a most wise and religious prince, on coming to the throne, has no thought of gracing his accession, according to our language on such occasions, with an act of royal clemency, but hastens to put him to death. In vain does the hoary murderer take refuge at the altar. Such a sanctuary might perhaps have availed him in a heathen country; but this was an abuse of the privileges of sanctuary, which the Jewish institution never allowed; God Himself had expressly required in His law that capital punishment should be inflicted on a murderer, even though he were to be dragged from the horns of His own altar. And this was now done. The king ordered his officers 'to fall upon him,' that they might take away the innocent blood which Joab had shed from him and from the house of his father'-thus expressing the feeling, which shows itself in various other parts of the sacred history, that to spare one who was guilty of blood was in itself to incur a participation in the same guilt.

In David thus disturbed on his death-bed by the consciousness of heavy guilt, because he had neglected, through whatever cause, to put Joab to death, and devolving upon his successor that charge as one of sacred obligation, who can fail to recognise the same spirit, as, under highly-wrought feelings of religion and in the presence of God, dictated some of those passages from which we so much shrink? The truth is, the aspect which such passages wear is no peculiar one, excepting them from the general character of the Sacred Books to which they belong; but rather, such is the character which is most evidently apparent in the whole of them, and which essentially belongs to the former dispensation in general. That dispensation disclosed with the greatest emphasis one particular side of God's own Character. But now, a more perfect revelation of the Divine Character has been made. And the result is, that under the influence of the more perfect revelation, we no longer feel altogether in unison with the servants of God. formed under the influence of the former more imperfect one. It is not intended, neither is it right, that we should. For the element of religious feeling that was then chiefly developed, was the sentiment of justice prone continually to assume the form of vindictiveness and severity: in Christianity, the more prominent characteristic is that of love ever ready to assume the form of gentleness and compassion. Of course, we do not assert, either that mercy was unknown to the ancient Israelite, or that the Christian character as personified in the great examples of the New Testament never arms itself with the severity of punitive justice. Yet the distinction above noted generally holds, and has the effect of making much of the language used by the Saints of the Old Testament sound harsh and discordant to our ears.

This characteristic spirit of the Christian religion is breathed

into it through several causes, almost wholly peculiar to itself. The consideration of some of these, while we keep in view the absence of any such influences in the older dispensation, will more clearly illustrate the disruption to which we refer as existing between our sentiments and those of the ancient servants of God.

The foremost of all, that indeed which of itself is sufficient to determine the genius of the whole economy, is the character which marks the appearance amongst us of its Divine Author Himself, JESUS CHRIST. This alone ascertains the character of that system of sentiment and action to which we belong; for this system is entirely an emanation from Him. Christ our Lord and Master came not into the world to punish the guilty, but to save them from the effects of their guilt. To this he devoted the whole of his life amongst us, enduring the continual contradiction of sinners against himself with meekness and patience. For this he submitted himself to a painful and ignominious death. As he is our Lord and Master, we are bound to follow his teaching and example. As he is our Saviour, and we owe everything to his compassion, we are bound ourselves to be likewise compassionate. This characteristic fact of Christianity, on which its whole superstructure is based, is wholly absent in the Elder Economy. And how immense the difference which it makes!

Without noticing any of the numerous other passages in which both our Lord himself and his Apostles enforce the application of this great leading fact for the regulation of our own feelings and conduct, we shall only advert to one, in which the Author of our faith at once and explicitly distinguishes the New Dispensation from the Old on this very ground. On a certain occasion, as he was travelling with his disciples through Samaria, the inhabitants of a village refused to admit him within its precincts, accompanying their refusal doubtless with an insulting manifestation of those feelings of bitter animosity which the Samaritans and Jews were so prone to cherish towards each other. The Apostles, James and John, proceeding upon the maxims which the Old Dispensation laid down, in reference to the manner in which the open impugners of God and his Prophets were to be dealt with, asked leave to call down fire from heaven upon the impious villagers, pleading the example of Elijah; to which example they might have added that of the more benign Elisha in dealing with the mocking children. To act thus had not formerly been wrong, but the contrary; neither does our blessed Lord censure what Elijah had done. But he explains his refusal to accede to the request of his disciples, by indicating, both that the spirit of the Economy which He came to establish was not the same as that of the Old Economy, and also, that it was the very character of His own mission which constituted the difference. 'Ye know not,'

he said, 'of what spirit ye are of,' i.e. what is the spirit of the Dispensation to which ye belong; 'for the Son of Man came not to destroy men's lives but to save them.'

How decided the contrast between the manner in which our blessed Lord demeaned himself on this occasion, and in which he uniformly persisted up to the very hour of his death, and the procedure, though likewise of Divine suggestion, which Moses followed in Egypt, at the Red Sea, in the Plains of Moab, and in the Land of Basan! And how strong the contrast between the spirit which by necessary consequence was communicated to the two several Dispensations, by the inspired legislator of the one and the Divine Author of the other, whilst acting in the discharge each of his own particular ministry.

