CHAPTER V.

EXTENT OF THE REMEDY.

HAVING treated of the nature of the remedy which the gospel brings, I proceed now to give an account of the different opinions which have been held concerning the extent of that remedy. But before I enter upon the controverted questions on this subject, I wish to direct your attention to two preliminary points. In the first all Christians agree; and the differences respecting the second do not distinguish any great bodies of Christians, but are confined to a few individuals.

SECTION I.

THE first preliminary point is, that the gospel appears framed and designed by God to be the religion of the whole human race.

As the Almighty Father made of one blood all nations to dwell upon the face of the earth, we cannot suppose that the paternal affection, with which he looked down upon those whom he formed after his own image, will be in the smallest degree affected by the varieties of climate and situation; and all the conceptions of enlightened reason lead us to presume, that if their moral state render them the objects of his compassion, the exercise of that compassion will not be bounded by any lines so capricious as those which the confines of different states mark upon the globe. Accordingly, the declaration made by the Almighty immediately after the first transgression intimates by the form of the expression, an idea most becoming the sovereignty of Him who speaks, that all the children of Adam were somehow to partake of the fruits of that victory which the seed of the woman was to gain over the tempter, and the promise made to Abraham, that in his seed all the families of the earth were to be blessed, conveys the most explicit assurance, that, at some future time, a dispensation, commensurate in extent with the population of the earth, was to proceed from the descendants of Abraham.

The dispensation given by Moses to the posterity of the patriarch was of a very different kind. It was confined, by the terms of its promulgation, to the land of Judea: the various ceremonies which it prescribed were such as the inhabitants of countries remote from Jerusalem could not perform; and the object of all the institutions was to preserve, in a small district, a peculiar people, holy unto the Lord;

while the rest of the world were left in ignorance and idolatry. The partiality, from which this local dispensation appears at first sight to have flowed, is a favourite subject of declamation with deistical writers. It is stated as an unanswerable proof that the Jewish religion is unworthy of the Supreme Being. The boasted peculiarity of the children of Israel is ranked by these writers amongst the other forms of superstition, which national vanity and a concurrence of circumstances maintained for ages in particular districts; and as Jesus and his apostles assert the divine authority of Moses, and build Christianity upon the law given by him, their claims of being the messengers of Heaven are represented as very much shaken by this degradation of Judaism.

This plausible objection is fully answered in all the able defences of Christianity; particularly by Leland, in his View of Deistical Writers, and by Clarke, both in his Evidences of Religion, and in some of his Sermons. The subject is also treated in Shaw's Philosophy of Judaism; in Law's Considerations on the Theory of Religion; in Jortin's Discourses on the Truth of the Christian Religion; in Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses; and in various treatises on the harmony of the divine dispensations. I shall endeavour to state, in a short compass, the idea which these writers have fully eluci dated.

The children of Israel were not distinguished by a special revelation upon account of any peculiar excellence of character, which rendered them, more than other nations, the objects of the divine favour; but they were raised up, in the wisdom of Providence, as the instruments of preserving in the world, amidst abounding idolatry, the knowledge and worship of the true God, and of conveying to future ages the hope of that Deliverer who had been promised from the beginning. To qualify them for this important office, they were separated from the surrounding heathen by circumcision, by a burdensome ritual, and by many express prohibitions against intermarrying with their neighbours. But it was not meant that they should remain unknown. The geographical situation of the land, which God had given them, brought them within the view of those nations who make the most conspicuous figure in ancient history. The commerce which they were obliged to maintain with other nations, the fortunes of some individuals of that chosen race, and many circumstances in the history of the nation, particularly their captivities and their dispersions, drew the attention of the world to the singularities of their establishment. Some knowledge of their law was, by these means, carried abroad; and from the land of Judea, as from a light shining in a dark place, there proceeded rays, which, in the midst of heathen superstition, prevented the darkness from being universal. It is difficult to estimate the degree of aid which the efforts of human reason derived from the revelation granted to the people of Israel. But the researches of Bryant, in his Ancient Mythology, and of other learned men, seem to place it beyond doubt, that this aid was more considerable than a superficial uninformed observer would apprehend. And when we consider the successive changes in the political state of the Jews, and the situation of the Roman empire at the time of the birth of that extraordinary personage, of whom

