change God's dealing towards him. I saw that it was adduced for the purpose of maintaining, not that the potter had a right to make a vessel good or bad according to his own pleasure, but that he had a right, if a vessel turned out ill in his hands, to reject that vessel, and break it down, and make it up anew into another vessel. The right of making a thing bad, is not contemplated at all in the passage the matter considered is, whether the potter, after having once made a vessel, is bound to preserve it although it turns out quite unfit for the purpose for which it was made, or whether, in such a case, he has the right of rejecting it. And as the exercise of this right of rejection on the part of the potter is unquestioned, although his works do not go wrong by their own fault, much more does God claim to Himself the right of rejecting a people, whom He had set up for a particular purpose, if they refused to answer that purpose.

We read in the following chapter that the prophet was desired to carry on and conclude this allegorical instruction to Judah, by taking a potter's vessel and breaking it at the entering in of the east gate of Jerusalem, as a sign of the rejection of the Jews,

and the desolation of the city, because they refused to answer God's purposes in setting them up. They were thus warned that God was not bound to them, merely because He had once chosen them for His people—but that He was at liberty to reject them, because they had rejected Him.

It is most notable through the whole history of the Jews, both in the Old and New Testament, that they were continually falling into the error against which this instruction was given to guard them. They thought that, because they were God's chosen people, and the depositaries of His promises concerning the Messiah, they were therefore secure, however much they sinned-they thought that God was bound to fulfil those promises to them, and could not without forfeiting His own truth, cast them off-they thought there was an absolute decree interposed between them and rejection. And as this error blinded them to the danger of sin and the nature of God's righteousness, God set His face against it, from the beginning of His communications to them. Thus when they rebelled against Him in the wilderness by refusing to go forward into the land of Canaan, on account of the evil report brought

back by the spies; He took them at their own word, and said, "Doubtless ye shall not come into the land, concerning which I sware to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun." "After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise." Num. xiv. 30, 34.

The context of the passage in Jeremiah proves that it was to guard against this very error of supposing themselves unconditionally elected that the parable of the potter was spoken, for it is introduced immediately after the utterance of great promises and great threatenings, as the reader will see, by looking back to the 17th chapter from the 19th verse to the end, where it is declared that if the people would really hallow the Sabbath, then there should enter into the gates of the city kings and princes, sitting on the throne of David, and the city should remain for ever; whereas, if they profaned the Sabbath, a fire should be kindled in the gates of the city, which should devour its palaces, and should not be quenched. It was to guard against their besetting error, and lest they should,

according to their manner, shelter themselves under the former distinguishing mercies of God to them, and thus put away the fear of His present threatenings, as if He were restrained by His own faithfulness from executing them, that the prophet is here commissioned to expound to them the true nature of their standing, and of the standing of all men before God,-namely, that He in very deed judges men according to their characters, and makes promises and threatenings to them simply in relation to their characters, and with the view of drawing them out of evil into good; and that, in accordance with this principle, He would in righteousness cast off the Jewish people, notwithstanding all his promises to them, if they refused to fill the office of His witnesses, which He had designed them to fill, and would raise up a people in their room who would fill it; and as He had at first made their nation a vessel unto honour, so if they refused to answer their honourable calling, He would make them a vessel unto dishonour, by openly rejecting them, and inflicting on them a punishment as signal as was their former preferment.

Here, therefore, I found a plain and nat

ural solution of the difficulty in Rom. ix. 21; and I saw that this apparently dark passage was, in truth, nothing else than an assertion of God's right to cast off the Jews from being His visible church, and that the apostle was arguing here with his countrymen exactly in the same strain as he had already been doing in a former part of the epistle (chap. iii. 5, 6,) answering, in both places, their self-justifying murmurs and excuses, with the same summary declaration of God's right to judge them, and righteousness in punishing them. A comparison of the two passages will satisfy the reader, that the same subject is treated in both, and that the question (chap. ix. 21,) "Hath not the potter power over the clay ?" (or, better and more literally, right over the clay?') corresponds exactly with the question, "Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance?" in chap. iii.

I thought, also, that I discerned a similarity between the Jewish apologies in both the passages, which changed considerably my apprehension of chap. ix. 19. It seemed to me that the spirit of the defence set up, chap. iii. 7, "For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto His glory, why yet am I also judged as a sinner?"