ARTICLE V.

SHORT SERMONS.

"For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.-Rom, x. 4.

To make known the way of salvation is the end for which the Gospel is preached. Yet how few that hear understand. All his life long a man will listen to the preaching of the Word, and when he comes to die be unable to give any good account of the ground of his hope. It is, that he prays, or that God is good, or that he has always done his best. What he has to do with the law which he has transgressed, or with Christ that died, he can not tell. The text declares it.

I. The perfect righteousness of the law is required of every man. 1. This is evident from its nature. It is moral; the moral law of God. It requires that they whom God has created in his own image do right; that they be pure, upright, holy, perfect. Its claims are based upon its nature, and the nature and relations of those whom it commands. They may destroy their own power to obey; nevertheless it abides, immutable, like its Author; it was proclaimed at Mount Sinai and has never been repealed.

2. Christ re-affirmed it with emphasis in his ministry. As he came expressly to save men, its claims will be abated now if ever. But what does he say? "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself." It is binding forever. "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." With still more fearful emphasis Paul "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them."

II. How are these immutable demands of God's perfect law to be met? Christ is the end of the law for righteousness.

1. By his death he made atonement for transgression. There was a full satisfaction of the claims of violated law. Christ was our substitute, endured the penalty of our transgressions, bore our sins in his own body on the tree.

2. By his life in the flesh he provided for us a perfect righteousThis was no less necessary than his death to satisfy all the requirements of God's law.

ness.

3. The benefits of Christ's life and death are imputed to us

through our faith. To every one that believeth he is the end of the law for righteousness, and to none others.

"He that believeth shall

be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned."

1. The subject illustrates the infinite, everlasting obligation of the redeemed to Christ. "Washed, sanctified, justified." All by Christ.

2. Shows us what will be the burden of the everlasting song. "Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God." 66 honor, glory, power!"

Blessing,

"And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zaccheus, make haste, and come down: for to-day I must abide at thy house. And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully."-Luke xix. 5, 6.

If there is anything in the New Testament which bears a strong resemblance to myth, the account of Zaccheus assuredly does. Our Lord, having just wrought one of his most impressive miracles, is passing through Jericho, attended and followed by a crowd of people. A well-known citizen of the place, of mean personal appearance and still meaner calling and reputation, a deputy Jew publican, despised and scorned by all good and respectable men, yet of great wealth, has conceived, for some unknown reason, a desire to see Jesus, and failing in his attempt, by reason of his small stature and the closeness of the throng, he climbs up into a sycamore tree by the roadside in advance, and observes carefully the form and countenance of the Son of man as he comes near. Jesus sees him, reads with omniscient eye, what is passing in his heart, addresses him kindly, and with his own peculiar wisdom, and goes with him, overjoyed at the unexpected honor to his house, while the astonished multitude scoffs. Zaccheus, up to this very day the rapacious and proscribed chief of the publicans, stands up in the presence of Christ and of his own household, and declares his intention to make restitution fourfold to any he may have wronged in the collection of taxes, and not this only, but to give one half of all his wealth to the poor. In this way he will manifest his attachment to the Saviour. That it is no sudden fit of enthusiasm, or temporary excitement, is made certain by the fact that Christ commends his conduct and pronounces him a genuine disciple, this very day brought into the kingdom. The history conveys lessons of great value.

1. We should obey every secret impulse to come near to Christ. This is felt, often, amid the press of worldly thoughts and pursuits

and company and pleasures. Let it be heeded without delay. It may be a gracious visitation, and the last.

2. The readiness of Christ to come to us exceeds all our expectations. Moved by a new and strange impulse, we turn aside from the crowd if, haply, we may catch a glimpse of his face, or hear his voice, and, lo, he comes home with us to our house and our heart.

3. The favor of Jesus Christ fills the heart with abounding joy. Into what a happy man is Zaccheus transformed in a single hour! The possession of all his wealth never imparted to him a thousandth part of the satisfaction which he finds in giving half of it away.

4. The grace of God makes a man upright. The covetous, grasping, close-fisted man may join the church, may pray, exhort, and pour out, in a dreary stream, his tongue philanthrophy, which neither warms nor feeds a single soul, but he is not a Christian.

5. The Gospel awakens and the Master approves a large liberality. Zaccheus did no wrong to his children, though he may have had half a score. On the contrary, he did the best thing to promote their worldly prosperity, and their souls' salvation. His example is not our rule; but the prevailing liberality of our day falls very far short of proving that salvation is come to the house.

ARTICLE VI.

LITERARY NOTICES.

1.-Annals of the American Pulpit; or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergymen of the Various Denominations, with Historical Introductions. By WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE, D.D. Volume VIII. Unitarian Congregational. pp. xxv, 578. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers.

1865.

