piety of the heart. Besides, owing to the ascendency which our senses have gained over our minds, it is so much more easy and gratifying to be able to see and recount our religious doings, than to attend to the secret duties of the heart, that we would fain lose sight of the spiritual nature of religion, in an engrossing attention to its outward forms.

On these accounts it is that a system of superstition, however torturing the rites it may inflict on its votaries, is able to boast a more imposing array of devotees, than the spiritual religion of the gospel of Christ. It is so much more easy to endure bodily torture, than to bend the will and impose mental discipline; there is so much in the idea of personal merit to sustain the endurance of physical suffering, and so much food for complacency afterwards in the review, that christianity has only to proclaim its acceptance of tortures and penances in the stead of spi itual efforts, in order to enrol among its followers mulitudes who now stand aloof in aversion and despair.

Owing to the operation of the same principles it was that the higher and ultimate designs of the Jewish economy became neutralized and lost. Burdened as that dispensation was with cerimonial observances, it was yet highly significant of all tha is spiritual and essential in the present economy. But the Jews, while they scrupulously honored the signs, en irely lost sight of the thing signified. They paid tithes of anise, mint, and cummin; they offered their animal sacrifices; they were even willing to multiply their ritual observances a hundred-fold provided, that by doing so, they might be spared the irksome task of reflecting, of sustaining a mental effort which should enable them to look to the end of that which was to be abolished;' this was a duty so much more difficult than to discharge a routine of outward ceremonies, that

they utterly dismissed it. In their carnal hands, the transparent type became opaque and useless, their speaking and instructive service became an unmeaning enigma, a dumb and tiresome show; and even the glorious temple itself, meant to be the shrine and sanctuary of living piety, became its sepulchre; the mighty mausoleum of a departed religion, in which all that remained to interest, was the constant celebration of its funeral rites.

Judea, having proved the grave of religion, became also the scene of its resurrection to a loftier order of life, and clothed in a more spiritual body. Christianity, as compared with religion in its Jewish state, is corruption clothed in incorruption.' And now, we might have supposed, religion is safe from its former fate; its spirituality will now form its protection; and, in addition, it will be guarded by the jealousy of devout admiration; but, instead of this, the very first danger to which it was exposed was that of being divested of its distinctive character, and of being reduced to an affair of forms and ceremonies. Many of its primitive disciples had been born in the shadow of the holy place; had inhaled the incense of the altar with their earliest breath; and had daily walked amidst the solemn and gorgeous magnificence of an economy modelled after the pattern of heavenly things, and adorned by the hand of Deity himself. Proud to be allied to such a church, they had derived their distinctive name from its initiatory rite, and gloried to be denominated 'the circumcision.' The loftiest conceptions of excellence and distinction, of personal security and future enjoyment, had long been identified in their minds with the circumcision.' And hence, though the superior character of the christian economy had long since carried their convictions, and won their esteem, yet true to their early prepossessions, they essayed to insert it as a graft into the Jewish stock, as the infallible

means of enhancing the value of its fruits. So far from entertaining the idea, that the christian institute was designed to supplant the Mosaic, they insisted that its saving efficacy depended entirely on its being incorporated with it: that whatever good of a subordinate kind it might impart to others, its ultimate blessings would only accrue to 'the circumcision.' And accordingly the apostles had early to interpose their authority, individually and collectively, in order to save the new dispensation from being overlaid and destroyed by a favorite and corrupted ritual.

The propensity in question however is by no means peculiar to the Jews, whether regarded as professors of Judaism or of christianity; it is one to which our common nature is prone. What is it that passes throughout Christendom generally for the religion of Christ? what but an elaborate accumulation of penances and mortifications, of splendid sights and melodious sounds, of fasts and festivals, a constantly recurring round of outward observances? As though conscious of its want of a spiritual life, they have vainly attempted to find compensation in a constant multiplication of heartless ceremonies: as if aware that they had no more of religion than the lifeless form, they have endeavored to conceal its death-like features by overlaying it with a profusion of costly decorations.

Nor does this propensity confine its pernicious operations to the sphere of our duties alone-of what we have to do; but invading the region of christian expectation and privilege, how generally has it debased the notions of men concerning the nature of that salvation which God proposes to accomplish for them. By salvation, they understand. a mere outward deliverance-the bestowment of pardon alone-without remembering that to be pardoned, in the scriptural sense, is at the same time to be renewed in the spirit of their mind; in the very soul of their soul. They

profess to be infinitely indebted to Christ, supposing him to have accomplished every thing for them in such a sense, that now they have only to give their consent, in order to be taken to heaven; not remembering that, before he can be said to have done any thing for them personally, he must actually commence a renovating process with them. They estimate their deliverance from hell, as from a place of outward torment; forgetting that sin has created a hell within them; that an angry and polluted conscience is a worm which dieth not: that unsubdued propensities to sin are fires which, if now left unquenched, will continue to burn on for ever; that dying in habits of vice we shall take them with us as chains of our own forging and imposing, and wear them for ever; and that unless they are delivered from these evils now by the renewing agency of the Divine Spirit, heaven itself, were they permited to enter it, would be no scene of joy to them, since every thing there would be at variance with their taste, and painfully opposed to their character. And in the same way they are accustomed to anticipate heaven as a spectacle of splendor, and the scene of every refined pleasure which can charm the senses; as the elysium in which they are to find happiness prepared and awaiting their arrival, whatever the state in which they may reach it. They entirely lose sight of the fact, that their present character is creating their future destiny; that their principles and actions, preceding their own departure, have already arrived in eternity, and are there preparing for them a place of reception. They forget, that on departing from earth, that which goes to be examined at the bar of God, is the unclothed soul, the naked human character, and that the inevitable test to which it is there subjected is, whether or not it has been formed and sanctified by the Spirit of God. They are blind to the important truth, that the happiness of heaven will principally

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result from holiness and conformity to God: that so far, heaven commences with the christian on earth; and that, when he leaves the world, he takes the elements of heavenly happiness with him; so that it is only by becoming a subject of the kingdom of holiness, now, that he can enter into the kingdom of happiness hereafter.

The principle which leads men to substitute external things for the religion of Christ, is of universal operation: we have seen that it has entered each dispensation, and appeared in every age of the church, obscuring the glory, and corroding the very vitals of piety. In the war it has waged with the spirituality of religion, it has succeeded in materializing and debasing it to a degree which has left nothing for the most secular and devoted worldling to hope or desire. It has so consulted his tastes and provided for his wishes, that he can easily serve both God and mammon; an achievement which was once pronounced impracticable; for while it leaves the heart at liberty for the reception of any guests, it provides that religion shall be satisfied with the attentions of form. It has subverted the whole constitution of Messiah's kingdom; for while it has dethroned him from his seat in the heart; and has turned his laws into prescriptions of empty forms; and the homage which is paid him, into an affair of heartless ceremony, of feudal custom; it has left him to sway an impotent sceptre over a kingdom of mere nominal subjects. By anticipation, it has even carried its deteriorating influence into the regions of futurity, invaded the upper province of his dominions, materializing the happiness of heaven itself. Oh, what would that kingdom, of which Christ is the author and glory, have become, had it been left to be moulded by the hands of man! It would have been made to consist

of meats and drinks;' an assemblage of outward observances, and those of the most trivial description; whereas