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the gospel. Their great moral principles were alike, and are necessarily the same under every covenant."

years

They are about five

They occupy it

Here are three stupendous movements; the gift of Canaan to the Jews and their settlement in it; the consecration of a vast nation in their generations for two thousand years by circumcision; and the giving of the divine law as set forth in three of the largest books of the Bible. Notice the magnitude of each movement. It is more than four hundred after the promise of Canaan before the nation enters it. hundred years in getting full possession of it. less than three hundred when ten of the twelve tribes are taken into a returnless and unknown captivity. The other two tribes are saved with labor till the appearance of the Messiah. During all these twenty centuries this nation is marked and, according to the statement, made distinguishable from all others, by a seal enstamped in the flesh of every male child. A divine code, civil, social, moral and religious, is given to them, so minute, profound, and universally practical that it has both shaped and given the best elements to the legislation of all the leading nations since the days of Sinai, and with the exception of the incorporation of certain principles of immutable morality in the law, these three vast works were performed of God that the world might be able to "identify Messiah when he should come." We submit that God is wont to make a point by more direct processes. Such an array of measures to secure the attendance of witnesses savors too much of the complicated and expensive manœuvres of human tribunals. The isolation, the marking and the personal government of an entire nation for two thousand years, as it were putting them under bonds and keepers to appear as witnesses at the end of that time for the identification of Messiah" has no congruity with God's simple and direct way of doing things. Moreover but a small fraction of all this array of pretended evidence was ever used. Those who were most inclined to use it, the scribes, were least inclined to profit by it and receive Jesus as the Messiah. When John the Baptist asked of our Lord whether he were the Messiah, Christ did not give him any of the evidences of his true character that this writer has gathered up with so wide a sweep. "Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: the

blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them." world this reply to John has been

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And through the Christian

the line of argument to We use neither of the

three sources of evidence indicated, except in minor and inci

dental ways.

If therefore this explanation of the Abrahamic covenant is the best that can be furnished to set aside the common views of it, farther controversy would seem needless. To obscure or ignore the foundations of the church of God as established and visibly organized with Abraham, it is here argued that the planting and training of the ancient church, the founding and preservation of the Jewish nation, and the giving and executing of the Sinaitic code were begun and carried on through two thousand years to furnish items of evidence that was little needed and less used. Is it then so extensive and so expensive a work to remove the ancient foundations and prepare the ground for a new church of God?

It is true that at one time the second provision in the Abrahamic covenant embraced only those who were embraced in the first, the Jewish nation. Then church and state were one in numbers and persons. Membership in the two was identical, and the seal of church-membership was at the same time the evidence of citizenship. Hence some have confused and confounded the two parts of the covenant, and taken the Abrahamic church and the Jewish nation to be one and the same body, with only different names. They have regarded the church as the mere envelope of Judaism, to be thrown aside when the contents were. It is strange that two institutions so wide asunder in their commencement, nature, constitution, and design should be confounded into one. The promise to found the nation and the promise to found the church were made several years apart, while the executions of the promises were four hundred and thirty years apart. The covenant which was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul." Gal. iii. 17. Assuming, therefore, that the Jewish nation was not organized till the organization and adoption of its govern

ment, there was this lapse of time between the commencement of the church and the commencement of the nation, a time sufficient, it would seem, to mark the two bodies as having separate existences. So either could expire without endangering the continued existence of the other.

The connection of the Abrahamic church with the organization and national polity of the Jews was only incidental, a connection as it were of contact merely and not organic. The one preceded the other in its organization four hundred years and more, was constantly embracing those outside of the nation, or imparting its blessings to them; and in its very structure declared that it was to endure with the continuance of the human race. The national organization, springing up four centuries later, and that adopted the church seal, was secular, and of limited continuance. Its end was but the beginning of enlargement and prosperity to the other. So soon as the incidental and restraining connection between the Abrahamic church and the Jewish nation was broken off by the divine abandonment of the latter, and "the middle wall of partition" was broken down, the church burst forth and spread on every side in the full force of its Messianic spirit, and in glorious fulfilment of evangelical prophecy. The pentecostal ingathering of three thousand, when "the Lord added to the church' daily such as should be saved" was but the first sheaf from the illimitable harvest-field, between which and the reapers the Jewish nation had been so long standing. When the miraculous and gracious display of that day amazed the curious multitude, Peter explains it by saying: This is that which was spoken by Joel the prophet." To what church were those three thousand added but to that ancient church of God whose glory and enlargement Joel anticipated and predicted? If we would understand Abraham and the New Testament references to him and his covenant, or if we would understand God in his ecclesiastical polity in this world, we must keep a clear distinction between the founding of the Jewish nation and the founding of the visible church of God.

