that can be found in English and continental literature. Yet there are topics on which this learned severity may be allowed to give way for a while. The following are taken nearly at chance, as brief specimens of the fluency and animation of his less restricted manner. He is speaking of the early trials of

Christianity.

"Churches had been founded in Rome, Corinth, Crete, the cities of Asia Minor, in Britain, Spain, &c. The nations of the world had been brought under the Roman yoke, that a free communication might be maintained between all parts of the civilized world.

"The usurpations of the Papacy had not begun; neither had the people proceeded to the opposite extreme of rejecting all government, as an infringement of their civil liberty. Every separate church was a society complete in itself, governed through all its gradations of laity, and through the minor offices of the priesthood, the deacons, and the presbyters, by an Episcopal head, who was liable to be deposed by the sentence of his own order, if he violated the faith of Christ. Every ruler was controuled by his brethren, while every independent hierarchy preserved its freedom under the empire of known law. The world has not since beheld more union in the belief, nor more perfection in the conduct of Christians. This was the plan which preserved the purity of the Christian creed against the first impugners of the majesty of the Son of God. This was the polity which stamped the reprobation of the general body of Christians, at Nice, upon the Arians, who denied the godhead of Christ, and at Constantinople upon the Apollinarian heresy, which denied his humanity. It was this which, at Ephesus, condemned Nestorius, who asserted that Christ was two persons; and at Chalcedon, the error of Eutyches, which confounded his twofold nature. that time the Ghost of imperial Rome was not seated upon the seven hills, to terrify the nations with the spiritual thunders of the Vatican; neither was every absurdity of doctrine, and every irregularity in discipline defended as a proof of liberty, and freedom from prejudice." Vol. II. p. 729.

Of the fortitude of the Church.

At

"It was not only the menace and the torture, the rack and the scourge, the stake and the sword, that raised themselves against the Churches of God. The ridicule of the satirist, the world's dread laugh,' the scorn of the philosophical leaders of the public opinion, the reasoning of the learned; contempt, and wonder, and pity; all that could move the affections, or break the resolution, the fear of infamy, which shrinks from slander; the love of approbation, which excites to virtuous and useful actions, and leads men to honourable eminence ; all of those, and more than those, powerful motives of action, appealed in vain to the hearts of the primitive Christians. The more their spiritual enemies within, and the turbulent heathen without, opposed the Churches of Christ, the more they multiplied and grew,' till the ma

jority of the empire professed the faith of Christ, and the Emperor of Rome became the convert and protector." Vol. II. p. 730.

Of the Epistles.

"It is in these Epistles that we are enabled, in a greater degree, to penetrate beyond the sealing of our own destiny.

The distant throne, the sapphire blaze,

Where angels tremble, while they gaze.'

In them we are confirmed in the belief of our own resurrection, in the assurance that this corruptible shall put on incorruption-they corrobo rate the events of the Gospels, and are the most decisive evidences of the rapid increase of Christianity. In them we hear, as it were, the angel of God declare that, Time shall be no more.' We see the Saviour of the world resign his mediatorial kingdom to the Father, that God may be all in all, the harvest of the Church gathered in,—the eternity that is past, united to the eternity that is to come, and man made partaker of a heavenly and glorious immortality." Vol. II. p. 211.

The following allusions to the state of the Jews,-that miracle of eighteen hundred years, are generous and animated; and, with some little abatement of their enthusiasm, true.

"In selecting notes from those sources (the Talmuds) an additional interest was unavoidably excited for the wonderful people, to whom so much of our Scriptures was addressed. Though various circumstances persuade me that the mass of the Jewish people is altogether indifferent to the exertions which many benevolent and good men are daily making on their behalf: though they at present despise, for the most part, the idea of a spiritual Messiah; we, who are Christians, well know that Palestine is the land of the Immanuel. We know that the most High so continues to govern the nations of the world, that their power, and wealth, and greatness, whether they arise from polity, or from war, or from commerce, shall all tend to the accomplishment of his prophecies.

"Of the unfulfilled prophecies of God, the most splendid, the most numerous, and apparently the most easy of execution, are those which relate to the Jews. They will again plant the vine and the olive on their native hills, and reap their harvests in the villages of their fathers. The history of the future age must develope the means by which this great event will be effected.

"We know not whether they will be borne back to Palestine in triumph, in the ships of a powerful maritime nation;-or whether in their behalf the age of miracles will return, and a great simultaneous effort be made in their favour, on the part of the sovereigns of Europe : or whether by the exertions of pious individuals the mass of the community will be so leavened, that all people shall unite to restore them to the Holy Land. We know not whether they shall obtain their political re-establishment, from the confederated rulers of the great re

public of Europe-or by the easier devotion of that wealth, which is daily making them the principal agents of the commerce of nations, purchase the right of the soil from its present feeble and divided possessors; or whether the future agitations and contentions of sovereigns, may render it desirable that an important boundary power should be reestablished in Palestine, and a formal surrender of their territory be made to their nation, as in times past the policy of Persia restored their ancestors to Jerusalem, in consequence of its defeat by the Greeks, and of that treaty which forbade the Persians to come within a certain distance of the coast; or whether they will be restored to their own now unoccupied, uncultivated, unregarded land, the central spot on earth, where the metropolitical Church of God may be most suitably established, and which seems to be waiting till the heir shall resume his claims; by some other way, which is known only to the God of their fathers. All this must be left to history, which is the only right interpreter of our faith-preserving prophecy. The experience of the past ages may teach us the manner in which the pride and ambition of man pursue their own plans, and are successful or are defeated, as the God of Christianity may please to appoint, for the accomplishment of his own designs."

