points the latter differs from the former. A new dispensation was introduced by Christ, of which the preceding one contained but the outline; the one was local, the other is universal; the one transitory, the other to last to the end of time;-by the acknowledgment of such points of distinction as these, the observation of the Apostle is, it is conceived, sufficiently explained. Meanwhile, no difference in kind is admitted to exist between the two dispensations. So far from this, the Gospel, we are told, is a new law, presenting, not merely the substance of which Judaism contained the shadow, but an exact counterpart of the features of the ancient system; so that, instead of the temple at Jerusalem, to which the Jews, wherever they might be, looked as the central seat of their religion, we have now the Apostolical chair at Rome, the centre of Unity to all Christians; instead of priests by natural, we have priests by spiritual, descent; an unbloody sacrifice takes the place of the "blood of calves and goats;" a graduated hierarchy succeeds to the threefold order of the ancient ministers of the altar; and we have a liturgical ceremonial which, it is avowed, finds its "parallel in the worship and ceremonies of the old law, ordained by God himself."*

It is in the Romish theory of sanctification, philosophically considered, that the identity of principle between the Law and the Tridentine version of the Gospel becomes chiefly apparent. Every one acquainted with that theory knows that its ethical basis is the Aristotelian doctrine of habits, applied to Christianity. The philosopher tells us, and tells us truly, that moral habits are formed by repeated acts,† the mere rudiment of the habit being that which is implanted by nature: if for moral we substitute spiritual habits, and for the rudiments of natural virtue, a power of doing holy actions, imparted to all in baptism, we have here the Romish doctrine of sanctification in its ultimate form. By acting out the holy nature supposed to be at the baptismal font communicated in germ, whether in the way of good deeds or of bodily mortifications, the Christian grows in grace, and is gradually disciplined into the image of Christ: obedience, at first painful, becomes by degrees habitual, and at last pleasant. Thus men are now, as of old, schooled into religion from without inwards. And the Church is the great institution of discipline in which the work is carried on. The Church, by her prescriptions and ordinances, operates upon

• Milner's End of Controversy. Letter 20.

† Οὕτω δὲ καὶ τὰ μὲν δίκαια πράττοντες δίκαιοι γινόμεθα, τὰ δὲ σώφρονα σώφρονες, τὰ δ' ἀνδρεῖα ἀνδρεῖοι, -Ethic. Nic. L. ii. c. 1.

the undisciplined will of man, and brings it into subjection to Christ. In one point, however, there is a wide difference between the system of discipline under which God placed the Jews, and that to which Christians are subjected; a difference which makes the latter a yoke far heavier than that which preceded it. Burdensome as the Jewish ritual was, it was, once for all, distinctly laid down in the written books of the law, which lay open to all, and from the precepts of which the priesthood was not permitted, in the smallest particular, to deviate: a regulation which effectually nipped the growth of sacerdotal usurpation over the consciences of men. Whereas, under the new law, the discipline by which men are to be made Christians is administered, not according to a well-defined prescription emanating from God himself, but according to the varying will of man; the Christian priesthood, represented in the Pope, possessing a right divine to add to the existing law whatever regulations may seem to them proper.

To those acquainted with the natural affinities existing between systems it will be no matter of surprise that, in the point last mentioned, an identity of sentiment should appear between the theory of Rome and that of the Church system as recently revived amongst ourselves: that by a writer of the latter school, the Church should be described as an institution which "not only forms by an outward and political coercion the exterior course of obedience, but shapes by a lighter and unerring hand the full lineaments of Christ's image. Its correction reaches the unwritten moralities: it enters into the inner heart of man; it forbids unforgiving thoughts; it commands a man to render good for evil, blessing for cursing; it obliges him to love God and man, and rebukes him if he disobey." (It has been usually supposed that these are the commands of Christ himself. But not to dwell upon this, it may be remarked that the passage contains, in short compass, the natural history of the Confessional.) "By her authority," we are told, "as God's vicar upon earth, she subjugates the whole energy of man which struggles against the will of God. By her inward discipline she checks, and, through grace, subdues to the conscience the aggressive and importunate affections of our nature." "Through the one objective discipline, the will is once more enthroned supreme, and its energies united with the will of God. Obedience passes, by little and little, from deliberation and conscious effort, to a ready and almost unconscious volition." "We are placed, as it were, under the discipline of childhood;" i. e., under an outwardly coercive law, like the Jew of old. And

since to a law, if it is not to be a dead letter, there must be added a living authority to execute its provisions, we are further informed that, under the new Christian law, such an authority has been actually established, -viz. the clerical order,-which now stands to the Christian people in the same relation in which God himself did to the Jews; "God having constituted an order which shall bear rule over his people, and shall bring them under the yoke of obedience to himself." A sentiment which the Romish Catechism expresses more succinctly when it tells us, that obedience to the Church (by the Church being meant, as usual, the Clergy) is one of the chief duties of a Christian man.†

*

It is, in fact, this false view of the Church, according to which it is, not a community of those who are Christians, but an institution to make men so, that identifies the Church system, fundamentally, with that of Rome, leading both the one and the other to transform the Gospel into a spiritualised Judaism. For, as is evident, on this supposition the external polity of the Church becomes that in which its true being lies; it becomes, what the Jewish law was, the divinely-appointed instrument of the Holy Spirit in working upon the spirit of man, by holding, as the system of Moses did, human nature in a fixed inflexible mould. On this hypothesis, too, an alteration of the exterior framework of the Christian polity is necessarily regarded as equivalent to the destruction of the spirit within; for such, in fact, would have been the effect of a similar alteration in the case of the elder economy.

