visited with all the severity of justice; and the atrocious contrivers and deluded participators are involved in one common condemnation. The guilt of this blood still lies upon them and on their children! It has followed them in the destruction of their temple, the subversion of their government, the dispersion, and disgrace, and persecution of their people. They have been "driven from before the face of the Lord," and "scattered among all people from the one end of the earth even unto the other." Marked, like the first murderer, at once for preservation and for punishment, their name and their disgrace have been perpetuated together, and they have been retained, in the midst of every Christian nation, as witnesses against themselves, and in favour of that dispensation, which their mad and rebellious opposition contributed, under the providence of God, to establish. It is natural that we should ask, why this undistinguishing severity has been exercised? Why the mercy extended to sins of ignorance in other cases has been here denied, and an offence, apparently marked with very unequal shades of atrocity, has been visited with equal and indiscriminate punishment ? In the narratives of our blessed Lord's previous ministry, we shall find at once an answer to this question, and an important lesson to ourselves, on the danger of trusting our conduct even to the suggestions of conscience, if we have not been careful to inform that conscience aright, and to establish, upon the solid foundation of Scripture, our rule of faith, and our principles of action.

The Chief Priests and Scribes, in their opposition to the Gospel, were influenced by motives of private interest and ambition, as well as by feelings of personal enmity to our Lord. In the establishment of his authority, they saw the ruin of their own; and, conscious that the continuance of their temporal existence, as a nation, was suspended upon the proof of his divine mission, they found cause of alarm and jealousy in the miracles by which it was attested, and urged as arguments for his destruction, the mighty works which they ought to have received as evidences of his divinity. "What do we? for this man doeth many miracles and if we let him alone, all men will go after him, and the Romans shall come, and shall take away both our place and nation.” Under this apprehension, we find them stimulating the zeal of the people and the jealousy of the government; and by alternate charges of blasphemy and treason, advanced in malice, and supported by perjury, succeeding at last in their diabolical conspiracy, and triumphing in the anticipated fall of their victim. With cruel and bitter irony repelling the self-condemned apostate, who mourns too late the innocent blood he has betrayed, and with a scrupulous or hypocritical evasion, refusing to appropriate to pious uses the money which they had not hesitated to apply to purposes the most atrocious and inhuman. In contemplating such a train of iniquities, crowned and completed with so dreadful an imprecation, we contemplate a picture of depravity unequalled in the history of man; and we look for the accomplishment of a judgment thus audaciously invoked and impiously defied. In the conduct of the Jewish populace, however, we see

some circumstances of extenuation. Led by the influence and authority of their rulers, zealous for their law, which they are taught to think endangered by the doctrines of this new teacher; fearful of again provoking the severity of an arbitrary government, they seem to have acted under impressions of religion, however mistaken, and of loyalty, however misapplied. Why then do we see them involved in one common punishment with the leaders and instigators of the crime? why, for a mere error in judgment (if it be no more,) sentenced to national reprobation, and condemned under the very sanction of the law which it was the object of their blind zeal to maintain? Because they wilfully and perversely rejected a revelation impressed upon their senses by repeated and miraculous evidence; because they listened to the suggestions of pride, and prejudice, and interest, in opposition to the dictates of reason, and conscience, and truth. Because their wild and capricious levity led them to desert and prosecute the Master, whose authority they had acknowledged, and whose benefits they had received; and within the short space of one week after their acclamations had hailed his triumphal entrance into the Holy City, as the chosen and anointed of the Lord, to pursue him to a cruel and ignominious death, as a traitor and a blasphemer. Because their obstinate prejudice resisted the testimony of innocence, which extorted the assent even of a foreigner and a heathen, and clamoured for mercy to a wretch loaded with every crime, while it unmercifully and unrelentingly thirsted for the blood of the Son of God!

