ized the establishment of the Jewish dispensation; what are such things, to the crucifixion of the Son of God, and to all that followed it of mercy and of wrath-and to all of both, that is yet to come! 7. It is this Gospel Church which we now behold, with its Sabbath, its Sacraments, its divine Scriptures, its pure faith, its spiritual worship, its holy life, its Elders, its Teachers, its Congregations, its assemblies, its divine Lord! Upon us, after so many centuries, has come this dispensation of the Kingdom of God with power, which succeeded the Ascension of the Lord. The followers of Jesus are gathered out of all nations. The promised Comforter abides with us.' The last days still continue; the last manifestation, and the most complete, of God's grace in saving sinners. And they shall all continue until he whose right it is, shall come and shall take the Kingdom. And while they continue, whosoever will call on the name of the Lord, shall be saved. Here, as in each preceding case, it is a new development of the same Kingdom, as distinct from all that went before, as they were from each other; and here, as always before, the same fundamental characteristics are not only preserved, but are more and more distinct. Assuredly it is more obvious now, than it could have been under any former dispensation, that it is the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ; that this Church is not coincident with the world, but is taken out of it; that each successive dispensation as it gives new grace, new duties, and new powers, at the same time makes the Church more distinctly separate, and consecrates it more completely to Christ. Nor does the history of mankind since the establishment of the Gospel Church, permit us to doubt, that the steadfast power with which the providence of God conducts all things, has made the career of his Church the most distinct element in the career of man, and has made the destiny of all things dependent on hers. In the fate of Egypt, in the fate of the nations cut off by Israel, and in the fate of apostate Israel herself, all men may read the fate of all the nations that forget God, and of every power that exalts itself against Christ. 8. We need not be in doubt concerning that sublime future of the Church of God, which is hastening upon us-for which 1 John, xiv. 16, 26; xv. 26; xvi. 7. Joel, ii. 28-32; Zech., xii. 9-12; Acts, ii. 16-21. the world is so little prepared, and of which it takes so little thought. It will come in its appointed time-it will not tarry. The whole analogy of all the past dealings of God, and the constant declarations of his word, teach us sufficiently that while the great principles which underlie the whole scheme of his grace and providence, will be preserved in all their fulness, and applied with increased distinctness and force; it might and since he has said so it will be under new and still more glorious forms, that these sublime principles will be exhibited and applied. They who sit calmly and silently by, listening to that wonderful discourse in which Jehovah disclosed to Abraham the nature and extent of his covenant with him, and sealed all his promises with the sacrament of circumcision: must needs make an almost infinite progression, before they can hear and realize those loud hallelujahs, which will fill the universe, when the Kingdom is delivered up on the Lamb's Book of Life. Still it is the very same Kingdom; and the grand principles which distinguished its feeblest beginnings, are the same which will be illustrated in its supreme consummation, and its eternal glory. Forevermore it will be Christ, and his saints, and a Kingdom composed of them. 9. What I have attempted is, to appreciate the fundamental idea of the Church of the living God, and to that end to disclose its elemental principles, and then to trace in an unbroken course, the divine procedure whereby these principles have yielded to us, the Gospel Church as it this day stands before us. The people of God, considered in their union with Christ, and in their communion with each other through their mutual communion with him, on one side; and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of God's Elect, the only Head, Lawgiver, and King in Zion, on the other; these are the two terms upon which the great problem rests. Between them are the will, and power, and providence of God, developing these two elements through a long course of ages, and a succession of dispensations; and the result is the Gospel Church State, a distinct, divine institute. Of this, Messiah is the Prince, and all his brethren, brethren to each other, are the members. Separate from the world, its mission is the reconquest of the world. Its end is the illustration of the perfections of God, to his own infinite glory, in the everlasting blessedness of the redeemed. CHAPTER XX. THE NATURE AND END OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD: WITH THE MEANS OF ESTIMATING BOTH. I. 1. The Perpetuity of the fundamental Ordinances of the Church of God.-2. Historical Means of appreciating the Nature and End of the Kingdom of Christ.-3. Practical Means.-4. Prophetical Means.-5. Ethical Means.-II. 1. The Church of Christ is a Kingdom whose Nature is exclusively Spiritual.-2. The peculiar Form of that Spirituality: Sinners saved by Grace.-3. It is an Everlasting Kingdom.-4. It is to be a Universal Kingdom.-5. Witness Bearing for Christ, the special Mission of the Gospel Church.-6. The immediate Object of this is, the Extension and Perfection of the Kingdom itself.-7. Infinite Freedom and Fitness of the Gospel Offer.-8. The Form and Action of the Church in extending and perfecting itself, illustrates its own Nature and End, as well as the Nature of God's Being and Grace.-9. The obligatory Force of the divine Organization of the Church thus developed: Its Relation to Faith and to Morals.-10. Resources of the Church in perfecting and extending herself: These are Marks of her Nature and End.