SERM. continue, but invested with a higher meaning,—a SUPP. TO с VI. meaning, new indeed in itself, but yet fulfilling for SERM. III. the first time what had before been dimly shadowed forth; "the first was taken away only that the "second might be established." It was indeed no visible hierarchy of angelic forms, to which their thoughts were now directed, but He who was the same always, and "whose years could never fail;" it was no earthly Sabbath to which He was to guide them, but the eternal "rest which remains for the people of God;" no weapons of human warfare, like those which won the land of Canaan, but the "word of God, quick and powerful, and sharper "than any two-edged sword;" the Laws was to be written not on tables of stone but "in their hearts and "in their minds;" the Sacrifice was to be offered up in no earthly sanctuary; the Priest was to minister within the veil, "not' in the holy places made "with hands, but in heaven itself, now to appear "in the presence of God for us." But still it was something to be told that the past and the future were not to be suddenly snapt in sunder,-something to feel that the new wine was not rudely to be forced on those whose natural feeling would still make them say that "the old was better,"-something to be assured by Apostolic teachers that the words, the thoughts, the associations with which c Heb. x. 9. e Heb. iv. 9. k h d Heb. i. 12. f Heb. iv. 12. VI. SUPP. TO SERM. they had been familiar would not perish in the SERM. approaching catastrophe, but would endure, as humanly speaking through the medium of this very Serm. III. Epistle they have endured, to become the stay and support of thousands in every age and country, to whom the difficulties, the sentiments, the very existence of the original Hebrew Christians would be utterly unknown and unintelligible. Yet, gradual as this preparation was, tenderly as they were accustomed by "the milk' of babes" to receive "the strong "meat which belongeth to them that are of full age," it still remained to touch some faculty or feeling in their own hearts which should respond to this higher strain, which should raise them fromm "the first principles of the doctrine of Christ to go on unto perfection," which should prevent them when in" sight of "so great salvation" from sinking back into the wretched state of the apostate nation, "rejected "and nigh unto cursing, whose end was to be "burned." That feeling was "Faith," the same "Faith" which had been so triumphantly brought forward by the great Apostle of the Gentiles in his conflict with Judaism, but which was now insisted upon not in vehement controversy, but in earnest exhortation; a faith, not condemned like mere Jewish faith, as in the Epistle of St. James,—not set in distinct opposition to the works of the Law, as in the Epistle to the Galatians,—but traced back through all its various stages from its most general manifes 1 Heb. v. 13, 14. n Heb. ii. 2. m Heb. vi. 1. • Heb. vi. 8. VI. SUPP. TO SERM. tation by which in its earliest effort the Jewish mind had" understood that the worlds were framed SERM. III. "by the word of God," down to its latest workings in the heroic struggles of the Maccabean age, “desti tute, afflicted, tormented." With such a "con"fidence (VTóσTaσis) in things hoped for, with "such an evidence of things not seen," they might well rise above the visions of outward dominion and array of legal ceremonies which hovered before the earth-bound senses of their countrymen; they might still have "patient trust that in a little while he "that shall come will come and will not tarry;' they might well be assured that although not like their fathers in the presence of "the terrible sight "of the mountain that might be touched and that "burned with fire," they were even amidst the impending ruin of their earthly home, brought within "the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusa"lem, to the innumerable company of angels, the general assembly and Church of the first-born "which are written in heaven, and God the Judge "of all, and the spirits of just men made perfect, "and Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant." II. Such is the Epistle to the Hebrews; the true link between St. Paul and St. John, the true preparation for the end of the old and the rise of the new dispensation, the true picture of the Apostolical sympathy of a loftier spirit and a larger heart with the wants and failings of the weaker brethren of r Heb. xi. 2—37. r Heb. xii. 18. q Heb. x. 37. s Heb. xii. 22. VI. SUPP. TO Judæa. Like the Epistle of St. James, it endea- SERM. vours to exhibit the new covenant not as the destruction, but as the fulfilment of the old: only in SERM. III. accordance with the change of times and circumstances, it was not now the moral but the religious element of the ancient law that the Hebrew Christians needed to see developed. Like the Apocalypse, it is written under the impression of approaching convulsions, and the prospect of what was in some sense the immediate coming of the Lord; its imagery is in many respects the samet, only with the necessary difference between the fervid strains of a prophetic vision, and the calm reasonings of a didactic treatise. Resembling however these two books in the readers to whom or in the circumstances under which it was written,―resembling them in the peculiar light which it throws on the local and temporary influences of the age, it resembles them no less in the subordination in which it stands to that aspect of apostolical Christianity which has of itself an universal and eternal interest. It is not, nor could we have expected it to be, a necessary part of the continuous progress of the new revelation; it fills up an interstice between the successive stages of the ascent; it does not in itself command on every side the approaches to the heavenly summit. But in saying even thus much, it is obvious that there have been, and will be, to the end of the world, t Comp. especially Heb. iv. 12; Rev. i. 16; xix. 13—15; Heb. vii., viii.; Rev. i. 13: Heb. xii. 22; Rev. xx. 1. A a SERM. peculiar times and occasions, when this Epistle furVI. nishes us not merely with a true representation of SERM. III. Christianity, but with the very representation of it SUPP. TO which is of all others most needed,-when the loss of it from the Sacred Canon could for the time be hardly compensated by the possession of all the rest. In To explain the peculiar bearing of the truths themselves which this Epistle teaches, is beyond my present purpose; I have spoken only of the occasion and the mode of its teaching them. every part of Scripture there is this two-fold method of Divine instruction; not the message only, but the circumstances of its communication, not the matter only, but the form. It is to the latter alone that I have wished to confine myself, as heretofore, so now; and, although in comparison with those who are employed in unfolding and applying the truths themselves we may seem to be but as hewers of wood and drawers of water in the Temple of God, yet it is surely a useful though an humble task to gather such lessons as we can from the time and circumstances under which these eternal truths were delivered. There have, as we know, been extraordinary exceptions when the two have been wholly disjoined, as when we are told that God through the voice of the dumb ass rebuked the madness of the prophet, or that Caiaphas spake by Divine inspiration" the words which even from Apo u 2 Pet. ii. 16; John xi. 51. |