Before we enter upon the comparison which we propose, as our more immediate subject, we would apply the warning which this awful example affords of the necessity of rightly informing the conscience, ere we venture to trust implicitly to its direction. Here we have an instance of a most atrocious crime, committed, not only without compunction or remorse, but with all the complacency of self-approbation; the passions and apparent interests impressing a bias upon the judgment, which completely warps the rectitude of its decisions, and leads to a literal fulfilment of the Prophet's description, putting evil for good, and good for evil. How far this erroneous direction of the conscience may justify an action in the sight of God, and ignorance be admitted as an apology for guilt, it is important, and happily not difficult, to ascertain. It is evident, that sin is not imputable where ignorance is unavoidable; but it is not less evident, that if either negligence, prejudice, or vice, prevent our acquisition of the knowledge within our reach, such ignorance will not be admitted as an excuse, but will rather operate as an aggravation of our offences. Our Lord himself warns us of this, in predicting the sufferings which the malice or ignorance of their Jewish or Heathen persecutors would inflict upon him and his disciples. All these things will they do unto you for my name's sake, because they know not him that sent me. If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloke for their sin. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and

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hated both me and my Father," To us, whose lot is cast in these latter and brighter days, this warning is not less applicable. To the aids for a right direction of the conscience are equally accessible, and we may be assured that a neglect of them will be equally fatal. The Holy Scriptures, those treasures of divine knowledge, are open to all who do not wilfully refuse them; open in the language of their country or of their choice, and attainable upon the cheapest and easiest terms. Upon many of us the sacred precepts which they contain are impressed in childhood, inculcated in youth, enforced in public exhortation, or urged in private advice. The evidence which to former generations was progressive is to us complete; and therefore, if we continue in darkness, if we reject the light of divine truth, or pervert the rules of moral virtue; if we prefer our passions to our duty, or if we persist, under the plea of submission to an infallible Church, in following the dictates of an erroneous conscience, while we possess, in the written Word of God, ample means for rectifying such errors, we assume the whole guilt of wilful and deliberate disobedience; and we appropriate to ourselves the awful condemnation, that we have chosen darkness rather than light, because our deeds, or at least our inclinations were evil.

We shall now proceed to enquire how far our own history will admit of a parallel with that which we have been considering: It is an awful and alarming charge to any people bearing the Christian name, that they have incurred, however indirectly, the guilt of such an imprecation. But if such a charge be capable of proof-if, moreover, it can be shewn to have been brought even by an inspired Apostle against professing Christians, it is surely the duty and the interest of every individual professor very seriously and impartially to examine, how far, and in what circumstances, it is applicable to himself.

The direct offence to which the Apostle imputes the guilt implied by this imprecation, (and which he designates, in another place, by the remarkable expression of crucifying the Son of God afresh,) is that of the Christians of his own time, who, through fear, or interest, or inconstancy, apostatized from their holy faith, denied the Saviour who had bought them with his blood, and returned to all those idolatries and abominations from which it had been one great object of his mission to rescue them. This is the wilful sin so emphatically denounced as hopeless and unpardonable;-not, we are to observe, from any defect of mercy in the Deity, for of his mercy there can be no end-but from the folly and infatuation of man in rejecting the medium through which that mercy is offered. To those who sinned wilfully after having received the knowledge of the truth; who, against their own convictions, abjured the profession of their religion, and dared the unmitigated judgment of their God, there remained no more sacrifice for sin, because “ they had crucified the Son of God afresh, and counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith they were sanctified, an unholy thing, and done despite unto the Spirit of Grace." Therefore, the blood, whose saving efficacy they had despised, should rise against them for condemnation; and the

Spirit, whose mighty evidence they had resisted, and whose divine suggestions they had quenched, should leave them to the guidance of their own wild and wayward imaginations!

Such was the guilt, and such the punishment of those early apostates. Such is the guilt, and such, as it appears from Scripture, will be the punishment of their imitators in every age of the world. It is important also to observe, that the offence thus denounced by the Apostle, was attended with palliations which cannot now be pleaded. The Christian then, as now, was called upon to chuse between the world on the one hand, and the Gospel on the other. But the former was invested with temptations, and the latter encompassed with difficulties, of which the experience of modern Christian communities affords no parallel. In the world which the early Christian was commanded to renounce, were included, "father, and mother, and brethren, and sisters, and wife, and children, and lands,”—yea, and even life itself! Opinions endeared by custom and education, affections entwined with his very nature, interests interwoven with all his hopes and views of earthly happiness! The way was not only straight, but rough not only narrow, but thorny. The kingdom of Heaven was to be entered, not only through the grave and gate of death, but through the flames of persecution, and the agonies of martyrdom. The cross, which we are called upon to bear but metaphorically, was then literally laid upon the followers of Christ, and the renunciation of every blessing in this world was required as the condition of salvation in the next.