Yet on this general view we are to remark, that, without some caution, it may tend to obscure the fact that the Jews, in their present state, are altogether a rejected nation, lying eminently under a divine malediction, and held up to the world as an evidence of the fulfilment of God's just indignation against a people stained with the darkest crime that it is possible to conceive, the bloodshedding of the Messiah! We are further to remember, that to the Jews, as such, no promises whatever are made, but of the continued rejection and wrath of Heaven.

It is declared that a remnant of them shall become Christians at some future period, possibly a rapidly approaching period, and that those converted shall, if we may interpret the prophecies literally, return to Palestine, and be reinstated in the possessions of the exiled people. But, as Jews, they never shall return'; their whole community shall go on in the same degraded and miserable state into which they have been cast by the judgment of God, until it shall perish, perhaps be suddenly and terribly extinguished, in that great predicted convulsion of empires, which is to be followed by the general conversion of mankind to the Gospel. Then shall such as remain of the Jews, perhaps but a small remnant, find the bandage fall from their eyes, be awakened to the fatal obstinacy and frenzied prejudice that made them through so many ages resist the evidences of Christianity; and adjuring all their old guilty repugnance to divine truth, kneel at the foot of the cross of Christ!

It is essential to caution the holders of our pulpits against the

possible error of confounding the present Jew with the Jew converted to Christianity; because one of the arguments by which that wretched people confirm their own stubborn folly, is their "restoration," as acknowledged by Christians. They adhere to an exploded ritual and a superseded law in the strength of a fallacious hope; and it is of the highest importance that our divines should not give them even a colour for their sullen and desperate delusion.

One only distinction seems in reserve for the converted remnant of Judaism; that their conversion to Christianity shall in some degree precede that of the pagans; that they shall be "the first-fruits of the Gospel" in that great æra when, after the "shaking of nations," it is to become the religion of the world. Under those circumstances it is our duty to labour for the conversion of the Jew, as it is for that of the pagan. They are equally in blindness, equally remote from the promises of revelation; prophecy alludes to neither but as a miserable and benighted class of mankind, and gives hope to neither, but on the condition of their abandoning all that constitutes the one Pagan and the other Jew, and both infidels to the faith of God. Mr. Townsend's interpretations are in general distinguished by the fairness that becomes a man willing to leave all controversy to be decided on its merits. Yet, a writer naturally abhorrent of the wretched sophistries of Socinianism, owes it to the superiority of his cause, to shun all suspicion of straining the sacred text. In the celebrated passage, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father," (Mark xiii. 32.) the stronghold of Socinianism, Mr. Townsend thus endeavours to invalidate the unbelieving argument,

"Even upon their hypothesis, our Lord was the greatest of prophets : and, as Daniel had been able to fix the time of the first Advent, it must naturally excite surprise that the Messiah should not know the time of his own second advent.

"The best mode of solving the difficulty appears to me to be this, which makes older equivalent to the causative of "; in which case the verse may be thus rendered:

"But the hour of the second advent, neither man, nor angels, nor the Messiah, have made known to the world; my Father only shall reveal it, by the suddenness of that day of judgment, in which he has appointed the Son to manifest himself in the glory of the Father."

The context will not bear this, for its purpose, palpably, is to excite Christians, and more eminently the Clergy, as represented by the Apostles, to keep themselves in a state of preparation against a tremendous visitation, the moment of whose

coming no sagacity can foresee. If Christ could have foreseen it, what ground is there in his general conduct, or in his words at the time, for supposing that he would not have revealed the period of a trial, in which his Church was to be involved more perilously than in all its previous passings through the fire of purification. He revealed its danger in the fall of Jerusalem, and pointed out the means of security. But the word oìder is incapable of the meaning here attached to it. Among the multitude of equivalents for Eidw, from the original video, through almost all the operations of the senses and the understanding, audio, colloquor, experior, animo cerno, mente consequor, scio, prævideo, agnosco, recordor, valeo, amo, &c. no authority makes it causative.

The doctrine as it stands is perfectly consistent with Christianity. We are to recollect that our Lord, though God in the highest sense of the name, was also "very man."-That to be man, he must have assumed all the qualities and powers of man, and of no more than man; that when he possessed supernatural powers, they must have been, as they were declared to be, "gifts" from above; and that a certain limitation of faculty is an essential condition of our nature. To reconcile this limitation with his Divinity, is a mystery which must be left for the time when we shall "know even as we are known."

There is something of the same over-refinement, from the same cause, in the following passage.

"It is singular that our translators have not observed the three modes of expression which the evangelists have here adopted, (in describing the death upon the Cross). Mark and Luke say, ɛɛπvevσɛ, he expired. John xix. 30. TapɛdwкE TO TVεvua, he yielded up his spirit. Matt. xxvii. 50. apŋkɛ to tvɛvμa, he dismissed his spirit. The spirits of mere men are, in general, evidently separated from the body in a way over which they have no controul. It was for our Lord only to die as the Prince of Life, by an act of supernatural power, and to separate, at his own pleasure and at his own command, the spirit from his body."

This interpretation is not in conformity to the acknowledged human nature of Christ. As a man, he feels pain up to the moment when he declares that the prophecies are completed. His pain amounts even to the excessive agony which is disclosed in his exclamation of being forsaken of God. It is impossible to conceive suffering in the person of God. of God. Whatever may have been the pre-eminent intensity of his sufferings, Christ lives, suffers, and dies-as man. His life is restored, not by himself, as man, but "by GoD that raised him up from the dead." (1 Peter i. 21.) He is declared to be "quickened by the SPIRIT." (1 Peter