shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant." (Gen. xvii. 9, 10, 12, 13.)

And this continued in force to the end. When the dispensation, as a way of access to God, was broken up, St. Paul witnessed respecting circumcision, "I testify to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to keep the whole law." (Gal. v. 3.)

But the dispensation, the privileges of which we have been considering, was temporary. It was to pass away when He came to Whom all its types bare witness, and in Whom they were all fulfilled.

In the fulness of time, Jesus Christ, the promised Seed, the Second Adam, was revealed. He came to introduce a new state of things—the kingdom of God. He came, not to found a religion only, or to make an atonement only, but to establish a kingdom of which He was to be the King.

And it was to be more than a mere kingdom. It was to be the Church, a company of men believing in Him, and baptized into His body. And these persons, so blessed, were not merely to be under Him as their King, or instructed by Him as their Prophet, or reconciled through Him as their Priest; but, over and above all these things, they were to be supernaturally joined to Him by an union so intimate, so close, that it could only be illustrated by the union that subsists betwixt a human body composed of various limbs and its head, and a vine and the branches that branch out from it.

Now He, the King of this new kingdom, the Head of this new body, was no other than God's only-begotten Son. To set up this new kingdom, the most stupendous miracle had to be wrought that the universe had ever seen. God had to become man, without ceasing to be God. The manhood had to be taken into God.

What, then, must be the nature of the new kingdom Christ introduced? Surely, we should have said, it must be a state of unmixed good; surely it must be paradise on

D

earth; surely there can enter into it nothing that defileth. I think that if we had lived before the times of Christianity, and had realized that the Eternal Son of God was to become incarnate, in order to inaugurate a new kingdom, we should have said, that such a Saviour must introduce a sinless state of things, a perfect Church. But from the lips of the Great Head Himself we have intimations of the real state of His Church; and how contrary are they to what we should have expected! Instead of being a state of unmixed righteousness, it is a field sown with mingled wheat and tares: "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a man which sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way," &c. (Matt. xiii. 24, 25.)

Again, He compares it in the same chapter to a net cast into the sea, and gathering of every kind, good and bad, which were not finally separated till the end of the world. And, lest it should be said that all these are descriptions of a merely external state of things, an outward and visible Church only, He uses another figure or parable, intimating, or rather asserting, the same mixed state of things of the Church, considered as His mystical body: "I am the true Vine, and my Father is the Husbandman. Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away. If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered," &c. (John xv. 1-6.) In due time this Church was founded, and then faith and holiness, such as the world had never seen before, began to grow and flourish in the earth. The Holy Ghost was poured forth, and men were gathered into the fellowship of Christ.

But scarcely had the Church gained a footing in the world, but the view of it given by our Lord Himself was seen to be the true one; there were tares mingled with the wheat; the net enclosed fish of all sorts; the vine had branches, some fruit-bearing, some barren, and some withering. And this, not in times of prosperity and

comparative quiet, but in times of persecution. The proof of this is to be found in the Apostolical Epistles, especially those of St. Paul.

By his Epistles we gain a far deeper insight into the actual state and character of the early Church, than we do from any other parts of the New Testament, for several of these were written to Churches which he himself had both planted and watched over; such were the two Epistles to the Corinthians, and those to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Thessalonians.

I would ask the reader to give me his most earnest and prayerful attention to the way in which the Apostle addresses the subjects of Christ's kingdom, the brethren of the several Churches to whom he wrote his letters.

He addresses them all as in a real state of grace, as all partakers of the Holy Spirit, and baptized by Him into Christ's body-not a mere outward society, but His mystical body. He upbraids some of them with actually committing, and warns all of them against committing, very gross and deadly sins.

And he makes the sinfulness of those amongst them who thus sinned, enhanced by the fact of their being really and truly in the state of grace he assumed them to be. He, in fact, addresses Christians exactly in the same way as we have seen that the inspired prophets addressed Jews; with this difference, that, whilst the Jewish prophets assumed that the evil Jews were the large majority of the Jewish Church, the apostle assumes (perhaps with the exception of the Corinthian and Galatian Churches) that the evil were, at present, the minority. Still, the mode of speaking used in both cases is exactly similar.

The prophets upbraided the majority of the Israelites, because that, after God had made them His people, they revolted from Him. The Apostle tells the minority (as we charitably hope) of wilful sinners amongst the Corinthians, that by their sins they wounded Christ the more deeply, because they had been grafted into His body.

For the proof of this let us first examine one of the longer Epistles, and that, one in which the Apostle enters most at large into the character and circumstances of his converts, the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

At its opening he addresses it to the Church of God which is at Corinth, the sanctified in Christ Jesus, the called to be saints. And all through the Epistle he addresses all the members of this Church as in one and the same state of grace. I will give instances.

"Of Him," i.e. God, "are ye in Christ Jesus." (1 Cor. i. 30.)

"Ye are God's husbandry;" (compare our Lord's parable of the field, Matt. xiii.;) "ye are God's building," (comp. Ephes. ii. 21, 22.;) 1 Cor. iii. 9. "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are." (1 Cor. iii. 16, 17.)

In chap. v. he speaks of those "within" and those "without," meaning by those within the whole Church, and by those without, the heathen, and he counsels them. to put out from among them (excommunicate) a certain very gross sinner.

In chap. vi. 11, “Ye are washed, ye are sanctified, ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." Again, ver. 15, "Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ?" Again, "Know ye not that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost?" Again, "Ye are not your own; ye are bought with a price.'

In the beginning of the tenth chapter, he insists on a very remarkable analogy between the Baptism of the whole body of the Corinthians into Christ, and the whole body of the Israelites into the dispensation of Moses, in the cloud and in the sea, for the practical purpose of warning the Corinthian converts that the ultimate result of their election and their covenant privileges was, like

those of the Israelites, conditional. Just as God had brought all the Israelites into a state of comparative liberty and salvation by the passage through the Red Sea, so had He brought all the Corinthians into a corresponding state of salvation at their Baptism; but as the one miserably failed of attaining the end of their deliverance, so must the other take heed lest they fall after the same example of unbelief. (2 Cor. vi. 1; Heb. iii. iv. passim ; Jude 5.)

The point of comparison is between the whole body of Israel, and the use they made of their common privileges, in the one case; and the whole body of the Church, and the use or abuse of their common privileges, in the other. As the passage of the Red Sea made all Israel partakers of a common redemption from bondage, so Christian Baptism (or the parallel would not hold good) brought all the Corinthians into a common state of grace in Christ.

We now proceed to the twelfth chapter, in which St. Paul describes the Church as the body of Christ. He commences the chapter with noticing the great variety of spiritual gifts in the Church, and after enumerating some that were not general, he notices a gift of the Spirit common to all. "By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body," and after drawing a wonderful and beautiful analogy between the human body and the mystical body of Christ, he concludes, "Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular."

Such is the language of the Apostle to the whole body of the Corinthian Church. Do such expressions imply that all those to whom he wrote were walking worthy of their calling? So far from this, the whole Epistle is full of reproof of them, not for shortcomings, or sins of infirmity, but for gross and deadly sins.

"Ye are carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?" (1 Cor. iii. 3.) And in the 17th verse, to which I before alluded, he speaks of their defiling the temple of God.