plan of salvation which in due time was to be disclosed to all nations, for the obedience of faith. This information was to serve as a check to the general corruption "for the time then present," and to make way for a better and more permanent state of things.

stance.

Here then we are required to take notice of a kingdom which God has formed for himself in the midst of the kingdoms of this world, which have ever sought their welfare either in military achievements, or in the arts and sciences, or in manufactures and commerce, and not in the Divine favour and blessing. This kingdom of God is to be regarded as twofold; namely, as consisting of an exterior form, and of an internal subAs to its exterior form, God fashions it by laws, ordinances, and his own peculiar guardianship, into a firm barrier against the general inundation of idolatrous rites and infidel apostacy. He propagates by its institutions a pure knowledge and worship; he defends the true worshippers within it in their conscientious performance of his will, and causes its light to shine also far and wide into the surrounding moral darkness. With respect to its internal substance, it consists of all those who, far from being satisfied with their own outward acknowledgment of the truth, admit it also to the government of their affections and lives, walk by lively faith in God and his promises, and make it their chief business to diffuse the light of the gospel in the world. These persons, whose number is not to be reckoned and determined, are emphatically, in all ages, the pillars of the earth, and the sustain

ers of its inhabitants. For their sakes, and in answer to their prayers and intercessions, does God still bear with an apostate world. They are the lively, healthful, and ever renewing flower of his dominion here on earth, whose exterior constitution would soon fade and fall off without it, like fruit twice dead at the core. These observations equally apply to the church of God under the Old Testament.

As the conduct and condition of every nation cannot but have a nearer or more distant relation to this kingdom of God, so all things bear a collective reference to Christ as their centre. The whole ritual of its ordinances under the former dispensation, all the sacrifices, festivals, and sacred observances, pointed, either figuratively or expressly, at the promised Messiah, and foreshowed the dominion he was to have over the earth. The kingdom of God under the New Testament is named by the very name of Christ; it is called Christ's kingdom. It leans for its support upon the recorded and stupendous parts of Christ's history, and proclaims his imperishable word. As all the vital members and flower of the kingdom of God, before the birth of Christ, testified their faith principally by trusting in the word of promise concerning the Messiah that was to come; so all the spiritual members of the same kingdom, under the New Testament, possess true life and inward substance in exact proportion as Christ is become alive within them, and is formed within them.

Christ is the centre of the kingdom of God, and hence of all mankind. The very time of

his appearing was the middle period of the world's history; and even the country where he was manifested in the flesh, where the kingdom of God was first propagated, and where it will at length be earliest glorified with the glory of the latter days, is in the centre of the world's population. The shortest distance from all parts of the world, as known to the ancients, may be found in the Holy Land, as a common centre for the compass of Europe, Asia, and Africa; and this very situation of a country the most important to all nations, is of no small account. Into this land did God conduct Abraham, and promised to give it to him and to his seed for an everlasting possession, as we read in the book of Genesis, where his history is minutely recorded. It required the steady eye of an eminent believer to look for the fulfilment of such a promise; for, when this promise was made, the land was as yet, and for a long time to come, in the hands of its ancient possessors, the heathen descendants of Ham: and when Abraham wanted in it only a small "parcel of ground," for a burial place, he was obliged to give a price for it to the sons of Heth. But harder trials of his faith still awaited him, especially the giving up of his Isaac, the very child of promise. This trial, however, he endured, and came off with honour ; so that he obtained the title of "Father of all them that believe." The Scriptures show us the example of his modesty, Gen. xxiii.; his devoted and self-denying courage, chap. xiv.; his peaceable disposition, chap. xiii.; his disinterestedness, chap xiv. 21-23.; his spiritual piety,

chap. xii. 7, 8; xiii. 18.; his humility, chap. xviii. 27; his zeal for the truth, chap. xiii. 4; xxi. 33.* But what nation among the heathen can show us such qualities in any of their ancient heroes? Yet Abraham, with all this, led the laborious life of a nomadic wanderer: for his large possessions of cattle obliged him to remove from place to place for pasturage; and when drought prevented his finding a sufficiency of it in the land of Canaan, he was constrained even to go down into Egypt, and seek a place for his flocks and herds in the rich pastures of the Nile. Moreover, he always dwelt in tents; a mode of life which could not but be attended with many inconveniences and privations. He built no city, because he looked for a better country, that is, an heavenly, whose builder and maker is God.

Abraham, by Divine appointment, received the sign of circumcision as a token of the covenant which God made with him; and this sign is still retained, not only by the chosen people descended from Abraham by his son Isaac, but likewise by the other numerous posterities of Abraham, as the Ishmaelites who descend from him by Hagar, and by the Midianites who descend from him by Keturah, and who are called at this day by the common name of Arabs and Bedoweens. From the country of Ishmael proceeded the religion of the impostor Mohammed, and that country is still its stronghold: its

*In these two last cited passages we find the expression, "Call on the name of the Lord;" which is by Luther, whose version the author follows, translated "Preach the name of the Lord."

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inhabitants, also, continue to revere Ibrahim (Abraham) as their great progenitor.

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Isaac and Jacob lived, like Abraham, a life of faith, as sojourners in Canaan. They built altars to the honour of Almighty God; they preached of his name among their heathen neighbours;* were honoured by him with special revelations, and consoled themselves with the Divine promise, the fulfilment of which they "saw afar off.” They sought a country and a home; but they "declared plainly" that it was a heavenly country for which they looked and this is what chiefly distinguishes them, and others like them, from the rest of the world, who "mind earthly things," and take up with nothing better and beyond. And as they maintained this heavenly mindedness in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, therefore God put upon them the great honour of recording their names into his own title, by calling himself "the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob." This is a distinction which casts into the shade all human glory and renown. How difficult it must have been for them, surrounded as they were with heathen neighbours so corrupt, to exercise and maintain this simple faith, several incidents of their history but too plainly intimate.

We need only call to remembrance those descendants of Ham who once peopled Sodom and Gomorrha, Admah and Zeboiim in the vale of Siddim, who carried their enormous wickedness to such a height, that even the forbearance and long-suf

* See the note on page 37.