When the intermissions of pagan severity released the Christian from these fiery trials of his faith, it was assaulted in another mode of warfare more dangerous, because more disguised. The universal relaxation of pagan morals rendered the yoke of evangelical virtue peculiarly strict and galling; and the surrender of every dear and domestic connection was often necessary to preserve the integrity of the Christian's hope, and the purity of his character. The world also was at variance with the religion of Christ, not only in its influence upon the mind of man, but in the more obvious and palpable warfare of hostile laws and institutions. It was not enough that the Christian subject punctually rendered unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's: he was often called upon to profane the temple of his God, and to prove the sincerity of his allegiance to his earthly master, by a violation of allegiance to his Master in Heaven. The powers of this world were in league with the powers of darkness in opposition to the Gospel of truth, and every human motive, and every natural affection, and every earthly interest, was opposed to the views, and the hopes, and the interests of eternity.

In the subsequent diffusion and establishment of our holy religion, and the fulfilment of the divine prediction, that kings should become the nursing fathers, and queens the nursing mothers of the church, the nature of the Christian warfare has undergone a change, and the virtue which stood unmoved against the storms of persecution, has been tried by the enervating sunshine of prosperity. Happy were it if we could say that it has

as well sustained the trial! But our personal experience, as well as our more extended observation, must convince us, that with the privilege of a free profession, the generality of Christians have too little maintained the power and influence of the Gospel. Glorying in the high title of Temples of the Lord, and guardians of the ark of his holy covenant, we have too confidently appropriated the distinction, without feeling the weight of the corresponding obligations and boasting the possession of a perfect rule in the law of our great High Priest, and an immaculate example in his life, we have been too often contented to walk only according to the course of this world, and to follow the impulses of the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience.

Let us not here be hastily accused of too darkly colouring the picture of the Christian world, or supposed to deny the existence of much that is excellent, and the promise (we trust) of much more, in the state of Christian society among ourselves. It would be a libel upon our holy religion to say that it has done nothing for mankind in the visible improvement of morals, and that the operation of its sacred leaven has not been evident even from the first, in the diffusion of sounder principles and a purer practice than the fairest periods of antiquity exhibited. But we dare not rest in the self-complacency of this view, while we still read the awful warning of our Lord, that "wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereat:"-neither should we rashly congratulate ourselves upon our safer and more prosperous position, or suppose that we are no longer, like our brethren of old, in the midst of an enemy's camp, while we find on record the apostolic declaration, that "the friendship of the world is enmity with God."

It is by this friendship of the world, that the Christian is now too commonly tried, as he was in the primitive times by its hostility. It is by this friendship that he may be led to a literal or a practical apostacy from his faith, and taught, in the presumption of human reason, to deny the Lord who bought him, or in the indigence of impure and unholy affections, to bring disgrace upon his profession. To cause his Saviour's name to be blasphemed through his disobedience, and in his life to dishonour and defy the God on whom he boasts his dependence for salvation. When all this is done, as it too often is, under the influence of a seared or a paralyzed conscience-when the god of this world hath blinded the minds of those who believe not, and hid from them the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ-when the faculty of reason which a gracious God has bestowed, is used to subvert his authority, or to disprove his existence-when powers of persuasion, or of argument, which might have turned many to righteousness, are employed to recruit the kingdom of Satan; when affections, which in their pure and legitimate exercise, seem given to perfect the soul for the beatitude of a seraphic state, are debased to the mean and corrupt pursuits of a selfish and sensual life-when faith in the blood of the covenant is ridiculed as a delusion, and trust in the guidance of the Spirit of God, stigmatized as enthusiasm and folly-when no touch of com