrific cry, against the idol, the 
 maker of the idol, and the worshipper of the 
 idol, that before the captivity the sin had 
 
140 LECTURE V. 
 
 become still more insufferable. So unspeakably 
 important a thing was it for mankind at 
 large, at a period when the current set so 
 strong for the worship of false gods, that one 
 man or one family should stand for the ex- 
 clusive and uncompromising worship of the 
 true God, — so consistent is it with the plan 
 upon which God's counsels proceeded, as de- 
 veloped in his own word, that He should 
 express partiality and affection above mea- 
 sure for the few that were faithful to him 
 amongst the multitudes that were faithless, — 
 so agreeable to His nature was it then (as it 
 still is) in consideration of that faith, to par- 
 don or overlook the errors of conduct into 
 which such persons might fall by sudden 
 surprize, or strong temptation, or human in- 
 firmity, or inadequate knowledge, — Rahab 
 herself, by reason of her confession in the 
 midst of so much to lead her astray, that the 
 
LECTURE V. 141 
 
 God of Israel ' was the God in heaven above 
 and in the earth beneath ' a , that is, by rea- 
 son of her faith in this great first principle of 
 religion b , was saved in the ruin of her town 
 in spite of her past evil life. And the Gi- 
 beonites, because moved by the same prin- 
 ciple, a belief in the name of the Lord, the 
 God of Joshua, they having heard of his 
 fame and all that he did in Egypt c , were 
 preserved notwithstanding their duplicity, so 
 that even Saul's slaughter of their posterity, 
 perhaps after four hundred years interval, 
 was not unavenged of God d . And possibly 
 the same consideration may furnish a key to 
 the pardon which David obtained at the 
 hand of a justly offended God, he being one 
 of the three kings who according to the au- 
 thor of Ecclesiasticus, ' never were defective,' 
 
 a Josh. ii. 11. b Heb. xi. 31. 
 
 c Josh. ix. 9. d 2 Sam. xxi. 1. 
 
142 LECTURE V. 
 
 that is, never forsook the Most High for 
 idols a ; and moreover the Lord expressly 
 tells Solomon that David his father had 
 walked ' in integrity of heart ', meaning, as 
 appears by what follows, that, whatever 
 were his other offences, he had never served 
 other gods b . And so the like high place in 
 his regard on this self-same account, did God 
 actually vouchsafe to Abraham, to Isaac, 
 and to Jacob, notwithstanding the sins of 
 which they were doubtless guilty. And if 
 on the Father of the Faithful himself, a dou- 
 ble portion of his parental approbation and 
 love rested, the allegiance of that valiant be- 
 liever was tried with double force, and stood 
 unshaken. 
 
 Thus have I endeavoured to clear up a 
 difficulty, which the mixed character of those 
 
 a Ecclesiasticus, xlix. 4. 
 b 1 Kings, ix. 4, 6. 
 
LECTURE V. 143 
 
 who have been called 'the saints' of the 
 Old Testament presents ; and to explain, how 
 the patriarchs might be fairly represented as 
 God's own, in spite of those many and fre- 
 quent backslidings, which still assuredly 
 there was nothing in them to excuse, much 
 less to consecrate. 
 
 Now these things were written for our 
 admonition. God is the same to day, yes- 
 terday, and for ever. The God of Abraham, 
 and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, 
 is our God also, and that which was hereto- 
 fore pleasant or displeasing in his sight is so 
 in principle still. He spared not the wor- 
 shipper of other gods, but whoso cleaved to 
 Him and to Him alone, in that man did He 
 delight. Still the same is no doubt true. 
 False gods in the literal sense we cannot 
 follow. The circumstances in which we 
 stand differ from those in which the patri- 
 
144 LECTURE V. 
 
 archs of old stood. But, says St. Paul, ' co- 
 vetousness is idolatry.' ' And some there are,' 
 says the Apostle, ' whose belly is their god.' 
 And some there are who take for a god a 
 man whose breath is in his nostrils, as they 
 did of old time who cried of their patron it is 
 ' the voice of a god and not of a man,' when 
 he spake. And some there are who, as our 
 Lord puts it, ' serve, (that is worship) mam- 
 mon and not God.' So that the love of 
 riches, and the lusts of the flesh, and the 
 praise of men, and the distinctions of life, are 
 still represented as so many idols; and still 
 therefore there may be according to the high- 
 est authority, worship of false gods even in 
 times like our own, and amongst persons 
 like ourselves, our bodies indeed, at Bethel, 
 our hearts at Beth-aven a ; and if the spirit of 
 these precepts be regarded as well as the 
 
 a Hooker. 
 
LECTURE V. 145 
 
 letter, idolatry there may be in many things 
 even besides these in which it is expressed: 
 there yet may be Lords many, and Gods 
 many. Let us then search our own hearts, 
 each for himself, that we may discover what 
 the idol is in our own case — be it a lust of 
 the flesh; be it a lust of the eye; be it a 
 pride of life; be it too much carefulness; be 
 it too much selfishness; be it too much indo- 
 lence; Baals and Belials and Molochs still, 
 but under other forms ; let us put it away as 
 an accursed thing, as a thing which is wean- 
 ing our affections from God on whom they 
 should be set, and effectually including us in 
 the number of those faithless and disloyal 
 creatures who were of old time accounted his 
 enemies, and against whom his wrath in turn 
 burned like fire. Let us put the accursed 
 thing away, and with the faithful Abraham 
 for our pattern, set the Lord our God first in 
 
146 LECTURE V. 
 
 all our doings and yield up to Him our hearts 
 and lives, keeping nothing back; that so, we 
 may be with Abraham, the friends of God, 
 not the servants only but the friends ; that so 
 we may not forfeit that friendship of God, as 
 Abraham forfeited it not, through those 
 frailties of our nature by reason of which we 
 cannot always stand upright; but find God 
 ready to overlook, to pity, to forgive, and 
 to say to each of us notwithstanding our 
 backslidings, * thy faith hath saved thee, go 
 in peace.' 
 
LECTURE VI. 147 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 genius and character of the mosaical law. 
 
 Psalm i. 2. 
 
 His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth 
 he meditate day and night. 
 
 In pursuance of the subject which has occu- 
 pied my attention hitherto in this course of 
 Lectures, the History of the Jews recently 
 given to the public, I intend in the present 
 sermon to make some remarks on the true 
 genius and character of the Mosaical Law ; 
 thinking the spirit in which that part of the 
 history in question is written, calculated to 
 mislead, by exhibiting the Jewish lawgiver 
 too prominently in the light of an eminent 
 patriot rather than an organ and minister of 
 God; and the Jewish law as a wise and 
 politic rather than a religious and mystical 
 
148 LECTURE VI. 
 
 code ; a code, not to be compared with any 
 other of ancient date, but standing by itself 
 and alone. 
 
 I. I have chosen my text as at once appro- 
 priate to the theme before us, and as furnish- 
 ing me with a favourable introduction to my 
 argument, for coupled with other passages in 
 the Psalms of a similar import, it gives us to 
 understand what were David's own views of 
 the point at issue — the nature of the Mosaical 
 law. For this law must have been at least 
 in the mind of the psalmist when he uttered 
 the words of the text and other like words, 
 it being the only written law of God extant. 
 
 This law then was a topic, it seems, on 
 which a man might profitably ' meditate day 
 and night.' It is elsewhere spoken of by the 
 same patriarch, as an ' undefiled law, convert- 
 ing the soul'; as being 'sure and giving wisdom 
 to the simple.' ' The statutes of the Lord ' 
 
LECTURE VI. 149 
 
 are declared to be 'right and to rejoice the 
 heart '; ( the commandment of the Lord to be 
 pure and to give light to the eyes.' a 
 
 Now if in thus saying David contemplated 
 the Mosaical Law — and it is impossible that 
 he should have excluded it from his contem- 
 plation — there was something, it appears, to 
 be found in that law which required investi- 
 gation and thought, in order that its worth 
 might be known ; a treasure as it were hid ; 
 a principle within it, which was calculated to 
 exalt, to purify, to illumine, to change the 
 feelings and taste of him who should make it 
 his study and his guide. But I ask, is this a 
 view of it which corresponds with the notion 
 that it was a scheme of mere temporal legis- 
 lation, adapted to the temporal wants of 
 mankind, and understood to arm itself with 
 no other than temporal sanctions? What 
 a Ps. xix. 7. 
 
150 LECTURE VI. 
 
 was there in the prospect of a portion more 
 or less desirable in the goodly pastures of 
 Canaan ; in the skilful performance of several 
 intricate rites ; in the washing of cups and of 
 pans and of person ; nay even in the coarser 
 duties of humanity there prescribed ; to be 
 pondered upon day and night with such vast 
 advantage ? What principle was there here 
 capable of converting the soul ; of making 
 the simple wise ; of rejoicing the heart ; of 
 enlightening the eyes ? Surely the Psalmist 
 must have seen more in this law than its 
 letter, before he could invest it with qualities 
 so noble, so peculiar, so elevating. 
 
 II. Descend we to later times, and let us 
 observe the terms in which it is spoken 
 of by the prophets ; these will be found 
 to correspond with the sentiments already 
 expressed by David; they will point as 
 plainly as words can, to an esoteric mean- 
 
LECTURE VI. 151 
 
 ing in the law, to high doctrines there com- 
 municated as it were in cypher. Thus * the 
 place where God should set his name' is a 
 subject touched with great emphasis in the 
 law. It is represented as the future centre 
 of all the worship of Israel. Thither the 
 rites, ceremonies, sacrifices, devotions, pilgrim- 
 ages of the people were all to tend as to a 
 point. Such was the future Jerusalem of the 
 law. And what do I find it in the vocabu- 
 lary of prophecy ? There Jerusalem is the 
 dwelling-place of the most high God. It is 
 there in the latter days, when the moon shall 
 be confounded and the sun ashamed, that the 
 Lord of hosts shall reign before his ancients 
 gloriously a . It is in that holy mountain, 
 even Sion, that the great feast is to be set 
 forth unto all the people, the feast of fat 
 things, the feast of wine on the lees, of fat 
 
 a Is. xxiv. 23. 
 
152 LECTURE VI. 
 
 things full of marrow, of wine on trie lees 
 well refined a . There the wolf and the lamb 
 are to feed together, and the leopard is to lie 
 down with the kid, and the calf and the 
 young lion and the fatling together, and the 
 little child to lead them, none being to hurt 
 or destroy in all that holy mountain b . It 
 would be as reasonable to suppose that these 
 beasts of the field and the extraordinary 
 habits assigned to them are things to be taken 
 in a literal sense, as that this Jerusalem is the 
 city built with hands, or this Sion the rock in 
 Judah. Nor is this all. — Where the multi- 
 tude of believers which should hereafter be 
 added to the church is spoken of, it is still as 
 an accession to the Israel of God . Their 
 approach is an influx into the courts of His 
 temple d . The ministers appointed to bear 
 
 a Is. xxv. 6. b lb. 
 
 c Is. ix. 3. d Is. lxii. 9. 
 
