stances of it which the common course of nature supplies. Thus, as Hooker remarks, political government is conducted on the legal principle. The legislator enjoins, or prohibits, what he conceives to be conducive, or injurious, to the well-being of the state, enforcing his enactments by temporal sanctions; and his whole work proceeds on the supposition of there being either no spontaneous direction of will towards what is required, or none such as can be safely left to itself, on the part of the governed. The law anticipates resistance to its requisitions, or, at least, an unwillingness to comply with them; and it secures obedience, by making the consequences of transgression so formidable as to outweigh the gratification derived from the indulgence of passion. In order, however, to gain a true analogy between a religious, and a political, system of law, we must turn, not so much to modern theories of government, which teach us that the office of the legislator is negative rather than positive, and is concerned chiefly with the protection of life and property, and the removal of hindrances to the national progress; as to the ancient notion of a State, according to which the latter is to be regarded as a school of virtue, and its laws as an educational discipline, for the citizens; - such an idea as floated before the mind of Plato when describing his imaginary republic, and of Aristotle.* In actual history, the legislation of Sparta, and the effects which it is said to have produced upon the national character, present the most remarkable instance on record of the nature and operation of a system which proposes to work upon man from without inwards.

More to the point, as being of a more internal and positive character, is the illustration furnished by the work of educating the young, especially that part of it which consists in moral discipline, and the formation of character: indeed, the analogy between the office of a schoolmaster, and that which the law of Moses discharged towards the Israelites, is distinctly recognized in Scripture. The process of education is conducted, especially in its elementary stages, upon the legal principle. Discipline, and habituation are the teacher's main instruments. All that he expects, at the commencement of his operations, to find present in his pupil, is, innate capacities upon which virtuous habits may be ingrafted; the habits themselves—such, for example, as truthfulness, honour,

Μαρτυρεῖ δὲ καὶ τὸ γινόμενον ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν· οἱ γὰρ νομοθέται τοὺς πολίτας ἐθίζοντες ποιοῦσιν ἀγαθούς· καὶ τὸ μὲν βούλημα παντὸς νομοθέτου τοῦτ' ἔστιν. Ethic. Nic. 1. 2. c. 1. † Gal. iv. 2, 3.

patience, self-restraint, and attention -he proposes to form by degrees, to work into the character by a course of suitable discipline. He begins by laying down specific rules, to which he requires unquestioning obedience. Those virtuous acts which a man of mature moral training performs spontaneously, the teacher compels those placed under his care to perform, in order that he may thus strengthen the immature principles of good implanted in the heart. While the moral sense is as yet feeble, he connects the idea of present suffering with vice, and present enjoyment with virtue; a mode of treatment which is laid aside in proportion as the pupil advances in judgment, and in quickness of moral perception. As regards merely intellectual habits, he is satisfied at first with the opus operatum, knowing that, from the constitution of our nature, what, at first, is an irksome labour, becomes by habit, a source of positive pleasure. The less the power of self-direction supposed to be present in the pupil, the more are external enactments multiplied, so as to hem him in on every side, to leave as little as possible to his own discretion, and so to supply as far as it is possible to do so, the lack of fixed internal principles. At this stage of his moral progress, the pupil is kept in the path of duty by an outwardly coercive law, or is under a legal system.

It is obviously accordant with the character of such a system that it should appeal to the baser, rather than to the more elevated, motives of our nature; that fear, rather than love, should constitute its constraining power. The will of the legislator, and that of those for whom he legislates, not being presumed to be in unison, or only imperfectly so, obedience must be secured by working on the passions of fear and self-interest: immediate temporal consequences must be annexed to the fulfilment or the transgression of the law. Political laws are seldom, if ever, accompanied with the sanction of reward; but in those cases in which the result sought to be attained is of a more refined nature, as, in the process of education, it is found advantageous to furnish incitements to the generous emotions, though the system can never quite dispense with those of an opposite character.

If the reader carefully examines both the structure of the Mosaic system itself and the statements of the New Testament writers respecting it, he will find that it was, in all its parts, constructed on the principles just described.

Οὔτ ̓ ἄρα φύσει οὔτε παρὰ φύσιν ἐγγίνονται αἱ ἀρεταί, ἀλλὰ πεφυκόσι μὲν ἡμῖν δέξασθαι αὐτὰς, τελειουμένοις δὲ διὰ τοῦ ἔθους, Ethic. Nic. 1. 2. c. 1.

The economy under which the Jews were placed, was a visible, external, Theocracy. When God took the people into covenant with Himself, He became their God not only in a religious, but in a national, sense: He became their tutelary God, and their king. He constituted Himself the supreme civil magistrate of the nation, and not only delivered to it the law by which it was to be ruled, but charged Himself with the administration of that law. Hence, the system presented an example of a perfect fusion of civil and religious polity. The same lawgiver framed both the civil and the religious enactments: the same volume of inspiration which instructed the Jew in his duty towards God, contained also the charter of his national privileges. The religion of the Jew was not only a religious but a national sentiment; it was loyalty as well as religion. To worship other gods besides Jehovah, was not only a sin, but a crime; a crime læsæ majestatis, or of a treasonable character, and, as such, justly punishable with death. Warburton has pointed out the necessity of a Theocracy of this kind, if idolatry, which otherwise does not fall under the cognizance of political laws, was to be suppressed by temporal penalties ;* but it may be further observed, that, under such a system, religion must descend, more or less, from its spiritual and internal character, and present itself in the shape of positive enactments, prescribing a certain course of external action. When God condescended to become both the civil and the religious legislator of the Jews, the religious portion of the law was compelled to assimilate itself, to a great extent, to the civil, so as to be capable of amalgamation with it, and with it to form one homogeneous whole; otherwise, the two could not have been well combined. No sooner does religion, as in Christianity, become enthroned in her proper seat, the conscience, and assert her claims to govern the inner man as well as the outward; no sooner does she present herself as a system of "spirit" and of "truth;" than she rises above the sphere of law, and, as is now at length understood, cannot be made the subject of legal enactment.

