especially the Apostle of the Gentiles; but he appears, wherever he went, to have addressed himself first to his own countrymen; his natural feelings of warm attachment and partiality towards them, being by no means forbidden by his heavenly Guide, who, on the contrary, designed that the Jews should have this precedence. The promises and threats of the Gospel were to be declared" to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." "It was necessary," says St. Paul, "that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing ye put it from you, lo! we turn to the Gentiles." It is probable, indeed, that the number of St. Paul's converts among his own brethren were, in most places, but a small proportion; though in some of the churches it appears, from several circumstances, that their amount was not inconsiderable; and in every church, it is probable that Jews and devout Greeks (i. e. such as had before renounced idolatry and acknowledged the divine origin of the Jewish religion) were to be found among the members, and among the earliest members. In those places, however, in which the great majority of the Christian brethren were converted Gentiles,

it might have been supposed that the Old Testament would have been but little studied or thought of; so far however was this from being the case-so far was St. Paul from allowing the Jewish Scriptures, those Holy Scriptures which he represents as "able to make us wise unto salvation," to be depreciated, or the Christian revelation to be regarded as any other than a completion of the Mosaic, that he seems to have expected in all his converts, an intimate acquaintance with the Old Testament; and to have earnestly, and not unsuccessfully, inculcated the necessity of interpreting the one scheme by the other, as two parts of the same great whole, and of considering "whatsoever things were written aforetime," as "written for their learning." On the Corinthian Church, for instance, he impresses this principle as of high importance; and though but a small proportion of them probably were Jews, he evidently implies that they were not on that account the less interested in all the concerns of the Jewish Church, whose successor was the Christian" I would not have you ignorant," says he, "how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and

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were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea. But with many of them God was not well pleased; for they were overthrown in the wilderness." And after touching on several points in the history of the Church of Israel, he assures the Corinthians that "these things happened unto them for ensamples; and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come,” (i. e. who live under the last dispensation of God; which is not, like the Mosaic, to be succeeded by any other, but will last to the end of the world.)

The passage just mentioned is only one out of many in which the Apostle adverts to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, as of high importance to be studied by Christians. And the frequent allusions he makes to them as familiar to his hearers, and of acknowledged value in their eyes, convey his judgment on the subject far more strongly than so many direct admonitions on the subject; they indicate what was the early, the habitual, and the universal mode of instruction employed by himself and all the Christian teachers. No Christian, therefore, who would copy the pattern of St. Paul, will leave the Old

Testament out of sight; but will learn from him that the former dispensation must be carefully attended to by one who would rightly understand the Gospel. And St. Paul's experience may also serve to guard us against another error, in some respects the opposite of that just alluded to; the confounding together of the two systems in one confused medley, and blending the law which had a shadow of good things to come," with the Gospel, which is the fulfilment of it: an error not uncommon with those who unthinkingly study the Bible as one book, without taking pains to discriminate the several parts of the great scheme of Providence it relates to. The two dispensations correspond in almost every point, but coincide in very few. Like the flower and the fruit of any plant, the one is a preparation for the other; and each of its parts bears some relation to the other, though they have but a very faint resemblance; the parts which are the most prominent and striking in each, respectively, being least so in the other; so that if any one were to give a representation in which the parts of the blossom and of the perfect fruit were confusedly combined and intermingled, it

would be an unnatural anomaly, very unlike either the one or the other. The example of St. Paul furnishes, as I have said, a safeguard against this error; he all along represents the Law as connected with the Gospel, as the shadow with the substance ;-as" our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ;" and the condition of the Israelites as analogous to that of Christians, but in many points dissimilar.

In several instances indeed, this correspondence and this difference are pretty generally perceived and acknowledged. That the paschal lamb, for instance, and the other Jewish sacrifices, were typical of the atoning sacrifice of the true Lamb of God,---the sin-offerings and other outward rites of purification having the same relation to ceremonial offences and external legal justification from them, that the offering of our Lord has to the wiping away of moral guilt and the inward sanctification of the heart,-this is a point on which few professed Christians are ignorant or doubtful; the correspondence, and, at the same time, dissimilarity having been explicitly stated, in the Epistle to the Hebrews: "if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the