tical or a religious character, without inquiring into the meaning of the expressions which they repeat, or having any just and adequate conception of the ideas which they are intended to represent. This fact shows the necessity of forming accurate and clear notions of those words, which are the hinges of opinions and actions; of adhering as much as possible to their strict sense in our different provinces of inquiry; and of endeavouring to extricate them from that capricious variety of meanings, to which, from the nature of human language and society, they are obviously liable.

In the stricter sciences, words easily obtain a fixed and determinate sense; and even in those branches of natural philosophy, where the progress of knowledge sometimes effects a change in the vocabulary, they soon acquire a steady and settled meaning, and few differences of opinion subsist upon the right explication of the terms. But in those parts of knowledge which have a direct influence upon action, and are, more or less, every man's business, they are subject to frequent changes and modifications. In religion particularly, words have passed, sometimes from a popular to a strict and determinate, sometimes from a strict to a popular and enlarged signification. New doctrines have been grounded on figurative expressions, too rigidly urged, and explained upon wrong principles. Old doctrines have been well nigh exploded in

consequence of a popular turn which has been given to scriptural phrases; and the earliest and least suspicious interpretations of those passages of holy writ, to which we appeal as authority, have become in a manner antiquated, and are sometimes condemned as rash innovations.

An instance or two will serve to illustrate these positions. The word "law" is used in several senses in the New Testament. Sometimes it signifies the Pentateuch, sometimes the whole volume of the Old Testament. Sometimes it is used figuratively', to express any thing which has the force and obligation of a law and occasionally it seems to mean, in the way of argument and illustration, a law indefinitely, or any particular law. But with these exceptions it signifies the law of Moses, either partially, or in the gross; either as limited to some particular portion of the whole law-the decalogue, for instance, the moral, or the ceremonial law-or as comprehending all these divisions, and the whole complex body of ordinances and enactments, commandments and precepts. Hence it signifies that peculiar dispensation of religion, or code of moral and religious duty,

1

Thus the Gospel is called the law of Christ, the law of faith, the law of righteousness, in allusion to the old or legal dispensation. See Romans vii. 21, 23. 25. viii. 2.

to which the Jews were subject before our Saviour's Advent. In this sense St. Paul uses the word, whenever he compares the law with the Gospel, and excludes it from the office of justification.

But when the heathens set up the plea of the sufficiency of a religion or law of nature in opposition to the Gospel doctrine of salvation by grace and justification by faith in Christ, St. Paul's phraseology and arguments were readily turned against them, in the way of analogy, and by parity of reasoning. Thus the word "law" acquired in popular usage the same abstract sense in which it had been used long before by the philosophers, and designated what is called the law of nature, or that code of moral and religious duties, to which man, independently of all positive laws or particular revelations, is supposed to be subject. This sense of the word was afterwards adopted in the literal and grammatical interpretation of St. Paul's epistles, and led to a distinction between "the law and the Gospel," which, though it might have been useful as a popular distinction, if the analogical reasoning on which it is grounded had been strictly adhered to, is not scriptural, and has unfortunately given occasion to erroneous and dangerous opinions. What the Apostle says of the law of Moses, considered as an imperfect and preparatory dispensation of religion, has been applied to this abstract notion

of the law of God, and of moral and religious obligation. "The state of things," says Bishop Taylor," in which the whole world is represented in their several periods, is by some made to be the state of every returning sinner, and men are taught that they must pass through the terrors of the law before they can partake of the mercies of the Gospel. The law was a school-master to bring the synagogue to Christ; it was so to them that were under the law, but it cannot be so to us, who are not under the law, but under grace."

But this is not the worst. Others have applied what St. Paul says of the total freedom of the heathen converts from the yoke of the Mosaic law, and the emancipation of believing Jews from its obligations as a religious dispensation, to the moral law, and believers in general; and have maintained, with equal folly and impiety, that God's elect are released from the obligations of the moral law. But the world would not probably have heard of these paradoxes of Antinomianism, if this analogical sense of the word, law, had not almost superseded its proper and original signification, and exerted an undue influence upon many of St. Paul's commentators and interpreters.

The other instance, which I shall adduce in proof of my observations, is the word to which

1

Taylor's Unum Necessarium, Polemical Works, p. 587.

my attention is now directed-I mean the word, Regeneration. No reasonable doubt can be entertained that it was appropriated to that grace, whatever may be its nature, which is bestowed on us in the Sacrament of Baptism, (including perhaps occasionally, by a common figure of speech, its proper and legitimate effects, considered in conjunction with it;) from the beginnings of Christianity to no very distant era of Ecclesiastical History. In those few passages of the ancient Christian writers', where it bears another signification, it is

'Thus Clemens Alexandrinus, speaking of the injunction in the Law of Moses, that the adulteress should be stoned to death, and comparing it with what our Saviour says on this subject, Matt. v. 32. xix. 9. Mark x. 11, 12. Luke xvi. 18. undertakes to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the Law and the Gospel on allegorical principles.

Οὐ δὴ μάχεται τῷ Εὐαγγελίῳ ὁ Νόμος· συνάδει δὲ αὐτῷ. Πῶς γὰρ οὐχὶ, ἑνὸς ὄντος ἀμφοῖν χορηγοῦ τοῦ Κυρίου; Ἡ γάρ τοι πορνεύσασα ζῇ μὲν τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ, ἀπέθανε δὲ ταῖς ἐντολαῖς· ἡ δὲ μετανοήσασα, οἷον ἀναγεννηθεῖσα κατὰ τὴν ἐπιστροφὴν τοῦ βίου, παλιγ γενεσίαν ἔχει ζωῆς· τεθνηκυίας γὰρ τῆς πόρνης τῆς παλαίας, εἰς βίον δὲ παρελθούσης αὖθις τῆς κατὰ τὴν μετάνοιαν γινομένης. — Stromata, 1. ii. p. 507. Edit. Potter.

Here the words born again, and regeneration, (dvayevvη0ɛioa and Tayyɛvɛoía) are professedly used in an improper and metaphorical sense; for the adulteress is represented as being, as it were, (olov) born again by her repentance and conversion; a way of speaking never used when baptism, or its effects, are called regeneration, because the word, though originally figurative, acquired a proper and determinate sense, in ecclesiastical language. The distinction between the remission of sins by regeneration in baptism, and by repentance and absolution after baptism, pervades the canons and discipline of the Church,