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to endure its violence. Were human weakness and folly opposed unaided to the power and craft of angels, the contest were, indeed, without hope. But, God be praised, it is not in our own strength that we are to contend with them. We fight under the banner of Christ our Lord, and the armour which His grace supplies to us is proof against all their terrors. While, therefore, the recollection that we wrestle with principalities and powers should make us sober and watchful unto prayer, the means of defence which we have received from the Most High should remove from us all desponding thoughts, and warm our inmost souls with a holy hope of victory.

But let us remember that this hope must needs be vain, unless our own exertions correspond with it, and that it is by a faithful perseverance in the works and warfare of a Christian, that our salvation must be secured. The helmet, the breastplate, the sandals of peace, which decorate the soldier of the Messiah, these are not a clothing adapted for sleep or revelry. The faith which is our shield is useless, if we suffer it to hang idle by our side; and our knowledge of the Scripture is but a sheathed sword, unless we wield it against the destroyer. Nor, let us forget that, even thus provided, we cannot hope of ourselves to help ourselves, and that our mortal courage and our celestial panoply must both alike be vain, unless we frequently support the one and renew the other by the holy influences of Christ's altar and sacrifice, and by that fervent prayer, which

can call down the Captain of our salvation to our rescue, and interpose the promise of the Most True God between ourselves and our spiritual enemies.

And to Him, the Seed of the woman, and bruiser of the serpent's head, to Him, from the inhabitants of every world, and element, and sun, and star, and from all who dwell on the earth, above, or under it, be ascribed, as is most due, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, all might, all honour, glory, and dominion now and for ever. Amen.

SERMON V.

ON THE INSPIRATION OF THE PENTATEUCH.
[Preached at Lincoln's Inn, November 10, 1822.]

EXODUS iii. 14.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM; and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

IN considering these words of God to His servant Moses, there are three points to which I am chiefly anxious to call your attention. They are, first, what grounds we have for believing that such a communication was actually made to Moses; secondly, the character and rank of the celestial person by whose immediate agency it was made; and thirdly, the meaning of the communication itself, and its moral and religious consequences. And though these topics have been so often and so ably discussed, that little novelty or illustration of argument can be expected on any of them, yet the endeavour may, by God's blessing, be not without its use, to present in a compendious form to my younger hearers some of the most striking evidences of that earlier creed on which our own is

mainly founded; to point out, in one conspicuous instance, the connection which subsists between the Mosaic and the Christian economy, and to refresh in our minds that recollection of God's nature and attributes in which both Jew and Gentile have, in all ages, been equally concerned.

It is true, indeed, and it is an observation which it is wise as well as candid to bear in mind, that our faith in the Lord Jesus may be satisfactorily defended by the internal and external evidence of the New Testament alone, though we should abandon as spurious or apocryphal the volume of the law and the prophets. It was thus that It was thus that very many of the ancient heathen were converted who cannot have been acquainted, to any great extent, with the sacred writings of the Jews; and it was thus that some early sects to whom, notwithstanding their errours, it would be unjust to deny the name of Christian, rejected the inspiration of the books of Moses as at variance with those Platonic prejudices' which were among the greatest hindrances which the Gospel had at first to encounter.

But though it be possible to receive the Christian faith without acknowledging the previous claims of the Mosaic theology, and though the defence of

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I Epiphanius Hier. lxi. 74. Λέγει ὁ αὐτὸς Μάνης, οὐ δύναται ἑνὸς διδασκάλου εἶναι παλαιὰ καὶ καινὴ Διαθήκης. 75. Δέν δρεσιν δὲ ἐξηραμμένοις καὶ γεγηρακόσιν ἀπεικάζει πάλιν νόμον καὶ Tрopýras. Irenæus, l. i. §. 24. [Basilides] prophetias a mundi fabricatoribus fuisse ait principibus, proprie autem Legem a principe ipsorum. See also §. 29, &c.

the one would not be desperate even if the other were unknown or abandoned, yet it is certain that by such an abandonment we should rob Christianity of that most powerful and convincing support which is afforded by the unbroken chain of prophecy; that we should relinquish the most valuable commentary which God has furnished on the religion of His Son; and that, since the first teachers of Christianity so often appeal to the authority of the law in order to establish their own Divine commission, we must, if the law be abandoned, endanger, in no small degree, their inspiration or their sincerity. When, therefore, we defend the Divine original of the Jewish creed, we are defending, in fact, our own;-and with this impression I will now submit to your consideration some few of those arguments which arise from the internal evidence of Scripture to establish the fact that Moses was really so honoured by God as is related in the third chapter of Exodus.

It may, in the first place, be maintained on grounds which will hardly be disputed or impugned by a candid unbeliever, that the account contained in the Jewish Scriptures of the parentage and education of Moses, of the authority which he acquired over the Israelitish tribes, and the religious and political system which they received from him is, in its essential points at least, and its leading and general outlines, accurate. I will not discuss the truth or falsehood of that supernatural machinery

which, if we believe the sacred historian, the

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