farther, is sufficient to shew, what kind of transgression the law was added to prevent, and who the transgressors were. What the witchcraft was which drew mankind away to the belief and worship of false Gods, it may not be easy for us, at this distance of time, to detect and understand. The shortest The shortest way is to suppose, what is certainly true, that idolatry was a subtle invention of the devil: and we know what he can do, and what absurdities men can receive and embrace, from what is at this time stirring in the world. Certain it is, that the company of these Heathens always was a snare to the people of God; of whom it is too truly said, that they transgressed against the God of their fathers, and went a whoring after the gods of the people of the land, whom God destroyed before them. We are to note well that expression, they went a whoring for as fornication and adultery are lusts of the body; so is disaffection to the true God, and a love of unclean idols, a lust of the mind; which ill company and bad teaching are sure to excite. For this cause God divided his people from the Heathens, and laid them under every possible obligation for their security, by

institutions of the law of Moses; as a good

would keep his son from the seducing

company

company of profligates and blasphemers. Many of the Mosaic laws are preservatives against heathenism but there is one law, of equal. effect with all the rest: this is, the distinction of meats into clean and unclean, in the 11th of Leviticus. By this law Heathens and Jews could not eat together, and so could not live together. God tells them in direct words, that the design of this law was to keep them sepa rate from the Heathens, and all their abominable customs-ye shall be holy unto me, for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people that ye should be mine.

Thus was the law concerning beasts under stood; for this end was it observed; and thus is it applied and interpreted in the Acts of the Apostles: where Peter, referring to his vision of the animals in the sheet, saith; ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation, but God hath shewed me (by putting an end to the distinction of meats) that I should not (now) call any man common or unclean. The separation was now at an end; and therefore this law, which had kept it up, was no more to be observed.

This law, as I have said, which forbid them to eat with Heathens, made it impossible to

live with them; and this might be sufficient to account for it. But it is delightful to see, how that law which kept up the distinction, comprehended in itself the sense and reason of the distinction. Forbidden meats were so fixed on as to resemble forbidden men; and lawful meats, properly understood, were so many lessons of purity, patience, obedience, and integrity.

To this question then, wherefore serveth the law? the apostle, we see, is right in one of his answers: it was added to the Patriarchal reli gion, to prevent those transgressions and abo minations which heathenism had brought into it. In his second reason we shall find him as right as in the first; namely, that the law was a schoolmaster unto Christ. And when Christ came, the Jews, who had been under this schoolmaster, ought to have known him immediately, and to have said: "These new and wonderful things, which we are taught to believe of Jesus Christ, are the very same in sense and substance with what we all have seen and been acting over from the beginning of our law. As children are sent to a schoolmaster to acquire the first rudiments of learning, so have we been brought up to learn these things: and as children are shut up

in a school, so have we been shut up from the world, to practise over continually those signs and figures which describe to us Jesus Christ."

For, is Jesus Christ a mediator between God and man? And had not we our mediator, Moses, between God and us, at Mount Sinai? Is Christ the true high priest of God? And have not we always been used to the sight of an high priest and his ministry? Is he a sacrifice for the sin of the world? And hath not the blood of sacrifices always been shed amongst us for atonement and sanctification, and always taught us that without shedding of blood there is no remission? Is Christ the lamb of God redeeming us by his blood, and turning away the wrath of God? And did not a lamb in Egypt save us by its blood from the destroying angel, when the first-born of Egypt were slain? They say Christ is the true passover. And is he not in every respect like the passover we have been used to? How wonderful is it that his bones were not broken when he hung upon the cross! but were not we forbidden to break a bone of the paschal lamb? They say he hath ascended into heaven, there to appear in the presence of God for us; and did not our high priest go yearly into the most holy place of the temple,

04

temple, and return from thence to bless the people, as the Comforter is now sent down from Jesus Christ in heaven? These and many other like things have we learned under our schoolmaster the law; and if we do not now see and understand them, after we have so long been used to them, we must be lost in ignorance, and incapable of receiving information.

What I have here said for the Jew, he should have said for himself; and he would have said it, had not the love of this world, together with a vain trust in the letter of the law, and in his own righteousness built upon it, blinded his eyes and hardened his heart. And when he had blundered in the beginning, by rejecting Jesus for not encouraging him in the love of this world; his pride would never condescend to compare the figures of the law, to see whether these things were so. He had determined that Jesus was not the Christ before he had enquired; so he would never enquire after he had determined. Wonder not that the Jew thus erred; for for the Christian world is still full of such Jewish scholars, who begin where they should end; who first determine, and are never afterwards disposed to enquire. Instead of beginning with the wisdom of God, and from thence deriving the wisdom of man, they begin with what man

has