A LETTER, ETC.

MY CHRISTIAN FRIENDS,

FOR your late happy conversion to the Christian Religion, I am more than thankful; I glorify God for it; and I am persuaded, all true believers in Jesus Christ will do the same: for you are now become the children of Abraham's faith, and heirs of the promises made to him. Before, you were only the children of his nature, as your Jewish brethren are and if we lament over them, as over those that are dead, we are to rejoice over you as persons who are alive from the dead. We are much surprized when a single Jew becomes a Christian; but that three should become so at once is a great event; which would give us great encouragement, if we might presume to consider it as the first fruits of an harvest not far off; when your nation shall have their eyes opened

to discover that Jesus Christ, whom they de spised and rejected, is the true Saviour of the world.

The Christian Religion in these last days having assumed various forms, and being even without form; I am thankful that the good providence of God hath directed you to that form of it which is still preserved by the Church of England; as sound a part of the Church of Christ, in its profession, as is to be found this day upon earth; I wish we might say as much for its discipline; and from it you may certainly receive what the Church of Christ hath to give. On one side of it, we see the errors and usurpations of the Church of Rome: on the other the lamentable divisions of the sectaries: who are to be peaceably admonished of that certain ruin which division must sooner or later bring upon the christian world. Your high priest, Aaron, was no universal bishop : he presided over one peculiar nation, who were the chosen people of God. And when the nations of the world were taken into one great Catholic church, so called to distinguish it from the Jewish particular church, there was no universal bishop, but our Lord Jesus Christ, the chief Shepherd and Bishop of our souls and every national church was governed by bishops

of

of its own, of whom we know the succession to these days, down to bishops of our own time: and have had the blessing of being you confirmed by one of the best of them. As your friend in Christ Jesus, I wish you to be farther instructed in the state of the case between us and the unbelieving Jews; that you may be enabled not only to stand your ground, but to perform the blessed office of leading others into the truth. Though I can say sincerely with St. Paul, that my heart's desire "and prayer to God for Israel is, that they "might be saved;" yet I dare not indulge a hope, that any feeble efforts of mine, or any thing I can teach you to say, will have effect on the Jews as a body, or on any considerable number of them, after they have so long resisted the arguments of wise and learned men. Whenever that shall happen, and by whatever instruments, it must be the Lord's doing, and it will be marvellous in our eyes. But the cause should never be neglected: it is not to be given up in despair; for St. Paul assures us God is able (there is therefore no determination. to the contrary), to graft his people in again into their own olive, if they abide not still in unbelief. And the most promising method we

can pursue, is to make use of their brethren whose eyes are opened, and by them to present a new sort of evidence, which Jews are not prepared to answer or evade. The evidence I mean is that of signs; such as our Saviour himself gave them from the Scripture of his own future resurrection. He gave them the sign of the prophet Jonah, swallowed for three days into the belly of a sea monster, and cast up alive upon the land. If the books of the prophets had been half filled with predictions in words, this one sign will have more force than them all on those who believe the fact: which, how is it possible to believe, without also believing the fact foreshown by it, I see not. Because there never would have been so strange a fact brought to pass in the world, as the return of Jonah from the belly of a fish; but for the sake of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the heart of the earth, which in due time was to follow and in the mind of God, the fact of Christ was before the fact of Jonah.

This is the sort of evidence I would use, to prove what the Jews disbelieve of Christ and his religion. Men disbelieve truth, because they have first embraced error, and cannot part with it. This we shall find to have been the

case

case with the Jews, whose errors were these following.

That God had promised to them in their father Abraham the possession of the land of Canaan; that is, the enjoyment of this present world; and that they were to serve him with this expectation. This was their first and greatest error; the foundation of all the rest. For from hence it followed, that the kingdom of their Messiah was to be a kingdom of this world and as Jesus of Nazareth did not affect such a kingdom, but declined it, they concluded he could not be the person; and that God had showed it, by leaving him to be despised, persecuted, and put to a shameful death. Concerning themselves they thought, that as God had chosen them for his people, they should never fall away, and be separated from him. That their law and their temple being intended for perpetuity, would never be abolish ed. And lastly, that the Church of God and its privileges could not be extended to the Gentiles, and that the Gentiles never would be taken into it.

Such were the doctrines of the Jews, when Jesus Christ came amongst them. In these doctrines their teachers had brought them up;