LECTURE VI. 153 
 
 them good tidings are watchmen set upon 
 the walls of Jerusalem a . The unbelievers that 
 refuse to hearken are Philistines b ; Moab- 
 ites c ; Edomites, inhabitants of Bozrah d ; 
 Egyptians e . The language of our puritans, 
 living as they did after the question had been 
 in a great measure settled by the writings of 
 the New Testament, however audaciously 
 applied, was so far strictly the language of 
 the prophets. 
 
 The ceremonial of the law is still regarded 
 by them as a figure ; as the mere husk of 
 better things within it. They make it a 
 matter of reproach to their carnal countrymen 
 that they overlooked its spirit, which has all 
 in it that was of value. ' To what purpose 
 this multitude of sacrifices ', this slavish inter- 
 pretation of a mysterious law ? ' I am full 
 
 a Is. xxi. 6. b lb. xi. 14. c lb. xxv. 10. 
 
 d lb. xxxiv. 5, 6. e Joel, iii. 19. 
 
154 LECTURE VI. 
 
 of the burnt-offerings of rams and the fat of 
 fed beasts. I delight not in the blood of 
 bullocks or of lambs or of he-goats. When 
 ye come to appear before Me, who hath re- 
 quired this at your hands to tread my courts ? ' 
 as though Moses had required far other ser- 
 vice; 'bring no more vain oblations'*. The 
 whole manifestly an expostulation of God 
 with a people who had wilfully closed their 
 eyes to the meaning of a code, which was, 
 and which they knew to be, a parable. I 
 argue therefore from the uniform language of 
 the prophets, that the dispensation under 
 which the Israelites were living was ac- 
 knowledged to be a typical dispensation. 
 Their very vocabulary bewrays this to be a 
 popular persuasion ; and had it been other- 
 wise, their prophecies must have been as un- 
 intelligible to the nation at large, as a dis- 
 a Is. i. 11. 
 
LECTURE VI. 155 
 
 sertation upon any occult science would be to 
 persons unacquainted with its nomenclature. 
 A fact which cannot be better illustrated than 
 by the unworthy sense which is seen to issue 
 from the prophecies when they are handled 
 by those, (some amongst them too, illustrious 
 scholars,) who reject the figurative use of 
 speech in their exposition of them, and under- 
 stand them to the letter. Accordingly when 
 it comes to the apostle Paul's turn to be an 
 interpreter of Moses he hastens without pre- 
 face or apology to descant upon this law as 
 spiritual; reproves his countrymen for allowing 
 a veil to be upon their heart when it was 
 read ; and unfolds the allegories of which (he 
 makes no question about the matter) it was 
 full ; so that the principle of interpretation 
 upon which the epistle to the Galatians, as 
 well as that to the Hebrews proceeds, is 
 enough to show that such an allegorical view 
 
156 LECTURE VI. 
 
 of the Levitical code had been always familiar 
 to the Jews ; that it was not accounted by 
 them as in any degree fanciful ; that it was 
 an argument in which there was nothing of 
 novelty save only the extent to which it was 
 carried. How indeed could the principle be 
 strange to men who had admitted into the 
 canon of Scripture the Song of Solomon ; and 
 who had refined indeed upon that principle 
 to such an excess, as to discover or to affect 
 to discover some mystery in every word and 
 letter ; every jot and tittle of the law ; in 
 the omission or insertion of a vowel ; or actu- 
 ally in its very size and shape? Trifling 
 this was with Scripture, if you will, but still 
 the strong propensity argues that there must 
 have been some strong foundation for it ; 
 there would not have been so much that was 
 counterfeit if there had not been something 
 that was genuine. That such scheme of in- 
 
LECTURE VI. 157 
 
 terpretation is still liable to abuse in rash and 
 unskilful hands I pretend not to deny ; nor 
 do I mean to enter into the question as to the 
 limits within which it should be confined ; 
 whether the allegories which the apostle found 
 are to be accepted as excluding or provoking 
 all similar attempts of our own. Suffice it to 
 have shown that the law had undoubtedly 
 in it, and was so understood by the people, a 
 sense beyond that which was ordinary and 
 obvious, and that therefore it cannot be ex- 
 plained with success, upon principles appli- 
 cable to other codes where the sense is single. 
 
 III. There is another consideration distinct 
 from the last though allied to it, which at- 
 tests the Mosaical law to be a peculiar law, 
 even as the people to whom it was given was 
 a peculiar people. I mean the extent to which 
 it admits of this allegorical interpretation 
 whereof I have spoken, both in its general 
 
158 LECTURE VI. 
 
 character and in its details. Chance could 
 not have produced it. A whimsical coinci- 
 dence between the several parts of two sys- 
 tems of things might happen once or twice 
 without proving any studied relation to sub- 
 sist between them; but the same could not 
 happen a thousand times, with the same 
 conclusion. Let us take the legal or politi- 
 cal history of Greece, of Rome, or of England, 
 and attempt to make it speak parables, and we 
 shall find it frustrate our efforts, baffle our in- 
 genuity. Not so that of Israel. — Indeed there 
 is something singularly harmonious in the 
 subordinate and primary movements of the 
 scheme of their polity; the former serving, if 
 I mistake not, to throw light upon the latter ; 
 separate items of their dispensation develop- 
 ing the general law by which it was 
 governed. For, instruction by action rather 
 than by precept is quite a feature in the in- 
 
LECTURE VI. 159 
 
 tercourse of God with his people throughout 
 every age. — I have had occasion to touch 
 upon this subject before a , but I must for 
 a moment revert to it. — We see it in the 
 gourd that was made to grow up over the 
 head of Jonah, and then wither away, so that 
 he should be angry for the gourd b , when he 
 was to be taught the consideration due to a 
 great city. In the arrows which Joash 
 was commanded by Elisha to take and smite 
 upon the ground, before Syria was to be so 
 smitten . — In the bonds and yokes which 
 Jeremiah was directed to make and put on 
 his neck before the kings were made servants 
 to Babylon d . — In the rending of the veil of 
 the temple at the crucifixion. — It is needless 
 to multiply instances. Now this method of 
 instruction the Almighty seems to have 
 
 a Lecture II. b Jonah iv. 
 
 c 2 Kinors xiii. 18, 19. d Jer. xxvii. 2. 
 
160 LECTURE VI. 
 
 adopted upon a great scale in his very first 
 introduction of himself to Israel, as their 
 Law-giver; and these several detached cases 
 of a like kind but of a later date, appear to 
 be the scattered rear of this his original 
 scheme of Revelation. Bearing then thus 
 much in mind, we shall perceive the nation 
 of Israel to be, as it were, actors upon the 
 wide stage of the universe; in whose persons 
 and by whose adventures, God was rehears- 
 ing to all the world the lessons of life. — They 
 were raised up to represent, not altogether 
 unconscious of the part they were playing, 
 the spectacle of the moral government of 
 God. Their annals were so shaped as to 
 be a morality. The prophets indeed, did 
 our present enquiry reach to them, are stand- 
 ing witnesses of the working of this ma- 
 chinery. They are perpetually breaking 
 away from matters of fact in Jewish history 
 
LECTURE VI. 161 
 
 to the corresponding features of God's reli- 
 gious administration of the world; the 
 temporal arid practical shadowing forth the 
 eternal and universal. From Hezekiah, or 
 Cyrus, or the prophet himself, they rush to 
 Christ a . From the calling of the Jews out 
 of Egypt and Assyria, to the calling of the 
 world to Christ b . From the escape out of Ba- 
 bylon, to the escape out of sin c . From the 
 desolation coming upon Israel by the armies 
 of the East, to that desolation which shall 
 come upon all the earth when Christ returns 
 at the latter day to summon it to judge- 
 ment d . Moses in the law is to be read upon 
 the same principle of interpretation. The 
 children of Israel were delivered from the 
 bondage of Egypt and were 6 baptised in the 
 
 a Is. xvi. 5. xli. 2. 1. 4. b Is. xix. 23. 
 
 c Is. xlviii. 20. 22. and comp. Rev. xviii. 4. ; Is. 
 lii. 11. d Is. xxiv. 
 
 M 
 
162 LECTURE VI. 
 
 sea,' (I speak not here of mine own authority 
 ye well know.) — They toiled through a long 
 and weary pilgrimage towards a better 
 country, a land flowing with milk and honey, 
 the glory of all lands. — Howbeit Moses led 
 them but to the borders of that pleasant 
 land, it being reserved to Joshua or Jesus to 
 give them, the people of God, this his rest a . 
 Thus the broad outline of the Israelitish his- 
 tory as put upon record by Moses, and as 
 applied by the author of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, wears the aspect of a parable ; 
 and the laws of the Israelitish nation which 
 he further promulgates, wear the same. The 
 purgation of almost all things by blood b ; a 
 process in itself rather to pollute than purify. 
 The body of the victim burned without the 
 camp c ; an arrangement in itself inconvenient 
 
 8 Hebr. iv. 1. b Hebr. ix. 22. 
 
 c xiii. 11. 
 
LECTURE VI. 163 
 
 rather than the contrary. The bone of the 
 lamb not to be broken; in the first instance, 
 as it should seem, out of mere haste which 
 could not tarry the dividing asunder the 
 joints and marrow. All, coincidences with 
 holier and better things, (as it afterwards 
 turned out), both in number so great, for I 
 have contented myself with one or two ex- 
 amples; and in nature so peculiar, for they 
 are often trifling and insignificant matters in 
 themselves; as by no possibility to be acci- 
 dental, or to admit of any satisfactory expla- 
 nation save one, even that the law and the 
 gospel were constructed as part and counter- 
 part, put together by God, and not by man 
 to be put asunder. 
 
 IV. Nor is this all. Difficult as it is to 
 deny that the doctrine of a future state seems 
 proclaimed with little emphasis in the law of 
 Moses, still certain glimpses there are in it of 
 
 M 2 
 
164 LECTURE VI. 
 
 such a doctrine, the heavens, as it were, here 
 and there opened ; glimpses, which sometimes 
 lead us to suspect that the knowledge afloat 
 upon this subject was far more than some are 
 disposed to assign to the Jews ; and that they 
 found it in passages of their law where we 
 pass it by. Certain it is, that when the 
 young man in the gospel demanded of Jesus 
 what he was to do that he might inherit 
 eternal life, Jesus referred him to the law, 
 ' what is written in the law, how readest 
 thou ' a ; clearly, I think, implying that the 
 question of eternal life was involved in the 
 law. — And here I shall not press into the 
 service of my argument the usual array of 
 texts which are supposed to convey this 
 truth, and which will occur to you of them- 
 selves, but refer you to others less trite, 
 though perhaps not less conclusive; for there 
 
 a Matt. xix. 16.; Luke x. 26. 
 
LECTURE VI. 165 
 
 are many fragments of the doctrine of a fu- 
 ture state, scattered throughout the law, if 
 we will be at the pains to gather them up, 
 enough when compared with its seemingly 
 carnal ordinances, to give a complicated 
 character to it as a whole, and to suggest 
 that in approaching it we are approaching 
 dark and difficult ground. — The tenure by 
 which Canaan is represented as held con- 
 veys the idea of something beyond the occu- 
 pation of the soil. The term pilgrim upon 
 earth, by which the Patriarch was designated, 
 and from which the author of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews deduces, that one so called 
 sought some other country a is continued un- 
 der the Levitical law. 'The land' says God 
 in reference to Canaan, ' the land shall not 
 be sold for ever, for the land is mine, and ye 
 are strangers and sojourners with me ' b ; 
 a Hebr. xi. 14. b Levit. xxv. 23. 
 
