gratitude, to inflame our love for His holy word, and induce us to seek with a more constant and persevering earnestness that “wisdom unto salvation," which it is its very province to impart to us through faith which is in Christ Jesus." Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. APPENDIX. ON THE EXTENT AND EFFICACY OF THE MOSAIC SACRI FICIAL ATONEMENTS. [See note, page 63; and Discourse VI. page 150-153.1 Heb. ix. 13, 14. If the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? AMONG several important questions, to which these words invite our attention, one of considerable interest and difficulty is the NEGATIVE character of the MOSAIC SACRIFICIAL ATONEMENTS, or the nature of their inferiority to the Christian atonement. For the doctrine of the atonement by Jesus Christ, or the reconciliation of a fallen and a sinful world to their offended Maker by the sacrifice of the Saviour upon the cross, is almost universally admitted to be the great foundation of the Gospel. Upon the atonement effected by our Redeemer are founded equally all the present privileges of Christ's elect people, and all their hopes of future glory. sive predictions concerning Christ and His Gospel, vouchsafed from time to time from the very sentence after the fall, at once to excite and cheer, inform and expand the hopes of the faithful under the earlier dispensations, and to demonstrate to us the transcendent importance of the last and highest. And thus through the great mercy of our God, and the gracious inspiration of His Holy Spirit, have the earliest Scriptures, been fitted for our learning, and adapted to make us "wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus"." III. Let it not be forgotten, however, that the view which we have thus endeavoured to take of the existence and the uses of certain anticipations of the Gospel interspersed throughout the Old Historical Scriptures, is superadded to that of their own great leading purposes. They discharge several important offices properly their own, and distinct from their connexion with the actual doctrines of the Gospel. And their value will not be justly appreciated, unless their leading objects are borne in mind. Some of these great purposes, which I have already endeavoured to treat at large, I may be permitted in conclusion to recapitulate briefly, in a 2 Tim. iii. 15-17. |