version of the truth, or of the most lamentable ignorance, and even absurdity! Every part of Scripture shows that it was in the light of a sacrifice-a full, perfect, and final sacrifice for sin, that it was represented by the apostles, understood by the people, and typified and rendered familiar to the mind by the universal practice of every age and country. And as this is the most natural way in which the death of Christ is to be understood, so is it, to us and to all mankind, the most satisfactory and consoling. For if Jesus be not our sacrifice, where is our atonement to be found? If he hath not indeed offered himself a ransom for many, then is our faith vain-we are yet in our sins. But, thanks be to God, our redemption hath been completed; the spotless victim hath been found, offered up, and accepted; the High-priest of our religion has presented himself to God as a propitiation for the sins of the whole world, and now, through his name and merits, is preached every where, on repentance, remission of sins!

Let us then look back a little on the subject which we have been considering, and in weighing the advantages which we possess over the pious of former days, let us reflect from what the knowledge of the Gospel has delivered us. Without this knowledge we must have been heathens and idolaters offering up sacrifices to gods, of whose very existence we had no credible information-gods created by our hopes or our fears-gods revengeful, malignant, weak or wicked-framed according to our own fancy or conscience, or according to the equally ignorant conceptions of others,-gods who could afford us no help in this world, and no hope for the next. Or at the best, and in the most fortunate circumstances, we must have been Jews; and, consequently, bound to observe all the rites and ordinances of the law of Moses. In that case, doomed to undergo in infancy the rite of circumcision -commanded to consider the first-fruits of our crops and the first-born of our cattle, and even of our children, as things dedicated to God, and to be redeemed

with a price-liable to constant legal pollution, and constrained to use the most strict and often tedious and irksome means for our purification; loaded with the minutest observances, and threatened with the most serious punishment for even the unintentional breach of them; compelled to appear, from whatever distance, three times in the year at Jerusalem, and then by no means "to appear before the Lord empty';" forbidden every seventh year to attend to the pursuits of husbandry, to sow, to reap, or to till the ground :—and all this without fully seeing the end or value of these services, sacrifices, and observances, and governed only in our obedience by our knowledge that such was the will of an irresistible and inflexible God-truly we should be ready to say with St. Peter, that this was indeed " a yoke which neither we nor our fathers should be able to bear 2"

Looking then, as is our duty, not only to the privileges to which we have been

1 Deut. xvi. 16.

2 Acts xv. 10.

advanced, but to the evils from which we have been delivered, what ought to be the measure of our gratitude to him from whom all these blessings flow?—to him who hath blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us," and hath raised us to the glorious liberty of the Gospel-a religion whose yoke is easy and its burden light, and which holds out to us the possession of happiness here, as well as glory hereafter?-surely we are bound, in the language of our Church, "to show forth his praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to his service, and by walking before him in holiness and righteousness all our days 2!"

1 Coloss. ii. 14.

2 General Thanksgiving.

SERMON XVII.

THE LOVE OF GOD A MOTIVE FOR LOVE
TO MAN.

1 JOHN iv. 11.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

IN following that course of religious study which our Church has laid down for us in her services, we enter now, as it were, upon a new division of the Gospel of Christ. Up to this period, the principal facts in the history of our religion and of its Author, and the principal points of doctrine which we are called upon to believe, have been brought before our consideration in the epistles and gospels, and first lessons for the day. We have thus followed our blessed Saviour from his incarnation on earth to his final