there had been a general expectation, there appears to be the best reason for regarding the whole conduct of the Almighty towards his chosen people, as part of that preparation by which he opened to the world the universal and spiritual religion, which, in the fulness of time, was published by his Son,-a preparation, which in none of its parts was so rapid as to our imaginations may appear desirable, but which it would be presumptuous in us, upon that account, to pronounce unsuitable to the circumstances of the case.

The law of Moses, then, was a local dispensation intervening between the promise made to Abraham, that in his seed all the families of the earth should be blessed, and the fulfilment of the promise. It originated in the promise; it announced the great event, which was the accomplishment of the promise, and it terminated with that event. A great part of the study of a Christian divine lies in tracing the connexion between the preparatory dispensation, and that to which it pointed; and the more intimately that he is acquainted with this connexion, the better able will he be to vindicate the God of the Jews from the charge of partiality. One thing is obvious, that this narrow confined religion gave notice of a dispensation that was to be universal. David says, in Psalm xxii. which is a continued prophecy of the Messiah, "All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the Lord; all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before him;" and the succession of Jewish prophets intimate, by various expressions, that the partial instruction, which the law of Moses afforded, was to be succeeded by a kind of teaching not confined to any one people, but under which nations that had been strangers to the true God were to know and worship him.

It is true that the national vanity of the Jews, flattered by their peculiar privileges, gave other interpretations of such prophecies. They either conceived that the dispensation of the Messiah, by subjecting the nations of the earth to their dominion, was to exalt them to the empire of the world, then held by the Romans; or, if their minds did rise to some conception of a spiritual change upon the world, it went no further than this, that other nations were to exchange the idolatry in which they had been educated for an observance of the ceremonies given of old from Mount Sinai. They did not think that the chosen people of God could ever be made to descend to that equality with the heathen, which is implied in supposing that the offerings made in other countries are as acceptable to God as those presented at Jerusalem. Far less did it occur to their minds that the whole city was to be laid waste, and the temple of Solomon razed to the ground: and that this effectual abolition of the ceremonies of the law was to prepare the world for receiving a spiritual religion, clearly discriminated from that local system. These prejudices of the Jews, founded upon a literal interpretation of their own sacred books, and possessing the minds of all ranks, required much attention at the first publication of the gospel. For Jesus appeared as the Messiah of the Jews, claiming to be that Son of David whom their prophets had described as a mighty prince; and his religion, deriving a great part of its internal evidence from its perfect consistency with that former revelation of which it is the fulfilment, was to go forth from Judea to enlighten the ends of the earth. The order

dence, then, required that Christianity should be preached the Jews; and it was necessary that, if they did not embrace the rose made to their fathers, the manner of its being preached should be such as to render their infidelity inexcusable, and indicate the justice of the severe punishment ordained for their

