There seems to be in the whole of the Archbishop's reasoning some confusion between the grant of Canaan to Abraham's seed, and their continued possession of it. The grant was absolute; but the continued possession of it was conditional, that is, it was made to depend on obedience to the law. Prophecy foretold that the covenant would be broken, and the nation, in consequence, dispossessed of their inheritance (Deut. xxviii.); but the promise that they should be placed in possession, should be subjected to the probation under which they failed, was absolute.

The corresponding facts under the Gospel have been pointed out in the text. The elect of God, in the New Testament, are supposed not merely to have been placed within reach of salvation, but to have been inwardly moved to accept the Gospel offer; i. e. to be under the influence of the Spirit, and in the enjoyment of spiritual blessings. The "saints and faithful brethren in Christ" at Colosse (c. i. 2.) were supposed by the Apostle to correspond to their profession; which was, not to be saints merely in name or professors merely of the faith, but to be real saints and believers. They may not have been so in fact; for every local Church is necessarily a mixed body; but with the fact the Apostle had nothing to do what they really were was known only to God, and St. Paul was compelled to take them at their profession. But in so doing he did not lower the meaning of these terms so as to comprehend the tares as well as the wheat; but, no account being made of the tares, the Church is designated according to the idea; that is, according to what it ought to be, and would be, if discipline were perfect. For it is only the imperfection of human discipline that prevents the separation of the tares inwardly as well as those outwardly: the former are no more really of the Church (the Church in its truth) than the

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latter: and when Christ, who knows the heart, comes again, they will be severed from the body with which they had only an external conjunction, and no inward fellowship. The Commentators have not unfrequently perplexed a very simple matter, by not remembering that the mixed character of local Churches arises from the impossibility of applying discipline to more than the overt act: they would be pure if men could exercise discipline as Christ Himself would. "Of these promiscuously contained in the Church, such as are void of all saving grace while they live, and communicate with the rest of the Church, and when they pass out of this life, die in their sins, and remain under the eternal wrath of God; as they were not in their persons holy while they lived, so are they no way of the Church after their death" (no more, therefore, were they of it during their life, or only so externally), "neither as members of it, nor as contained within it. Through their own demerit they fall short of the glory unto which they were called, and being by death separated from the external communion of the Church, and having no true internal communion with the members and the head thereof, are totally and finally cut off from the Church of Christ." Pearson on Creed, Art. ix. "Not that there are two Churches of Christ; one, in which good and bad are mingled together; another in which there are good alone; one in which the saints are imperfectly holy; another in which they are perfectly such: but one and the same Church, in relation to different times," (he might have added, under different aspects, wev and owoev,)" admitteth or not admitteth the permixtion of the wicked, or the imperfection of the ungodly." Ibid. "So likewise do the Apostles speak to all members of the Church as to elect and holy persons, unto whom all the privileges of Christianity do belong; although really

hypocrites and bad men do not belong to the Church' nor are concerned in its unity,' as St. Austin doth often teach." Barrow, Discourse on the Unity of the Church. "The invisible Church is ordinarily and regularly part of the visible, but yet that only part that is the true one; and the rest but by denomination of law, and in common speaking, are the Church, not in mystical union, not in proper relation to Christ; they are not the house of God, not the temple of the Holy Ghost, not the members of Christ; and no man can deny this. Hypocrites are not Christ's servants, and therefore not Christ's members, and therefore no part of the Church of God, but improperly and equivocally, as a dead man is a man; all which is perfectly summed up in those words of St. Austin, saying, 'that the body of Christ is not bipartitum,' it is not a double body; non enim revera Domini corpus est, quod cum illo non erit in æternum;'-all that are Christ's body shall reign with Christ for ever." Bp. Taylor, Dissuasive from Popery, p. ii. b. i. s. 1.

C.

ON THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF SACRIFICE.

Page 95, line 15. The evidence seems, on the whole, in favour of the supposition, that this mode of worship commenced under divine sanction.] The following is a summary of the arguments in favour of the divine origin of sacrifice.

1. However natural the simpler oblations of the fruits of the earth, as expressions of gratitude and dependence, may appear, it is difficult to perceive on what principles unaided reason could imagine that bloody sacrifices could be acceptable to the Creator. As Eucharistic offerings they are manifestly unsuitable as symbolical repre

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sentations of the feeling of guilt on the part of the worshipper they might indeed have a natural use; and Mr. Davison (Prim. Sac. p. 22.) thus accounts for their introduction. But it seems doubtful whether, in the earliest instances on record, the sacrifice of Abel, for example, this feeling could have been associated with them, or at least could, in the first instance, have given rise to them. It has been remarked, (Lect. VI. p. 224.) that the spiritual progress of the race bears an analogy to that of the individual, and that we must not expect, and in fact do not find, in the first fathers of mankind, those deep convictions of sin which we discover in later times: even Cain needed a divine admonition from without to remind him of the sin slumbering at his door, which was soon to break forth in savage ferocity. It needed striking visitations from God; centuries of experience; and above all, the written law with the inspired expositions of it contained in prophecy; to produce adequate conceptions of human sinfulness: and it is not likely that, until this feeling existed in some considerable degree, so strong and marked an expression of it as the slaying of a victim, would spontaneously occur to the mind.

2. In its piacular character, as a rite of atonement and propitiation, it seems admitted that reason could never have surmised the efficacy of sacrifice. (Davison, Prim. Sac. p. 28.) If therefore the notions of the heathen on this point, by whom, as we know, universally, an expiatory power was attributed to animal sacrifice, proceeded not from the echoes of some primeval tradition, they owe their parentage to gross superstition. Yet that such a superstition should of itself have taken root in the various religions of the world, under circumstances b Magee, Discourses on Atonement, Note 33.

which seem to preclude the idea of derivation the one from the other, seems hardly credible. The theory of some, that the sacrifices in question sprang from the gross anthropomorphism of uncultivated nations, by which the Gods were invested, not merely with human passions, but with animal appetites, and therefore the worshipper conceived himself bound to appear before them, not merely with gifts, as bribes, to procure their favour, but with gifts which imply the gratification of the lower appetites, as the flesh of slain animals,-is open to the objection that such extreme ignorance respecting the nature of Deity is hardly to be ascribed to the very early age in which the custom of sacrifice is found to have prevailed; according to Scripture soon after the fall: the Apostle, in the Epistle to the Romans, teaches us that the grosser forms of idolatry were the result of a gradual process of deterioration, of neglect to improve the measure of light still remaining to the fallen creaturea. Nor can their human origin be satisfactorily explained on the notion of their being federal rites, implying, as eating and drinking did amongst men, friendship with the Deity, or reconciliation when that friendship was interrupted"; for in the earliest species of sacrifice, the burnt-offering, no part was reserved for the offerer's use, the whole being consumed on the altar; and moreover, on this hypothesis, it is difficult to account for the rise and prevalence of the revolting practice of human sacrifices.

3. Turning to the inspired records, we find, it is true, no positive determination of the point in dispute; but, on the other hand, nothing that militates against the supposition of the divine origin of sacrifice. If the

Sykes, Essay on Sacrifice. Mede, Works, b. ii. c. 7.