his people; so from the time of the delivery of the Law, until the time of their actual settlement in Canaan, his visible church never ceased to be established among the Jews, not even while resident in the wilderness. Now it may justly be presumed of such a Law, that being the proper work of a Divine legislator, for whatever purpose it was intended, it must have been complete and perfect; and therefore, from the moment of its delivery, a just representation of the future Jewish constitution both in church and state. Considered too as the revelation of the will of God to his creatures, placed in the specific relation of the members of his church on earth; it could not but be an adequate standard both of their faith and their practice, as equally subject to the Divine will and appointment beforehand; it must have supplied as plenary a knowledge of all that the Head of the church might require of its members whether to believe or to do, as would suffice to render the comers thereunto perfect, and to leave them ignorant of nothing which they might be concerned to know for the sake of their duty, and in order to their acceptance.

The very design proposed by the owner in the conversion of a part of his estate into a vineyard, required that the vineyard, when formed, should be let out to proper persons to be cultivated in his stead; and the very selection of Judæa as the local habitation of the church upon earth, required that a particular community should be placed in possession of that country, as the congregation of that church. A visible church without a visible congregation, and a visible congregation without a visible and local

habitation upon earth, would be a nonentity. The vineyard was provided for the husbandmen before the husbandmen were found for the vineyard; and the land of Judæa had already been selected, and set apart to be the habitation of the church on earth, long before the Jews, as a nation, were ready to be settled there. The choice of the husbandmen to be the possessors and cultivators of his vineyard, rested of course with the owner; and the choice and selection of any one nation to be the possessors of his church on earth, distinctly from the rest, could be made only by God. And as the appointment of the husbandmen, under such circumstances, to the possession of his vineyard, was so far gratuitous on the part of the owner; so was the call of Abraham, in the first place, and the establishment of his posterity in their peculiar relation to God, in the next, simply the effect of the grace of God. Abraham did not choose God, but God chose Abraham; and obedience to the call of God, for ought which we know to the contrary, might be the first step to his turning to God and as to his posterity, notwithstanding

i Philo Judæus was plainly of opinion that Abraham before his call, was not a worshipper of the true God; De Nobilitate, Operum ii. 441. 43: τοῦ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἔθνους ὁ πρεσβύτατος, γένους μὲν ἦν Χαλδαίου, πατρὸς δὲ ἀστρονομικοῦ, τῶν περὶ τὰ μαθήματα διατριβόντων, οἳ τοὺς ἀστέρας θεοὺς νομίζουσι, καὶ τὸν σύμπαντα οὐρανόν τε καὶ κόσμον. Cf. ibid. page 11. line 47, et sqq.; De Abrahamo: and 417. line 36 sqq. De Præmiis et Pœnis.

Suidas also, under the name of 'Aßpaàμ, has a gloss to this effect : Οτι ἤρξατο ἡ εἰδωλολατρεία ἀπὸ Σερούχ ἕως τῶν χρόνων Θάρρα τοῦ πατρὸς ̓Αβραὰμ, κ, τ. λ.

The present is not the time, nor place, to enter upon such a question as this, whether the father of the faithful before his call, was a worshipper of the host of heaven, as it is implied in

their designation to be the people of God, from the time of the call of their progenitor-the fulfilment

the first of these testimonies, or an idolater, according to the second. The only passage of scripture, which seems to countenance either of these opinions, is Joshua xxiv. 2: "And Joshua "said unto all the people, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, 66 even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor; "and they served other gods." So likewise, verses 14 and 15. If the teraphim, spoken of as the gods of Laban, which Rachel is said to have taken away by stealth, Gen. xxxi. 19. 34, 35. (Cf. 30. 32.) or those strange gods, which had got into the family of Jacob, and were put away by his command, after his return from Padan-aram, Gen. xxxv. 2. 4: were these gods of their fathers; it is probable that they were images, and therefore that the species of false religion to which they were addicted, was not that of the worship of the stars, but idolatry. It is very observable, however, that no mention is made of Abraham as well as of Terah, in this allusion to the ancestors of the Jews who had served other gods, beyond the river, while they were still there. Nor is there any text in scripture that even by implication, and much less directly, asserts that Abraham himself was an idolater in any sense, before his call: whatever his family might be.

