ART. ful day, who should convert many, old and young. Now VII. it is certain that no other person came, during the second Temple, to whom these words can be applied; so that they were not accomplished, unless it was in the person of our Saviour, to whom all these characters do well agree. 25, 26, 27. But to conclude with that prophecy which of all others Dan. ix. 24, is the most particular: when Daniel at the end of seventy years captivity was interceding for that nation, an angel was sent to him to tell him, that they were to have a new period of seventy weeks, that is, seven times seventy years, 490 years; and that after sixty-two weeks, Messiah the Prince was to come, and to be cut off; and that then the people of a prince should destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end of these was to be as with a flood or inundation, and desolations were determined to the end of the war. They were to be destroyed by abominable armies, that is, by idolatrous armies: they were to be made desolate, till an utter end or consummation should be made of them. The pomp, with which this destruction is set forth, plainly shews, that the final ruin of the Jews by the Roman armies is meant by it. From which it is justly inferred, not only that if that vision was really sent from God by an angel to Daniel, and in consequence to that was fulfilled, then the Messiah did come, and was cut off during the continuance of Jerusalem and the Temple; but that it happened within a period of time designed in that vision. Time was then computed more certainly than it had been for many ages before. Two great measures were fixed; one at Babylon by Nabonasser, and another in Greece in the Olympiads. Here a prediction is given almost five hundred years before the accomplishment, with many very nice reckonings in it. I will not now enter upon the chronology of this matter, on which some great men have bestowed their labours very happily. Archbishop Usher has stated this matter so, that the interval of time is clearly four hundred eighty-six years. The covenant was to be confirmed with many for one week, in the midst of which God was to cause the sacrifice and oblation for sin to cease; which seems to be a mystical way of describing the death of Christ, that was to put an end to the virtue of the Judaical sacrifices; so sixty-nine weeks and a half make just four hundred eighty-six years and a half. But without going further into this calculation, it is evident, that during the second Temple, the Messias was to come, and to be cut off, and that soon after that a prince was to send an army to destroy both city and sanctuary. The Jews do not so much as pretend that VII. during that Temple the Messias thus set forth did come, or ART. was cut off; so either the prediction failed in the event, or the Messias did come within that period. And thus a thread of the prophecies of the Messias being carried down through the whole Old Testament, it seems to be fully made out, that he was to be of the seed of Abraham, and of the posterity of David: that the tribe of Judah was to be a distinct policy, till he should come: that he should work many miracles: that he was to be meek and lowly: that his function was to consist in preaching to the afflicted, and in comforting them: that he was to call the Gentiles, and even the remote islands, to the knowledge of God: that he was to be born of a virgin, and at Bethlehem: that he was to be a new lawgiver, as Moses had been: that he was to settle his followers upon a new covenant, different from that made by Moses that he was to come during the second Temple: that he was to make a mean, but a joyful entrance to Jerusalem: that he was to be cut off: that the iniquities of us all were to be laid on him; and that his life was to be made an offering for sin; but that God was to give him a glorious reward for these his sufferings; and that his doctrine was to be internal, accompanied with a free offer of pardon, and of inward assistances; and that after his death the Jews were to fall under a terrible curse, and an utter extirpation. When this is all summed up together; when it appears, that there was never any other person to whom those characters did agree, but that they did all meet in our Saviour, we see what light the Old Testament has given us in this matter. Here a nation that hates us and our religion, who are scattered up and down the world, who have been for many ages without their temple, and without their sacrifices, without priests, and without their genealogies, who yet hold these books among them in a due veneration, which furnish us with so full a proof, that the Messiah whom they still look for, is the Lord Jesus whom we worship. We do now proceed to other matters. The Jews pretend, that it is a great argument against the authority of the New Testament, because it acknowledges the Old to be from God, and yet repeals the far greater part of the laws enacted in it; though those laws are often said to be laws for ever, and throughout all generations. Now they seem to argue with some advantage, who say, that what God does declare to be a law that shall be perpetual by any one Prophet, cannot be abrogated or reversed by another, since that other can have no more VII. ART. authority than the former Prophet had: and if both are of God, it seems the one cannot make void that which was formerly declared by the other in the name of God. But it is to be considered, that by the phrases of a statute for ever, or throughout all generations, can only be meant, that such laws were not transient laws, such as were only to be observed whilst they marched through the wilderness, or upon particular occasions; whereas such laws which were constantly and generally to be observed, were to them perpetual. But that does not import that the Lawgiver himself had parted with all the authority that naturally belongs to him, over his own laws. It only says, that the people had no power over such laws to repeal or change them they were to bind them always, but that puts no limitation on the Lawgiver himself, só that he might not alter his own constitutions. Positive precepts, which have no real value in themselves, are of their own nature alterable and as in human laws the words of enacting a law for all future times do only make that to be a perpetual law for the subjects, but do not at all limit the legislative power, which is as much at liberty to abrogate or alter it, as if no such words had been in the law; there are also many hints in the Old