presumptuous to hope, that the increasing attention now given to the case of the Jews is one favourable omen of the divine mercy towards them? Though some general expectation of their conversion has been ever entertained in the church, yet Christians have been too indifferent to this great mystery, and they have too generally confined the prophecies of the Old Testament to an analogical and accommodated sense; and it is only of late years that they have begun to consider the literal and immediate bearing of those glorious predictions on the salvation of the antient Israel. May the Holy Spirit descend once again on the Church! Then our minds, illuminated by his

grace, shall be enabled to understand with all saints what is the height, and depth, and length, and breadth of the love of Christ to the Jew, as well as Gentile, and shall know the love of God which passeth knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fulness of God.

Especially shall we be encouraged in this blessed prospect by bearing in mind, that whatever difficulties may appear to us to attend the conversion of the Jew, greater difficulties attended the first calling of the Gentiles. Both are mysteries, but the more improbable one has been fulfilled, and leaves us therefore no just ground of doubting as to the accomplishment of the other. Mark the language of our in

spired Apostle in the words immediately preceding the text: For if thou, O Gentile convert, wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree; how much more shall these which be the natural branches be graffed into their own olive tree? ver. 24. What a transporting declaration! What a relief to the labouring faith of the Christian! What an argument for exertion! What a pledge of success! How cheerfully may we enter on the path which this Society marks out, with the persuasion that the mystery of the admission of the Gentiles into the church, of which we are witnesses, is the harbinger and pledge of the re-admission of the Jews, of which we hope to be the humble instruments.

But an ignorance of this mystery is not the only impediment to the duties incumbent on us as Christians: a secret contempt or indifference for the pitiable state of the Jews is a still more formidable one. To this the Apostle opposes THE SOLEMN CAUTION, LEST YE SHOULD BE WISE IN YOUR OWN CONCEITS. Such is the tendency of our fallen nature, that privileges of almost every kind produce some measure of vanity and confidence. It was thus with the Gentile converts to whom St. Paul addressed himself. There was a considerable danger lest they should be wanting in that tender com

passion for the Jew, and that zeal for promoting his conversion, which became the Gentile Christians. There was reason to fear, lest a secret reliance on their own spiritual advantages, on their being inserted, though wild by nature, into the true olive, while the natural branches were broken off to admit the new graft, should lead to contempt and indifference for the rejected branches, should produce a lurking pride and self-conceit, and should end in a neglect of those duties of sympathy and commiseration which the miserable condition of the Jewish unbelievers demanded.

Something of the same danger still threatens the Christian church, or rather has, as I fear, habitually been operating in almost every period since the Apostle wrote. Christians, instead of praying for and endeavouring to save the Jew, have despised and contemned him. They have admitted the immense debt of gratitude they owe to that nation, from which, as concerning the flesh, Christ came; they have admitted the duty of forgiving our enemies and praying for them that persecute us; they have admitted generally the great mystery of their future salvation; they have even admitted the duty of attempting their conversion ;—but with all these admissions, has not, I may ask, a lurking contempt and indifference paralyzed almost every exertion in their favour? Have

not Christians, like the priest in our Lord's parable, passed by on the other side? Have they not been content quietly to enjoy the privileges of that church into which the mercy of God had brought them, whilst a poisonous though subtle conceit has infected their whole frame and habit of thinking as it relates to the Jews? And is not the humbling of this fatal pride of heart the design of the Apostle in my text, and the necessary prelude to deep and genuine compassion toward the Israel of God? Let self-conceit then be banished from our minds, and let compassion fill every breast for the fallen glory of Israel! Let all tendencies to presumption on our own privileges, or to indifference as to the dereliction of others, be carefully guarded against! Rather, like our Apostle, let us speak, if we must speak, of the guilt of the Jews as being the enemies of the cross of Christ, not without tears! Let us endeavour, with him, to provoke them to emulation and to save some. Let it be our hearts' desire and fervent prayer to God for Israel, that they may be saved! Let us be willing to endure any sufferings, and to enter upon any labours, for the ancient and now dispersed house of Jacob. But why do I speak of the Apostle as our pattern in this duty? I would rather lead you to the lowly Saviour, and bid you observe him as he wept over the very city which he pro

nounced rejected of God! I would call on you to listen to his tender address to the daughters of Jerusalem, as he was dragged to the mount of crucifixion. I would invite you to hear his dying intercession for his very murderers, whilst engaged in nailing him to the cross, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And I would ask, if every heart should not be softened into sorrow? I would ask, if any apathy ought still to retard us in the work of benevolence, if any conceit of ourselves should chill that ardour of love, which such examples ought to kindle to a flame?

For no one surely will here revive THE MISCHIEVOUS ERROR-for I can call it by no other name to which I have already more than once adverted, that the blindness of the Jews is the judicial infliction of the Almighty, and that therefore emotions of compassion are not suitably urged in such an extreme case? Why then, I would ask in reply, was not such a reason urged by our Apostle when commanded to preach to the Gentiles? Were not the Gentiles given up to a reprobate mind, and thus judicially blinded, though not in the same degree with the unhappy Jew, yet in a somewhat similar manner? Or why, I may again ask, does the whole Christian world rise up as one man in vindication of the wrongs of Africa, inhabited as it is by the descendants of Ham, the inheritors of the male