nature which can melt marble, fuse platinum, and burn the adamant. In the infancy of evangelic effort, even Christians looked despondingly on some sections of the human family; and it was a grave question with some whether it was better to extirpate cannibals or evangelize them; whether the Gospel should be preached to the Indians; and a large mass, consisting of Negroes, and Hottentots, and " Chineses," were set aside as utterly out of the question, a caput mortuum, of which nothing could be made. These despondencies, which were unlawful from the moment it was said, "Preach the Gospel to every creature," have now been effectually refuted by the partial success of the Gospel on every creature ; partial, but still enough to show that every creature is a fit subject for the Gospel to act upon. But I can quite see in some brethren a suspicion that the Hebrew subject will prove refractory-that there is a peculiar impracticability about the Jew. Be it even so that the Jew's heart is the hardest of all hearts; that peculiar hardness has happened unto Israel. There is a power, an agent which can dissolve this stony heart; and just allow that they are the most obdurate people in the world, and it follows that when the Gospel has proved itself the power of God and the wisdom of God, to the salvation of the Jews, it will be seen how omnipotent is the Gospel of peace in the hand of the Spirit of Love. When the Jews are converted, it will be a most singular event; the final evidence of the Gospel's Divine original, and a mighty impulse to its spread.

2. But, secondly, the Jews are likely themselves to be most energetic and efficient evangelists.

(ii. 2, 3), that, “in the last days the law shall

Isaiah says

go

forth out

of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."

Zechariah says,

And

Many people and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem, and to before the Lord....... Ten men out of all languages of pray the nations shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you; for we have heard that God is with you." (viii. 22, 23.) Jerusalem, by that time possibly the great centre of wealth and influence, will be the source of light and evangelization; the emanating fountain and the converging focus, whence truth shall issue and whither inquiry shall return; from which the Word of the Lord shall go forth, and to which all tribes of awakened people shall go up the missionary metropolis of the world.

3. And a third and more important way in which I believe that Christianity is to profit by the conversion of the Jews, in which all families of the earth are to be blessed in Abraham, is that in that converted nation we may expect to see a re-production of Christianity in its noblest and purest style; the graces of the Gospel exemplified as they have not been since the day when the very chiefest Christians were Jews. It ought ever to be remembered, that whether for the purposes of ulterior conversion of the world, or for the elevation of the existing Church, the instrumentality most needed is a normal piety of the highest type; a living Christianity so full-grown, and so full-hearted, that no man shall despise it, and no man shall mistake it. And in reading the prophecies I see many proofs that regenerate Palestine is to present the world with a living epistle largely written, of this first-rate Christianity. The paradisaic scenes of peace and harmony delineated, streets without violence, and

say

A.

sanctuaries without profanation; the worshipping concourse and the rapt adoration, and the manifested presence of Jehovah; the blending of Sabbath sanctity with week-day activity, bespeak a piety of the most exalted order. And I stagger not at the promise because of what the Jews are now-I believe that they are much maligned, and I also believe that they are not too moral. But I also believe that, though everything which prejudice has suspected and malignity invented were true, the miracle of grace, which makes them a pattern to all people, will only be the more adorable. I do not stop to that if they be abject, persecution has made them so; nor do I interpose the names of Reuchlin and Benezra and Neander in arrest of that sweeping sentence which would adjudge them to irretrievable degradation. But I fall back on the unquestionable fact that the finest specimens of redeemed and regenerate humanity which mother earth has ever borne upon her surface, or received into her bosom, are the men gathered to their fathers in the sepulchres of Israel, the saints that sleep in Palestine. I do not forget that the Church's finest models and most stimulating examples are men who answered to the name of Jew. And just as from the indevotion of a prayerrestraining and irreverent age, I look back to the son of Jesse praising seven times a-day, and soliciting the lyre familiar with his ecstasies to a strain more seraphic yet, till the labouring lyre could do no more, and his own awestruck hand trembled into silence; so from the stinted devotion and phlegmatic praises of our Gentile Churches, I look forward in hope to the day when other Davids shall lead the choir, and sweet singers of Israel sound the key-note of the Church's gratitude; and if without the temple pomp, at least

r

with Hebrew fervour, we shall answer one another, "Praise ye the Lord, for his mercy endureth for ever." And just as from the selfishness and caution, and wary worldly wisdom of modern preaching, I look back with amazement at that meteor of mercy, that burning and shining light, who, self-forgetful and self-spending, flamed round the benighted earth, knowing and making nothing known but Christ, then exhausted, shot back into that sun which had fired him at the first; so looking round on our glow-worm regiment to the leeward of the hedge, and then looking out on dark Britain and a darker world, I am ready to exclaim, "The Lord send us another Jew like Paul." And then, when I look round on the Church of Christ comminuted into a thousand fragments, and every day shattering more and more the stone which ought to fill the earth-when I think how fallen out by the way are the pilgrims, the brethren journeying to the same land of peace and love, I look back with wistfulness to the Daniels and Johns of better days, who exerted such healing and harmonizing influence on all their coevals; and when I think of it as one most likely source of Christian union, I pray the Lord to hasten in his time the day when Ephraim shall no longer envy Judah, but from Ephraim and Judah, converted and restored, shall come forth a company, THE MODELS OF THE CHURCH, THE

MISSIONARIES OF THE WORLD.

LECTURE II.

THE NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE JEWS.

BY THE REV. F. A. COX, D.D., LL.D.,

OF HACKNEY.

2 SAM. VII. 22-24.

Wherefore thou art great, O Lord God for there is none like thee, neither is there any god beside thee, according to all that we have heard with our ears. And what one nation in the earth is like thy people, even like Israel, whom God went to redeem for a people to himself, and to make him a name, and to do for you great things and terrible, for thy land, before thy people, which thou redeemedst to thee from Egypt, from the nations and their gods? For thou hast confirmed to thyself thy people Israel, to be a people unto thee for ever: and thou, Lord, art become their God."

THE history of nations has always been justly deemed a most interesting and instructive study. It is not merely calculated to gratify a natural and reasonable curiosity