really seen. If it be confined to Christ, he that came down from the Father certainly had the purest and fullest views of every fact which he asserted, of every duty which he enforced, of every tenet which he promulgated, and of every purpose which he proclaimed to mankind as employed by their moral governor for their moral improvement; and yet his instructions, though accompanied by the evidence of works to which the unaided powers of human nature must have been unequal, had been perversely disputed, or contumeliously rejected. If Christ had insisted only on such truths as were not at variance with the prepossessions of the Jewish by-standers, his testimony might have been received; if he advanced no proposition which jarred with the spiritual pride, or interfered with the usurped authority of the Pharisees, Nicodemus might have been emboldened to profess himself a disciple of the Teacher who had done such mighty works.

Having then (in v. 11) assumed the authority with which he was invested as a teacher come from God, and laid his claim to unsullied veracity in every statement, and to unerring wisdom in every doctrine, he points out the improbability of producing conviction upon greater matters, when his endeavours to convince upon the less had been thus unsuccessful-" If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things? The same absence of impartial and fixed attention-the same disposition to measure every tenet offered to your consideration by your own scanty views, or crooked prepossessions-the same unwillingness to ex

amine the grounds upon which, as a master of Israel, you have erected your pretensions to superior sagacity and superior sanctity-these very same causes which prevent you from believing what is more familiar to your memories, and more obvious to your understandings, will have betrayed you into more incurable and more criminal incredulity, when your teacher expatiates upon a subject of far greater difficulty, and far higher moment.

At the outset of this discourse, as you remember, I told you it would be requisite for me to elucidate the phraseology of St. John, and here you have a direct instance. For it might be asked, in what consists the difference between things earthly and things heavenly, to which Christ adverts? Is it the distinction between things temporal and eternal—between things that relate to earth only, and things which entirely and solely belong to Heaven? The question deserves to be answered seriously; and I shall endeavour to furnish you with such a solution as may be intelligible, satisfactory, and useful. You will observe then, the things earthly and the things heavenly were both of them spiritual, though different in kind, and disparate in importance. The things earthly were things done upon earth, and easy to be known when done, and of this sort was that birth from above, or that birth of the spirit upon which Jesus had been conversing. Now if, in consequence of his entrance into the kingdom of heaven, that is, his conversion from Judaism, or Gentilism, to the Gospel, a man had acquired one virtuous, or conquered one vicious habit―if, having taken Jesus

for his guide, he found his faith more and more firm, his hope more lively, his piety more ardent, his charity more comprehensive, these earthly events might always become subjects of contemplation; they were in themselves instances of personal experience, and upon reflection they must have been ascribed to the operation of causes, which utimately are to be resolved into the agency of God. On the other hand, heavenly things, as I shall endeavour presently to show from the sequel of Christ's discourse, imply the counsels and dispensations of Almighty God in the gracious and wonderful redemption of mankind. But in order to prepare you for a more distinct conception of the interpretation just now given to heavenly things, as discriminated from things earthly, I must, on the principle of associated ideas, previously lay open the peculiar propriety, and I add, the peculiar grandeur of the word heavenly, which in my opinion was here selected by Christ, and which is clearly illustrated by some corresponding phrases in the context.

In the verse that immediately follows the text, we read, "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, who is in heaven;" and in the next it is said, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up." Now it has been observed by several learned men, that the word translated and, does not carry on the reasoning; and it has been added, that there is no apparent connection between the text and the two verses just recited, nor between the two verses them

selves. To the first observation I assent, for and, as a solitary term, does not connect the sense of the verses; but in the second remark I do not acquiesce. Though in Hebrew the connective particle is possibly in two or three places causal, and in two or three others illative, yet I have never met in sacred or profane writers, any passage which justifies the opinion of Schmidius, and some other critics, that in St. John we ought to render the Greek word for. But if, according to the conjecture proposed by Markland, we repeat the words, he said, then the proposition will be intelligible, though independently considered; and when the grammatical difficulty is thus removed, we perhaps may find our way to some principle for showing that these two verses are in their sense really connected with the doctrine of our Lord upon things heavenly, though the connection may not on the first transient glimpse present itself even to readers neither dull nor unlearned.

But my first concern, as I stated to you, is with the choice of the expression, heavenly. In the admirable preface of Brandan Ladolphus Raphelius to the learned and philological notes of his father on the New Testament, he very copiously and luminously interprets the phrase, "No man has ascended into heaven but the Son of Man, who was in heaven." He has at full length pointed out the chain of our Lord's reasoning; he understands earthly things to mean, as do other learned and pious men, that regeneration by the spirit, which Nicodemus was unwilling to believe, and he supports

this part of his opinion by two pertinent quotations from Origen and Ammonius. Literally to ascend to heaven cannot be applied to Christ, for his ascension had not taken place; figuratively it means the investigation of hidden things, and for such investigation Christ, who came down from heaven, was in a peculiar and pre-eminent degree qualified. Now in Deuteronomy, (iii. 3,) "This commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off; it is not in heaven, that thou shouldst say, who will go up for us to heaven and bring it to us, that we may hear and do it." Alluding to this passage, St. Paul (Rom. x.) says, "The righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, say not in thine heart who shall ascend into heaven, that is, to bring down Christ from above; or who shall descend into the deep, that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead; but what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thine heart, that is, the word of faith which we preach." His meaning is, the Gospel justification is not so hidden, that we must draw it down from heaven, or raise it from the abyss; for this were the same as if a man should literally endeavour to bring Christ down again from heaven; it would imply that, having come down from heaven before, he had not in his Gospel sufficiently explained to us the principle of justification, and also other heavenly things necessary to be known for our salvation. So in Proverbs (xxx), "Who has ascended into heaven or descended; who hath gathered the winds into his fist? What is his name? And what is the name of