if it were not for one remarkable feature in the Divine dispensations, we should often be at a loss for a connecting link between the clear and the obscure. One

system of agency, almost exclusively employed by the Almighty, furnishes a perpetual clue to the consistency of his providences. Man is made his chief instrument in his gracious dealing with man. Thus the personal history of the patriarch or the prophet, of the apostle or the martyr, is identical with the detail of those events by which designs of Almighty love proceed to their destined issue; and the biography of the servant of God, is the register of the mercies of God. Even in the crowning act of grace and consummation of all prophecy, the achievement of man's deliverance from sin and death, the same rule holds. The believer's charter of pardon is found written in the life and death of Christ the Son of God, God manifest in the flesh, the elect of the Father, in whom his soul delighted. We are

not aware how materially we are indebted to this mode of revelation, for the ease and simplicity of our elements of doctrine. We acquire the benefit insensibly, and could only be made to perceive its extent by being deprived of our recollection of the history of the Bible, and being required to learn anew the substance of our faith, without any help from its connexion with the facts in which it was there embodied. There is a natural tendency in the memory to lay hold on personal adventure, and to imbibe the moral associations involved with it. It has pleased God to sanctify this propensity to an inestimable use, by making it the channel through which the record of his condescension to our fallen world chiefly engages our attention, explains itself to our understanding, and interests our affections. On opening the pages which are "given by inspiration," we find beings "of like passions with ourselves," the hearers of his messages of mercy and of

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warning, the subjects of his dispensations of grace and of chastisement. Among these, a few are conspicuous, as distinguished by signal tokens of his confidence, and honoured by Him, either with a special commission to impart his revelations to their fellow-creatures, or with an express direction, to exemplify the course which He would have them take, as pilgrims" that " desire a better country, that is, a heavenly." On these his chosen instruments our curiosity naturally fixes its gaze. They are personages not so awful as to intimidate us from scrutinizing their conduct, nor too sublime for us to conceive a sympathy with their emotions and resolves. Had the Divine will been made known to us only through "the ministration of angels," and no other examples of obedience been proposed to us than we could gather from occasional glimpses of those ethereal spirits, we should have been tempted to regard the path of duty as we now do

She bare a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the

chiefly by the example and experience of his saints. Prophets and Evangelists, were afterward guided to preach the truth in a more doctrinal shape, yet still with a tissue of narrative interwoven. But in the Pentateuch, (with the peculiar exception of the law given from mount Sinai,) and in the historical books which follow, how much of narrative there is, how little of direct precept! It is clear that this is intentionally so ordered, and that we are to seek our education for the deep and lofty lessons of the Gospel, in the spiritstirring annals of the people who lived under the remoter dispensation.

Let us seek it. They live again for our information in the sacred pages.

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Being dead," they "yet speak." They succeed one to another, from generation to generation, in the office of hereditary witnesses, to the promises and the warnings given to the seed of Adam at the fall, to the blessing and to the curse, between which the destiny of every living