best qualified to his service, by such ways as are most apt to persuade and induce men. Solomon built his temple with the tallest cedars; and surely, when God refused the defective and the maimed for sacrifice, we cannot think that he requires them for the priesthood. When learning, abilities, and what is excellent in the world, forsake the church, we may easily foretell its ruin, without the gift of prophecy. And when ignorance succeeds, we may be sure, heresy and confusion will quickly come in the room of religion. For undoubtedly there is no way so effectual to betray the truth, as to procure it a weak defender.

Well now, let us make a brief recapitulation of the whole. Government, we see, depends upon religion, and religion upon the encouragement of those that are to dispense and assert it. For the farther evidence of which truths, we need not travel beyond our own borders; but leave it to every one impartially to judge, whether from the very first day that our religion was unsettled, and church government flung out of doors, the civil government has ever been able to fix upon a sure foundation. We have been changing even to a proverb. The indignation of heaven has been rolling and turning us from one form to another, till at length such a giddiness seized upon the government, that it fell into the very dregs of sectaries, who threatened an equal ruin both to minister and magistrate; and how the state has sympathized with the church, is apparent. For have not our princes, as well as our priests, been of the lowest of the people? Have not coblers, draymen, mechanics, governed, as well as preached? Nay, have not they by preaching come to govern? Was ever that of Solomon more verified, that servants have rid, while princes and nobles have gone on foot? But God has been pleased, by a miracle of mercy, to dissipate this chaos, and to give us some dawnings of liberty and settlement. But now, let not those who are to rebuild our Jerusalem, think that the temple

must be built last. For if there be such a thing as a God, and religion, as whether men believe it or no, they will one day find and feel, assuredly he will stop our liberty, till we restore him his worship. Besides, it is a senseless thing in reason, to think that one of these interests can stand without the other, when in the very order of natural causes, government is preserved by religion.

But to return to Jeroboam with whom we first began. He laid the foundation of his government in destroying, though doubtless he coloured it with the name of reforming God's worship; but see the issue. Consider him cursed by God, maintaining his usurped title, by continual vexatious wars against the kings of Judah; smote in his posterity, which was made like the dung upon the face of the earth, as low and vile as those priests whom he had employed: consider him branded to all after ages; and now, when his kingdom and glory was at an end, and he and his posterity rotting under ground, and his name stinking above it, judge what a worthy prize he made in getting of a kingdom, by destroying the church. Wherefore the

sum of all is this; to advise those whom it may concern, to consider Jeroboam's punishment, and then they will have little heart to Jeroboam's sin.

DISCOURSE V.*

THE SCRIBE INSTRUCTED.

MATTH. xiii. 52.

Then said he unto them, therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.

In this chapter we have a large discourse from the great Preacher of righteousness; a discourse fraught with all the commending excellencies of speech; delightful for its variety, admirable for its convincing quickness, and argumentative closeness, and (which is seldom an excellency in other sermons) excellent for its length.

For that, which is carried on with a continued unflagging vigour of expression, can never be thought tedious, nor long. And Christ, who was not only the Preacher, but himself also the Word, was furnished with a strain of heavenly oratory far above the heights of all human rhetoric whatsoever; his sermons being of that grace, that (as the world generally goes) they

[ *One of the earliest public sermons we have of South," says the Retrospective Review, "is, "The Scribe Instructed,' and ought to be read by every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven.' He was then a young man, but possessed all the wisdom and excellent good sense which mature age and experience can give. He had already amassed a treasure of rich and useful knowledge, which he produced at once to instruct, astonish, and confound."-ED.]

might have prevailed even without truth, and yet pregnant with such irresistible truth, that the ornaments might have been spared; and indeed it still seems to have been used, rather to gratify, than persuade the hearer. So that we may (with a reverential acknowledgment both of the difference of the persons and the subject) give that testimony of Christ's sermons, which Cicero, (the great master of the Roman eloquence) did of Demosthenes' orations, who, being asked which of them was the best, answered the longest.

Our Saviour having finished his foregoing discourse, he now closes up all with the character of a preacher or evangelist; still addressing himself to his disciples, as to a designed seminary of preachers; or rather indeed, as to a kind of little itinerant academy (if I may so call it) of such as were to take his heavenly doctrines for the rule of their practice; and his excellent way of preaching, for the pattern of their imitation ; thus lying at the feet of their blessed Lord, with the humblest attention of scholars, and the lowest prostration of subjects. The very name and notion of a disciple implying, and the nature of the thing itself requiring, both these qualifications.

Now the discussion of the words before us shall lie in these following particulars in showing what is meant, 1st, By the Scribe. 2dly, By being instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven. 3dly, By bringing out of his treasure things new and old; and how upon this account he stands compared to an householder.

And 1. concerning the word Scribe. It was a name, which amongst the Jews was applied to two sorts of officers.

(1.) To a civil; and so it signifies a notary, or in a large sense, any one employed to draw up deeds or writings. Whether in an higher station, as we read in the 2 Kings, xxii. that Shaphan was the king's scribe or secretary; or, as in a lower sense, we find this appellation given to that officer, who appeared in quelling

the uproar at Ephesus, as we read in Acts xix. 35. where he is called youuuatevs, which we may fitly render, (as our English text does) the town-clerk. To this sort also some would refer those mentioned in Matth. ii. who are there called the scribes of the people.

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(2.) This name scribe signifies a church officer, one skilful in the law to interpret and explain it. For still we find the scribes reckoned with the great doctors of the Jewish church, and for the most part with the Pharisees in the evangelists, and by St. Paul with the disputer of this world, 1 Cor. i. 20. and sometimes called also vouxoi, lawyers, (Luke vii. 30. Luke xi. 52.) that is, expert in the Mosaic law. Not that these scribes were really any part of the Pharisees, (as some have thought,) for Pharisee was the name of a sect, scribe of an office. By scribe therefore must be here meant an expounder of the law to the people; such an one as Ezra, that excellent person, so renowned amongst the Jews, who is said to have been a ready scribe in the law of Moses. For though, indeed, the word scribe in the English and Latin imports barely a writer, and the Greek, by its derivation from yodqw, strictly signifies no more; yet by its nearer derivation from roάuua. which signifies a letter, it seems to represent to us, that these scribes were men of the bare letter or text, whose business it was to give the literal sense and meaning of the law. And therefore, that the men here spoken of, whom the Jews accounted of such eminent skill in it, should by their office be only transcribers of it, can with no more reason, I think, be affirmed, than if we should allow him to be a skilful divine, who should transcribe other men's works, and, which is more, preach them when he had done.

But,

2. As for being instructed unto the kingdom of heaven. By the kingdom of heaven is here signified to us, only the preaching of the gospel, or the state of the church, under the gospel; as, repent, for the kingdom