broken and thrown away, when the law, which they contained, comes to be restored to its original place, the heart of man. And the very comparison, which we have been noticing, involves in it a satisfactory proof, that the law of the two tables does contain a summary of the essential principles of religion and morality in general. As the law which, under the New Covenant, is written on the heart, it can contain no less.

I would farther ask, what is a law? Is it the mere form of words, in which a duty is enjoined, or a sin prohibited? Is it not, rather, the injunction of the duty, and the prohibition of the sin, under whatever form of words they are conveyed? The same duties may be commanded, and the same sins forbidden, in different terms, and yet the law itself remain unchanged. A question, therefore, naturally suggests itself, namely, Does the law of Christ, as given in the New Testament, correspond in its requirements to the law of the two tables? If it does; then, even on the supposition of the terms being different in which the requirements are expressed,-to say that the precepts of the latter are abrogated, and are no longer binding on Christians, will be to say no more than that the form of words is set aside, while the law itself continues the same. It is the matter of duty, and not the expression, that constitutes the law. We can readily conceive the legal codes of two nations to be very different in their forms of expression, and yet substantially, and even to the minutest item, to contain the same enactments. Should we not, in such a case, say of the two countries, that they were governed by the same laws?

The same sentiment, namely, that it is the essential

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elements of duty, and not any forms of words which these elements may be imbodied, that constitute the law, may be further confirmed and illustrated, by considering what was the state of things before the giving of the law to Israel. Sin is scripturally defined "the transgression of law;" and, while it is the maxim both of inspiration and of common sense, that " where no law is, there is no tr transgression," it is not less clear, that where there is no transgression, there can be no punitive infliction. On these principles, as we formerly saw, the apostle Paul argues, that, since there was death before the giving of the law, there must have been sin; and that, consequently, there must have been a law before that given by Moses, of which sin was the transgression:-a law which was the common rule of obligation to the human race, and of which men universally, Gentiles and Jews alike, were the violators, and, as such, under a common damnatory sentence. The moral obligations of Jews and Gentiles, considered as fellow-members of the human family, must ever have been the same; and the apostle's argument with the Jews requires us to believe, that the moral law, as given by Moses, was substantially (that is in all its essential principles and requirements) the same with what had existed from the beginning, of which sin was the transgression, and death the sanction. Indeed, in the moral government of God over his creatures, we cannot imagine the existence of two laws. The relations of God to men, and of men to God, have always been the same; and the same obligations on the part of the creature have arisen out of them. And, as the grand design of God, in separating to himself the seed of Abraham, was, to keep alive in the world the

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true knowledge of himself, of his character, of his will, his purposes of saving mercy; we have the very same reason for thinking, that the moral law given by Moses had been his law to man from the beginning, as we have for thinking that the character which he gives of himself had been his character from the beginning; or that the salvation pointed to by the ceremonial institutions of Judaism was the " common salvation," revealed to our first parents, for themselves and for their progeny, without distinction, in the first promise. If the moral law, as given by Moses, was any thing different from what had all along been the divine code of morals to man, then do we desiderate the accomplishment of one at least of the ends of the separation of Israel,-the exhibition, namely, to the surrounding nations of the will of the one living and true God, as the moral governor of the world. Nay we may say, I think, without presumption, that if it were otherwise, there would be a singular defect in revelation. There is a close and interesting relation between the law and the gospel. It is the transgression of the former that has necessitated the gracious provisions of the latter. Would it not, then, be a strange thing, that we should have no authoritative discovery of the will of God as to human duty, the transgression of which has given rise to the grace of God in human salvation? It is, assuredly, as transgressors of law, that Gentiles as well as Jews are under condemnation. The denunciation, Gal. iii. 10, "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them," includes the one as well as the other. For although the Gentiles have not, as the Jews had, the written law, the

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apostle clearly identifies the principles and requirements of the law of nature with those of the law of revelation, (however imperfectly, in consequence of natural corruption, those principles and requirements might be understood,) when he says-Rom. ii. 13-15, "For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified: For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves; which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another." We have nothing to do, in our present argument, with the leading design of these words, when taken in connexion with what precedes ;-which is, to affirm and establish the great general principle in God's judicial ‘administration, that responsibility is according to privilege. But there are two things to be learned from them, which are directly and decisively to our purpose. The first is, that the law which the Jews had, and the Gentiles had not, is the law given by Moses; and consequently, that the distinction usually made, in explaining the word “law” as on different occasions used by the apostle, between the moral law and the ceremonial, is not an arbitrary but a fair and legitimate one: for, that it is of the moral and not of the ceremonial precepts of Moses that Paul here speaks, it would be a waste of words, and an insult to your understandings, to set about proving; and yet in his argument, without adverting to the ceremonial institutes at all, he calls those precepts simply "the law." The second is, that the dictates of the divine will, in natural conscience,

(except in as far as they are perverted by circumstances of temptation, operating upon the various forms of corruption) are the same as the dictates of his will in the written law. On no principle but this, is it possible to understand the affirmation, that when the Gentiles "do by nature things contained in the law," they "show the work of the law written in their hearts." They were, in fact, then, under the same law; only they had it not in its written form : they had it with the obscurity and imperfection of natural reason, compared with the clearness and fulness of direct divine revelation. But still it was the same law. This much the apostle most explicitly intimates. It was the same law, then, which was written on the heart of man originally; of which the dictates, more or less partial and corrupted, remain in the conscience of man still; which was promulgated by Jehovah to Israel, in its complete uncorrupted form, and with full attestation of its authority; which, having been originally written on the heart, was then recorded in stone; and which, under a later and more spiritual economy, was again, as we have seen, to be transferred from the stone to the heart. The truth is, that in all ages and countries, and under every dispensation of divine discovery, the law of God, as the rule of moral duty to man, must, of necessity, be the same; subject, it may be, under the divine prescription, to such occasional and temporary modifications as do not encroach upon its great principles, but essentially without change. The law which was given at Sinai, had been the law from the beginning, and shall be the law unto the end. Christ and Moses, as we shall see more fully immediately, are in this respect one.