"engraven in cold stones," speaking of the Decalogue, was glorious; and if the glory that was there, as shining upon the countenance of Moses, was too intense a splendour for mortal eye to gaze on; how much more glorious must the manifestation of the spirit be? For," he says, "if the ministration of condemnation, which said, The soul that sins shall die, had such intense material splendour that the human eye could not look on it even when reflected from the countenance of Moses; how much more doth that ministration which furnishes a mode of justification by the righteousness of Christ, exceed in glory?" But then the difference is here; the glory of the Old Testament economy was a material, visible, tangible glory; the glory of the New Testament economy is a moral glory, far more magnificent, but only adequately appreciated by hearts that have been renewed, and eyes that have had the film purged away by the application of the Holy Spirit of God. The vulgar eye thinks glorious only what it sees; and the vulgar taste thinks that glorious which it tastes and which it handles; but there is a glory far excelling that; the triumphs of righteousness, the triumphs of patience, the triumphs of love, the triumphs of truth; these have a moral magnificence that enlightened minds can appreciate and enlightened eyes can see, that far excelleth the glory of the letter, which has been done away.

Well, then, says the apostle, "Seeing that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech;" the greatest excellence that speaking can have; for, if the meaning of speaking is to be intelligible, the plainer it is, the better. Speaking may be extremely plain, and yet neither coarse, nor low, nor vulgar. All vulgarity,

buffoonery, and coarse jest and joke, introduced into the preaching of God's word, is perfectly horrible; and it is possible to use the plainest words, and yet not to use coarse and vulgar words; nay, the plainest words are often the most elegant. And it is a singular fact that the most uneducated taste will appreciate great truths plainly spoken, when it never can sympathise with those truths caricatured by rude or violent expressions. We use great plainness of speech; but the plainness of good sense and of good taste; and the plainer the speech the more intelligible the sermon.

The

"But," he says, "the minds of the Jews were blinded; for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament.” They cannot see what the Old Testament means. Jew reads the Psalms, and the Prophets, but he cannot see that all of these relate to Christ. He reads as if it were through a vail; that is, through a mist, through a cloud. He cannot see the inner glory, the inner significance, of what is there written; and the veil therefore remains upon their hearts; they do not see that Christ is in Isaiah, and that Isaiah wrote of him. But, he says, the day will come when the veil shall be taken away from the mind, the eye, and the heart of the Jew; and he shall be able to see the Gospel according to Isaiah, as plainly as we see the Gospel according to St. Matthew; and he will feel, when the veil is taken away, what the natural man feels when his heart is renewed, that there is in Isaiah the testimony of Jesus, I would say as clearly and unequivocally as in any of the books of the New Testament Scripture.

And then he says, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, there is liberty, there is perfect access

to him. But," he says, 66 we all with open face, beholding as in a glass," that is, the countenance of Christ reflected from the page of the Bible, "the glory of the Lord, are changed, transformed from glory to glory." It is said by the Persian poet that the flower that grows near the rose smells of the rose; so he whose heart is found constantly in communion with Christ, in communion with the Bible, with its divine hopes, and its blessed precepts, and its bright promises, will be transformed more and more. We all know by a recent discovery, the calotype and daguerreotype, that light writes itself; that the light reflected from an object writes that object by a mysterious power upon the susceptible paper that is exposed to it. Well, that idea is contained here; that we, looking to Christ, and receiving from him, as he is revealed in this book, the glorious beams that are radiated from his character, shall have impressed upon our living selves the very likeness of Christ, till men can see Christ in us, and Christ on us, and that we are unmistakeably what we should be, Christians, followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul's reference to the transforming glory is evidently taken from the events recorded in Exodus xxxiv. 33, employed as an allegory.

Paul's allusion to the veil on the head of the Jew is illustrated further by the fact, that in the synagogues, then as now, the Jews read and pray with veils on their heads.

Christianity is the religion of light. Reserve belongs to the castes of India, or the mysteries of paganism, not to Christianity. It is not dim, but bright religious light.

"It may be worth while," says Stanley, "to go through the various images which the apostle has called up in this chapter; first, there is the commendatory Epistle of the Corinthian Church, written on his heart; secondly, the same epistle written on their hearts and lives, read and re-read, by the wayfarers to and fro through the thoroughfare of Greece; thirdly, the contrast between this Epistle written on the tender human feelings, on the vibrations of the wind by the breath of the Spirit carrying its tidings backwards and forwards, whithersoever it will, with no limits of time or space, like the sweep of wind on the Æolian harp, like an electric spark of light, and the Ten Commandments graven in the granite rocks-hard, speechless, lifeless. Fourthly, there rises into view the figure of Moses, as he is known to us in the statue of Michael Angelo, the light streaming from his face, yet growing dim and dark, as a greater glory of another revelation rises behind it."

CHAPTER III. 2, 3.

THE LIVING EPISTLES.

"YE are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart."

The thought plainly embodied and implied in the passage we have read is: whatever one is in his inner and real character, that he is sure to develop or throw forth upon his exterior and every-day life. In other words, it implies that character cannot be hidden; that just as the thoughts of the writer are embodied in the epistle which he pens, so the thoughts, the feelings, the affections, the desires that are generated or inspired in the human heart will in some shape, and to the most discerning or to the ordinary eye, show what they are by their external and visible manifestation. If this be true of most things, it is emphatically true of the most powerful force which we know in the universe, namely, the Gospel of Christ Jesus. Its effects, as these are described in the New Testament, are so powerful, that it is impossible they can lie hidden. Far lesser revolutions show themselves; far inferior changes are developed