Jews. The great, that is, the Pharisees and Sadducees, hated Christ with far more uniformity and rancour than the common people. The reasons are obvious. He exposed their systems of doctrine and modes of teaching, refuted their arguments, reproved their abominable conduct, displayed to the people at large their folly and wickedness, and threatened them with the total ruin of their reputation and authority. These were of fences not to be forgiven by proud, bigotted, unprincipled, and malignant men. They were not in fact forgiven. Throughout his whole public life they exercised the most furious resentment against him, and hesitated not to adopt every measure to compass his destruction. All that sagacity could devise or art execute, was employed to ensnare and entrap the Redeemer in his words and actions. When these measures failed, as they always did, resort was had to violence and power. These at length succeeded; and the most perfect human malignity was finally gratified by seeing the Saviour nailed to the cross.

The people at large regarded him with far less bitterness than their leaders. It is several times mentioned, that the efforts of the Sadducees and Pharisees to destroy Christ were prevented of success by their fear of the people. It is frequently testified, in substance, that the common people heard him gladly.' It is also evident, that, had not appeals been made to their doubts, fears, and prejudices, with great art and perseverance, and on many occasions, their attachment both to him and his doctrines would have risen still higher, and much more nearly accorded with their interest and duty. On a number of occasions, however, they indulge the most violent animosity against him. Almost at the commencement of his preaching, the inhabitants of Nazareth attempted to put him to a violent death, by forcing him down the precipice of the hill on which their city was built. Several times afterwards their countrymen endeavoured to stone him, and in the end united, at the instigation of their rulers, in accomplishing his death, with a fury approximating to madness.

3. The preaching of Christ produced the conversion of a considerable number of his hearers.

The number of those who were converted by the preaching of Christ cannot be estimated with any exactness. The eleven apostles, the seventy, the more than five hundred brethren, to

whom at one time Christ appeared in Galilee after his resurrection, are numbers mentioned in the Scriptures. The last not improbably included the two first. To these we ought, I think, to add a considerable number more, since it is often said, that some of the people,' and many of the people, believed on him.' No reason occurs to me why we should not, generally at least, consider the faith here spoken of as evangelical. If this be admitted, the number of converts made by the preaching of Christ must have greatly exceeded the largest number specified in the Gospel.

Still it is, I suppose, generally believed, that the success with which Christ preached the Gospel was small, compared with that of the apostles, and compared with that which we should naturally expect to follow preaching of such singular excellence; especially when the perfection of his life and the glory of his miracles are connected with the nature of his preaching. The success, however, was upon the whole such as to enable the Gospel to take effectual root in this sinful world, and to provide the means of supplying preachers throughout all succeeding ages, and of spreading the Gospel, within a moderate period, over a great part of the earth.

I have now finished the observations which I proposed to make concerning the personal preaching of Christ; and shall conclude this Discourse with a few REMARKS, naturally flowing from the considerations suggested on this subject.

1. These considerations call up to our view, in an interesting manner, the glory and excellency of Christ as a teacher.

From the things which have been said in these Discourses, it is, if I mistake not, clearly manifest, that both the matter and manner of Christ's preaching were singularly important and excellent. The errand on which he came into the world was the greatest which ever entered into the conception of rational beings, or which was ever proposed in the providence of God. Of this vast and sublime purpose the preaching of the Gospel was a primary and indispensable part. To this part he appeared perfectly equal. The will of God the Father concerning the duty and salvation of men, he entirely understood; and, together with it, the character, the sins, errors, ignorance, and wants of those to whom he was sent; their hatred of truth, their opposition to their duty, and their reluctance to be saved. The same perfect acquaintance he

also possessed with the nature and import of the preceding Revelation its types, prophecies, and precepts, the false glosses made on its various contents by the teachers who went before him, and the miserable prejudices imbibed by those whom he taught. These errors he detected and exposed; these sins he powerfully reproved; and the truth and duty opposed to them he enjoined with a force and evidence wholly irresistible. In this manner he taught the way of life with such clearness, that he who ran might read,' and that 'way-faring men, though fools,' could not' necessarily err

therein.'

At the same time, he adorned these instructions with a candour, frankness, gentleness, and sweetness of demeanour, with a sincerity, boldness, and energy of character, immensely honourable to himself, and supremely great and lovely in the view of every just and discerning mind. Over all, his daily example as a moral being, cast a glorious lustre, at once transcendently beautiful in itself, and illuminating in the strongest manner the nature and excellence of all that he said.

