hearty inward repentance, of which, in each case, God only, or those to whom He may impart the knowledge, can adequately judge.

When Paul says to the Corinthians in reference to that member of their Church who had caused a scandal by his offence, " to whomsoever ye forgive any thing, I forgive it also," though I am far from saying that the offender's sin against God was not pardoned, it is quite plain this is not what the Apostle is here speaking of. He is speaking of a case in which they and he were not merely to announce, but to bestow forgiveness. They were to receive back the offender, who had scandalized the Society into the bosom of that Society, on his professing with sincerity, or rather apparent sincerity (for of that alone they could be judges) his contrition. They would, of course-as believing those his professions-cherish a confident hope that his sin against God was pardoned. But doubtless they did not pretend either to an omniscient discernment of his Sincerity, or to the power either of granting divine pardon to the impenitent, or of excluding from God's mercy the repentant sinner.

Power of

the Keys.

§ 7. Then again, with respect to the "Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven" which our

2 Cor. ii. 10.

Lord promised (Matt. xvi. 19) to give to Peter,* the Apostles could not, I conceive, doubt that He was fulfilling that promise, to Peter and to the rest of them conjointly, when He "appointed unto them a Kingdom," and when, on the day of Pentecost, He began the building of his Church, and enabled them, with Peter as their leader and chief spokesman, to open a door for the entrance of about three thousand converts at once; who received daily accessions to their number. The Apostles, and those commissioned by them, had the office of granting

There seems good reason to believe, though it would be most unwarrantable to make it an article of faith,—that Peter really was the chief of the Apostles, not, certainly, in the sense of exercising any supremacy and absolute control over them,- -as dictating to their consciences, as finally deciding all cases of doubt- or as claiming any right to interfere in the Churches other Apostles had founded, (See Gal. ii. 7-9 and 11-14,) but as the chief in dignity; taking precedence of the rest, and acting as President, Chairman, or Speaker in their meetings. Peter, and James, and John, and sometimes Peter, and James,—always with Peter placed foremost, were certainly distinguished, as appears from numerous passages in the Gospels, from the rest of the Apostles. He was apparently the chief Spokesman on the day of Pentecost, when the Jewish Believ ers were first called on to unite themselves into a Church; and he was the chosen instrument in founding the first Church of the (“devout") Gentiles, opening the door of the Kingdom of Heaven to Cornelius and his friends.

I need hardly add, that to claim on that account for Peter's supposed successors such supreme jurisdiction over the whole Churchuniversal, as he himself neither exercised nor claimed, would be most extravagant. And to speak of a succession of men, as being, each, a foundation on which the Church is built, is not only extravagant, but unmeaning.

admission into the Society from time to time, to such as they judged qualified."

Christian

Heaven.

And that this Society or Church-church the was "that Kingdom of Heaven" of Kingdom of which the keys were committed to them, and which they had before proclaimed as " at hand," they could not doubt. They could not have been in any danger of cherishing any such presumptuous dream, as that they or any one else, except their divine Master, could have power to give or refuse admittance to the mansions of immortal bliss.

On the whole then, one who reads the Scriptures with attention and with candour, will be at no loss, I conceive, to ascertain, what was the sense, generally, in which our Lord's Disciples would understand his directions and injunctions. Besides what is implied, naturally and necessarily, in the very institution of a Community, we know also, what the instructions were which the Disciples had already been accustomed to receive from their Master, and what was the sense they had been used from childhood to attach to the expressions He employed. And as we may be sure, I think, how they would understand his words, so, we may be equally sure that He would not have failed to undeceive them,

1owCoμévovs, rendered in our version "such as should be saved;" by which our Translators probably meant, according to the idiom of their day, (which is the true sense of the original) “persons entering on the road of salvation."

had they mistaken his real meaning; which therefore, we cannot doubt, must have been that which these Disciples apprehended.

Procedure of the Dis

8. As for the mode in which the

ciples in Apostles and other early Christian to their Ministers carried into effect the direc

conformity

Master's

directions. tions they had received, we have indeed but a few, and those generally scanty and incidental, notices in the sacred writers; but all the notices we do find, go to confirm if confirmation could be wanted—what has been just said, as to the sense in which our Lord must have been understood—and, consequently, in which He must have meant to be understoodby his Disciples.

And among the important facts which we can collect and fully ascertain from the sacred historians, scanty and irregular and imperfect as are their records of particulars, one of the most important is, that very scantiness and incompleteness in the detail;—that absence of any full and systematic description of the formation and regulation of Christian Communities, that has been just noticed. For we may plainly infer, from this very circumstance, the design of the Holy Spirit, that those details, concerning which no precise directions, accompanied with strict injunctions, are to be found in Scripture, were meant to be left to the regulation of each Church,

in each Age and Country. On any point in which it was designed that all Christians should be, every where, and at all times, bound as strictly as the Jews were to the Levitical Law, we may fairly conclude they would have received directions no less precise, and descriptions no less minute, than had been afforded to the Jews.

of noticing

omis

sions in any

It has often occurred to my mind that Importance the generality of even studious readers the are apt, for want of sufficient reflection, work. to fail of drawing such important inferences as they often might, from the omissions occurring in any work they are perusing;-from its not containing such and such things relative to the subject treated of. There are many cases in which the non-insertion of some particulars which, under other circumstances, we might have calculated on meeting with, in a certain book, will be hardly less instructive than the things we do meet with.

And this is much more especially the case when we are studying works which we believe. to have been composed under Divine guidance. For, in the case of mere human compositions, one may conceive an author to have left out some important circumstances, either through error of judgment or inadvertency, or from having written merely for the use of a particular class of readers in his own time and country,