166 LECTURE VI. 
 
 strangers and sojourners in this land, directed 
 therefore by such language to look for a land 
 which should be their own and a dwelling-place 
 which should endure. — Again, touching the 
 memory of the departed, ' ye shall not round 
 the corners of your heads, neither shalt 
 thou mar the corners of thy beard. Ye 
 shall not make any cuttings in your flesh 
 for the dead nor print any marks upon 
 you' a ; an injunction apparently grounded 
 upon the same principle as that which after- 
 wards spake in the words of the apostle, 
 even ' that we should sorrow not as others 
 who have no hope,' b and so understood by 
 Hooker. The law against the necroman- 
 cer, or one who puts questions to the dead, 
 as the Septuagint translators render it, what- 
 ever may have been the offence, and whether 
 one of imposture or otherwise, at any rate 
 a Levit. xix. 27. b 1 Thess. iv. 13. 
 
LECTURE VI. 167 
 
 points to a popular belief of a world beyond 
 the grave a . And another passage seems no 
 less calculated to impress us with a notion that 
 there was a treasury of religious knowledge in 
 the keeping of the Israelites beyond the or- 
 dinary estimate. ' It came to pass,' we are 
 told, ' at the end of four hundred and thirty 
 years, even the self-same day it came to pass, 
 that the hosts of the Lord went out from the 
 land of Egypt ' b . Now if the point from 
 which this period takes its date was the day 
 when God made the promise to Abraham, as 
 should seem by a text in the Epistle to the 
 Galatians c , it would follow that this day had 
 been ever observed amongst the Israelites, 
 even during their bondage, as an anniversary, 
 a day much to be remembered; and such a 
 notion corresponds with the testimony borne 
 
 a Deut. xviii. 10. b Exod. xii. 41. 
 c Gal. iii. 16,17. 
 
168 LECTURE VI. 
 
 in the speech of Stephen, who tells us, that 
 when Moses saw one of the children of Israel 
 suffer wrong and defended him and smote 
 the Egyptian, * he supposed his brethren 
 would have understood how that God by his 
 hand would deliver them ' a . And it may be 
 added, that the oath which Joseph took of 
 the children of Israel before he died, saying, 
 surely God will visit you, and ye shall carry 
 up my bones from hence; and the scrupulous 
 care with which Moses in the confusion of a 
 forced flight from Egypt complied with this 
 command two hundred years after it had 
 been uttered b , seems to imply the existence 
 of an intense tradition amongst the people, 
 grounded upon God's early promises to their 
 fathers, such as the mere surface of the his- 
 tory by no means indicates. Nay more — as 
 in the later days of the Jewish empire the 
 a Acts vii. 25. b Exod. xiii. ll>. 
 
LECTURE VI. 169 
 
 doctrine of the rewards and punishments of a 
 future life was beyond all question habitually 
 circulated in the vernacular language of the 
 time, through emblems drawn from scenes 
 which Canaan supplied; for on the one hand, 
 the blessed were to sit down with Abraham, 
 Isaac and Jacob; on the other, the cursed 
 were to be consigned to Tophet ordained of 
 old, that valley of corpses in the suburbs of 
 Jerusalem, the type of Hell, where the worm 
 of corruption never died and the funeral fire 
 was never quenched ; so is it probable that 
 in the earliest periods similar ideas were at- 
 tached more or less distinctly to similar ob- 
 jects, and that the remarkable emphasis with 
 which the glories of Canaan are described, 
 glories far beyond these with which nature had 
 clothed it, so much so that the fact has fur- 
 nished an infidel objection; as well as the 
 horrid catalogue of blight and blast, famine 
 
170 LECTURE VI. 
 
 and sword, locust and murrain, for which 
 those glories were to be exchanged, were 
 understood to express more than met the ear, 
 to breath something beyond themselves, and 
 in such ulterior sense have been regarded by 
 Calvin, whose hints upon the character of the 
 Mosaical law, whatever may be our reason- 
 able dread of his distinguishing dogma, bear 
 all the marks of a masterly conception of these 
 ancient oracles of God a . 
 
 V. There is one aspect more in which the 
 Levitical law presents itself, and which quite 
 takes it out of the rule of ordinary codes of 
 law — the disposition which it manifests to 
 multiply offences with a studious purpose of 
 making all men debtors to it. The ordinary 
 object of law is to protect; the peculiar ob- 
 ject of the Levitical law is to condemn. Of 
 
 a Instit. Christ. Relig. Lee. ii. c. viii. § 8, and Lee. 
 ii. c. xi. § 3. 
 
LECTURE VI. 171 
 
 what possible consequence could it be to so- 
 ciety, if we consider the matter merely on 
 its own merits, whether a kid be seethed in 
 its mother's milk or not; whether the dam 
 be taken sitting on its young ones or whether 
 the young be taken without the dam; whe- 
 ther the plough be drawn by an ox and an ass, 
 or by any other beasts of draught yoked in 
 any other combination ; whether woollen and 
 linen be woven into the same garment, or 
 either stuff to the exclusion of the other; whe- 
 ther fringes be made upon four quarters of a 
 vesture or not? How are these, and a mul- 
 titude of other rules equally arbitrary and 
 capricious, as it should seem, independently 
 considered, to be viewed except as parts of 
 a system of law meant to implicate, meshes 
 of a net intended to be so fine as that nothing 
 might escape it? And the same may be said, 
 I think, of many other injunctions in the Le- 
 
172 LECTURE VI. 
 
 vitical law which have been sometimes sup- 
 posed to have for their sole end the separation 
 of the people of God from the idolaters. If 
 the use of swine's flesh, for instance, was 
 forbidden to the Jews because their heathen 
 neighbours offered it in sacrifice, why not 
 the flesh of oxen or of sheep? Nothing, in- 
 deed, can be more clear than that restrictions 
 of every sort and kind, such as an inconsider- 
 ate reader of Scripture might be tempted to 
 call vexations and nothing less, were wound 
 about the followers of Moses ; and that every 
 day and every hour of the day, in the ordi- 
 nary and extraordinary duties of life, the 
 most circumspect Israelite must have found 
 himself driven to oblations and ablutions, by 
 sins of ignorance, of inadvertence, and even 
 of the merest accident. Now such a scheme 
 contemplated with a close and constant refer- 
 ence to the great doctrine of a Redeemer to 
 
LECTURE VI. 173 
 
 come, even as it is by St. Paul in the second 
 and third chapters of his Epistle to the Ro- 
 mans, and indeed in all his Epistles; such a 
 scheme regarded as a contrivance for stopping 
 every man's mouth so that all the world may 
 become guilty before God ; the Mosaical law, I 
 say, so construed, is at once intelligible and 
 satisfactory; but let it once be measured 
 by the ordinary rules applicable to human 
 laws, by the ends they propose to them- 
 selves, and the means they take for securing 
 those ends, and nothing can be more ano- 
 malous; for what a principle would a 
 legislator be thought to adopt who in the 
 concoction of his laws, manifestly made it 
 his aim to bring every man in the land under 
 its penalties and pains! 
 
 For all these reasons therefore, I cannot 
 conceive how the point can be mooted that 
 at any rate, Moses, even though he should 
 
174 LECTURE VI. 
 
 be regarded as a mere politician, ' is entitled 
 to the highest rank among the benefactors of 
 mankind, as having been the first who at- 
 tempted to regulate society by an equal 
 written law ' a — the very character of that 
 law being enough in itself to exclude any po- 
 litical hypothesis ; and the mere suggestion of 
 its possibility betraying, as appears to me, 
 an imperfect acquaintance with the structure 
 of the law itself; an insensibility to the mys- 
 teries which are certainly lurking throughout 
 it; I will not say an unconsciousness, but at 
 least a want of an adequate impression that 
 the place whereon the historian stood was 
 holy ground. 
 
 On the whole, the law of Moses was 
 framed perhaps with a view, amongst other 
 views, to try the faith of its expositors. It 
 was read in one sense by the Sadducee, in 
 
 a Hist, of the Jews, i. 161. 
 
LECTURE VI. 175 
 
 another by the woman of Samaria; the former 
 could see in it ' neither resurrection nor angel 
 nor spirit', the latter could see in it that 
 'Messias which was to come and tell all 
 things.' a So divers might be the interpreta- 
 tions thereof; so meetly was it composed for 
 discovering who was the ( wise servant '. For 
 ourselves at this time of day, to be unre- 
 solved as to its nature, there is less excuse. 
 If its peculiar capacity for figurative applica- 
 tion; if the scattered glimpses of high and 
 holy things which it offers, reaches as it were 
 into the abysses of the firmament; if the in- 
 tentional multiplication of its prohibitions 
 and commands, touch not, taste not, handle 
 not, onerous to a degree that must have 
 merely served to exasperate had they been 
 understood to convey no ulterior lesson; if 
 these features suffice not to mark it with a 
 
 * John iv. 25. 
 
17C) LECTURE VI. 
 
 character altogether its own, savouring of 
 things other than earthly; still the language 
 of the Psalmist concerning it, the language of 
 the Prophets, the language of St. Paul, the 
 language of the Lord himself, ought surely to 
 rescue it from misconception with every pro- 
 fessing Christian, and forbid it to be con- 
 founded with the statutes and ordinances of 
 man. 
 
LECTURE VII. 177 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 credibility of miracles. 
 
 Psalm cxi. 2. 
 
 The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them 
 that have pleasure therein. 
 
 In further allusion to the work of which I 
 have already spoken so frequently, it is my 
 intention in this Lecture to expose the futility 
 of all attempts to explain the miracles of the 
 Mosaic History upon the principle of second 
 causes ; and to point out some considerations 
 which appear to render any such device for 
 procuring assent to their credibility, needless. 
 On the first part of the question I shall 
 waste but few words. It is possible that in 
 some instances a seeming miracle may admit 
 of being explained by a second cause. The 
 
 N 
 
178 LECTURE VII. 
 
 bitter waters of Marah might be sweetened 
 by the natural virtue of the plant cast into 
 them. The raiment of the Israelites might 
 not wax old in their forty years' pilgrimage 
 through the wilderness by reason of their 
 working up the materials with which their 
 flocks supplied them, or of their intercourse 
 with the caravans of the traders. But if it 
 be admitted that in these and a few other 
 cases the principle of second causes may be 
 applied successfully to account for what at 
 first sight appears miraculous, will that 
 principle apply in all cases ? — and if its ap- 
 plication be not universal, as in this instance 
 its advocate does not pretend, where is .its 
 value in rendering Scripture more palateable 
 to unbelievers, which is the object, I suppose, 
 in the use of it ? It may be true that manna 
 is now found in the desert as a natural pro- 
 duction ; that it is collected before sun-rise, 
 
LECTURE VII. 179 
 
 and dissolved, if not collected, before noon ; 
 but it is not contended that on the sixth day 
 twice as much can be gathered as on any 
 other day. It may be true that the upper 
 part of the Red Sea may be now forded, and 
 with the advantage of a peculiar and strong 
 wind, dry-shod ; but it is not discovered that 
 the waters stand as a wall on the right hand 
 and on the left, nor yet that a pillar of cloud 
 and fire is seen presiding over the passage. 
 Miraculous, undoubtedly, the Mosaic history 
 claims to be, and by no ingenuity whatever 
 can it be purged of its miracles. It remains 
 therefore only to consider whether there be 
 any thing in this its miraculous character 
 which can justly be an offence to a reason- 
 able man. 
 
