means clearing the guilty," received a presentiment of the great gospel announcement, "God is love." And if substitution and expiation by sacrifice are as ancient as the world before the flood, we find the principle assumed and the practice systematized, codified, reduced to a rubric, in the statute-book of Israel, and the precedents of Abel, Noah, and Melchisedec, carried out in the priesthood of Levi, and in those altars which did not cease to smoke for fifteen centuries.

And yet, although so much of the old patriarchal revelation was restored or preserved in the Hebrew economy, the knowledge of God, access to Him through mediation, the hope of a Redeemer, sacrifice, and Sabbath-keeping,-in other words, although Judaism was in one respect a reform from Paganism and a return to the pure and primitive Patriarchism (as Protestantism is a reform from Popery, and a return to pure and primitive apostolism), it must not be forgotten that in all its outward form and figure it was a very different system; and could an Abel or an Enoch have made the direct transition from the palmy days of the patriarchal piety to the era of the Aaronic priesthood, he might have felt it a change from liberty to bondage, and from sunshine to clouds and shadows. And even although the actual transition was from an old dispensation's twilight to a new one's dawn, and

from the vagueness and uncertainty of decaying tradition to the precision and permanence of a written revelation, so narrow was the range, so strict the rubric, and so stern the threatenings of the new economy, that, looking back to that incident in the childhood of the Church of God, we feel as if it then had quitted the lap of a nursing mother to be under the bondage of a schoolmaster. Its first salutation,-one which the wild and wayward scholar greatly needed, but still a salutation harsh and startling,-was in the hoarse thunder of Sinai, and its first lesson a severer ordeal than Pythagoras imposed on his pupils, a novitiate of forty years' silence, a probation not of forty days but of forty years, in which one murmuring word would be fatal. And the task which was prescribed, and which it took a thousand years to learn, was enforced by so many pains and penalties, and truant moments were visited by corrections so severe, that after ages of so strict a monitor we do not wonder that it was felt a joyful emancipation when Jesus stretched out His hands and said, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;" we do not wonder that in exchanging Moses for Messiah those who made the trial declared His yoke to be easy and His burden light.

XXIIL

The Hermit Nation.

"For from the top of the rocks I see him, and from the hills I behold him lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations."-NUMB. XXIII. 9.

For

IN last Lecture we saw how the Patriarchal passed into the Hebrew dispensation. It was needful to narrow the channel in order to save the stream. our present purpose we do not require to ask, What became of the residue? What became of those little rills which were not included in the great artificial canal, but which were allowed to run off into the great expanse of humanity? It is an interesting inquiry, and justice has hardly been done it. Too frequently, and in forgetfulness of what the Bible tells, it has been assumed that the whole of that primeval revelation evaporated and left no trace. But although the trace may be minute or the stream may be muddy, there is nevertheless an appreciable tincture of primeval truth in almost all the religions of Paganism. It may not be sufficient to make men better; nay, like that pure element which carries

health and exhilaration in its free and open current, but which in its stagnant overflow converts into a pestilent swamp what before was but a barren wilderness, the corruption of a truth may be more offensive and more deadly than simple ignorance, yet still they are not without significance, those vestiges of primeval verity. What means this tradition, so prevailing, of a golden age that was, this longing, so universal, for a better time not seen as yet? Whence this dark discomfort, this conscience of sin, this dreary feeling that God and man are disagreed, and whence this general effort to get anew into a right relation? those peaceofferings and vows and sacrifices which confess transgression, and plead for pardon and for mercies otherwise unmerited? Are they not the relics of a better religion that once existed? a few fragments, rusty and corroded perhaps, of that earlier truth which in Noah's ark was transported from the old world to the new ?—so many little pools or runnels which in their choked and struggling course are still derived from the fountain which started so clear and strong on Ararat ?

But for the present we take leave of this primeval and catholic revelation, with its fast-disappearing and corrupting remains. We need not even discuss the question how far it was possible for the Gentiles to come to the saving knowledge of God with the light

that in some places lingered after the Mosaic dispensation was established. Our business now lies with that little country which, for fifteen centuries, was the Goshen of the earth; the one illumined region in a world whose spiritual gloom was deepening age by age, till at last it had become a darkness. that might be felt. We are to contemplate that system which at first sight is to many of us cumbrous and uncouth, but which, on nearer inspection, we shall find, like the other works of Jehovah, a masterpiece of wisdom wonderful.

And looking at Judaism, the first thing that strikes us is its local limitation. Here is a little spot of 10,000 square miles,' about one five-thousandth part of the globe's terrestrial surface, or a fifth of England's area; and in this little nook we find locked up the peculiar people, the privileged possessors of the only authentic religion, the exclusive guardians of the one Divine revelation. The people dwell alone, and are not reckoned among the nations. And it is not only that their territory is small, for, like the eagle whose home is a crag, but whose hunting field is the entire domain of ocean, earth, and air, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome nestled on a narrow ledge, but made the flap of their pinions heard afar; but, with the fire of ambition blazing in his eye, Israel is an eagle whose

1 The area of the Holy Land was about 10,000 square miles. The terrestrial area of the globe is upwards of 48,000,000 of square miles.