who upon the Cross, was taking away the sins of the world.

And now there comes a long sad time of declension and even of apostasy among God's people, in spite of the abundance of the revelation. It may be that prosperity was the touchstone shewing that the baser metal had not yet been removed from their hearts. All of us know that sympathy with joy requires a higher frame of mind than sympathy with grief, and assuredly prosperity reveals the thoughts of many hearts more than the battle with adversity. And so Israel in his prosperity fell into sin, and sin brings disorder in its train. One of the greatest of Israel's teachers ascribes his fall to those same three things which are the occasion of many a fall among ourselves 'pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness.' And now their covenant God, ever mindful of His ancient promise, sends to His people one after another of the long line of those wonderful men, the Hebrew Prophets. The importunity with which He sent them, God himself describes in the strong but touching metaphor "rising up early I spake unto you." With lips touched by the burning coal from the altar of God, they inveigh with a matchless fervour against the sin which was cankering the heart of the people; they speak of the purity of God and of the purity of spirit which alone can see Him; they insist upon the service of the heart and on the utter vanity of mere

53

III.] the very teachings of the Gospel. ceremonial rite. "I delight not," says Jehovah, speaking through the mouth of the chiefest of their number, "I delight not in the blood of bullocks or of lambs or of he-goats; incense is an abomination unto me; your appointed feasts my soul hateth; wash you, make you clean, cease to do evil, learn to do well." They almost anticipate the very teachings of the Gospel. And these continue for nearly three hundred years, and then the Old Testament is closed and there is no prophet more. The revelation of God in the old covenant is complete. It began in Eden, it grew clearer and clearer for a few thousand years till it reached the streaks of the dawn in Malachi. It still required the lapse of centuries before the Sun of Righteousness arose with healing in his wings.

To such as you, my brethren, and in a review so brief, it is unnecessary for me to speak of the promise of the Hope of Israel which always accompanied the revelation and shared in every accession to its clearness. But there is another thought which in your presence I think I have no right to evade, but which certainly I shall refer to with diffidence. What knowledge, what hope had the Ancient Saints of a future life? This is a question which in these days of free enquiry has distressed many an anxious mind. I admit the traces of such a hope are few and indistinct, yet they are not wholly wanting. I will not now stop to cite them, but I would rather endeavour

to account for the absence of their more definite expression. I have already said, at an earlier part of this discourse, that the main religious thought in the patriarchal dispensation must have been that of an invisible Divine Being ever present and in covenant with the family. The very tents in which they lived, the altar which stood in their midst, must day by day have reminded them that it was the call of their covenant God which had placed them in the land of their pilgrimage; as they journeyed from place to place, in every crisis of their histories, ever and anon there was the vision of their God, whether at Mamre, or Bethel, or Hebron. And when the great family, the clan, became a nation, then there was the sense of the presence of their own Covenant God in the nation. They felt His presence in the Miracles before Pharaoh; they felt His presence on that night of death and of deliverance, 'much to be remembered;' with the eye of faith they saw Him in the Pillar of Fire and in the cloud, they saw Him in the Tabernacle, they saw Him in the holy rites of their religion, they saw Him in their sacred books, they saw Him in their Prophets. Now could a people thus circumstanced, even so much as suspect the possibility of a break in the continuity of the relation between themselves and this their everexisting Covenant God? Is it imaginable that a people, the daily language of whose choicer spirits was MY God, Thou God of Fathers, could suppose

my

III. 11.] relation of man to an ever-present God. 55

this divine relation with all the hopes which it inferred, closed for ever with the close of the threescore years and ten, suddenly vanishing in the cold isolation of the grave? I confess myself unable to conceive it.

Is this then the thought to which our Saviour refers, when He said in reply to the Sadducees, "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living"? I think it is at least a part of its meaning, You remember also when the disciples saw their risen Lord on the shore of the lake by the side of the mysterious fire and the meal prepared-none of them ventured to ask Him, Who art Thou? knowing it was the Lord. Does this also express in some degree the feelings of the saints of old regarding their immortality? I think it does.

The time permits but few words more, and I conclude.

We have seen how the Revelation of God in His grace to man proceeded under the old covenant with that same slow but effectual progress which is equally observable in the Revelation of God in His works, and during the completion of those manifold works themselves. These all bear the impress of one and the same Omniscient, Omnipotent, loving mind, working the good pleasure of His will in a secure, and definite, and stately plan. I know not, brethren, what impression may have possessed your own feelings while in spirit

56 True greatness of the redeemed man. [LECT. III.

we have together traversed so many fair provinces of nature and of grace, but the one thought which has never for long been absent from my own mind is that expressed so touchingly by David after long survey of the bright host of heaven from his native hills; 'Lord, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him, and the Son of man, that Thou visitest him?' There must be something inherently great in a Being for whom the Lord of the universe has cared with all this care; not indeed man in his ruin, but man such as he is when viewed in the light which streams from Bethlehem, from Olivet, and from the cross upon Moriah; man redeemed, man restored to his true, his better self, man sanctified, man with the Christ within the heart, man the child of God, man the Heir of glory. Surely nothing that is mean or paltry or depraved can have a Natural home within the spirit of such a being. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are pure, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, he will think on these things.