SUBSTANTIALLY this is a gallery of Unitarian clergymen done by surviving friends and mostly of the same religious sect. This plan discovers its advantages in the present volume even more obviously than in its predecessors. While it gives great variety and vivacity to these sketches, throwing just the light upon the successive pictures which best brings out their distinctive features, it shifts, as is simply right, the responsibility for opinions and judgments concerning the various matters involved from the editor to the respective writers of these memorials. Dr. Sprague has thus been able to give free scope to these gentlemen to vindicate and eulogize their

departed friends, without at all lending his sanction to their verdicts. Equally, that denomination can have no ground to charge a misrepresentation of individual opinions and of general character and influence, as it is made essentially its own biographer. It should not, however, be inferred from this, that the Doctor's work, in these pages, has been merely to arrange other people's manuscripts for the press. Besides the immense labor of finding and setting in motion these subsidiary pens, he has had the herculean task of methodizing, balancing, supplementing the whole mass of material. Several of the sketches in each volume are entirely his own, and generally the substratum of biographical facts has been furnished from his inexhaustible antiquarianism.

The great literary and historical merit of this whole series of massive volumes is too well known to need further commendation We shall, instead of this, give the rest of our space to some special points of interest in this volume.

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One thing, which at once arrests the reader, is the difference, we had almost said, toto cœlo, between the earlier and the later Unitarianism. The catalogue of these founders of that church begins with Dr. Gay of Hingham, 1717: and the first half of its eighty names takes up the lives of men who, to-day, would find themselves houseless and homeless in the churches which here are polishing their sepulchres. Their dissent from the Westminster Catechism, which many of them taught in their schools through life, was almost entirely limited to difficulties concerning the Divine Trinity, and the electing purpose of God. They called themselves High Arians on the former point, and Arminians on the latter. Here and there one, like Chauncy, denied the eternity of future punishments. But of this eminent controversialist, it is here written by a personal friend, that he possessed and enjoyed a firm and unwavering faith in the truth and inspiration of the Scriptures, and in the impossibility of their having been written but by the supernatural inspiration of God." Dr. Henry Cummings taught Christ's "voluntary humiliation and death, when he made his soul an offering for sin," and "had no sympathy with any system that does not recognize the mediation of Christ as the grand feature of the Christian economy." Dr. Jeremy Belknap did not think it wrong to sing praises to Christ and the Holy Spirit as the Redeemer and Sanctifier; he gave his ready assent" to the doctrine of "the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost" as "the one living and true God," and adds: certain it is that Socinians reject such kind of language, and disavow the notion of a Trinity in any form; not now to say anything of the atonement which they universally deny, but which those I am defend

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ing as strenuously maintain." p. 81. Dr. Ripley of Concord, reminds his hearers, in a half century sermon, that he had fully preached the early apostasy of man, moral human depravity, regeneration . . . . and the need of Divine influence to effect that change; justification through faith in Christ to all who repent and obey the Gospel; Jesus Christ, . . . . the meritorious agent and medium of mercy to penitent sinners; a judgment to come by the Son of God, when the wicked will go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into life eternal." p. 115. Dr. John Reed says that, beside all else, Christ's death was "requisite as an atoning sacrifice. His precious blood was the price of our redemption. . . . . As Mediator, he suffered and died for our offences. He exchanged his own innocent, meritorious life for our guilty, forfeited lives. The iniquities of us all were laid upon him. He bore the punishment due to our sins in his own body on the tree, that we might be pardoned and acquitted." p. 146. We have heard this denied within two months, in an Orthodox Congregational Association. Dr. Howard of Springfield, "held to the doctrine of atonement, in the sense of propitiation or expiation, with the utmost tenacity." He defended a "vicarious" atonement, p. 184; and to the author of a sermon denying this, he wrote, after strongly stating this Scriptural doctrine: " is not the author of such a sermon guilty of deep, deep, deep ingratitude to Him who loved us with a love stronger than death; and, when we were enemies, gave his life a ransom for us?" p. 184.

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What would such men have done in the late Unitarian Convention at New York? In one point, however, we trace a resemblance. These early "liberals" as even then they called themselves, had about the same horror of Creeds as their present posterity. They repudiated them, and thus opened one wide door to the utterly antichristian position of the van of Unitarianism to-day.

They denied the Athanasian statement of the Trinity, and chiefly for this were regarded as heretical. It has occurred to us whether the admission of that doctrine, with the rejection of a true and proper atonement for sin, is enough to save the orthodoxy of a man now? Did the Fathers make that, rather than this, "the article of a standing or falling church?" How much is the confession of the Trinity worth, with the denial of Christ's vicarious expiation for human sin?

We are strongly impressed with the great personal and literary accomplishments of a series of young preachers who, from about the year 1812, mostly occupied the pulpits of Boston and its environs,