 Now it should seem that this disposition 
 to mitigate miracles by a recourse to second 
 causes arises from not bearing in mind the 
 
 N 2 
 
180 LECTURE VII. 
 
 object which the Deity may be supposed to 
 have before Him, chiefly, if not solely, in his 
 management of the physical world at all 
 times ; that there is strong reason to believe 
 that his views do not terminate in the well- 
 being of that world, considered independently 
 and in itself ; that the regularity of its system 
 does not seem to be the proper end which 
 the Almighty proposes to Himself to effect ; 
 that such regularity He does indeed order, 
 but still with an ulterior and nobler aim ; 
 that there is much cause for thinking that 
 the scheme of the natural world was at first 
 constructed, and has been conducted since, 
 with a reference to the scheme of the moral 
 world ; that the one is in subordination to 
 the other, as the less to the more worthy ; 
 and that the natural system cannot be re- 
 garded without error, unless it be regarded 
 as standing in this inferior relation. For it 
 
LECTURE VII. 181 
 
 will make a very wide difference in our 
 judgement of the physical system in which 
 we live, both its nature and working, 
 whether we contemplate it as an end or only 
 as a means to an end. If as an end, the 
 notion of any derangement in its parts may 
 shock us, because it would argue imperfection 
 in the plan. If as a means to an end, then 
 no presumption would lie against such oc- 
 casional derangement, unless it shall seem 
 that the derangement tended to frustrate the 
 end, much less, on the contrary, if it should 
 seem to promote it. The movement of a 
 loom is regularity itself, but the object of the 
 implement not being mere regularity but the 
 fabric of a web to which such regularity is 
 instrumental, it becomes not a flaw but a 
 perfection in the contrivance that it admits 
 of being thrown out of gear (as the phrase is) ; 
 for this obstruction ministers to its ultimate 
 
182 LECTURE VII. 
 
 object, the fabric of the cloth, no less than 
 its regularity. And he who should undertake 
 to lecture upon the mechanism of the loom, 
 and was ignorant of the purpose for which it 
 was made, would infallibly fall into mistakes, 
 particularly where its movements or the 
 checks to its movements might seem to have 
 in them something peculiar and out of cha- 
 racter with the whole. I am aware of the 
 danger of illustrations on subjects like the 
 present. I do not therefore contend for every 
 conclusion which might be drawn from 
 pushing the parallel to an extreme. At the 
 same time the most obvious objection of all, 
 that in the case of the machine, the necessity 
 of such suspension of its laws implies defect, 
 I am not careful to guard against ; defect it 
 certainly does imply somewhere, but it may 
 be quite as well in the material as in the 
 maker or the machine ; and perhaps the ne- 
 
LECTURE VII. 183 
 
 cessity for miraculous interpositions implies 
 defect too, not in God however, but in man, 
 for whose moral welfare it is probable that 
 miracles would not have been wanted, had 
 he not fallen from his innocence, or in other 
 words had he not been created free ; a position 
 surely not impeaching the perfection of God's 
 workmanship. 
 
 I apprehend therefore that if it can be 
 established, First, that the natural world 
 bears very strong marks of being at all times 
 in subordination to the moral, as an instrument 
 to an end : 
 
 And secondly, that the moral world may 
 sometimes require for its well-being irre- 
 gularities in the operation of this its instru- 
 ment, we shall remove a stumbling-block out 
 of the way of the acceptation of miracles, and 
 relieve ourselves from the necessity of ac- 
 commodating them to the taste of a false 
 
184 LECTURE VII. 
 
 philosophy by a fruitless attempt to resolve 
 them into second causes. 
 
 I. 1 . Now in general, it may be said, 
 that the vegetable bears every appearance 
 of being made for the animal, the animal for 
 the rational creation. They have clearly a 
 connection one with another. There is 
 amongst them a strict relation in bulk, in 
 quality, and in adaptation of parts ; and 
 certainly the links of this relation cannot be 
 taken in any other order than the one I have 
 assigned. It would be difficult to suppose 
 the man made for the sheep, or the sheep for 
 the pasture. 
 
 2. Again — the human frame gives token 
 of being formed for the human soul within it, 
 that is, the material for the moral part ; the 
 members being merely convenient tools for 
 the functions which the soul has to exercise, 
 and care being taken in the substance or 
 
LECTURE VII. 185 
 
 collocation of them that the safety of the 
 soul, (I mean so long as it is entrusted to the 
 body's keeping,) shall be secured; that por- 
 tion of the body which is her chief seat, being 
 carefully deposited in a strong box of bone, 
 evidently constructed with a view to the safe 
 custody of a treasure of great price; and with 
 a like consultation for her continuance in the 
 body, the pipes necessary for the passage of 
 the animal fluid which promotes such conti- 
 nuance, are carefully placed as much as pos- 
 sible out of harm's way, laid deep, whilst 
 others of the same nature but charged with 
 less important functions, are superficial and 
 exposed; a provision of the same kind as 
 that of a conduit for a garrison which is sunk 
 low in the earth lest accident should betray 
 it to the enemy, and it be cut off. The 
 whole arrangement bespeaking, so far as it 
 
186 LECTURE VII. 
 
 goes, the subservience of the physical to the 
 moral, as a means to an end. 
 
 3. Again. If this relation of parts in the 
 individual argues such a truth, so does the 
 relation of individuals to their whole species. 
 It is difficult, almost impossible, to explain 
 the positions in which mankind are placed 
 with respect to one another, on any principle 
 but that of a regard for moral interests. The 
 helpless condition in which we are at first 
 born, and in which we are a long time con- 
 demned to abide, a defective provision, as 
 it should seem, in itself, whereby multitudes 
 are made to consume the resources of their 
 mother earth, perhaps the scanty resources, 
 who die before they can refund, and all that 
 has been spent upon them perishes; but a 
 process nevertheless which, if regarded in its 
 moral aspect, is full of beauty and blessing, 
 
LECTURE VII. 187 
 
 for it propagates the charities of father, son, 
 and brother. The rapidity with which ge- 
 nerations of men come and go, upon the 
 earth, like the other, a scheme, evil as it 
 may be thought in itself, for it peoples the 
 world at a vast, at a prodigal expence of life; 
 it removes one race of beings merely to sub- 
 stitute for them another race of the same 
 kind, who are to occupy the same station, 
 and thus multiplies the sorrows of death ; but 
 still viewed in its moral effects, the plan be- 
 comes not only intelligible but satisfactory; 
 it fills this world with activity and energy, 
 with enterprize and eagerness, with sobriety 
 and foresight, with caution and self-restraint, 
 and it furnishes multitudes of citizens for the 
 world which is to come. 
 
 4. Again. The physical properties of 
 the various substances with which we are 
 surrounded, exert in general both directly and 
 
188 LECTURE VII. 
 
 indirectly, both in themselves and in their 
 manipulation, so extensive an influence upon 
 the moral beings (merely considered as such) 
 whom they affect, that it is not possible to 
 suppose that such influence did not enter very 
 largely into the reckoning of the Creator; 
 that it was not intended, calculated, and 
 contrived; a consideration indeed to which 
 the heathens themselves were alive, so ob- 
 vious is it. Darkened as were their under- 
 standings, they could not fail of reading in 
 the world around them manifest tokens of 
 this ulterior purpose for which it was framed. 
 Its Maker, according to their interpretation 
 of the signs before them, had shaped it so as 
 to stimulate the latent energies of mankind 
 for good; he had moderated the prolific 
 bounties which he would otherwise have 
 showered as from an urn, expressly with a 
 view to human improvement; for this cause 
 
LECTURE VII. 189 
 
 he would not suffer the sea to be still, nor 
 the leaves to drop spontaneous honey, nor 
 the rivers to flow with wine, nor fire to be 
 found on the earth, in order that the faculties 
 of man might be turned to the investigation 
 of the arts, that he might learn to extract 
 corn from the furrow and the spark from the 
 flint, and to launch his hollow tree upon the 
 waters and to guide it by the stars of heaven, 
 and be led in short to industry and health of 
 soul as well as body, by the necessary con- 
 ditions of his being a . 
 
 5. Again. The comprehensive range of 
 consequences, of moral consequences, which 
 are often seen to flow from the new deve- 
 lopement of some physical fact inconsiderable 
 perhaps in itself, seems still to tell that Pro- 
 vidence had overlooked the meanness of his 
 instrument in the majesty of his aim, and 
 
 a Virg. Georg. 1, 121 et seq. 
 
190 LECTURE VII. 
 
 that his chief object in rendering a trifle so 
 pregnant must have been a moral one. The 
 introduction into a country of a new root, the 
 construction of a new tool, the application of 
 a new power, changing the whole moral as- 
 pect of a whole empire; lands lately barren 
 and waste where the fox had his hole, and 
 the bittern his solitude, now teeming with 
 beings born for immortality. The polarity 
 of the magnet, a property that had slept 
 from the foundation of the world, is disco- 
 vered — I say discovered, though the process 
 of invention is often so purely accidental that 
 it should seem to indicate a Supreme Being- 
 giving out, of himself, the virtues of his ma- 
 terial world to his rational creatures one by 
 one, as they were ripe for them. The po- 
 larity of the magnet is discovered, in itself a 
 toy for a child, and perhaps for a moment 
 regarded as no more, but what vast effects 
 
LECTURE VII. 191 
 
 is the discovery charged with ! What a com- 
 mission has a little needle to open ! What 
 a spring does it give to the intercourse of the 
 nations of the earth ! How are the remotest 
 of the isles now congregated! How active are 
 they now in providing for each other's wants, 
 means of mutual transfer being no longer pre- 
 carious! What a stirring there is in our ma- 
 nufactories and marts! What a circulation of 
 knowledge moral and religious is put in mo- 
 tion! Or, an air is detected capable of igni- 
 tion, diffusing a cheap and brilliant light, 
 and readily propelled into the darkest recesses 
 of our towns. How may we bless the useful 
 light for the moral benefits it sheds upon these 
 monuments of Cain ! The obstacle, more ef- 
 ficient than police, or judge, or gaol, or 
 scaffold, the obstacle it opposes to the pro- 
 ceedings of men who shun the light being 
 bent on deeds of darkness ! In selecting these 
 examples taken from the million, I am desi- 
 
192 LECTURE VII. 
 
 rous of fixing your attention to one single 
 consideration, the apparent insignificance of 
 the instrument as compared with the vast and 
 various effects it is made to work; a needle's 
 point propagating a code of laws perhaps over 
 the round world; a stream of thin air pu- 
 rifying the morals of a multitude, and minister- 
 ing to mankind on their march to immortality ! 
 I cannot but conclude that consequences 
 so out of all proportion to the cause, were a 
 main object, I do not say the sole object, but 
 a main object of the Almighty's solicitude, (if 
 I may venture so to speak,) in calling that 
 cause into action, and that the tool with 
 which it was His pleasure to work them out 
 was fashioned by him with a view not to 
 its own neatness, but to the magnificent 
 workmanship which it was its glory to be 
 employed upon. I have taken the case of 
 comparatively modern discoveries in physics, 
 because whilst our attention cannot but be 
 
LECTURE VII. 193 
 
 challenged by the vast moral consequences 
 which manifestly flow from them, their no- 
 velty serving to awake in us such specula- 
 tions, they at the same time must remind us 
 of similar good offices to the moral system 
 which are discharged by all those other phy- 
 sical arrangements with which we are most 
 familiar, but which fail to strike us perhaps 
 in the light of ministers to morals by reason 
 of their being habitually presented to us under 
 other and lower asjoects. 
 
