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it and will have it for our common daily lives; unless we tell our divines that they may explain it away lest it should prove to be a Revelation for mankind, but that we want such a Revelation; the Revelation of a Word who was with God, and was God, and who took upon Him the nature of all men, and died the death of all men, that not the scholar or the divine, but the man might be God's child, and might see Him as He is.

I have reconsidered and revised these Sermons; but I have not found more than a sentence or two which I cared to change,—and this for the sake of making the meaning more clear, not for the sake of modifying it in the least. I brought the subject down to the period of history which is embraced in my "Prophets and Kings," of which a new edition has lately appeared. Some portions of the ground I have travelled again, in my "Sermons on Sacrifice," especially the part referring to Noah and Abraham. But I do not think that I have exactly repeated myself; and though my convictions on the subject of Sacrifice have been far more fully developed in the later volume, I am sure I have not contradicted anything I said in the earlier. In both I have endeavoured to show, that the Old Testament is not contrary to the New; that the New is not a mitigation or softening of the acts and the maxims which are exhibited to us in the Old, but the complete unfolding of the principles involved in those acts and maxims; that St. John is not more of a sentimentalist, not less of a warrior, than Joshua; that both alike hold forth rewards only to those who overcome; that each, in his

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own way, presents to us a Captain of the hosts of the Lord,-a Word of God,-whose garments are dipped in blood. I have striven to prove that selfishness is the curse which both Testaments are setting forth as the destruction of mankind, because it is the separation of men from God and from each other; that Sacrifice is revealed to us in both as the only means by which the great enemy of the Creator and the creature can be vanquished. I have maintained that Sacrifice, according to the teaching of both Testaments, involves Death,—the death of the person who presents it, which is symbolised by the death of animals, though that could never take away sins. I have spoken of the death of the Cross, the death of the Son of God, as the only interpreter of the facts of the world; as the only solution of the meaning of all previous Sacrifices; as the only ground of all future Sacrifices; as that, without which all the example and all the blessed life of the Son of God would have been nothing; as that which was necessarily attended with agony and horror unspeakable, with the sense of separation between the Father and the Son, which the darkening of earth and heaven could but feebly typify. I have maintained that His death alone could take away the sin of the world, because it alone could satisfy the perfectly loving mind of God; because it could alone unite mankind to God in the person of His Son and our Lord, who was known before the foundation of the world, but who was manifested in the latter day on Calvary; because it alone could draw the minds of all men, each wandering in, his own

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way, seeking his own ends, to the one centre. I have striven, lastly, to show that neither Testament sets before men the doctrine, that the selfishness which all God's righteous and terrible punishments have been contending with on this earth, which God's mighty sacrifice has been redeeming us from, is to be the law of a future state; that we are to expect in that state the gratification of self, the repeal of the law of sacrifice. I have maintained that the vision of such a state is the vision of a Hell, in which the Devil is reigning supreme and absolute; and that the Heaven which the Bible, in both its portions, would lead us to think that God has prepared for them that love Him, is a society, from which selfishness, and self-seeking, and self-indulgence shall be entirely banished; where the Lamb that was slain shall be the standard of the life, the object of the adoration, of all creatures; where not a self-concentrated, self-glorifying Being, but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, shall be the new name that is written on all hearts, shall be confessed as the foundation of the divine city, the New Jerusalem.

July, 1855.

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION.

THE Author of these Sermons has been recently charged in a dissenting Review with 'not suffering men ' in general to hold converse with the Bible, unless the 'Church in some way be present at the interview, like 'the jailor when the prisoner receives a visit from his 'friends.'* Whether this statement is true respecting an individual Clergyman, is a question of immense importance to him, of little to the world. But I am supposed to be afraid of the Bible, because the Church of which I am a minister is afraid of it. In many other instances, the Reviewer says that my 'relations' with the Church are 'unfriendly;' in this part of my conduct, he believes I am its too faithful representative. This accusation therefore concerns us all. It has nothing to do with the sins or the follies of me, or of any who may happen to agree with me. Every Clergyman of the English Church ought to be prepared to prove by his words and his acts whether he pleads guilty to it or not.

I will merely set down a few notorious facts. I find myself obliged by my position to read each day to * Eclectic Review, September 1851, p. 269.