to eight persons, sailed over the ruins of a world-unhurt.

There is something so awful in this universal judgment, it speaks at every period of time with such terrific warning to a dissolute and corrupt generation, and it ought to awaken in a Christian bosom so many reflections on as sure a destruction to overwhelm him, and the world on which he treads, without the deliverance wrought for the spiritual Noah in the ark of his

faithful by the

church, that we shall reserve the comparison for a future and particular illustration.

To the exceptions that may be made to the Mosaic account of the deluge, we can oppose the present state of the earth, with its manifold evidences of the wonderful transaction. And what has been the grand epoch of every ancient kingdom; an event, that has been admitted as true by every nation, whose monuments are preserved, or whose writings are accessible; an event, which has given to symbol a character, and to allegory a meaning; which, divesting mythology of her ornaments, and chronology of its errors, can furnish to every people a real

memorial of their descent and origin, combines the religion, the manners, laws, arts, and antiquities of every country against the mere assertions of infidelity.

Placed again upon a new world, and feeling for those who had perished in their iniquities, Noah begins the renewed duties of life with an act of worship to his merciful preserver. He built an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt-offerings unto the Lord. Here we have again the same commemorative sacrifice, as the result of faith and dependence; there was no immediate communication from the Deity; both the form, and the act of worship, bear a manifest reference to some known and established ceremony; and the terms of the covenant made with Noah in consequence of it are precisely the same with that renewed afterwards with Abraham, I will establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; evidently alluding to a covenant already in being, which had been made, and which, from a sense of his great deliverance, he must be satisfied would never be broken.

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The descendants, however, of Noah, like the descendants of Adam, soon forsook the ways of the Lord, and at last filled up the measure of their iniquity by their idolatrous confederacy at the tower of Babel. The unchangeable word had passed, that they should be no more destroyed by water; and like Cain, they were now driven from the presence of the Lord; left (as the Apostle argues) to their own imaginations, till their foolish hearts were darkened, and professing themselves wise, they became fools. But the promise given in the Garden of Eden remained sacred, and again we see another faithful servant called out of the idolatrous land, and led by the hand of God into the paths of truth and righteousness. In personal intercourse, in heavenly visions, in prophetic revelations, he was instructed, blest, and comforted; and the history of Abraham is the typical history of all true believers, who, in full assurance of faith, sojourn in the land of promise, as in a strange country, looking for a better, that is, an heavenly habitation. From Abraham, the father of the faithful, as from a root, the visible church rose as a tree, distinct from all others; but when every

thing had been done for Christ's vineyard, and the vine that ought to have produced good grapes, brought forth sour grapes, the Gentiles were grafted in. Its heavenly nurture, its progressive growth, its blessed fruit, were disclosed to him in fuller light. In the promise of a son, in the plains of Mamre, in the land of Moriah, he is addressed by One, whose title is, I am the Almighty God; and who, in Apostolic language, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with GOD. In the renewal of the covenant of grace, it was not only made known to him, that Christ was to be of Abraham's seed; but the calling of the Gentiles, the bringing all nations into the church, that all the families of the earth might be blessed, were matters of distinct revelation by Him who said, Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad. Throughout the whole Patriarchal age, we find the same guardian Power, and the same gracious Providence, watching over and protecting the covenanted blessings of his servants; and either by interesting points of resemblance, by type, by figure, or prophetic direction, leading them to just apprehensions of

the true God, and to the performance of such worship, as would procure his favour and acceptance: concealing no glory that could be manifested to mortal eyes, and unfolding a mercy that should embrace every son of Adam, who called upon his name.

Such was the religion of the Patriarchal church, which went out into all the earth; in the purity of which the antient fathers of our faith lived and died; which the Jews constantly affirm to have been handed down from Adam to Noah, and the wisest heathens to have come to them (in the portions it did come) by reve lation and tradition; which was published and preached to the old world by the antediluvian prophets, from Adam successively to Noah; and to the new, by Noah and Shem, by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in Canaan; by Joseph and the Church, in Egypt; by Moses and Aaron, as it remains to shew, at the deliverance from thence, when it was re-published in writing; by the standing evidence of the church in Judea, which was surrounded by the Gentiles on all sides, and in the very center of the then known world; by the proselytes, that travelled to and