 6. Again. How far more august a cha- 
 racter does the physical system assume ; how 
 far more manifestly does it betray the im- 
 press of God if regarded as subordinate to 
 the moral system, than if viewed as final in 
 itself. Its mountains, its mines, its rivers, 
 its seas, its vapours, its influences, at once 
 become clothed with a majesty not their own. 
 
 o 
 
194 LECTURE VII. 
 
 The Lord is in the whirlwind, the Lord is in 
 the fire — at once the world is taken effectu- 
 ally out of the hands of chance or of any- 
 creative principle of any kind, but such as is 
 moral in its nature and office. A consider- 
 ation, which marks the spirit, I may venture 
 to observe, in which physical science should 
 be pursued, and which dictates that the moral 
 bearing of the subject under investigation 
 should never be lost sight of in the material; 
 the latter being probably a secondary object 
 only with the great Contriver. A consider- 
 ation too, I will add, which prescribes to the 
 possessors of physical property, to the lords 
 of the soil, the rule by which they should 
 dispense their estates; even the same by 
 which the Lord of all dispenses His, seeking 
 to make them subservient to the moral wel- 
 fare of moral creatures. Meanwhile the 
 
LECTURE VII. 195 
 
 beauty of the physical system, considered 
 simply as a piece of mechanism is thus in no 
 degree impaired; that is left just where it 
 would be, were it to be beheld only as a cu- 
 riosity of art; whilst the reflection that beau- 
 tiful as it is whilst thus contemplated, fitted 
 as it is to fill our hearts with amazement at 
 its Maker even then, this is after all but a 
 low and unworthy view to take of it; that 
 its ulterior office is its paramount office after 
 all; that if it does serve marvellously well the 
 life which now is, still its great glory is that it 
 is gradually adapting myriads of moral beings 
 to a more brilliant life that is to be; such re- 
 flection, I repeat, gives a dignity to the 
 creation which it could never assume as a 
 physical structure merely, however exquisite 
 its workmanship. 
 
 7. And in general; the very obvious 
 manner in which the aspect of the earth is 
 affected by the moral conduct of its inhabit- 
 
 o 2 
 
196 LECTURE VII. 
 
 ants — the livery it wears in reference to that 
 conduct — declares the strict sympathy which 
 subsists between the natural and moral order 
 of things; the fields themselves telling as 
 plainly as if they could speak, whether their 
 occupier is industrious or indolent; the sinews 
 of a man's strength, whether his life is pure 
 or profligate; the fatness of a land, whether 
 its government is temperate or tyranni- 
 cal. 
 
 Now did we arrive at the conclusion that 
 the natural world is made in subordination 
 to the moral, by a single process of reasoning, 
 there might possibly be some mistake. But 
 when we see so many independent arguments 
 all having the same issue; when we take up 
 successively new positions from which to 
 observe nature, and still find them all pre- 
 senting her before us, in this uniform aspect 
 at least, whatever variety there may be in 
 other features, there seems no room for error. 
 
LECTURE VII. 197 
 
 II. Regarding therefore this principle as 
 established, namely, that the natural world, 
 is made with a view to the moral world, we 
 must now consider upon what plan it would 
 be likely to be administered in order to se- 
 cure the end; whether any could be imagined 
 more convenient, than a system working ac- 
 cording to general laws in the main, but sub- 
 ject to a suspension of those laws upon occasion 
 — which is the second division of my subject. 
 
 Now it is very plain, that the welfare of 
 the moral system would require strict regu- 
 larity in the working of the natural system 
 on the whole : a system of disorder or of per- 
 petual expedient being extremely unpropitious 
 to the improvement of moral beings ; a system 
 proceeding according to fixed laws highly 
 conducive to it. Upon no other plan indeed 
 could there be any exercise of foresight, a 
 
198 LECTURE VII. 
 
 most essential ingredient in a course of moral 
 discipline, any punctuality, any industry, any 
 prudence, any calculation of cause and conse- 
 quence; so that life would become a mere 
 casual existence, a voyage without chart, 
 without star, without compass, without har- 
 bour. The fact therefore that the world is 
 made to move for the most part according to 
 certain laws, is so far from raising any pre- 
 sumption against the theory I advocate, that 
 it tends to confirm it; such laws being abso- 
 lutely necessary for the object proposed. At 
 the same time it is equally plain that occa- 
 sional, though rare, deviation from these rules 
 in the course of nature, would minister to the 
 same object, the encouragement of morals, no 
 less ; and if so, then there is nothing incredi- 
 ble in such deviation, but the contrary, so 
 long as we look upon nature not as something 
 
LECTURE VII. 199 
 
 sacred and unchangeable, but as an instru- 
 ment to an end. 
 
 1. First, then, a course of nature subject 
 to no interruption whatever, would be apt 
 to disqualify men for reasoning at all upon 
 religious subjects; to lay all such curiosity 
 asleep. We may behold the sun bathing 
 the world in light a whole year through 
 without a thought; he expires in an eclipse 
 and furnishes us with food for meditation. 
 Yet abstractedly the spectacle of his bright- 
 ness is far more striking than that of his ex- 
 tinction. The heathen poet of old had 
 yielded himself up to the drowsy influence 
 of the philosophy of his time, and troubled 
 not himself about a God. But when he 
 chanced to hear the thunder rolling through 
 an azure sky, his attention was arrested, and 
 he was an atheist no more. 
 
 It would be a property therefore of extra- 
 
200 LECTURE VII. 
 
 ordinary interpositions to qualify the minds 
 of men for entertaining the subject of a spirit- 
 ual world. 
 
 2. A course of nature subject to no inter- 
 ruption whatever would tend to withdraw the 
 minds of men, (even if they did apply them to 
 the question,) from an intelligent First Cause ; 
 to extinguish, or at least to impair, the idea of 
 a God; extreme regularity being found, ac- 
 cording to our experience, a quality of me- 
 chanical rather than of intellectual agents. 
 And this was, therefore, peculiarly the ob- 
 jection of the scoffers concerning whom St. 
 Peter speaks ; they were hard to be persuaded 
 of any final advent of a Judge, for "where" say 
 they, " is the promise of his coming? for since 
 the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they 
 were from the beginning of the creation" 2 
 
 a 2 Peter iii. 4. 
 
LECTURE VII. 201 
 
 The unbroken continuity, as they pretended, 
 of the system in which they lived, was the 
 stumbling block to their faith. It would be 
 a property then of extraordinary interpositions 
 to inspire a belief in an intelligent First Cause. 
 3. A course of nature subject to no inter- 
 ruptions whatever would tend to annihilate 
 the belief of a perpetual Providence ; an occa- 
 sional interposition, on the contrary, would 
 satisfy us that the Maker had never aban- 
 doned his own work; that He was ever 
 quickening it, even at moments when its 
 movements might seem the most regular and 
 mechanical. It would realize to us the ac- 
 tive presence of God, and possess our souls 
 with the comfortable assurance that we had 
 Him ever at our right hand, howbeit we be- 
 held Him not ; that He is with us at our 
 down-sitting and uprising; when we are 
 in danger, and when we are in distress; 
 
202 LECTUltE VII. 
 
 if sick, that we have in Him the un- 
 seen physician; if poor, the unseen bene- 
 factor; if strangers, the unseen friend; if op- 
 pressed, the unseen champion; if dying, the 
 unseen guide and guardian of our fearful 
 and faltering spirits. It gives wings therefore 
 to our prayers, feeling as we in this case do, 
 that we are not struggling in our petitions 
 against a steady stubborn frame of things, 
 blindly beating on, intolerant of a touch, 
 even though it be the touch of God, but that 
 we are pouring our wants into the willing 
 ears of a Great Being who has our moral 
 welfare at heart; who can hear and answer; 
 who can alter without deranging; who can 
 mould nature in the hollow of his hand, and 
 work up the accidents of our life to our weal 
 or to our woe without disturbing the economy 
 of his universe. 
 
 4. A course of nature subject to no inter- 
 
LECTURE VII. 203 
 
 ruption whatever would render God's crea- 
 tures less sensible to the harmony with 
 which His providence acts upon the whole. 
 The extreme beauty of the general order 
 which prevails would be less observed; as 
 the shock it is that informs us of the smooth- 
 ness of the road, or the earthquake of the 
 earth's stability. It would be the property 
 therefore of extraordinary interposition, to 
 impress upon mankind the wonderful wis- 
 dom of God at all seasons, and so to make 
 them praise and reverence Him. 
 
 5. Interruptions in the course of nature 
 evidently introduced for man's benefit have 
 another advantage still, for when we see 
 that the Maker of the world actually goes 
 out of his way, as it were, to suspend his 
 own laws for the convenience of man, how 
 can we do otherwise than acknowledge the 
 benevolence of God, his great good-will to 
 
204 LECTURE VII. 
 
 man; and accordingly how can our love fail 
 of waxing warmer towards Him ? 
 
 Other benefits there might be, resulting 
 from the dispensation of which I speak; so 
 that on the whole it would appear that no 
 system, as far as we can judge, could be 
 contrived, better adapted to the moral wel- 
 fare of mankind, than a system that should 
 move for the most part according to general 
 laws; those laws however subject to occa- 
 sional, though rare, suspension, alteration, or 
 check. And it is probable that for all these 
 religious benefits, in whatsoever degree we 
 experience them, a disposition to ponder upon 
 a world unseen, a belief in an intelligent 
 First Cause, in a Superintending Providence, 
 an admiration of the order which reigns in 
 the universe, and of the benevolence it be- 
 speaks, we are unconsciously indebted in a 
 great measure to the tradition of miracles 
 
LECTURE VII. 205 
 
 done in the old time, which has descended 
 to us, and the very agitation of which ques- 
 tion animates us more than we are aware, 
 to wholesome thoughts. Did we possess a 
 Revelation which made no pretensions to 
 miracles, (were it possible to have such and 
 to believe in it;) were there no fame of a 
 miracle worked in the world, and so the sub- 
 ject of miraculous agency had never been fa- 
 miliar to our minds ; I cannot think that the 
 healthy tone of which I have spoken would 
 have been preserved to them effectually, if 
 at all. I say this in reply to an objection 
 that might be offered, that if the value of 
 miracles be such as I have described and the 
 necessity of them so imminent, why have 
 they ceased? — Ceased indeed they have, but 
 it is not as if they never had been; they still 
 live in their effects; and though they have 
 passed, they have left behind them a wake 
 
206 LECTURE VII. 
 
 which still bears us along with it. — And if 
 it be further objected that the apparatus of 
 this universe is far too vast for the office we 
 assign it; that the theatre is too magnificent 
 for the drama; what is man that he should 
 be so considered, or the son of man that he 
 should be so regarded? it may be answered, 
 that the dignity of a being whose destinies 
 stretch forward to eternity, much more of 
 millions of such beings, may well surpass 
 any estimate that can be formed of it in 
 matter or in the properties of matter; 
 and that the virtue which according to our 
 view, goeth out of our system for the promo- 
 tion of moral ends, may attain, for aught we 
 know to the contrary, to other orders of 
 beings far more in number and far more ex- 
 alted in station than the children of men. 
 
