Sinai "which gendereth"- bringeth forth children—to bondage, was Jerusalem or the whole Jewish ecclesiastical state, for which its central city is the just representative. These rank together, stand in file-ovoroxeî. Jerusalem, on her distinctive Hebrew platform, was in servitude under law; her people having connection with Abraham by natural descent; but if only so having connection with God and his kingdom, being still involved in a spiritual bondage personally, as well as a ritualistic bondage nationally.

This was the condition of the Jew, inthralled externally and ceremonially by prescriptions which awaited in Christ their fulfilment as spiritual realizations; and inwardly and vitally enslaved to guilt and fear, from which the revelations of Sinai brought him no escape. From all of this the apostle asserted the Christian's emancipation. And so we turn to our other picture.

In Sarah, the free woman, the gospel church has its prototype. Her son was "by promise"-supernatural agency coming in to his generation to obviate the course of natural laws (cf. Gen. 17, and Rom. 4). Here is a foreshadowing of His greater nativity whom Gabriel announced to the virginmother; and also of the second birth of all the spiritual seed of "the father of the faithful." Thus given by special promise from God to his parents, and born in a state of typical freedom, Isaac became the fit type of the spiritual church and kingdom of Christ on earth and in heaven. This is called "the Jerusalem above"— avo "the mother of us all;" free, in the spirit and laws of its Founder. Here is indicated the unity, indivisible and eternal, of all believers, as well as the source of the power which has incorporated them in this fellowship, and the platform of equal privileges on which they stand. Children of the promise (by virtue of promise) as Isaac was, are we, the apostle avers; possessors of all these immunities in the Jerusalem above, the city of God. And this representation of Christian enfranchisement covers the entire history of spiritual religion, past and future, though in widely different measures. For this typification must not be compressed within time-limits so as to obliterate the weighty truth, that the church has always stood on the same covenant in Christ; that her real life

is identical in all ages; that, hampered as has been its development by local and temporary restraints- the bondage of the letter-its growth and movement has been steadily progressive under this law of freedom, and will be, until that state of complete and blessed deliverance from all entanglements shall be attained which the apostle John describes among the visions of the Apocalypse:

"I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them and be their God." Rev. xxi. 2-3.

To justify these views more thoroughly to his Judaistic readers, the apostle now brings a citation out of their own Scriptures, applying to the purposes of his argument this text from Isaiah liv. 1: "Rejoice thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for many children hath the desolate one more than she which hath an husband." This is quoted with verbal accuracy from the lxx. Originally and directly it was predictive of the restored fortunes of the Hebrew church then in great depression. But over and beyond this, it looked to the more expanded and palmy fortunes of Zion in gospel-periods, as here the spirit of inspiration expressly applies it. This is an example of the perspective of prophetic sketching— the point of vision commanding several similar yet distinct events, lying rather disjoined in space than in time to the seer's eye, having points of obvious approximation, and thrown upon the same canvas. A prediction which had had its proximate and minor accomplishment, was now to find its ulterior and wider. Sarah, mother of the free, barren at first, and desolate when her husband turned from her to the bond-maid, blessed at length by a son through promise, should be the mother of many more offspring than her rival. Taking this from the type to the antitype, it means that however feeble at its commencement were the resources of the Christian church compared with those of the Hebrew ecclesiastical establishment, nevertheless it should multiply and spread

among the nations, as Isaac's progeny outnumbered that of Ishmael. And the pertinency of this to the discourse in hand was, that as now this reign of Christian freedom had been formally inaugurated and was moving on to its predicted and predestined triumphs, it was utterly irrelevant and "behind the times," to be urging up the revival of the old principles and formularies of a state of religious pupilage and bondage. Hagar, Ishmael, Sinai, (the ritualistic), are no more the symbols of the church's spiritual life, of man's spiritual privileges. The world has entered a new era of its moral career. Its emblem now is Sarah, Isaac, the Gospel, the Jerusalem above. Formalism, then, is a wicked and hopeless resurrection. It belongs to Ishmael and the Hagarenes; and with all its mechanical trumperies, under whatever sectarianism developed, should lie still in the grave where our Lord has buried its dead body.

