SERMON XIV.

(THIRD SUNDAY AFTER EASTER.)

THE PATRIARCHAL DISPENSATION 2.

Acтs, Chap. xiii. ver. 32, 33.

"The promise which was made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children."

ALL that God has thought proper to reveal to us concerning himself and his dispensations, is contained in that one volume which for its just pre-eminence above all others we call "the Scripture" (or the Writing), "the Bible" (or the Book). It is a collection of several compositions, various in their classes and styles, written by authors of different æras and characters: but whatever be the variety of these compositions in matter or in form, they all agree in the one particular of being set by the Spirit of God above the reach of any possible falsehood as to their contents. The leading object which connects these miscellaneous parts within the unity of a system is, that they lay before the world the history of God's providential administration, from the beginning of created existence to the final consummation of all things. What book can compare in dignity with this, which has God for its subject ? Vide Note [F.]

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What in interest to us, with this which has his dealings with the children of men for its matter? The profane historian would have told you of changes in manners, improvements in arts, rise of states and empires, revolutions by which they fell to decay: -the sacred historian considers man in a relation more dignified, and through a duration of greater extent. In the Bible, man is spoken of not as a member of a political society, but of an association which connects him with God; as a stranger on the earth, whose sure resting-place is in heaven; a spiritual agent, accountable for all he has done and for all he has received, to that great Creator whose transcendent excellence he must revere, and whose commands he is bound to obey. With this view of man, his intercourse with his fellow-men is in Scripture cleared of the embarrassment of local manners and temporary usages: the entire species forms one system, in which all are considered under the general relation of subjects of the same Lord, and brethren born from one common parent.

One difference indeed it recognizes among men, -a difference according to the degree of the knowledge of that Lord which at various times had been vouchsafed by him to the world. Such a diversity in the religious knowledge communicated at different periods is obvious on the face of the Bible, in its division into the Old and New Testament. But if we look with a little more minuteness into the Old Testament, and consider that the Jewish

law was not given until the time of Moses, who flourished two thousand five hundred years subsequent to the date of the creation, we shall find an earlier period of great magnitude, which must have been under a very different species of religious institution, and which enjoyed a different degree of religious light. For to have left the objects of his creative bounty without the guidance of revealed communication, at a time when their inexperience stood so much in need of assisting admonition, would have been inconsistent with the goodness of the gracious Creator, and contradictory to the analogies of that divine nature, which to the heathens at a later period, remote from intercourse with his chosen people and unacquainted with their law, "left not itself without witness a." That in point of fact God did not leave the patriarchs without knowledge of himself, is evident from the first of the five books of Moses, which supplies us with their history for this records numerous instances of God's personal communication with the patriarchs, and various directions which, on special occasions, he gave them respecting their moral duties and their religious services. A state so very peculiar as that in which men at the infancy of the world were placed, required religious communication in very different modes, and admitted it only within degrees different from those of the Jewish or Christian Scriptures: and in the Book of Gene

* Acts xiv. 17.

sis these communications are disclosed to us. By this we ascertain the existence, in addition to the Levitical or Jewish and Christian dispensations, of an earlier and different providential administration of the world. This is called the Patriarchal Dispensation.

But are we to say that the Lord is changeable in his will, and wavering in his wisdom; he whom the apostle describes as "the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turninga ""The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by wisdom hath he established the heavens":" and can any thing be discovered in either, which, after trial, was found to require a revision? Could any of the dwellers in either have embarrassed his systems, and forced on him a change in his counsels? No: this would have been to set the imperfection of the creature above the perfection in power and wisdom of the great Creator. The little plans of the children of men may be deranged, and their counsels may be confounded; but who can disturb the systems of Him who made all things, and knoweth all their powers and their possibilities of action? Man may be ignorant, he may be inattentive, he may forgetnot so the God of knowledge: if at one time his system is different from what it was at another, it is at all times that which was fittest for its purposes, the best which man in the exercise of that free will which has been permitted him would,

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James i. 17.

Prov. iii. 19.

under existing circumstances, receive. When the first was ordered, the second was in contemplation, to be at its proper season introduced: for "known unto God are all his ways from the beginning";" and what was done in time was determined on from eternity. But though the counsels of the Lord admit no change, man in his collective as in his individual capacity, we know to be variable and capricious. The individual is unsteady in his will, and fickle in his taste; the collective body has its passions also, the nation its peculiar character. Improvements in civilization and advance in knowledge, make differences in the human state little short of its difference from the inferior classes of animated nature. The growth of society is like the growth of the individual; and the modes of treatment which would be proper for the infant would be utterly inapplicable in the adult state. Where arts necessary almost for human life were but in a course of slowly-progressive invention; where tribes subsisted by following the beasts of the field; where intercourse was limited, habitations remote, and professional divisions unknown,-no person will say that the same should be the modes of institution, the same the paths for man to walk in, as those which were fitted for higher degrees of civilization and greater facilities of communicating. God, who sees all things as they are, adapts his instructions, as far as may be consistent with his