 We have only therefore to satisfy ourselves 
 of the probability of our principle that the 
 
LECTURE VII. 207 
 
 first object of the Deity in the construction and 
 continuance of his handiworks is to advance 
 the moral welfare of the accountable creatures 
 which he has brought into existence, and 
 then, both the ordinary and extraordinary 
 parts of his reputed plan become alike credi- 
 ble. Even as it is with human actions; 
 there, a carriage altogether inexplicable, nay 
 incredible upon any other grounds, becomes 
 at once intelligible and worthy of belief when 
 we take some moral purpose which it is 
 meant to serve, for our key. How strange, 
 for instance, is it to see a fond and indulgent 
 parent scourging his child and sparing him 
 not for his crying! a most affectionate rela- 
 tive submitting his dearest kindred to severe, 
 nay what would be in common cases, cruel, 
 constraint! A most humane judge doing 
 violence to his heart whilst his tongue dooms 
 the evil-doer to death! Nay it is possible to 
 
208 LECTURE VII. 
 
 conceive cases where a community devoted 
 to husbandry should order all its crops to be 
 laid waste; or to mechanism, and com- 
 mand all its machinery to be broken up; or 
 one which had directed all its efforts to the 
 construction of barriers against the river or 
 the sea, ordaining that its embankments shall 
 be cut down; yet all these matters, though 
 utterly at variance, apparently so at least, 
 with the principles by which such individuals 
 or societies were known to be governed in 
 general; though calculated to excite surprise, 
 no doubt, when viewed independently of the 
 motives which prompted them, are allowed 
 at once to be natural and consistent with the 
 ordinary conduct of the parties, as soon as we 
 are made aware that a great moral purpose 
 was involved in them. 
 
 Still I have not maintained, though per- 
 haps maintained it might be, that the Al- 
 
LECTURE VII. 209 
 
 mighty Maker of the universe, in the mul- 
 titude and complexity of its parts, locked 
 into one another as they are so intimately, 
 each member evidently contributing to ma- 
 nifold functions besides those which seem 
 proper to it, has constructed his fabric with 
 a view to a moral end and to no other; 
 neither that the material elements amongst 
 which we live, can in all their combinations 
 and qualities, be seen distinctly to work 
 with a reference to that end, or at least with 
 any thing like an exclusive reference to it. 
 My argument only requires that this should 
 be the case to a very great extent; that a 
 moral purpose should be a very leading prin- 
 ciple consulted in the physical arrangement 
 of things, and so much my experience con- 
 firms to be a fact. 
 
 Accustoming ourselves therefore to con- 
 template the scene of nature about us under 
 
 p 
 
210 LECTURE VII. 
 
 this aspect, (which I believe to be the true 
 view to take of it,) I think we shall find 
 little inclination, because little inducement, 
 to reduce the miracles of which Scripture 
 speaks, to a scale of more moderate preten- 
 sions, and so betray a distrust in the strength 
 of our position, without disarming, disabling, 
 or conciliating our antagonist. Rather shall 
 we be disposed to believe that at the com- 
 mand of a prophet of God, the waters did 
 stand on a heap, because we shall not limit 
 our notions of any of the elements to their 
 physical properties merely, but regard them 
 all, ' fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind and 
 storm ', in this light the foremost of all, as 
 * fulfilling his word '. Then shall we not be 
 surprised at the meanest of his creatures 
 doing his behest as we find it asserted, even 
 to the botch, the emerod, the mildew, the 
 dust, the canker-worm, the locust, and the 
 
LECTURE VII. 211 
 
 lice ; for they are no longer in our sight things 
 of nought, but God's vast and various army 
 marching under orders. Then we shall not 
 stumble at any commands which God may 
 give them in charge to execute, however at 
 variance they may seem to the rules which 
 He prescribes for their ordinary observance, 
 seeing that the message and not the messen- 
 ger is the point on which our eye will fix. 
 And then shall we not wonder if at the last, 
 when the natural world shall have done the 
 work whereunto it is mainly appointed, the 
 whole fabric shall be broken up, like a ma- 
 chine that is done with, a mould out of date, 
 and the heavens shall pass away with a 
 great noise, and the elements shall melt with 
 fervent heat, and the earth also, and the 
 works that are therein shall be burned 
 up a . 
 
 a See Psalm cii. 25.-28. 
 
 P 2 
 
212 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 Incidental evidence of the resurrection of 
 
 OUR LORD. 
 
 1 "Cor. xv. 14. 
 
 If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain and 
 your faith is also vain* 
 
 Let the resurrection of our Lord from the 
 dead as described by the evangelists be once 
 fairly established as a matter of fact, and I 
 think that every candid inquirer after truth, 
 (and with no other would I wish to dispute,) 
 that every such person, dismissing the ob- 
 jections which speculative ingenuity may 
 raise against the Gospel, will be disposed at 
 once frankly and freely to assent to the cha- 
 racter which Jesus claimed and the doctrines 
 which he taught, instinctively exclaiming 
 with the soldier, ' verily this was the Son 
 
LECTURE VIII. 213 
 
 of God.' So argues St. Paul, ' Declared,' 
 says he, ' was Jesus to be the Son of God 
 with power according to the spirit of holiness, 
 by the resurrection from the dead' a 
 
 Now waving the many, and the unan- 
 swered, arguments which have been urged in 
 support of this stupendous event, — the body 
 not furtively removed to a disciple's chamber, 
 but begged of Pilate, examined by the soldiers 
 whether it were dead, deposited in a sepul- 
 chre of which the situation and condition 
 were subjects of public notoriety ; the body 
 not produced, on the rumour that it had 
 revived getting abroad, though its production 
 would have been the simple way of ex- 
 tinguishing that rumour effectually and for 
 ever ; the body not stolen, for though under 
 other circumstances such a tale would have 
 been extremely plausible, it was refuted by 
 a Rom. i. 4. 
 
214 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 the very act and deed of the chief priests 
 and pharisees themselves, who anticipating 
 such an attempt set the watch, contributing 
 thereby (blindfold as they did it) most un- 
 wittingly to the testimony of that very 
 miracle which it was their object to suppress ; 
 waving, I say, these and other arguments 
 which have been advanced upon the re- 
 surrection, I will narrow the question to a 
 single point, namely, the extraordinary dif- 
 ference manifested in the character and 
 conduct of the disciples before this reputed 
 event and afterwards; a difference not so 
 much asserted as implied, implied without 
 being explained ; and the argument therefore 
 not so much founded upon direct evidence, as 
 upon that which is vastly more satisfactory, 
 incidental. 
 
 Instead however of taking the case of 
 the disciples generally, I will take the in- 
 
LECTURE VIII. 215 
 
 dividual case of Peter ; both for the sake of 
 greater precision, and because in Peter more 
 circumstances concur illustrative of our inquiry 
 than in any other of the followers of our 
 Lord. Now Peter is clearly presented to us 
 in two aspects. His former and latter self, 
 though having common features enough to 
 identify the man, do offer a very singular 
 contrast ; a contrast which Jesus foresaw 
 would arise, when shortly before his Passion, 
 He said unto him, ' when thou art converted,' 
 as though his conversion was yet to come, 
 6 strengthen thy brethren.' True it is that 
 an extraordinary illapse of the Holy Ghost 
 had been vouchsafed in the mean season at 
 the day of Pentecost ; but a change in Peter 
 manifests itself even before that day; and 
 besides, the Spirit itself passes its virtue to the 
 head and to the heart whether to convince or 
 to convert, through means. What then if a 
 
216 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 principal means in the present instance was, 
 the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead? 
 
 Peter, a fisherman, having an honest heart 
 and a high spirit, but apparently ill-informed 
 in Moses, and the prophets who spake of Jesus, 
 and from the study of whose words the 
 woman of Samaria had collected his real 
 nature and office, received a call from a 
 mysterious stranger. He obeyed the call; 
 left the nets ; and followed him as a disciple ; 
 satisfied that he was attaching himself to no 
 ordinary person, by reason of the miraculous 
 powers with which he saw him endowed ; 
 and having a vague and indefinite notion of 
 a Messiah to come about that season, (for 
 such an expectation was general,) a temporal 
 prince who should redeem Israel ; a suspicion 
 moreover that this might be he of whom the 
 world was to witness the glory ; and a hope 
 withal that his own fortunes would be bound 
 
LECTURE VIII. 217 
 
 up with those of his Master. After a while, 
 however, Peter is commissioned not to go 
 forth and conquer, but to go forth and preach : 
 and power to heal sickness and cast out 
 devils is imparted to him. But neither does 
 this open his eyes to the nature of our Lord 
 himself, or of the kingdom which he was 
 founding, for to a question put by Jesus to 
 his disciples, ' whom say ye that I am' ? 
 Peter's answer was indeed ' thou art the 
 Christ,' but on Jesus proceeding to set forth 
 the things that were coming upon him, Peter 
 not finding them square with his own idea 
 of a Messiah, and unwilling to renounce 1 it, 
 for it was an ambitious dream, took him and 
 began to rebuke him a . As yet therefore he 
 had no open vision. In course of time he is 
 admitted to be an eye witness of the trans- 
 figuration, and was of those who were com- 
 
 a Mark viii. 32. 
 
218 LECTUltE viir. 
 
 manded by our Lord ' to tell no man the 
 things they had seen, till the Son of man was 
 risen from the dead.' a But clear as this 
 communication seems to us, it was not so to 
 them. So figurative was the language of 
 the Jews, and so little prepared were the 
 hearers of this saying, ' unlearned and igno- 
 rant men,' by their study of prophecy, for a 
 literal acceptance of it, that they only 6 ques- 
 tioned one with another ivhat the rising from 
 the dead slioidd mean? Still therefore the 
 understanding of Peter was holden touching 
 this high mystery. Later yet, Jesus in con- 
 fidential intercourse with his disciples as they 
 traversed Galilee together, spake again of 
 his own death and of his rising from the 
 dead the third day, but still the words fell 
 upon ears unprepared to hear them and 
 6 they understood not that saying and were 
 a Mark ix. 9. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 219 
 
 afraid to ask him ,a ; afraid, by reason of that 
 awe with which the disciples of Jesus seem 
 ever to have been impressed, notwithstanding 
 their daily and intimate communion with 
 him, so that their language towards him, 
 even at moments when they might be sup- 
 posed to be least guarded, has usually some- 
 thing in it of reverential reserve, meant 
 perhaps, or if not meant, calculated, to have 
 an influence on the forms of devotion to be 
 adopted by those who should come after 
 them, and not friendly (as it should seem) to 
 those familiar appeals to the Saviour in 
 which honest but presumptuous rapture has 
 sometimes indulged. — The last passover ap- 
 proaches. The apostles, Peter amongst the 
 rest, are afraid to go up to Jerusalem ; and 
 though at last they overcome their fears, 
 Jesus is suffered to set out alone b . He is 
 
 a Mark ix. 32. b lb. x. 32. 
 