This is not the place for the inquiry, how far some particles of truth may be contained in the above representations of the functions of the Church. There is no doubt a sense in which, even now, the Christian society is a school of discipline to its members. It is especially so to the children and young persons within its pale, whose condition, therefore, so far approximates to that of the Jew under the Mosaic law. Even towards its adult members, especially those of them who are not yet fully under the influence of divine grace, the Church-i. e. the Christian community-stands in the relation of a school of education operating from without inwards. But the difference is this: the Church, so far as it is a school of discipline, a schoolmaster to lead men to Christ, operates not, as the Mosaic system did, by means of law, by positive ordi

Manning, Unity of the Church, pp. 230. 251. 254. "Hæc autem ecclesia nota est. cognoscatur necesse est."- C. x. s. 11.

Nam cum illi ab omnibus parendum sit,

nances and outward prescriptions, but by what is comprised in the expression, Christian influences, i. e. the teaching, the life, the example, the spirit, the general standard of practice of those who compose the Christian community. There is all the difference in the world between a system of influences of this kind and a system of law. The latter is artificial and arbitrary, the former is natural, as being the spontaneous result of the new creation in Christ: the latter is fixed, rigid, and unbending; the former is plastic, and variable, operating invisibly and insensibly upon those subjected to it. It is only in this sense that the Church can be called a school of discipline, and in this sense it is so; not, however, any particular order in the Church, but the whole society itself. According to the other view, which regards the Church as an institution of legal discipline, the Saviour's prayer, "Sanctify them through thy Truth, thy Word is Truth," loses all its import. Not faith, but, as of old, the law, purifies the heart; and, as in the matter of justification, the Church, not Christ, is made the mediator between man and God, so in the matter of sanctification, the Church-i. e. its external system, not the Word through the Spirit, becomes the instrument of the Christian's transformation into the image of Christ.

SECTION II.

THE SPIRITUAL OPERATION OF THE MOSAIC LAW.

WHEN the Romanist presents us with a conception of the Church which makes the latter essentially one with the religious polity under which the Jew was placed, the question at once occurs, Has there been no progression in the course of God's dispensations towards our fallen race; no gradual unfolding of the scheme of revelation; no advance from an elementary to a more mature stage of religious knowledge and experience? Did Christ, when He came, find the pious Jew no further advanced towards just views of religion than his ancestors were at Sinai, and therefore needing. like them, in common with his Gentile believing brethren, to be placed under a new law, which, like the old, and in the same sense, should operate from without inwards? In the following

observations, the natural effect of the Mosaic law, when it met with a pious and reflecting temper of mind, will form the subject of consideration. We have seen how it operated as regards the nation at large, raising up a fence between it and heathenism, under cover of which the true Israel might be nursed into a state of preparedness for Christ: we have now to consider what its effect must have been upon the pious part of the Jewish people, the spiritual seed of Abraham, which eventually was to form the nucleus of the Christian Church.

The fact is that, as Nitzsch observes in his answer to Moehler,* the law must, in the case of the pious Jew, have tended, by a natural and inevitable process, to its own dissolution as a system of outward prescriptions, and to the substitution of an inward and spiritual, for an outward and formal, worship of God. Even during its continuance, the letter must have become antiquated in favour of the spirit, and the pious Jew could not long have remained a legalist.

"The law was our schoolmaster,"-a system of educational discipline, "to bring us to Christ." This it was on account both of the elementary knowledge of the Christian scheme which it imparted and of the moral dispositions which it produced in those cases in which it met with a personal sense of religion.

And first, as regards knowledge. The law, in its priesthood, ritual, and worship, contained a shadow, or faint adumbration, of the verities of the Gospel: it is reasonable, then, to suppose that, though but "a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things," it conveyed to the pious Jew a measure of information concerning them, and led his mind beyond its own ritual enactments. How far this information may have extended, is one of the most obscure and doubtful questions in the whole compass of theology. The remark has already been made that it is extremely difficult for the Christian, possessing as he does the key to the Levitical ritual, to realise the position of those who, living under it, were destitute of this advantage; the consequence of which has been a tendency to attribute to the Jewish believer a more accurate acquaintance with the specific doctrines of the Gospel than there is reason to believe he actually possessed. So far as we have means of judging, it should seem that the specific references to the Gospel which the Ceremonial Law contained were, during the existence of the Jewish economy, imperfectly, if

Prot. Beant. &c., p. 195.