If Christ had not come into the world, if he had not preached the Gospel, what would now have been the condition of mankind? The Mosaic system, of necessity confined almost entirely to the Jewish nation, had, before the advent of our Saviour, degenerated chiefly into a mere mass of externals. The moral part of this system was in a great measure neglected or forgotten; the ceremonial had almost wholly occupied its place.

Even this, also, had lost its proper designation, and influence. The sacrifices, instead of being regarded as mere symbols of that real and great atonement which taketh away the sins of the world,' and to typify which they were originally instituted, seem to have been at this time considered as expiations in themselves. The ablutions, which were intended only to direct the eye to the cleansing of the soul by the blood of Christ, and the affusion of the Spirit of grace, appear to have lost their typical character, and to have been exalted by a gross imagination into means of washing away the stains of the soul, and making it pure in the sight of God. The oblation of incense was apparently supposed by the suppliant to ascend with his prayers to the heavens, and to accompany them with a sweet odour to the throne of God. To wear long clothing,'

to make broad their phylacteries,' to pray in the corners of the streets,' to fast twice a week,' to bow down the head like a bulrush,' to sit in sackcloth and ashes,' and to tithe mint, annise, and cummin,' were considered as the price paid for heaven; the price with which salvation might assuredly be purchased. In the mean time, piety to God, justice, judgment, and mercy' towards men, and that government of our passions and appetites, without which neither can exist, were kept out of sight, and out of remembrance. Pride and avarice, cruelty and lust, reigned without controul and without opposition. Scarce an effort seems to have been made, or even thought of, to check the tide of declension. The progress was rapid and unimpeded, till the measure of iniquity became full. About forty years after the crucifixion, the crimes of the Jewish nation, according to the testimony of Josephus, himself a Jew, rose to such a height, as to forbid the longer continuance of any civilized state or social union among this people. Furious animosity, unexampled pollution, civil war raging with singular violence, unparalleled treachery, and murder without bounds, then became the prominent and almost the only features of the Jewish character. The rest of the world was absolutely overspread with Polytheism, and all the debasement and all the miseries to which it so frequently gives birth.

Had not Christ, then, come into the world, and preached the Gospel to mankind, the Jews would, perhaps, have been, substantially, what, since the destruction of their nation, they have been in fact; reprobates, outcasts from God, possessing hearts harder than the nether millstone;' impervious to truth, impenetrable by argument, shorn from the side of virtue, vagabonds in the moral as well as in the natural world, roaming now in quest of gain or prey to satisfy immediate lust, now wandering in a benighted wilderness, through every bye-path, to find eternal life, and mistaking the glimmerings of every ignis fatuus by which they are misled for the light of hea

ven.

We, in the mean time, together with all the present offspring of the gentile world, should have been prostrating ourselves before calves and crocodiles, dogs and cats, an image of brass, or the stock of a tree. Instead of the churches which, on a thousand hills, now stand open for the worship of Jehovah we should, with the heathen of the old world, have consecrated to

a multitude of brutal gods the dark groves, and still darker caves of our mountains, or erected, with immense expense and suffering, splendid temples to the honour of thieves, strumpets,, and murderers, or for the inhabitation of blocks and statues. Instead of the hymns which here daily ascend to heaven, perfumed with the incense of redemption, our ears would have been stunned with the outcries of the priests of Baal, or the yells of the priestesses of Bacchus. Instead of the communion table, which now holds out the bread of life, and invites us to eat and live, altars would here have smoked with the offerings of pollution, or streamed with the blood of human victims. Instead of listening to the invitations to renounce iniquity, to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and to lay hold on a glorious immortality given by God himself, and announced weekly from this desk, the youths who are before me might, in some instances at least, have been trembling beneath the frown of a Druid, prepared to plunge his knife into their bosoms, as an offering to the gods of superstition: no uncommon fate of bright and promising young men in ancient times, throughout that island from which our ancestors emigrated to this country.

From all these evils, and from that perfect dissolution of the moral character of which they are either the cause or the substance, Christ has delivered those, who receive and obey his instructions. The darkness, in which men groped, and stumbled, and fell,' in the pursuit of eternal life, he has scattered by the sunshine of the Gospel. The objects of our faith and the rules of our duty he has written in living colours. To ignorant, sorrowful, and despairing man, despairing of future enjoyment and future being, he has proclaimed the glad tidings' of life eternal. To rebels and enemies he has published' everlasting peace.' To Zion he has announced that the God who reigns over heaven and earth, is her God. 'How beautiful on the mountains are the feet' of this divine messenger, descended from the regions of immortality to proclaim grace, mercy, and peace' to this ruined world!

2. Christ as a preacher is a perfect pattern to every minister of the Gospel.

That he is such a pattern in the substance of his preaching is a truth, which can need no comment. Every minister,