220 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 betrayed and made prisoner. Peter follows 
 his Master, but it is ' afar off.' He lingers 
 about the palace of the high-priest to see the 
 end, but he mingles with the crowd. He is 
 challenged by the maid servant with being 
 one of that man's disciples, but he denies it 
 with an oath. He shrinks from too near an 
 approach to the cross, standing apparently 
 with the others at a distance. He leaves it 
 to an honourable man, but comparatively 
 a stranger to Jesus, to beg and bury his 
 corpse ; and to the women (whose fearless 
 affection for their friend, here as so often 
 puts the stronger sex to shame,) to bring 
 spices and embalm it. Where is the expect- 
 ation that this body was not to see corrup- 
 tion, in all this? Where, in what ensues? 
 Was Peter, or were any of our Lord's fol- 
 lowers watching the tomb; counting the 
 lingering hours till the third day should 
 
LECTURE VIII. 221 
 
 dawn; straining their very eye-balls to catch 
 the first heaving of the great stone as it made 
 way for the Son of man to come forth? No 
 such thing. Jesus was now no more to them 
 than one of the departed. The hope that it 
 was he which should have redeemed Israel, 
 was, according to the confession of his dis- 
 ciples on their way to Emmaus, extinct. 
 The cearments that were prepared, were for 
 a body that was to perish. The haste that 
 was made, (for it was all that could be made 
 consistently with resting on the Sabbath,) 
 was the haste of friends who would antici- 
 pate, if possible, its natural and offensive 
 decay. Their previous conversation was the 
 conversation of those who expected to find 
 the vault as they left it, ' who shall roll us 
 away the stone? ' Their surprise, a surprise 
 arising merely from the absence of the body, 
 6 they have taken away the Lord out of the 
 
222 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 sepulchre, and we cannot tell where they 
 have laid him'; a surprise in which Peter, 
 to whom the tidings are brought, partakes, 
 for as yet ' they kneiv not the Scripture that he 
 must rise again from the dead ' a . He sees in- 
 deed the linen clothes lying, and above all, 
 the napkin not lying with the linen clothes, 
 but wrapped together in a place by itself; a 
 trifle, but still an argument that the body 
 had been deliberately removed, and he with- 
 drew, ' wondering in himself at that which 
 was come to pass ' b . Such was the state 
 of Peter's mind, (nor of his only, but a single 
 example is convenient,) up to the very mo- 
 ment when our Lord stood confessed before 
 him, ' for he was seen of Cephas ' c . The 
 ocular proofs of his return to life which Jesus 
 subsequently thought fit to afford to his dis- 
 ciples, are expressed with the utmost possible 
 
 a John xx. 9. b Luke xxiv. 12. c 1 Cor. xv. 4, 5, 
 
LECTURE VIII. 228 
 
 brevity by all the Evangelists, the notoriety 
 of the fact superseding, as they might think, 
 the necessity of many particulars. Three 
 out of the four comprise them in a few verses ; 
 and St. John who is more explicit than the 
 rest, and who besides gives an account of the 
 Lord's appearance at the sea of Tiberias to 
 Peter and his companions as they are fishing, 
 enters into no long or laboured details. Any 
 strange or striking effects wrought upon the 
 minds of those who were witnesses of the 
 Resurrection — the strong faith — the bright 
 hopes — the pean over death which they 
 could now sing and shout, victorious though 
 it might yet be for a moment, are all hushed; 
 and instead thereof, (who shall tell of the 
 Evangelists as enthusiasts? ) instead thereof, 
 we find it noted, in the midst of a scene of 
 unearthly grandeur, the Lord of Life, whom 
 but a few days before, the nails and the spear 
 
224 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 had pierced, standing on the lake-side and 
 calling to his e children'; we find it recorded, 
 I say, even here, that the net was still 
 dragged to land two hundred cubits; that it 
 was full of great fishes, an hundred fifty and 
 three; that nevertheless it brake not. The 
 curtain now closes over the disciples. We 
 lose sight of them for a short season; till in 
 the Acts of the Apostles they re-appear, but 
 no more to be the men they have been. 
 
 Peter we have left evidently perplexed by 
 the character of Jesus; never able fully or 
 indeed nearly to make himself master of it; 
 often falling into gross and grovelling mis- 
 takes concerning it; if ever obtaining at some 
 propitious moment a glimpse of its real nature, 
 again blinded; and to the very last a timid, 
 indecisive, halting disciple, with none of that 
 fervid self-abandonment to which he of all 
 men would have soon resigned himself, had 
 
LECTURE VIII. 225 
 
 he been fully possessed with a belief that the 
 humble teacher whom he had attended, had 
 for his name, Wonderful, Counsellor, the 
 mighty God, the everlasting Father, the 
 Prince of Peace. 
 
 An interval elapses ; and what do I find him 
 on meeting with him again ? No longer the 
 reed shaken with every wind; no longer the 
 disciple of a doubtful mind, faithful and 
 faithless by turns, now the apostle and now 
 the apostate; but the sure and stedfast rock 
 upon which a church may be built; teaching 
 and preaching Jesus Christ in all boldness ; 
 appealing to the Prophets; resorting to the 
 temple openly in the face of day; avowing 
 the authority, the hateful authority by which 
 he could make the lame walk, and glorying 
 in the avowal; charging his countrymen, 
 even the highest and haughtiest amongst 
 them, with the murder of the Just One; brav- 
 
 Q 
 
226 LECTURE VIIL 
 
 ing the prison-house rather than hold his 
 peace upon a subject touching which his 
 heart was hot within him, for says he, e we 
 cannot but speak the things which we have 
 seen and heard' a ; released, and again in 
 bonds for the same offence; once more deli- 
 vered from the stocks, and no sooner delivered 
 than again in the courts of the Lord's house, 
 lifting up his voice as before, in defiance of 
 priests and council, who could only marvel at 
 the strength of a conviction which they could 
 not understand, that seemed to blind its 
 victim to all prospect of danger, that could 
 not be lulled or alarmed out of a public con- 
 fession of a name, and if leading to chastise- 
 ment and chains, as it did, still cheering the 
 sufferer with the brave consciousness that he 
 was counted worthy of the shame. 
 
 Now if we narrowly observe St. Peter in 
 
 a Acts iv. 20. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 227 
 
 this his second character, we shall discover 
 one idea to be predominant in his mind, the 
 Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Every 
 speech that he utters after we meet him again, 
 proves that of this one great event, which had 
 occurred in the interval, his mind was full. 
 Doubtless Jesus had committed to him many 
 doctrines to disperse amongst the people 
 which might save their souls alive; but I 
 find the Resurrection of Jesus to be the single 
 idea that for a long while haunts him (so to 
 speak) in every place, before every audience, 
 in every argument. Not that the Evangelist 
 is solicitous to draw our attention to this cu- 
 rious fact, for on the contrary it merely 
 escapes from him in the overflowing of his 
 narrative, but our attention being directed to 
 the subject of evidence, it happens to strike 
 us of itself. 
 
 Thus the disciples meet to advise respect- 
 er 2 
 
228 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 ing a successor for Judas; Peter is the 
 chief speaker; he opens the subject of their 
 consultation; enlarges upon the circumstances 
 of the death of the traitor; argues the pro- 
 priety of filling up the place from which he 
 fell ; produces the prophetic declaration in the 
 Psalms authorizing such appointment; and 
 then adds, ■ wherefore of these men which 
 have companied with us all the time that the 
 Lord Jesus went in and out among us, be- 
 ginning from the baptism of John, unto the 
 same day that he was taken up from us, 
 must one be ordained to be a witness ivith us 
 of his Resurrection ' a . No doubt the party 
 on whom the lot might fall, whoever he 
 might be, was to preach the gospel, to baptize 
 in the name of the Father and of the Son and 
 of the Holy Ghost, to heal diseases, to do in 
 short all the work of an Evangelist ; but these 
 a Acts i. 22. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 229 
 
 are not the things that present themselves at 
 the moment to Peter's thoughts; of these 
 matters he says not a syllable; the testimony 
 of the Resurrection is the all-engrossing idea 
 of his mind, and to that he gives emphatic 
 utterance. 
 
 No great while afterwards occurs the day 
 of Pentecost, the miraculous effusion of the 
 Holy Ghost, and the gift of tongues. There 
 were those however upon that occasion who 
 mocked the apostles, and said, ' these men are 
 full of new wine.' Upon this Peter rises in 
 defence of himself and his brethren ; refutes 
 the slander ; applies a passage of the prophet 
 Joel to the scene of that day ; and then ad- 
 dressing himself to the topic which in the 
 present state of his mind superseded every 
 other ; < Ye men of Israel,' says he, ' hear 
 these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man ap- 
 proved of God among you by miracles and 
 
230 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 wonders and signs, which God did by him 
 in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also 
 know; him, being delivered by the deter- 
 minate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye 
 have taken, and by wicked hands have cru- 
 cified and slain. Whom,' he continues, ' God 
 hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death, 
 because it was not possible that he should 
 be holden of it. For David speaketh con- 
 cerning him, I foresaw the Lord always be- 
 fore my face, for he is on my right hand that 
 I should not be moved. Therefore did my 
 heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad ; 
 moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope, be- 
 cause thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, 
 neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see 
 corruption. Thou hast made known to me 
 the ways of life ; thou shalt make me full of 
 joy with thy countenance. Men and brethren, 
 let me freely speak to you of the patriarch 
 
LECTURE VIII. 231 
 
 David,' (mark the delight with which he en- 
 larges upon this part of his argument !) ' that 
 he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre 
 is with us unto this day. Therefore being a 
 prophet, and knowing that God had sworn 
 with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his 
 loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up 
 Christ to sit on his throne ; he seeing this be- 
 fore, spake of the Resurrection of Christ, that 
 his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh 
 did see corruption. This Jesus', then he 
 again repeats, ' hath God raised up, whereof 
 we all are witnesses? a 
 
 The next transaction in which I find Peter 
 engaged, is the miraculous cure of the lame 
 man at the Beautiful Gate. The people run 
 together greatly wondering; but says that 
 Apostle, ' Why marvel ye at this, ye men of 
 Israel, or why look ye so earnestly on us, as 
 
 a Acts ii. 32. 
 
232 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 though by our own power or holiness we 
 had made this man to walk. The God of 
 Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, the God 
 of our fathers, hath glorified his son Jesus, 
 whom ye delivered up and denied him in 
 the presence of Pilate, when he was deter- 
 mined to let him go. But ye denied the 
 Holy One and the Just and desired a mur- 
 derer to be granted unto you. And killed 
 the Prince of Life whom God hath raised from 
 the dead, whereof we are witnesses \ a Still we 
 see the same leading idea in Peter's harangue ; 
 the burden with which his mind labours ; 
 the turn which his argument speedily takes, 
 be the direction in which it begins what it 
 may. But the good deed done to this im- 
 potent man is not yet suffered to rest. On 
 the morrow Peter and John are examined be- 
 fore the priests. Again Peter rises up with 
 
 il Acts iii. 12. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 233 
 
 all the eloquence of sincerity, and exclaims, 
 6 Ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel ! 
 be it known unto you all, and to all the 
 people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus 
 Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom 
 God raised from the dead, even by Him doth 
 this man stand before you whole.' a And 
 when his enemies would have descended to 
 a compromise, letting him and his companions 
 go, in consideration that they should thence- 
 forth teach in the name of Jesus no more, he 
 would hear nothing of such base concession, 
 and boldly made answer, ' whether it be 
 right in the sight of God to hearken unto 
 you more than unto God, judge ye. 5 So ef- 
 fectually is he changed, short as the interval 
 was, since, to save himself from danger, he 
 even denied with an oath that he ever knew 
 the man. Nay with such * great power ', it 
 a Acts iv. 10. 
 
