course according to it. It is a leading feature of Christian piety, on the other hand, that it aims to be true to Christian principle. It is not copying a form, but living a spiritual law. It thinks less of the deed than of the heart. It varies the act at pleasure, provided that it be a true expression of a true spirit. Under the one system, the design was that the observance should draw the character after it and mould it; under the other, the design is first to secure a right character, and then allow right observances to flow from it. The one looked more at what man does; the other, at what he

is.

Again, in the one case, true piety was exclusively to be looked for within a single visible national community, and true worship to centre around a single temple; in the other, piety is not confined to communities but dispositions, nor worship to temples but hearts. Hence, in the one instance, much was thought of an uninterrupted line of outward descent; in the other, much of this, and only of this, a fresh and personal spiritual birth and life.

We may also see the greater spirituality of the gospel piety, in the greater spirituality of the gospel revelation. Truth is the food of piety. And the truth of the Old Testament, taken as a whole, is far less naked, concentrated, spiritual, than that of the New. In the one case it appears in the shell; in the other, in the kernel; in the one, thrown into outward and concrete forms; in the other, having a purer and more faithful expression. Even the moral law, which, in the Old Testament, is broken up and expanded into ten concrete bulks, is, in the New, condensed and brought out in two simple spiritual elements, love to God and to man. In the former, one finds truths; in the latter, Truth.

senses.

Moreover, the piety of the earlier and ruder period was largely dependent on symbols and helps addressed to the God instructed men in righteousness with sensible illustrations. The Mosaic was emphatically the pictorial dispensation, addressed to pie'y in its childhood; and the designs were impressive, forcible, thrilling, rather than delicate, chaste, artistic. But during the gospel period, such

symbols are not relied on, and piety is left to go over to, and rest on, spiritual supports. God has carried it beyond the primer dispensation. Faith has little to aid it, short of the unseen and eternal. It has lost its material wings, and can fly only as it has spiritual ones.

And, again, the ideal future that fills the mind of the Christian, is far more spiritual than that which filled the mind of the Jew. The latter had in view a scene of earthly splendors, the pageantry and magnificence of an earthly Messiah, under whose realm all other nations should hide their heads. And his religious aspirations and experiences dropped down to a kindred level. But the ideal future of the former takes in the spiritual triumphs of the cross in this world, and the spiritual glory that is to follow in the next. Its reaches are spiritual, heavenly, divine. And hence his aspirations and experiences, swinging in a kindred orbit, rise to the spiritual, heavenly, and divine also. The church is far, yet, however, from having exhausted the spirituality of the gospel. Higher and ever higher attainments, in this direction, lie before her. And here, again, we remark that, to make them, she needs no new revelation, only a higher reaching after, and possession of, the spiritual elements of the word of God already in her hands.

In this way, then, we answer the question: How has God proceeded to give religion to man? What wisdom is here displayed by him! What adaptation! What benevolence! And how wise, too, to select a single people, in the first instance, isolate them, and carry on a process of religious training with them alone, undistracted by foreign interference, till they had reached sufficient maturity to allow the removal of all restrictions and receive the commission to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth! And how encouraging to the modern church, on whom this commission is devolved, to consider that, when she carries the gospel to the heathen, it is not elementary religion she gives them, but religion with thousands of years' growth upon it! It may require a century for her to give it to them; for them to receive it; but when it is received, they do not get the baldness and sim

plicity of the Patriarchal faith; they do not get Judaism, or the controversies of the Augustinian period; they do not get Monasticism; nor the superstitions of the Middle ages; nor the intolerance of later times. They get the spiritual and living religion which we have. They step at a stride across all the distance traversed by the race in religious growth. They emerge at once from the moral region of the flood, or beyond it, to the summit of the nineteenth century.

We close our rapid survey by remarking that it becomes the modern church to remember her true historical position. The ages have been struggling for her. The victories of the past are hers. All time has been in travail to give her birth. Her proper place and attitude is to stand on the summit of the religious achievements hitherto made, with her eye gleaming with Divine light, fixed on higher achievements in the future. Let her not turn backwards. Let her not take to her bosom any of the old and lower types of religion, nor hold to them with clutched hand. Let her live more in the future, and for the future, than the past, obeying the Divine direction which Moses was commanded to communicate to the ancient church, but which contains the spirit of God's perennial call to the church in every age: "Speak unto the children of Israel, THAT THEY GO FORWARD."

