salvation-the total depravity of man, and the necessity of his being born again by the quickening power of the Holy Ghost are alike neutralised by the attempt at putting the new piece to the old garment. "The rent is worse." There is "a form [or outline] of knowledge and truth in the law." It tended to show man the inapproachableness of God, and his distance from God; it tended to produce a fear of God, although a slavish one. But when the breach of the law was attempted to be healed by making grace supplementary to the law, thus virtually casting contempt upon the riches of God's grace, both law and grace perished together; and the result is that conventional righteousness which makes the will of man and not the will of God to be the arbiter of right and wrong. The other attempt at forcing men who know not Christ to act on the principles of Christ, being necessarily modified by the desire to produce a present result, has issued in that anomaly-a Christian World-the wine lost because the reality and power of Christian principle is entirely lost-"the bottles perish,” for the world is ignorant of its condemnation by the very fact of its being recognised as Christian. How entirely the mass is leavened, has ever been forced on the conscience of those, who, in their endeavour to maintain "a conscience void of offence towards God and towards men," have, through this strange entanglement, found fealty to Christ regarded as turbulence to the state or society, and obedience to constituted authority impli cating them with falsehood and superstition. Religious acts have been enforced by civil authority and civil acts, the most foreign to the Spirit of Christ, stamped with his name. The end of all this confusion is fearful judgment; as it is written, that thou "shouldest destroy them which destroy or corrupt the earth."

We find another force of the word leaven (Matthew xvi. 6). In this passage it is that which leavens, rather than the process of leavening, which appears most prominent. Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed, and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees." The ignorance of the disciples has furnished us with the sense in which the word leaven is here

used.

"Then understood they how he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees." This doctrine is at the root of all false religion. It is the demand of man's mind to subject God to his mind, by asking other credentials of himself, than those he is pleased at the time to give. Thus Jesus Himself, the actual "sign" so long since predicted, even Immanuel, proving his mission by the most astounding miracles, is asked for a sign from heaven. The Pharisaic formalist and intellectual Sadducee alike agree in this, to have a God according to their own thoughts-a God who shall uphold them in their good opinion of themselves. The Lord draws not the line between them, but classes both under the phrase, “a wicked and adulterous generation," to whom no further sign should be given than that of Jonas the prophet, the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Himself. "He left them and departed.". But the leaven is still the same, working in persons apparently the most oppoposite-it is the grand prevalent doctrine of unbelief, that the will of man, and not the will of God, is to decide what God is and what God ought to do, even when it is a question of the salvation of a sinner.

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and

"A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump" is applied to morals (in 1 Cor. v.) and to doctrine (Gal. v. 9); and solemn is the warning. In a congregation of Christians there can be hardly such a thing as the sin of an individual only affecting himself. Looking diligently, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, thereby many be defiled." And so of false doctrine-all are liable to mistakes and errors, and even to intellectual difficulties; but these will not amount to false doctrine, until, in the pride of his mind, a person thinks he is going to set others right, or in the spirit of party, seeks to draw away disciples after him, then their word doth eat as a canker."

The passage, 1 Cor. v. 6-8, is of instructive interest; because it so fully recognises the two aspects of the Church-its unleavened aspect-" as ye are unleavened"; in its presentation in Christ before God, and its actual aspect, as that wherein leaven is recognised as being

"Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump." In the one aspect, it can ever be said, "God hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath He seen perverseness in Israel"; in the other, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." To the understanding of man it appears a strange thing, that perfect acceptance with God should be compatible with the idea of the Lord Himself trying the heart and searching the reins. But it is all plain to faith—and the righteous live only by faith-of what Christ is, and what he is in Christ. In Christ he sees the Church as "unleavened," and the holy discipline of God is ever unto this one object-that the actual condition of believers may more correspond to their true condition as accepted in the beloved. 66 Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened; for even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."

There is such a thing as Christian attainment, but is not the attainment of a standing before God; that is given to us in Christ Jesus. "By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand." But there is attainment in the soul's progress in conformity to this standing so wondrously given to us. This attainment was the desire of the Apostle (Phil. chap. iii.), and in this his language must ever have been so long as he was in the flesh-"not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect"-for nothing would satisfy the cravings of his soul until he actually was in that perfect conformity to Christ, for which he had been apprehended of Christ. In this respect, the way of God is so different from our way, and so pre-eminently above it. It is objective. He holds out to us what He by his grace has already made us to be in Christ; and whilst thus comely in the comeliness which He has put upon us, there is ever the danger of our trusting in our beauty, as though we had anything out of Christ. In his infinite wisdom, whilst perfectly knowing the inward craving of the soul

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after that perfectness which is ours in Christ He Himself, by the searching probe of His word, discovers to us all that we are in ourselves-our folly, vileness and ignorance. In doing this, he makes us, in peaceful calmness, increasingly value the word, as ye are unleavened"-at the very time he addresses to us the word, "Purge out, therefore, the old leaven."-PRESBUTES.

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A SOLEMN THOUGHT.

IF the hour of our translation be not soon, there will be a generation arise of much hardier, flinty, material, than I and many others, are; a band of martyr-men, who surrender the world and face the power of it, with decided hearts. We wonder at some of the qualities which marked the generation that went before us. We wonder, for instance, that George Whitfield could have. remained in the establishment, and that Church-truth and prophetic or Jewish truth was not better discerned than it was; that confusion and uncleanness were so sanctioned. But a generation may come after us, who will wonder that, with the heavenly truths we know (and in which they will agree) hardness was not better endured, and vigour and zeal were not more put forth.

FRAGMENTS.

THE life which we lead here below is full of changes; one must live very close to God if one is to preserve the equilibrium in one's soul, and to rejoice in those things which pain, as a man, one's heart, as seeing them in the light of the will of God our Father.

THE state of many persons, at the present time, recalls to mind the malediction pronounced upon him that staid himself upon an arm of flesh Jer. xvi. He shall not see when good cometh.

NO XXVIII.

ROMANS XI. 1—22.

THE question here is this-Has God rejected His people?

That He has not, is proved

1st. Because there is an election, as in the days of the prophet: the rest are blinded.

2ndly. Because, if they have stumbled, it was not that they might fall, but that salvation might be accorded to the Gentiles. Observe, the Apostle does not say to some Gentiles, but to the Gentiles; and that the Gentiles, and not some Gentiles, are put in contrast with the Jews. Certainly it is not some elect Gentiles in contrast with some elect Jews; but the Gentiles in contrast with the Jews. Therefore, the Apostle says, that the rejection of these last is the reconciliation of the world. So that the Apostle tells us that the Gentiles and the world have been placed, since the fall of the Jews, in a new relationship God-ward to that in which they were previously. It is not the question whether they were all made effectually partakers of the benefits of that relationship; but the thing itself had taken place.

The third proof is that, when the fulness of the Gentiles shall be come in, then all Israel, Israel as a nation, shall be saved, and that at the return of Christ. When Paul speaks "to you Gentiles," he does not say, To you, Gentile believers; for he adds "Inasmuch as I am Apostle of the Gentiles." Was he Apostle to the Gentile believers? Clearly not; he was Apostle of the Gentiles in the sense of Gentiles in contrast with Jews, with the circumcision of which Peter was the Apostle. Moreover, verse 13 precedes verse 25, where he says "My brethren." In the 13th and following verses, he is occupied with salvation granted to the Gentiles, and with the reconciliation of the world as a doctrine, and not with a warning to his brethren.

The more one examines the passage, the more is it evident that the interpretation which applies it to the existing economy, considered in the light of the call of the Gentiles, and which makes it to be a warning to the