These were great and beneficent designs. At the same time, these triumphant hopes and consolations of Religion have ever been, in some degree, the portion of the righteous: virtue itself suggests them to the mind; and, although they have never been felt so fully as by those whom the Gospel has instructed, yet it is not here that the astonishing mercy of that dispensation is peculiarly to be found. Amidst all the gloom and misery of mortality, the good man can lift the eye of hope; it is the sinner who can find no beam of consolation; it is he who feels himself hated by man, despised by himself, without hope of pardon from God, and who wears out his life in melancholy dejection, or seeks a vain relief in the repetition of his sins. Even in heathen times, Virtue under misfortune could find consolation by laying claim to the protection of Providence; and the

object which, of all others, was supposed most interesting to the Deity, was that of a good man struggling nobly with the storms of the world. It was left for an higher philosophy to discover that there was yet an object more interesting to Heaven, that of a bad man turning from the evil of his ways,-that the tears of the penitent are precious in the sight of Angels, and that the Father of Spirits is ever ready to be entreated by those who long to be restored to his favour.

Such was the great design of Almighty benevolence in the promulgation of the Gospel. The passage before us shews further in what manner this design was executed. Our Saviour came to offer pardon to an offending world. Did he therefore come with a supercilious air of authority, and assume an unfeeling superiority to the beings whom he came to reform? No; he lowered himself to their

condition in every thing but sin; he went easily, we perceive, into every kind of society, and took no precedence except what was naturally yielded to his Wisdom and his Virtue. It was by the gentlest and most insinuating means that he carried on the work of reformation. Wherever penitence appeared, that instant he embraced and received it, and would never permit the haughtiness of human virtue to repress the returning sinner. No man, indeed, according to the Religion which he taught, has a right to claim any inherent superiority over his fellow-creatures; those who think themselves righteous above all others, he considered as the farthest removed from the true principles of Christian perfection; and while they supposed themselves at a distance from the class of sinners, in his view they were the most nearly connected with them. Nothing, therefore, could be finer

He

than the covert reproof which he here gave to the Pharisees, and to all such false pretenders to righteousness. seemed to say, that they were too righteous to require any assistance from him; but their consciences must have informed them, when he made this observation, that in fact they required, more than any others, the healing of the Divine Physician; and that it was in that character only, not as good and perfect men, that they could have any title to approach to him.

While the principle of Christian mercy is so beautifully brought out in these few expressions, "I came not to call the

righteous, but sinners, to repentance," the liberality and freedom of the duties which the Gospel inculcates are shewn in the course of some other little incidents which immediately follow. The same morose and intolerant Characters

who seemed to think it so unbecoming a Divine Teacher to go into the company of sinful men, likewise found fault with our Saviour, because he did not strictly inculcate the necessity for those external observances which constituted, in their apprehensions, the chief sum of Religion. He did not insist that his disciples should fast; and on the Sabbath-day his piety did not principally shew itself in the minuteness of rules and forms.

On the subject of fasting, his thoughts are veiled in a language somewhat metaphorical; but it is not difficult to discover his meaning. He means to say, that all practices of this kind are, in fact, merely helps to Devotion; and while he was with his disciples, and instructed them in the true principles of Religion, and fired their hearts with the love of God and of man, that they stood in no need of any artificial self-denial; and that he would leave