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rection, it was owing only to the prompt vigilance of the chief priests and Pharisees. These authorities are keenly reproached by Jesus himself, and the people threatened with the loss of the kingdom of God on account of their rejection of him.

Matt. xxiii. 13: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in." A political sense is here the most clear and intelligible. The saying is placed soon after the account of the repression, by the Pharisees, of the incipient insurrection, and thus appears to mean, "Ye Pharisees will neither aid yourselves in that national deliverance, the introduction to the kingdom of heaven, of which I come to bring the signal, nor allow free course to the efforts of these truer sons of Israel, whom my voice had begun to rouse." That the Pharisees hindered men's souls from reaching the eternal happy state, in consequence of the false doctrines taught by them, is too strained and figurative an interpretation to be admitted without strong support from the context, corresponding passages, or connected events. The expression is not "heaven," but the "kingdom of heaven," i. e. indisputably "the kingdom of the Messiah;" and how did the Pharisees in fact hinder men from entering into it? Most obviously, by their conduct just related, their suppression of the popular enthusiasm, and determined maintenance of the actual state of things.

When Jesus is apprehended, the disciples appear disposed to defend him by force: but he represses the attempt; "Put up again thy sword into its place for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword." This disclaimer however of the use of military weapons at that moment, when it could only involve the disciples in his own fate, by no means proves that he would have held the same language on all other occasions. The moment for effective resistance was then past; the attempt must evidently accelerate his own fate, and sacrifice them.

In the parables of Jesus, kings and armies are not unfrequently introduced, and sometimes in such a manner as to sanction rather than condemn their ordinary employments. Matt. xxii. 7; Luke xiv. 31; xix. 27. If he represented the righteous and triumphant king as slaying his enemies, we can hardly suppose that he would have disapproved of the slaying of some Romans and recusant Jews, in order to attain the triumph.

These indications are, I think, sufficient to authorize the conjecture, that although Jesus intended at first, and entertained most ardently the desire, to be the leader of the people to general righteousness and repentance, trusting to the divine arm for deliverance;—yet the position into which after some time he found himself drawn by his undertaking, led him to desire earnestly the aid of his countrymen in any way by which it could be rendered effective.

Yet admitting, in its fullest extent, the semi-bellicose aspect which this view affixes to Jesus, we are not thereby compelled to withdraw the epithets of wise or virtuous, which we might have felt disposed to attribute to him in reference to his predominant character of moral teacher. That he enter

tained the idea of freeing his country from a hateful foreign yoke, when other means failed, by exciting to a gallant and unanimous resistance, would probably raise him in most eyes more than a demeanour invariably answering to the description "the meek and lowly Jesus."

THE END.

PRINTED BY RICHARD KINDER, GREEN AREOUR COURT, OLD BAILEY.

In boards, 8vo. pp. 86.

CHRISTIAN THEISM,

66

BY THE AUTHOR OF

AN INQUIRY CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY."

T. ALLMAN, 42, HOLBORN HILL.

"The following are some reflections on the direction which the religious sentiments of men may be expected to take after the relinquishment of their belief in miraculous revelations. On some occasions old truths have an interest and fitness of application which give them a freshness equal to that of novelty. . . . To those who have felt compelled to acquiesce in the conclusion referred to with respect to the Christian religion, the truths which can be gathered from Nature come to have a force and reality which were never before perceived. When we are called upon to decide between Nature's religion and none, it seems to us as if we had not yet sufficiently weighed the import of the lessons conveyed in Creation, and we find in them the interest and value belonging to new discoveries."-Preface.

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