Paul says that the gospel was preached to Abraham, and our Saviour says: "Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad." His faith, then, was in Christ, and he was justified by faith. He made a profession of religion, and so

became the head of a covenant body of believers. This covenant body had the oracles of God," " the adoption," and "the covenant," and "the service of God," and "the promises," and is called the church of the living God." God calls himself "their God," and he calls them "his people." The early members of that confederation are said to have " died in the faith." And it was a faith that laid hold on heaven, and not Canaan; for they "confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth," and "desired a better country, that is, a heavenly." Here are all the elements of a church and the marks of churchmembership a proper creed, a confession of it by godly men united under it, a covenant and seal between them and God, the seeking of a heavenly country, dying in the faith, and entrance into a city that God had prepared for them. ` So those who believed and were blessed with believing Abraham in the Abrahamic covenant were in every proper sense the church of the living God. So God in his covenant with Abraham did constitute the visible and universal church.

We have confined ourselves in this discussion to two points: the origin and the constitution of the visible church. As to its origin we find that it began with Abraham under the special interposition of God. In its constitution these principles develop themselves as essential and fundamental: The acknowledgment of God and his authority as supreme; faith in Christ as the Messiah; a confession public of that faith; a public dedication to God, under covenant and seal, of one's self and household; and acts of public worship. There are other questions pertinent to this discussion and growing out of it that our limits alone forbid us to examine. Whether God has discontinued that Abrahamic church: whether he did ever constitute another; whether it and the Christian church are identical; whether in the Christian as in the Abrahamic church the basis is the family rather than the individual; what became of the old olive-tree when some of the branches were broken off; into what the Gentile scions of the wild olive are grafted; how the promises and prophecies concerning the latter day glory of the ancient church can be fulfilled if that church ceased at the inauguration of the Christian church- these are legitimate and irresistible questions arising from our discussion, that it grieves us to leave in silence.

ARTICLE II.

MEDIEVAL WORSHIP.

The Voice of Christian Life in Song; or Hymns and HymnWriters of Many Lands and Ages.

Carter & Brothers. 1859.

New York: Robert

New

Lyra Catholica: containing all the Hymns of the Roman Breviary and Missal, with others from Various Sources: etc., etc. York: E. Dunigan & Brother.

A SINGULAR contrast of true and false religious feeling runs through the forms of worship, public and private, of the church of the Middle Ages. Rich in the inheritance of the devotional treasures of the past, even back to the earliest Greek and Latin hymns and liturgies, it added to these many devout effusions in the spirit of a like pure and childlike faith and love. But along with these is mingled a strain of unchristian and idolatrous devoteeism which, it would seem, could not proceed from the same fountain. If it did not, nevertheless the streams run on in parallel channels; or rather they blend and interplay in the same current, as the clear and the turbid waters of different tributaries sweep together along some of our Western rivers. Two religions of extremely unlike qualities appear as if married at the altar of the church. We have what we accept undoubtingly as the fruit of the renewing Spirit giving forth its emotions and aspirations in the hymns and homilies of a Bernard and the men of his stamp ; and interspersed with these clusters of the true vine, we have grapes of the degenerate plant of a strange vine tasting more of the fields of Sodom or Babylon than of Eshcol. We have the yet more perplexing fact, that saintly souls, who could so exquisitely relish the "Tersanctus" and the "Gloria in excelsis" as a medium of worship, could even tolerate, much more apparently enjoy, the mottled piety and superstition of the Stabat Mater dolorosa," and the "Marian Te Deum." It is easy to understand that a merely formal worshipper might (as now) find a pleasurable excitement in those

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