-11. The Position of false Professors and Sects, with reference to the Visible Church.-12. The Relation of the Infant Seed of Believers to the Visible Church. I. 1.—I HAVE shown that the entire organization of the Church of God is produced from within outwardly, and has been obtained under the successive and special ordinations of God, by the direction which he gave, from time to time, to the elemental principles which constituted his own idea of his Kingdom. I have also pointed out more incidentally how the Church, under each successive form of it, casting off whatever was peculiar only to the preceding dispensation, has preserved through all dispensations every outward mark responsive to its own absolute nature, which was ever bestowed on it by God. The Sabbath ordained by God at the creation, and ordained afresh as part of the Moral Law at Sinai, endures in its divine force. The worship of God by bloody sacrifices statedly practised from the fall of man, observed by all the patriarchs, erected into the form of a sacrament in the Passover, and thoroughly incorporated with the daily life of the Church under the Mosaic dispensation; so found its consummation in the sacrifice of the Son of God, that the one offering of himself by which he hath perfected forever them that are sanctified, is the living way whereby alone we can enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.1 The sacraments, though their form be changed, are even more distinctly signs and seals of the Covenant of Grace than they were when first given to the Church. The will of God made known to us by his most holy word, is just the same infallible rule of our faith and our obedience, as when it was personally addressed by God to the ancient saints, or when it was communicated in visions, made known by heavenly messengers, or spoken by inspired Prophets and Apostles. Divine ordinances of worship, of instruction, and of rule, however their form may vary under successive dispensations, have always been of the very essence of the visible Church-have always sprung from God himself-have always been grounded in the exclusive headship of Christ in the Church, in the union and communion of his saints with him, in their communion with each other, and in his rejection of the world and their separation from it. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil, were the emphatic words of the Lord Jesus; Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.* 2. We possess in the sacred Scriptures a plain account of the progress of this divine Kingdom on earth, from the fall of man till about the close of the first century of the Christian era, covering a period of forty-one centuries. The subsequent progress of this Kingdom for seventeen centuries and a half, to our own day, is preserved in its own annals, in the records of those who have hated and sought to destroy it, and in the testimonies of those nations which have lived side by side with it through all generations; some of which also precede the advent of Christ by many centuries, and some were coincident with his life, and with the first ages of the Gospel Church. We have its history from the origin of time and of man to the present moment: and of all that has existed on earth this is true concerning it alone. In the age of the Apostles themselves it seems to have penetrated the mass of all human society, and to have found its way to the ends of the earth; and through innumerable vicissitudes, in defiance of perpetual persecution, and notwithstanding its own terrible corruptions and apostacies, it finds itself recognized, after 1 Heb., x. 10-20. 2 Matt., v. 17-20. eighteen centuries, by the predominant nations and races of mankind, as a divine Kingdom upon which are staked the highest interests of man and the greatest glory of God. We have means thoroughly complete of estimating its nature and its progress. 3. Invested with such a history, it is living before our faces, the most important and the most wide-spread of all existing institutions. Rent, indeed, in many ways, when casually observed; manifested under various forms, more or less inconsistent with each other; exhibiting in its separate parts an extreme variety of condition, from one of fierce persecution by the world up to one of pampered luxury-from one of earnest struggling for the truth down to one of hopeless indifference concerning Christ. But this diversified state of things affords us the more ample materials for an enlightened judgment, concerning that true and wonderful commonwealth of the saints, which has survived the endless convulsions in which all other institutions have perished, and which seems not only to be established in the heart of all existing civilization, but to be the very parent and nurse of it all. 4. Moreover, to enlarge and rectify our appreciation, alike of this vast history both divine and human, and of this boundless existing manifestation, we are furnished in the Scriptures with the prophetic history of this city of God to the end of time. If we choose to allege that the prophecies which constitute so large a part of the divine word, are wrested and misapplied by the most of those who have expounded them; this only leaves to us a greater mass of history yet to be enacted, the whole of which we must take some account of, in forming our judgment of the absolute nature, the total progress, and the ultimate destiny of the Messianic Kingdom. In every such attempt we have this immense advantage, that besides knowing what is past, and seeing what exists, we are instructed also concerning what is to come.1 5. There are, however, means still surer than those already pointed out-complete as they appear to be-of estimating the nature and end of that Kingdom of God whose divine idea and elemental principles I have endeavoured to trace in the preceding chapter. God has himself defined everything for us. He has not only caused the detailed history of his Church for four 1 |