The apostle concludes with a further reference to the same history, by way of encouragement and counsel to his Christian brethren. They should not be surprised nor intimidated at the hostility of their Jewish adversaries. It was only the mocking spirit of Ishmael born κατὰ σάρκα - persecuting Isaac born κατα IIvevua. So it had been and would be. The Jewish church now superseded and outlawed, as a form, would persecute the Christian kingdom of grace. Abraham's natural seed (and Adam's as well) would persecute Abraham's spiritual seed, the offspring of the "second Adam;"-Satan's adherents would, as ever, persecute Christ's. But here, too, the Scripture had spoken prophetically and authoritatively. God commanded Abraham to reject from the patrimonial inheritance Hagar and her mocking son. (Gen. xxi. 10.) The bond and the free could not share in the same heirship. The applications still follow the same line of significance. They are(a) Typically; the destiny of the which was old and ready to vanish (Heb. viii. 13) before the Christian; which, when Paul wrote, had reached its full period of probation, and was not to be kept upon the stage by any such forced measures as the zealots of Galatia were employing; either in its old church-forms or in any other succeeding thereto. They were working contrary to their own Scriptures, and to the foreordinations of God.

Hebrew ecclesiasticism away - έγγὺς ἀφανισμοῦ

(b) Spiritually; this denotes the intrinsic antagonism of the elements of slavery under sin and emancipation under Christ; that there must be no entangling alliances permitted between the two, doctrinally or practically; that nothing can come of any such amalgamations but weakness and misery feebled faith and a hybrid piety.

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(e) Prophetically and universally; it declares the doom of all who continue their affiliation with the unbelief of natural irreligion, the deadness of unrenewed affections; and fail of the new birth of redemption into the living sympathies of Christ's and the Holy Spirit's fellowship. The separation of the bond and the free is essential, and it must be eternal. While the preponderance of the regenerate to the unregenerate will increase with more and more rapid progression as the ages roll onward, yet it will be as true of the next world as of this, that the children of spiritual bondage cannot be heirs with the sons and daughters of the Lord. The lines of this division run onward forever.

ARTICLE VI.

PASCAL'S RELIGIOUS THOUGHTS AND CHARACTER.

Thoughts, Letters, and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal. Translated from the French by O. W. WIGHT, A. M. With Introductory Notices, and Notes from all the Commentators. New York: Derby & Jackson. 1859.

THE name of Pascal, long venerated among scholars, is, in this country at least, comparatively unfamiliar to any other class. The "Provincial Letters," by which he is most widely known, wonderful as they are as models of style and argument, are, from their controversial nature, not fitted to interest the popular mind. And if they were, Pascal cannot be understood by these alone. But he has left other memorials which will bring him near to the hearts of all Christians in proportion as

they are studied. To notice these is the object of the present article; and it may not be amiss, in the first place, to give a short sketch of the life and character of their author.

Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, June 19th, 1763. Being an only son, and having lost his mother at an early age, he was peculiarly the comfort and companion of his father, who resolved to take the whole direction of his education, and transported his home to Paris, where, at liberty from the professional engagements which had occupied his provincial life, he could give his entire attention to the education of his son, as well as avail himself of the advantages which the metropolis afforded for that purpose.

Pascal pursued a systematic course of study on all necessary subjects, but it was not long before he discovered a special and extraordinary talent for geometry, which his father was at first unwilling to encourage, lest it should distract his attention from other branches of study; but, at length, surprised at the genius which he manifested, ceased to prohibit his mathematical passions, and allowed him to pass his hours of recreation in this, his favorite pursuit.

But constant application soon began to undermine a constitution never robust. At the age of twenty-four, he was attacked with paralysis, and during the rest of his life he was a frequent and often severe sufferer. While yet young, he abandoned the brilliant career of science, upon which he had entered, and influenced in great measure by the example of his sister Jacqueline, who devoted herself to a religious life, at Port Royal, gave himself up to the search after God, and religious truth. No man ever sought more humbly, incessantly, and prayerfully. His convictions of the fallen state of man were most deep, and his admiration of Jesus Christ, and trust in him as a Redeemer from this state, most heartfelt and abiding. The Christian religion appeared to him so plainly the only refuge of humanity, that he meditated, as the great work of his life, a treatise on the "Evidences of Christianity," the disjointed materials for which are collected under the name of " Thoughts;" for he did not live to carry out his great design. More and more the victim of disease, his melancholy lapse into asceticism of which we have traces here and there in the "Thoughts," doubtless contributed