of course, fall into the greatest confusion of thought. He will be like a man who shall have received from his father, at various times, a great number of letters containing directions as to his conduct, from the time when he was a little child just able to read till he was a grown man; and who should lay by these letters with care and reverence, but in a confused heap, and should take up any one of them at random, and read it, without any reference to its date, whenever he needed his father's instructions how to act. For the Bible corresponds very much to such a collection of letters from a father to a son.

'Accordingly, many erroneous notions, wholly or partly drawn from Judaism, have again and again found their way into the Christian church.

'For example, there have been, in almost all ages of the church, persons who have taught that Jesus Christ is to come upon earth and reign in great worldly splendour at Jerusalem for a thousand years, which period is thence called the Millennium. And superior privileges, as God's peculiar people, are then to be restored (according to this doctrine) to the Jews; that is, to such Jews as shall have continued unbelievers; not to the descendants of those great multitudes of them who embraced Christianity in the days of the apostles, and since, and who thereupon soon became blended with the Gentile Christians. But the remnant of the Jews, who shall have obstinately rejected the gospel up to that time, are then to be restored to their own land, and to have a superiority in God's sight over men of Gentile race. And the temple of Jerusalem

is to be restored, and to be again the place of peculiar holiness, whither all men are to resort to worship.

'Now these expectations of a Christ, who is to be a great and victorious temporal king, and of a kingdom of earthly glory, and of the restoration of the temple, and of the exaltation of the Jews above all other people, are precisely those to which the Jews were so wedded when our Lord came, and which led most of them to reject him.'

As a familiar illustration of the case of those Christians, described in the above extract, whose expectations of Jewish temporal glory arise from the reading of their father's letters without reference to their date, I subjoin the following beautiful and well-known letter of Martin Luther, written to his eldest child when he was four years old :

'Grace and peace in Christ, my dearly beloved little son. I am glad to know that you are learning well, and that you say your prayers. So do, my little son, and persevere : and, when I come home, I will bring with me a present for you from the annual fair.

'I know of a pleasant and beautiful garden, into which many children go, where they have golden little coats, and gather pretty apples under the trees, and pears, and cherries, and plums, and yellow plums; where they sing, leap, and are merry; where they have also beautiful little horses with golden bridles and silver saddles. When I asked the man who owned the garden, Who are these children? he said: They are the children who love to pray and to learn, and who are pious.

'Then I said: Dear Sir, I also have a son; he is called Johnny

Luther. May he not come into the garden, that he may eat such beautiful apples and pears, and may ride such a little horse, and play with these children? Then the man said: If he loves to pray and to learn, and is pious, he shall also come into the garden; Philip, too, and little James; and if they all come together, then may they have likewise whistles, kettle - drums, lutes, and harps; they may dance, also, and shoot with little crossbows.

Then he showed me a beautiful green grass-plot in the garden. prepared for dancing, where hung nothing but golden fifes, drums, and elegant silver cross-bows. But it was now early, and the children had not yet eaten. Therefore I could not wait for the dancing, and I said to the man: Ah! dear Sir, I will instantly go away, and write about all this to my little son John; that he may pray earnestly, and learn well, and be pious, so that he also may come into this garden: but he has an aunt, Magdalene, may he bring her with him? Then said the man: So shall it be go and write to him with confidence. Therefore, dear little John, learn and pray with delight, and tell Philip and James too, that they must learn and pray; so you shall come with one another into the garden. With this I commend you to Almighty God; and give my love to aunt Magdalene; give her a kiss for me. Your affectionate father,

'MARTIN LUTHER.'

Had Martin Luther's son, when he arrived at years of manhood, persisted in demanding of his father a literal fulfilment of the promises which had been made to him when

he was only four years old, he would have resembled those Christians, who, finding in the writings of the Old Testament, promises of Jewish temporal superiority and glory, and, in fact, of the complete restoration of Judaism, with its temple, its priests, and its sacrifices, require God literally to perform the promises of a past and imperfect dispensation, as if the New Covenant, with all its higher spiritual glories, had never been introduced into the world.

It is interesting to find that intelligent Jews have been led by such prophetical declarations as that contained in Jerem. xxxi. 31, to perceive that the New Covenant of the Messiah was always intended by God to be something very different in its nature from the Old. The following are some remarkable observations on this difference by Rabbi Albo in the Ikkarim, which De Rossi justly styles, Una grandiosa ed interessante opera.

'When God, who is highly to be extolled, gave the Law, he knew that this form of education was sufficient for a certain period, which his wisdom had fixed, that it was sufficient to prepare those who received it, and incline their minds to receive the second form, although God has revealed this to no man; but, when the time shall come, God will reveal that second form to men. He is like a physician, who prescribes a diet to his patient until a certain period, which he knows, but which he does not tell to the patient. When, however, the time is at hand in which the sick man is to recover, the physician changes his diet, permitting what he had forbidden, and forbidding what he had permitted. The patient need not,