However the reverend teacher may have discovered some necessity or political expediency to induce him now and then to yield to the Mammonian influence in the church, these are admirable sentiments, and are amply sufficient to confirm our great principle, that in this controversy

THE TESTIMONY OF THE GOSPEL IS ALL IN ALL.

SECTION III.

THE CHRISTIAN DISPENSATION.

You will find, Christian reader, that the difference which subsists between us and our opponents here, is to be found in the fact, that they treat Christianity as a Religion, and a great mystery, and we speak of it as a Dispensation. To remove everything like ambiguity and complexity from these terms, let it be observed, that the word, Dispensation, we employ as conveying the idea of a particular system; a distinct order of things; having its own elementary principles, its own peculiar laws, nature, direction, and destiny. By the term Christian dispensation, we mean that system, or order of things, which the Son of God, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, proffered and propounded to the human race; the elementary principles, properties, and laws of which are to be found in the writings of the Evangelists.

Let it be further stated, that the elements, principles, and laws of the Christian dispensation, are not only, sui generis, all divine; they are not only anomalous to the elements, principles, and laws of the world in which we live; but they go further; they are practically, radically, and essentially, regenerating, redeeming, correc

tive; and they refer to time, as well as to eternity. As the good physician applies himself to the diseased body, so the Physician of souls offers his Dispensation, as remedial to a distempered world.

How the world became degenerated and depraved? Why the Lord God Almighty has not been pleased to cleanse it with a breath?—are queries into which we presume not to enter. The fact of our fallen state as human beings, and the fact of a scheme of deliverance being wrought out for us, as human beings, by the Lord Jesus Christ, these are the grounds upon which we take our stand.

It is of the utmost importance to remember, that the Christian Dispensation is offered to mankind, and to every man, in his twofold capacity:-first, as a being for time, and afterwards as a creature destined to live throughout all eternity; and, furthermore, that the laws, the precepts, the practical principles of this Dispensation, must be for the government of mankind, and every in time.

man,

Our spiritual masters and pastors generally wrap themselves up in their mysteries-they overlook this momentous distinction—and so speculate, spiritualize, and sublimate the whole economy of the Christian Dispensation for time, as to make it barren of good works, and useless as a compendium of righteous morality. This they do, because, under the cloak thus produced, they can indulge their cupidity, their covetousness, their

C

attachment to the things of Mammon. They are willing to forget how utterly irreconcilable are the services of God and Mammon, and resist the force of the evangelical declaration, that "the friendship of this world is enmity with God."

Keeping this important distinction always in mind, we shall easily see how it is, that the most distinguished Christians of our day contrive to accomplish the alleged impossibility of serving both God and Mammon at one and the same time. They serve, or affect to serve, God as religionists, or as spiritualized persons, for all purposes that have respect to heaven and to a future state. But as worldlings, and creatures of time and sense, how can they help themselves? They must go with the tide, the current, the stream, on which they float; and being consecrated conservatives of the system-that is, the system, as we shall soon see, which has Mammon for its deity-how can they venture on resistance to its laws? Oh! the truth is plain enough, fellow Christian,-but where the remedy for such a mongrel, adulterous, and complicated state of things is, is not so plain. Never mind! The Lord of the Christian Dispensation is in his holy place; he sitteth between the cherubim and seraphim.

Christianity is said to be the Religion of the people. Now let us turn to our Bibles to ascertain the full meaning of this word, Religion.

The word Religion does not occur once in the Old

Testament; in the New it occurs five times. The Apostle Paul, in his address to Agrippa, of the period when he was a persecutor of the Christians, says,"After the straitest sect of our religion, I lived a Pharisee." And then, after his conversion, he writes thus to the Galatians,-" Ye have heard of my conversation after the Jews' religion, how that, beyond measure, I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it, and profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own nation."

After Paul, the Apostle James-the radical Apostle James-when urging the professors of the faith of his day to be doers of the word, and not hearers only, adds, "If any man seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain. Pure religion, and undefiled before God and the Father, is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."

Now, it is worthy of remark, that the word used by the Apostle in his address to Agrippa, and rendered by our translators "Religion," is eminently of Pagan import and etymology, being derived from the Thracian mysteries instituted by Orpheus; and the term was employed in this particular instance, not in reference to Christianity, but to external and not spiritual Judaism. The word rendered "Jews' Religion," in the passage we have quoted from the Epistle to the Galatians, properly means Jewish worship, or Jewish customs, in their carnal acceptation, and not in the spiritual purity of the