234 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 is added, ' did the apostles give witness of the 
 Resurrection'* (observe the expression!) that 
 the multitude, regardless of all self-interest, 
 the hardest thing in the world to tear out of 
 men's hearts, threw their possessions into a 
 general fund, rich and poor, and lived in un- 
 reserved communion. 
 
 Still heedless of the caution administered 
 to them by the priests, Peter and John offend 
 again ; are again taken before the council ; 
 are reproached with having filled Jerusalem 
 with their doctrine, contrary to the injunction 
 of silence which had been imposed on them. 
 To all which Peter's ready reply is, ' the God 
 of our Fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew 
 and hanged on a tree. Him hath God ex- 
 alted with his right hand to be a Prince and 
 a Saviour ; to give repentance to Israel and 
 forgiveness of sins. ' b Still the Resurrection 
 
 a Actsiv. 33. b Acts v. 31. 
 
LECTUHE VIII. 235 
 
 of Jesus is the beginning and the end of every 
 speech of Peter, the single recollection that 
 eclipses every other. And to follow him 
 through one confession more; when con- 
 vinced by the correspondence of his own 
 vision with that of Cornelius that the door of 
 mercy was open to the Gentiles also, and 
 when he initiates Cornelius into the faith of 
 Jesus, ( We,' says he, 'are witnesses of all 
 things which he did both in the land of the 
 Jews and in Jerusalem; whom they slew 
 and hanged on a tree. Him God raised up 
 the third day and shewed him openly, not to 
 all the people,' (observe the exactness with 
 which he enters into these favourite details,) 
 'but unto witnesses chosen before of God, 
 even to us who did eat and drink with him after 
 he rose from the dead. iZ 
 
 Such is Peter in his latter character ; sted- 
 
 a Acts x. 40. 
 
236 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 fast, as he was once wavering ; and the cause 
 of his stedfastness, I mean, as I have already 
 said, the second cause, though never directly 
 alleged, indirectly hinted, in the deep, the last- 
 ing impression which the Resurrection of Jesus 
 had wrought in him ; an impression which 
 every syllable that drops from his lips after 
 that event, clearly but incidentally betrays. 
 
 I think more satisfactory testimony to the 
 reality of the Resurrection cannot be ima- 
 gined, for it is not so much the testimony of 
 assertion as of coincidence. 
 
 II. There is another circumstance, how- 
 ever, quite independent of the reasoning 
 hitherto pursued, which strongly corroborates 
 my argument. I have insisted upon the Re- 
 surrection as the feature of Peter's preaching, 
 when he is presented to us in his second 
 character ; and I have contrasted it with his 
 utter incapacity even to comprehend the doc- 
 
LECTURE VIII. 237 
 
 trine in his first character. Now in complete 
 but singular accordance with this change in 
 the teacher, do I find the change in the 
 teacher's persecutors. 
 
 The persecutors of Jesus and his disciples 
 before the crucifixion are the Pharisees above 
 all men ; but afterwards, the Saddacees. The 
 distinction is very curious. 
 
 Thus Jesus himself evidently considers the 
 Pharisees as the faction systematically op- 
 posed to him and to all the prophets — ' Woe 
 unto ye Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites'. 
 ' Ye are the children of them which killed 
 the prophets, fill ye up then the measure of 
 your fathers.' a And before Jesus came up 
 to the last Passover, 6 the chief Priests and 
 Pharisees \ we are told, ( gave commandment 
 that if any man knew where he were, he 
 should show it, that they might take him.' b 
 
 a Matt, xxiii. 29. 32. b John xi. 57. 
 
238 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 And that when Judas prepared to betray 
 him ' he received a band of men and officers 
 from the chief priests and Pharisees' a 
 
 But how was the case with the apostles, 
 after that their Master was removed ? Thus 
 it was. 'And as they (Peter and John) 
 spake unto the people, the priests, and the 
 captain of the temple, and the Sadducees, 
 came upon them.' b And on another occa- 
 sion, ' the high-priest rose up and all which 
 were with him, which is the sect of the Sad- 
 ducees, and were filled with indignation, and 
 laid their hands on the apostles, and put them 
 in the common prison.' c And in like man- 
 ner, when the personal history of St. Paul is 
 submitted to us in the Acts of the Apostles 
 in its turn, we may observe that he cleaves 
 to the Pharisees as the friendly faction, and 
 throws himself upon them for a protection 
 
 a John xviii. 3. b Acts iv. 1. c lb. v. 17. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 239 
 
 which the Sadducees would have probably 
 refused hirn a . 
 
 Now, whence this unwonted exasperation 
 of the Sadducees, the philosophers of Israel, 
 the complacent quietists, who from the bat- 
 tlements of wisdom's temple, cast an eye of 
 pity on their brethren below, who were wan- 
 dering they knew not whither, after the way 
 of life ? or if not such, at least the sceptical 
 disputants of the day, who occasionally con- 
 descended to embarrass both sides of an ar- 
 gument, and support neither. What was it 
 in Peter that now stung these temperate, 
 tolerant, phlegmatic Gallios into the labour of 
 persecution ? Doubtless the vigorous propa- 
 gation of this unpleasant doctrine of the 
 Resurrection, for ' the Sadducees say that 
 there is no resurrection ' ; doubtless the vio- 
 lent assault made upon their darling dogma, 
 
 a Acts xxiii. 6. 9. 
 
240 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 the corner-stone of their whole no-creed ; 
 doubtless the triumph likely to accrue to the 
 Pharisee, the odious Pharisee ; it being a 
 serious grief to them to find that their old 
 antagonists promised to have the better of 
 them in the dispute, and that, alas ! to the 
 life immortal they must needs be content to 
 rise after all. And what can argue more 
 plainly, though what less obviously, that the 
 resurrection (as I have said) was become 
 the burden of the apostles' preaching ; that it 
 was regarded as the distinctive badge of 
 their profession ; than this new host of as- 
 sailants which was now called up ? 
 
 Look now, I entreat you, how undesigned 
 is the testimony to the resurrection which I 
 have laid before you from first to last ; for 
 there lies its value : and let it be remembered 
 that the task of culling out of the several 
 speeches of Peter, reported in the first nine 
 
LECTURE VIII. 241 
 
 or ten chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, 
 such allusions as they contain to this one 
 wonderful event, and of exhibiting them thus 
 collectively before you, has been altogether 
 an act of my own, not an act of the historian. 
 They are certainly found, when so assembled, 
 to be striking iterations of the same prominent 
 article of faith ; enough to indicate how fully 
 and forcibly this article had possession of the 
 apostle's mind. But in the narrative itself, 
 they are mixed up with other matters too 
 numerous and too various to recount, so that 
 it would be very possible for a reader of that 
 narrative, on being taken by surprise, and 
 asked what subject it was which ran like a 
 thread through all that Peter is there made 
 to utter, it would be very possible, I say, for 
 him to be at a loss for an answer upon the 
 instant. And still more possible would it 
 be that he should have read the Gospels and 
 
 R 
 
242 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 Acts, however recently and however atten- 
 tively, and yet have failed to remark, what 
 nevertheless is true, the singular fact, that in 
 the Gospels the Pharisees are represented as 
 the principal enemies of the cause of Christ, 
 and the Sadducees in the Acts ; a fact, argu- 
 ing both a change in the complexion of the 
 apostle's preaching, and the nature of the 
 change, but surely in a manner the most ob- 
 lique and casual that can be imagined. 
 
 Am I then mistaken in supposing that I 
 have established, or all but established, these 
 points, — that Peter (and he only one of se- 
 veral) felt all the conviction which a human 
 being is capable of feeling, touching the re- 
 surrection of Jesus ? Such a conviction as 
 rendered him utterly insensible to any and 
 every hazard, even the extremist, which his 
 avowal of that conviction imposed ? Such a 
 conviction as was powerful enough in its 
 
LECTUHE VIII. 243 
 
 effects, to inspire the wealthier Christians of 
 the day with a determination to make a 
 voluntary abdication of their property, and 
 fling it into a common fund, for the use of 
 their poorer brethren ? And to stimulate a 
 sect, hitherto wont to repose in sceptical 
 apathy, and to pride themselves on so doing, 
 to the exercise of a cruel activity, for the 
 purpose of extinguishing the wild-fire, as 
 they would think it, which was devouring 
 the land ? Am I mistaken in supposing that 
 I have upheld these truths, rather by infer- 
 ential than positive evidence ; by tracing 
 effects which are given to a cause which is 
 disregarded, or not at least produced as a 
 cause ; and a most remarkable alteration in 
 the character and conduct both of individuals 
 and of whole sects to one origin, as being all 
 referable to it, though not formally referred 
 
 Ii 2 
 
244 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 to it, even to the resurrection of Jesus from 
 the dead f 
 
 Then is not our preaching vain, nor your 
 faith vain. Brethren ! ' I look for the re- 
 surrection of the dead, and the life of the 
 world to come ', is the solemn profession of 
 us all ; if it be the stedfast conviction of us 
 all, let it appear ; let it work in us, as it did 
 in Peter, a conduct and conversation agree- 
 able thereto. Let us, like him, carry our 
 faith into our life. Let us trade as men that 
 have other merchandise. Let us build as 
 men that expect other houses. Let us buy 
 as men that look to parting with their pos- 
 sessions. Let us make our friendships as 
 though we made them not for this world 
 only. Let us sorrow as men not without 
 hope. Let us live one with another as tra- 
 vellers together to the same land, and see 
 
LECTURE VIII. 245 
 
 that we fall not out by the way. Let us 
 frame and execute the laws, if such be our 
 call, not as men-pleasers, but with a single 
 eye to add ' fellow-citizens to the saints.' 
 Let us let our estates, if we be landlords, as 
 remembering the word of God, how he spake, 
 * the land is mine, and ye are strangers and 
 sojourners with me.' Let us teach, if we be 
 teachers, so as not to forget, in our praise- 
 worthy zeal for science and letters, above all 
 things, * the good and the right way.' And 
 if we be ministers, let us wait on our minis- 
 try ; and, remembering that we shall one day 
 have to present every one of our flocks unto 
 Christ, let us by fervent exhortation, by fear- 
 less rebuke, by love unfeigned, by example 
 blameless, prepare to present them without 
 confusion of face : that so, having served God 
 faithfully in our several vocations during our 
 span of trial here, we may at last pass through 
 
246 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 the gate and grave of death, to our joyful 
 resurrection ; for His merits who died and 
 was buried, and rose again for us, Jesus 
 Christ Our Lord. 
 
 G. YYoodiall, Printer, Angel Court, Skinner Street, Loudon. 
 
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