This is the key to a great part of the New Testament; and I do not kow any views which persons who expound the Scriptures to the People have more frequent occasion to bring forward and to apply, than those which I have now stated. From these views we derive the reason of our Lord's confining his personal ministry to the Jews, and forbidding the apostles, when he sent them forth during his abode upon earth, to go into the way of the Gentiles. From hence we are able to account for the slow opening of the universal character of Christianity; and we learn to admire the skill and address with which our Lord employed general expressions, parables, and action, gradually to unfold this offensive truth. The name by which he commonly designed himself, "the Son of Man," was most expressive of his connexion with the whole human race. In his discourses with the Jews, he frequently called himself the light of the world, and many words dropped from him, which, howsoever they were understood by his hearers, appear to us intended to mark the full extent of his gracious undertaking.* "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd." "I, if I be lifted up," referring to the manner of his death on the cross," will draw all men to me."t Several of his parables convey under a thin disguise the future extension of his kingdom, the rejection of those who thought they had an exclusive title to its privileges, and the introduction of those whom the Jews held in contempt. Our Lord began his public ministry at Jerusalem by driving the buyers and sellers out of the temple; and he repeated this action a little before his crucifixion. The action appears to an ordinary reader to be merely a transport of zeal. But if you read the enlightened commentary of Bishop Hurd at the end of the first volume of his sermons, you will regard it in a much higher light, as a symbolical action, intimating in the most significant manner that the house of God was to become, under the Christian dispensation, a house of prayer for all nations. The only place in the temple allotted for the devout heathen, or proselytes of the gate, who chose to come up to Jerusalem, that they might there worship the God of Israel, was an outer court, in which many things necessary for the service of the temple were exposed to sale, Our Lord, by driving the buyers and sellers out of this court, vindicated the rights of the Gentiles, who had been insulted during their devotions by the uproar of a fair; and although he did not proceed so far as to bring them into the sanctuary, yet by this mark of his attention he gave a pledge of the fulness of that grace which was soon to be revealed to them.

Accordingly the commission given to the apostles immediately before his ascension, was unlimited. "Go, make disciples of all nations. Ye shall be witnesses to me unto the uttermost part of the Mat. xx. xxi. xxii.

* Mat. viii. 11.

John x. 16; xii. 32.

earth. And he said unto them, that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." The gift of tongues, conferred upon them ten days after his ascension, qualified them for executing this unlimited commission and the miracles, which they were enabled to perform, constituted an evidence of their divine mission equally intelligible to men in all countries, and fitted to bring universal conviction. Paul, who was added to the number of the apostles after the ascension of Jesus, was told by a special revelation at the time of his conversion, that he was to be sent far from Jerusalem to the Gentiles;† and Acts x. relates the manner in which the minds of the other apostles, who still retained many of the prejudices of the Jews, were opened to conceive the true character of the gospel, and to understand the extent of their own commission. Peter was instructed in a vision not to call that unclean which God hath cleansed; he then received a command to preach the gospel to Cornelius, a devout heathen; and his preaching was accompanied with a descent of the miraculous gifts of the Holy Ghost upon Cornelius and his family. These three circumstances, the vision, the command, and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, appeared to the other apostles to constitute a full vindication of his conduct; and although they had blamed Peter when they first heard of his going in to the Gentiles, they were satisfied, after he expounded to them the whole matter, that by the gospel there is "granted to the Gentiles also repentance unto life."

As soon as this enlarged idea took possession of their minds, it formed one great subject of their discourses and their writings; and we see them labouring to bring it forth to the admiration of the world. While Paul avails himself of his Jewish learning to prove that the Gospel is the end of the law, his epistles abound with the declaration of that mystery, i. e. that part of the conduct of divine Providence formerly unknown, which had been revealed to him, that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and partakers of the same promise in Christ by the Gospel. He magnifies the grace of God, who now appears not the God of the Jews, but the God of the Gentiles also, "rich in mercy to all that call upon him ;" and he dwells upon this distinguishing excellence of the Gospel, that under it there is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircumcision, but that Christ is all in all. The Evangelist John, who wrote his Gospel long after the rest, in relating a saying of Caiaphas the high priest, adds these words of himself, that Jesus Christ "should die not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God which were scattered abroad;"‡ and in the book of the Revelation, where he writes by the commandment of Jesus the things shown to him in vision which were to be hereafter, he mentions an angel whom he saw flying in heaven, having the Gospel to preach to them that dwell upon the earth; and he says that he beheld a great multitude of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.§

I have thought it of importance thus to bring together, in one view,

* Mat. xxviii. 19. Acts i. 8. Luke xxiv. 46, 47. John xi. 40-52.

† Acts xxii. 21.

§ Rev. xiv. 6; vii. 9.

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