• Divine Legation, book v. s. 2. It may be remarked that the peculiarity above alluded to of the Jewish polity takes from us the power of arguing from it to the duty of the Christian magistrate in matters of religion. The Jewish polity stands alone in the history of the world, and can have no parallel in any Christian state. It does not follow that because a Jewish king, as God's viceroy, was bound to punish idolatry, a Christian government has a right to suppress by force what it conceives to be religious error. When it can be shown that God has delivered to any Christian state a law prescribing the manner in which He is to be worshipped, and made that law part of the civil constitution of the state, appointing the magistrate His deputy to execute its provisions, the argument from the Jewish polity may stand; but not until then.

That the religion of the Jews, when placed under their law (and to this early period of their history we must throughout this section be understood as referring), might be susceptible of such en actment, it was, so to speak, carnalized,* or framed so as to regu late the outward, rather than the inward, man. Hence St. Paul describes the Mosaic dispensation, in its legal character, as one "of the letter," in contrast with Christianity, "the ministration of the Spirit." Those expositors fall short of the Apostle's meaning, who represent him as affirming, merely that under the Gospel we enjoy a larger measure of the Spirit's influence than was vouchsafed under the Law; or that the ceremonial of Moses was more intricate and burdensome than that of Christ. The difference which the Apostle establishes between the two dispensations, is a difference in kind. Taken by itself, and without reference to the prophetic amplifications of it which were subsequently given, the Law was a system of categorical prohibitions and enactments, which were to be literally obeyed, and obedience to the letter of which was all that was at first required; in other words, in the Law the form predominated over the spirit. Under the Gospel, on the contrary, the spirit predominates over the letter; or general principles are furnished, to be applied to particular cases according as they arise, under the guidance of an understanding enlightened by the Spirit of God. In the one case, the object was to form principles of action; in the other, it is to direct their application. In point of fact, if we look back to the provisions of the law when it was first promulgated, we find in them little or no reference to anything beyond the national worship of Jehovah, as the tutelary God of the nation. The proximate object of the divine law-giver, as we gather it from the book of Exodus, was the con. stitution of a people worshipping, amidst the surrounding abominations of polytheism, the one invisible God, according to a prescribed ceremonial. Abstinence on the part of the people, as a people, from idolatry was, in the first instance, all that was required. Hence the repeated description of the covenant of Horeb, as an engagement, on the part of the Jewish people, to renounce the idolatrous practices to which they had been accustomed in Egypt, and which they saw prevalent in the nations around them, in return for the special protection and favour of Jehovah. "Take

"Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances" (the "elements" or "rudiments" "of the world" alluded to by St. Paul, Gal. iv. 3. Col. ii. 20.) "imposed on them until the time of reformation." Heb. ix. 10.

† Cor. iii. 6. Compare Rom. vii. 6.

heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of anything which the Lord thy God hath forbidden thee;" "If there be found among you any man or woman that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing his covenant, and hath gone and served other gods" &c.:*it is in terms like these that the covenant, in its original form as it was delivered at Sinai, is constantly mentioned. Hence, too, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, contrasting the Mosaic with the Christian covenant, quotes the prophecy of Jeremiah, according to which the latter was to differ from its predecessor, as the spirit differs from the form, the inward volition from the outward letter. We look in vain, in the first issue of the law, for any requisitions relating to an internal change of heart, or that which is comprehended in the term, personal religion. Indeed, individuals as such, are never addressed in the books of Moses: it is the nation in its corporate capacity that is exhorted and admonished. Still less are any specifically Christian sentiments-such as repentance, contrition of heart, or faith—inculcated as pleasing to God. The moral law itself appears in the shape of specific prohibitions and commands, bearing upon the external conduct, the only exception being the tenth commandment, which forbids a sin of the heart:-for it may well be questioned whether the command to have no other gods but Jehovah conveyed to the Jew of Sinai anything beyond a warning against mixing up the worship of other tutelary deities with that of his own. Apparently indifferent to the inward state of those for whom he legislated, the Divine Law-giver imposed upon them a system of positive ordinances, by which, in all the functions and relations of life, they were constrained, and habituated, to the recognition and service of Himself alone. The propensity to idolatry, which the Israelities had contracted in Egypt, was met by prohibitions enforced by immediate temporal penalties; and the corrupt will was thus brought under a yoke acknowledged, even by the pious Jew, to be difficult to bear.

Of course, the above observations apply to the form, rather than the substance, of the Mosaic law, as delivered at Sinai. The substance of the moral law is the same in every age: and in every age has comprised the requirements of inward purity, and substantial moral duty. Of these no religious system, which had the

*Deut. iv. 23. and xvii. 2, 3.

Heb. viii. 8-10.