for divine truth; and converts made by the persecuted brethren who had fled thither for protection, led to the successful efforts and extended ministry of Barnabas at Antioch. The sin of Adam was made to minister to the birth of Christ: and to the death and crucifixion, through wicked hands, of Christ, are we indebted for our title to the resurrection of life eternal.

It must not, however, be inferred, that the consequences which, under the control of God, are made to arise out of the wickedness of men, are any justification of wickedness itself; or that the complexion of evil is altered and its guilt diminished because it has pleased God out of evil to produce good. We must recollect, in the language of holy writ, that offences must needs come, but that woe is denounced against that man through whom the offence cometh.

Further when, for instance, we are told that Jesus was delivered by the council and

foreknowledge of God, and that nothing passed but what his wisdom had determined to be done, we must not suppose that God can be the author of evil, or that men are to be punished for the decrees which God himself had made. It is well observed by Stanhope, "that they who conspired the death of Christ acted upon principles and a choice so free, that the whole was effected through the agency of human and ordinary means; and that it is one of the marvellous instances of the divine wisdom and power, to permit the unrighteousness of men, without any just imputation of the guilt contracted by it, and then to make those sins which are not thought fit to be restrained instrumental to excellent purposes."

Again when it is said that there must be also heresies amongst you, that they which are approved may be made manifest amongst you; we must recollect, in the language of Warburton, "that both in the

natural and moral world, the good produced by this mixture is so evident, as fully to support the trite observation, that evil was suffered for the sake of a greater good: yet that God was so far from constituting evil in the moral world, for the sake of that good which it occasioned, that the whole of this ordinance was good, out of which the folly and perversity of man produced evil. Should it then be asked how God came to suffer this perversion; the answer is, that the subject was free agency, which was not to be controlled; and that all, according to our ideas, that could be done without impinging upon it, was done, namely, by God's turning the natural tendency of evil to the production of new good; so that God and man have been perpetually at strife, the one to produce good out of evil, the other to produce evil out of good."

I have thus endeavoured to shew, that the mixed state of life in which we are

placed may be attended with salutary consequences. From the view of the parable, I shall now offer, as I had proposed, some obvious remarks and rules of conduct.

And, first, we learn that persecutions are incompatible with the scheme of the gospel : "let both grow together till the

harvest."

Men have, unhappily, in all ages of the Christian world, mistaken the character of the kingdom of Christ. They have brought often to the service of God the feelings and the passions of the worst of men. Religious opinions, taken up perhaps on hazard, or received on authority rather than conviction, or derived from a contracted view, or a disturbed imagination ; are sometimes maintained with unwarrantable acrimony, and enforced upon others with untempered ardour. In the opinion of the bigot, cruelty may be called in to enforce conviction, and creeds may be

guarded by penalties, and pains, and torture. The bigot would exterminate when he could not cure. He would confound heresy with crime, and would pursue speculative error with the reprobation that is due only to wickedness itself. Not unfrequently would he spare the one rather than the other, and give. indulgence to vice which he refuses even to the scruples of virtue. How often has the odious maxim of Bishop Parker been acted upon, that it is more necessary to set a severe government upon men's consciences and religious persuasions than even their vices and immoralities! How often, like the woman of the mystic Babylon, has the bigot been drunk with the blood of the saints, and the blood of

the martyrs of Jesus! The page of ecclesiastical history is defaced and blurred by the cruelties that have been inflicted under the mask of religion. Christianity was sown and fostered in blood; and when, at the reformation, the blessings of that gospel that