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called to act on it. And this is agreeable to analogy. My child will ask me questions on the fitness or unfitness of what I enjoin: but I silence him: "You are not yet able to comprehend this: your business is, to believe me and obey me." But the Schoolmen will not be satisfied with this view of things: yet they can make nothing out satisfactorily. They have their de re, and their de nomine: but nothing is gained by these attempts at clearness and nice distinctions. These very accurate men, who think they adjust every thing with precision, cannot agree among one another, and do little else than puzzle plainer minds.

WHATEVER definitions men have given of Religion, I can find none so accurately descriptive of it as this-that it is such a belief of the Bible as maintains a living influence on the heart. Men may speculate, criticise, admire, dispute about, doubt, or believe the Bible; but the RELIGIOUS MAN is such, because he so believes it, as to carry habitually a practical sense of its truths on his mind.

THE fears of the general class of Christians are concerned about the superstructure of religion; but those of speculative minds chiefly relate to the foundation. The less thinking man doubts

whether he is on the foundation: he, whose mind is of a more intellectual turn, doubts concerning the foundation itself. I have met with many of these speculative cases. Attacks of this nature are generally sudden. A suspicion will, by surprise, damp the heart; and, for a time, will paint the Bible as a fable. I have found it useful, on such occasions, to glance over the whole thread of Scripture. The whole, presented in such a view, brings back the mind to its proper tone: the indelible characters of Simplicity and Truth impress with irresistible effect that heart, which can discern them as having once felt them.

ON THE

OLD AND NEW DISPENSATIONS.

THE Old and New Testaments contain but one scheme of Religion. Neither part of this scheme can be understood without the other; and therefore, great errors have arisen from separating them. They are like the rolls on which they were anciently written, before books of the present form were invented. It is but one subject and one system, from beginning to end; but the view which we obtain of it grows clearer and clearer, as we unwind the roll that contains it.

THERE is one grand and striking feature of distinction between the spirit of the Old Testament Dispensation and that of the New. o.

The Old Dispensation was a dispensation of limits, waymarks, forms, and fashions: every thing was weighed and measured: if a man did.

but gather sticks on the Sabbath, he was to be stoned without mercy: if a Jew brought an offering, it was of no avail if not presented at the door of the Tabernacle: the manner, the time, the circumstances were all minutely instituted; and no devotion or piety of spirit could exempt a man from the yoke of all these observances, for God had appointed these as the way in which he chose that a devout Jew should express his state of mind.

But the New Dispensation changed the whole system. Religion was now to become more peculiarly a spiritual transaction between God and the soul; and independent, in a higher measure than ever before, of all positive institutions. Its few simple institutions had no further object, than the preservation of the unity, order, soundness, and purity of the Church-in regard to doctrine, government, and discipline.

Nor had these appointments that character of unaccommodating inflexibility, which marked the institutions of the Old Dispensation. All nations, men of all habits and manners, are to drink life from the beneficent stream as it flows. It is to throw down no obstructions, that are not absolutely incompatible with its progress. But it is appointed to pervade every place which it visits. Some, it enters without obstruction, and passes directly through. In some, it meets with mounds and obstacles; yet rises till it finds an entrance.

Others are so fenced and fortified, that it winds round them and flows forward: continuing to do so, till it, at length, finds some method of insinuating itself.

And thus the Dispensation of Grace in the Church accommodates itself to the various tempers and habits which it finds in different ages, nations, and bodies of men: it leaves in existence numberless opinions and prejudices, if they are not inconsistent with its main design, and mingles and insinuates itself among them. It has not limited Christianity to any one form of Church Polity, ordained and perfected in all its parts by divine authority: but Christians are left to act herein according to circumstances, and to the exercise of sound discretion under those circumstances.

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