And with respect to the worship of other gods, as laid to the charge of the ancestors of the Jews beyond the flood, it would by no means follow that the, knowledge or worship of the true God, was already lost and extinct among them, because it was not exclusive, or still uncombined with any species of idolatry or false religion. There is abundance of proof in the subsequent history of the patriarchs, that the knowledge of the true God in their time, was more or less retained among the inhabitants of Canaan, among the Philistines, and in Egypt. Laban indeed may appear to distinguish the God of the father of Jacob (that is, the God of Isaac or of Abraham) Gen. xxxi. 29: from his own god, or gods; but verse 53, in the same chapter, he speaks of the God of Abraham, as the God of Nachor, and the God of their father, that is, the God of Terah also. As the God of Nachor he would be the God of Laban also; and it is

of this dispensation in their behalf at last was so independent of their own concurrence, that if their ancestors had known little of God, before their separation from among the idolaters beyond the river, their posterity retained as faint a recollection of him, at the very time when the first step was taken for their deliverance from Egypt, and from among the idolaters in that countryk.

The commission of the vineyard to the husbandmen was preceded by the preliminary stipulation usual in such cases; according to which, the husbandmen, so long as they continued in possession of the vineyard, bound themselves to respect the rights of the owner, and the owner, so long as they continued to respect his rights, bound himself to retain them in possession of his vineyard. The existence of a covenant between God and the Jews is too notorious a fact to require any proof. It is more important to observe, with respect to this particular circumstance in the real history answering to the fictitious-that as the covenant of the owner was made with the husbandmen before they were put in possession of his vineyard; so was the covenant of God made with the Jews, before they were placed in possession of the promised land, and of the relation of the members of

quite clear, from Genesis xxiv. that in the time of Bethuel, the father of Laban, the knowledge of the Lord, as such, or of the one true God, was not confined to a single branch of the family of Terah, the line of Abraham-but was equally familiar to the other, the line of Nachor.

k Exod. viii. 26; xii. 12; xxxii. 1. 4. 8: Levit. xvii. 7; xviii. 3: Numb. xxxiii. 4; cf. xxxii. 17: Joshua xxiv. 14: 2 Kings xii. 28: Ezekiel xx. 7, 8. 18. 24; xxiii. 3: Acts vii. 39-43 : Cf. Amos v. 25, 26.

the visible church; and as the continuance of the husbandmen in that possession depended upon the observance of their original contract, so did the continuance of the Jews in the relation so acquired, on the fulfilment of the covenant by which they acquired it. That this covenant was concluded at Horeb, at the time of the delivery of the Law, Moses being the mediator between God and the people; that it was a covenant of promises on the one hand, founded on condition of performances on the other; that the substance of the covenant on both sides amounted to this, that God should be exclusively their God, and they should be exclusively his people1; that conse

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The substance of the covenant in question is summed up in such texts as these: Exodus vi. 7: “And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God." Exodus xix. 5, 6: "Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure " unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine. And ye “shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation." The first of these declarations was made immediately after the first appearance of Moses before Pharaoh, in quality of the person commissioned to demand and effect the deliverance of the people of the Lord, from among the Egyptians: the second, immediately after the arrival at mount Sinai. The answer of the people to that overture is recorded in these words, Exodus xix. 8: "And all the people answered together, and said, All that "the LORD hath spoken we will do." Cf. xxiv. 3. 7, 8.

The fact of the formal conclusion of this covenant, by which God became their God, and they became his people, on such stipulated terms, with that generation of the Jews, who came out of Egypt, exclusively, is insisted on, expressly, at Deuteronomy, v. 2, 3: "The LORD our God made a covenant with us in "Horeb. The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, "but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day."

And that the covenant thus solemnly concluded with the fathers, the representatives of the nation at that time, was to be considered as concluded with every generation of their posterity,