Testament, which shew that the precepts of the Mosaical law were to be altered: many plain intimations are given of a time and state, in which the knowledge of God was to be spread over all the earth: and that God was every where to be worshipped. Now this was impossible to be done without a change in their law and rituals: it being impossible that all the world should go up thrice a year to worship at Jerusalem, or could be served by priests of the Aaronical family. Circumcision was a distinction of one particular race, which needed not to be continued after all were brought under one denomination, and within the same common privileges. These things hitherto mentioned belong naturally to this part of the Article: yet in the intention of those who framed it, these words relate to an extravagant sort of enthusiasts that lived in those days; who abusing some ill-understood phrases concerning Justification by Christ without the works of the Law, came to set up very wild notions, which were bad in themselves, but much more pernicious in ther consequences. They therefore fancied that a Christian was tied by no law, as a rule or yoke; all these being taken away by Christ: they said indeed, that a Christian by his renovation became a law to himself; he obeyed not any written rule or law, but a VII. new inward nature: and thus as it is said that Sadocus mis- .ART. took his master Antigonus, who taught his disciples to serve God, not for the hope of a reward, but without any expectations, as if he by that affectation of sublimity had denied that there was any reward, and from thence sprung the sect of the Sadducees: so these men, perhaps at first mistaking the meaning of the New Testament, went wrong only in their notions; and still meant to press the necessity of true holiness, though in another set of phrases, and upon other motives; yet from thence many wild and ungoverned notions arose then, and were not long ago revived among us : all which flowed from their not understanding the importance of the word Law in the New Testament, in which it stands most commonly for the complex of the whole Jewish religion, in opposition to the Christian; as the word Law, when it stands for a book, is meant of the five Books of Moses. The maintaining the whole frame of that dispensation, in opposition to that liberty which the Apostles granted to the Gentiles, as to the ritual parts of it, was the controversy then in debate between the Apostles and the Judaizing Christians. The stating that matter aright is a key that will open all those difficulties, which with it will appear easy, and without it insuperable. In opposition to these, who thought then that the Old Testament, having brought the world on to the knowledge of the Messias, was now of no more use, this Article was framed. The second part of the Article relates to a more intricate matter; and that is, whether in the Old Testament there were any promises made, other than transitory or temporal ones, and whether they might look for eternal salvation in that dispensation, and upon what account? Whether Christ was the Mediator in that dispensation, or if they were saved by virtue of their obedience to the laws that were then given them? Those who deny that Christ was truly God, think that in order to the raising him to those great characters in which he is proposed in the New Testament, it is necessary to assert that he gave the first assurances of eternal happiness, and of a free and full pardon of all sins, in his Gospel and that in the Old Testament neither the one nor the other were certainly and distinctly understood. It is true, that if we take the words of the covenant that Moses made between God and the people of Israel strictly and as they stand, they import only temporal blessings that was a covenant with a body of men and K VII. ART. with their posterity, as they were a people engaged to the obedience of that law. Now a national covenant could only be established in temporal promises of public and visible blessings, and of a long continuance of them upon their obedience, and in threatenings of as signal judgments upon the violation of them: but under those general promises of what was to happen to them collectively, as they made up one nation, every single person among them might, and the good men among them did, gather the hopes of a future state. It is clear that Moses did all along suppose the being of God, the creation of the world, and the promise of the Messias, as things fully known and carried down by tradition to his days: so it seems he did also suppose the knowledge of a future state, which was then generally believed by the Gentiles as well as the Jews; though they had only dark and confused notions about it. But when God was establishing a covenant with the Jewish nation, a main part of which was his giving them the land of Canaan for an inheritance, it was not necessary that eternal rewards or punishments should be then proposed to them: but from the tenor of the promises made to their forefathers, and from the general principles of natural religion, not yet quite extinguished among them, they might gather this, that under those carnal promises, blessings of a higher nature were to be understood. And so we see that David had Ps. xvi. 11. the hope of arriving at the presence of God, and at his right hand, where he believed there was a fulness of joy, and pleasures for evermore: and he puts himself in this opP. xvii. 14, position to the wicked, that whereas their portion was in this life, and they left their substance to their children; he says, that as for him, he should behold God's face in righteousness, and should be satisfied when he awaked with his likeness; which seems plainly to relate to a state after this life, and to the resurrection. He carries this opposition further in another Psalm, where after he had said, that men in honour did not continue, but were like the beasts that perished: that none of them could purchase immortality for his brother, that he should still live for ever, and not see corruption: they all died and left their wealth to others, and Ps. xlix. 14, like sheep they were laid in the grave, where death should feed on them in opposition to which he says, that the upright should have dominion over them in the morning: which is clearly a poetical expression for another day that comes after the night of death. As for himself in particular, he says, that God shall redeem my soul (that is, his life, or his body, for in those senses the word soul is used in the 15. 15. : |