A second cause of the distinction impressed upon the character of Christianity, is the clearness with which it developes in our minds the sense of guilt and unworthiness. This is partly the correlative of the display of Christ's mercy as the Saviour. For in proportion as we feel, as every man ought to feel, that our deliverance from God's displeasure is the fruit of Christ's merciful interposition, so does the sense of our own undeservingness grow in our minds. This consciousness is further increased by that disclosure of the future state of suffering which the Gospel makes to us, and which was not made to the saints of the Old Testament. Neither may we omit the effect in our clearer perception of the nature of spiritual obedience and our consequent increased consciousness of sin, which is produced by the teaching of the Holy Spirit, the gift of which is certainly one great and peculiar characteristic of the kingdom of heaven. The united effect of these influences on the human spirit must inspire into it a habitual persuasion and consciousness of its own demerit, to a degree which cannot be looked for under the former dispensation. It is true that a fall like that which David was guilty of, could not fail to give the conscience a strong sense of sin; and also, that no man can ever make a conscience of his daily life without becoming increasingly aware of imperfection. These facts are proved by what we read in the Book of Psalms, if they could otherwise have been questioned. But there was then, compared with the circumstances under which we are placed, a deficiency in the motives to self-humiliation, which could not but produce a corresponding deficiency in the feeling. What we notice then is, that the feeling of self-abasement to which Christianity so variously trains us, necessarily leads us to be mild and sparing in dealing with others. We are conscious that we have no right to do otherwise. With such sentiments tincturing the whole spirit, for us to pronounce an imprecation upon one with whom we

must feel ourselves to be fellow-sinners, is literally a mora. impossibility.

We have before noticed the effect, which is produced by our connecting so closely with the notion of God's anger against sinners that of the sufferings of the other world. Without our enlarging, therefore, on this topic here, our readers will at once perceive how vast a motive power this persuasion must exert in producing sentiments of compassion, and that this is another means by which the Christian character becomes distinguished from that of a pious Israelite under the law of Moses.

Much might be said of the spirituality of the Christian community as contrasted with the worldly and visible character of the Mosaic institute. But though much has been left unsaid which might have been added corroborative of our position, we trust that enough has been said to prove its justness. The considerations which have been alleged suffice, we trust, to show that the tone of feeling embodied in the maledictions of the Psalms, viewed subjectively, belonged to the economy under which they were uttered; and that, with the degree of religious light then imparted, such feeling was the legitimate and proper frame of a mind which was animated by the Spirit of God, and actuated by that Higher Influence to deal with surrounding objects according to the character in which they were then exhibited; but that in the altered spiritual position in which Christians are placed, such feelings are no longer either natural or proper, and that we cannot admit them as cherished visitants into our bosom without doing violence to the instincts of Christ's Spirit within us.

We cannot forbear adding a few words respecting a subject of considerable practical interest. Since we use the sacred Psalter so constantly in our devotional services-an usage, which has ever been followed by the devout from the very earliest ages, and which commends itself to our feelings just in proportion as our feelings are pervaded by the spirit of piety—it becomes an important question, what is the posture in which the mind ought to deal with such passages as we have been considering, when they come before it in the course of our daily reading.

The answer to this question is, that, though we should not be justified in employing such language ourselves, we can entirely feel with it as coming from the inspired writers. The circumstances of the Jewish dispensation, as we have shown, were such, that the saints under it could more fully apply to actual persons and parties, the enmity of the righteous soul to abstract evil, than the Christian saint can. Such application, then, in him were perfectly just and holy. They were no more

The

than the hatred of evil itself is in the Christian saint. form of the personal application is their accident not their essence. The Psalmist did not hate the persons in any other sense, than as embodying and personifying evil. He did not hate them directly, but only reflectively; he hated not the men, but the evil in the men. We may use such expressions accordingly and profit by them, as stimulatives to the hatred of evil. This holy principle requires strengthening and deepening in us; those passages in the Psalms fulfil this purpose. To the Christian they are the symbols of that fearful displeasure with which the Holy Spirit of God regards sins-sins, perhaps, which he has himself been guilty of. They should be to him likewise the symbols of that displeasure which, as God's servant, he is himself bound to feel against sins, and even against sinners so far as that emotion is duly qualified by his own circumstances as a Christian. And lastly, the solemn thought occasionally may well pervade his mind, that the hour will come when a sentiment analogous to that which is thus expressed by the Psalmist will penetrate every individual of the countless assemblage of the redeemed-might he be of that happy number! while they shall stand at the right hand of the Judge, rejoicing in the perfect triumph at last achieved by God over every power of evil which has infested and marred His creation.