ARTICLE V.

THE THEOLOGY OF DR. GILL.

By Rev. Daniel T. Fisk, Newburyport, Mass.

ONE of the most noticeable and hopeful features in the present condition of the theological world, is a revived and increasing interest in the department of ecclesiastical history. This interest has been gradually manifesting itself,

not only among the speculative minds of Germany, but also among the more practical thinking men in England and America. And what especially renders this awakened interest an omen of good, is the fact, that it has been directed, not chiefly to the external affairs of the church, but to the doctrines as they are found embodied in creeds and symbols, and the elaborated systems of eminent theologians. Familiarity with dogmatic history cannot fail to advance the truth, promote comprehensiveness of faith, allay the bitterness of sectarian feeling, and in many ways contribute to the unity of "the body of Christ."

That is not, then, a useless nor unimportant service which presents to the student of theology a faithful epitome of the doctrinal views of eminent divines of other days. This service the present Article proposes to render in regard to one who has been thought worthy by many to stand in the line of immediate succession to the most distinguished English theologians of the seventeenth century.

John Gill (D. D.) was born on the 23d of Nov. (O. S.) 1697, at Kettering in Northamptonshire, England. In very early life he was a subject of deep religious impressions; and, at the age of twelve years, gave evidence of true conversion; although it was several years later when he publicly professed his faith in Christ by uniting with the Baptist church; of which his parents were members and his father a deacon. To the peculiar tenets of that church, on the subject of baptism, he was strongly attached, and was a ready and zealous champion of the same. While yet young, he entered the ministry, and, in 1719, was called to the charge of a church at Horsely Down, Southwark, near London. Here he passed the remainder of his days, in "labors abundant," and died in 1771, in his seventy-fourth year. His published works are voluminous, and bear honorable testimony to his industry, ability, scholarship, and piety. Besides numerous controversial pamphlets and tracts, he edited the works of Dr. Crisp, accompanying them with notes and a memoir; published a work entitled "Cause of God and Truth," in four large octavo volumes; a Commen

But

tary on the entire Scriptures, in seven folio volumes; a Body of Doctrinal Divinity, in two quarto volumes; and a Body of Practical Divinity, also in two quarto volumes. The substance of his principal published works, was first preached to his own people, in courses of sermons. although his sermons were, to a great extent, "doctrinal," and his style was cumbrous and unadorned, his earnestness of manner rendered him not only an acceptable, but even a popular, preacher. As a controversialist, he was fearless, uncompromising, never weary of returning to the combat, sometimes manifesting a vehement and overbearing spirit, which constrained even his admiring biographer to admit that, occasionally, he used "a little more acrimony and severity, than perhaps some might think needful;" and which led John Wesley to say of him: "he is a positive man, and fights for his opinions through thick and thin." As a scholar, his attainments were more than respectable. Besides a general knowledge of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, he was well versed in scholastic, patristic, and rabbinical lore; and one of his partial biographers goes so far as to say: "if any one can be supposed to have trod the whole circle of human learning, it was Dr. Gill." 2 As a theologian, he was a good representative of that type of Calvinism widely prevalent previously to the "improvements in theology," made by President Edwards. The influence of a familiarity with the metaphysics of the schoolmen is everywhere discernible in his works; while his unimaginative mind led him to a bald literalism in his interpretation of the Scriptures, which could employ Oriental imagery in exact scientific statement of doctrine. less a person than Toplady says of him: "Perhaps no man since the days of St. Austin has written so largely in defence of the system of grace, and certainly no man has treated that momentous subject, in all its branches,

No

1 His biographer states that he sometimes exerted himself so much, as to require three or four handkerchiefs to wipe the perspiration from his face during a single discourse.-Memoir prefixed to his Com. on N. T., p. 29.

2 Memoir, p. 31.