from the superstitious or hypocritical Pharisee by rational cheerfulness, by engaging affability, by active and unwearied benevolence, carrying his piety onward from wordsto things, and employing it to regalate every act of life; and by its mild, steady, but unobtrusive and unostentatious influence, to direct and sanctify the performance of every social duty. Thus He threw fresh radiance and fresh endearments around the sacred duty of Charity itself, by uniting the occasional exercise of it with our convivial enjoyments; for he instructed his followers, when they prepared a feast, to call the blind, the poor, and the maimed; and he added, that however unable such persons might be to return the kindness they had received, yet they who thus mingled courtesy with bounty, and made things temporal subservient to things spiritual, should meet with a recampense at the resurrection of the just.

May I be permitted to remark, that an adumbration of this conduct is to be found in the life of him, whom PLATO describes as

the

the most just man he ever knew, and whom we are accustomed to consider as one of the wisest philosophers of the heathen world. Increasing his usefulness without diminishing his dignity, SOCRATES associated with the lost sheep of the gentile flock; even with courtezans, libertines, and sophists, and by expedients the most gentle he endeavoured to rectify their errors, and correct their irregularities; did not our Master, for the same benevolent purpose, mingle in familiar converse with publicans and sinners? SOCRATES, on the most serious topics, drew his images from surrounding scenery and the objects of common life; have not the most judicious and learned expositors observed the same beauties in the discourses of Christ? SOCRATES condemned the mischievous subtleties of those declaimers who displayed their ingenuity and fondness for paradox, in separating the useful from the honourable; did not our Lord in the same manner combat the doctrinal refinements of those teachers, who not only tore asunder what God had joined together

in.

in the religion of Moses, but set the ritual above the weightier matters of the law, and made of little or no effect some express prohibitions in the Decalogue, especially those which are pointed against perjury and adultery? SOCRATES, as CICERO justly re- marks, brought down philosophy from the skies to the bosoms and business of men in social life; · did not our Lord, in a yet nobler strain of simplicity and sublimity, inculcate the first and second great commandments, and when revealing or enforcing the will of his Father, did he not uniformly appeal to those clear and salutary apprehensions of right and wrong which the hand of God has deeply engraven upon the tablet of the human heart? ·

PLATO, we may farther remark, and XENOPHON, however dissimilar from each other in the colour of their stile, the choice of their subjects, and the purposes for which they recorded the opinions and actions of SOCRATES; yet seem to have been equally impressed with these characteristic qualities.

to

to which I have adverted, in the daily life of the Grecian sage. In the same manner the Evangelists, however they might differ from one another in the sources of their knowledge, or in the peculiar temperaments of their own minds, uniformly ascribe to their Master, the marked and entire exemption from affected singularity and exterior austerity, which I consider not only as shedding additional graces on his personal character, but affording additional evidence for the divinity of his mission..

If we enquire into the nature of Christian liberty, by examining those passages where it is most largely insisted on by the Apostles, we shall find it partly to consist in a freedom from the obligations of the cere monial law in matters otherwise indifferent, and from the spirit of bondage or fear which was produced by the curses entailed on the transgressors of that law, not having the means or opportunity of remission; partly in a freedom from the judicial law, and partly in a freedom from the bondage of sin in general

general and the punishment impending over all who were concluded under it. Now the obligation to obedience under the Mosaic ritual having been abolished by theC hristian dispensation, and that dispensation itself being also final, it follows that any attempt to fetter and clog the consciences of men by needless ordinances, or to enforce as matters of positive and indispensable obligation, those things, which Christ hath left, and by leaving hath to us made indifferent, every such attempt, I say, is directly at variance with the spirit of liberty to which we are called, and virtually tends again to hold and bind us fast in the yoke of slavery.

Nor are we alone to regard the acknow-ledged difference between the Mosaic and Christian dispensations in the temporary nature of the one and the permanent obligation of the other, but there are various other points of consideration that seem to me of no small importance. The law of Moses was evidently calculated for a small part of mankind only, containing, as is well known,

many.