A BIBLICAL AND THEOLOGICAL
DICTIONARY:

[An intimate acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures is a secure haven, and an impregnable bulwark, and an immovable tower, and imperishable glory, and impenetrable armour, and unfading joy, and perpetual delight, and whatever other excellence can be uttered.]

566LABAN, the son of Bethuel, grandson of Nahor, brother to Rebekah, and father of Rachel and Leah, Gen. xxviii, 2, &c. Of this man, the first thing we hear is his entertainment of Abraham’s servant when he came on his errand to Rebekah. Hospitality was the virtue of his age and country. In his case, however, it seems to have been no little stimulated by the sight of “the ear ring and the bracelets on his sister’s hands,” which the servant had already given her, Gen. xxiv, 30; so he speedily made room for the camels. He next is presented to us as beguiling that sister’s son, who had sought a shelter in his house, and whose circumstances placed him at his mercy, of fourteen years’ service, when he had covenanted with him for seven only; endeavouring to retain his labour when he would not pay him his labour’s worth, himself devouring the portion which he should have given to his daughters, counting them but as strangers, Gen. xxxi, 15. Compelled, at length, to pay Jacob wages, he changes them ten times, and, in the spirit of a crafty, griping worldling, makes him account for whatever of the flock was torn of beasts or stolen, whether by day or night. When Jacob flies from this iniquitous service with his family and cattle, Laban still pursues and persecutes him, intending, if his intentions had not been overruled by a mightier hand, to send him away empty, even after he had been making, for so long a period, so usurious a profit of him.

LACHISH, a city of Palestine, Joshua x, 23; xv, 39. Sennacherib besieged Lachish, but did not make himself master of it. From thence it was that he sent Rabshakeh against Jerusalem, 2 Kings xviii, 17; xix, 8; 2 Chron. xxxii, 9.

LAMAISM, the religion of the people of Thibet. The Delai Lama, Grand Lama,” is at once the high priest, and the visible object of adoration, to this nation, to the hordes of wandering Tartars, and to the prodigious population of China. He resides at Patoli, a vast palace on a mountain near the banks of the Burampooter, about seven miles from Lahasse. The foot of the mountain is surrounded by twenty thousand lamas, or priests, in attendance on their sovereign pontiff, who is considered as the viceregent of the Deity on earth; and the remote Tartars are said to regard him absolutely as the Deity himself, and call him God, the everlasting Father of heaven. They believe him to be immortal, and endowed with all knowledge and virtue. Every year they come up from different parts to worship, and make rich offerings at his shrine. Even the emperor of China, who is a Mantchou Tartar, does not fail in acknowledgments to him in his religious capacity; and entertains in the palace of Pekin an inferior lama, deputed as his nuncio from Thibet. The grand lama is only to be seen in a secret place of his palace, amidst a great number of lamps, sitting cross-legged on a cushion, and decked all over with gold and precious stones; while, at a distance, the people prostrate themselves before him, it being not lawful for any so much as to kiss his feet. He returns not the least sign of respect, nor ever speaks, even to the greatest princes; but only lays his hand upon their heads, and they are fully persuaded that they thereby receive a full forgiveness of their sins. The Sunniasses, or Indian pilgrims, often visit Thibet as a holy place; and the lama entertains a body of two or three hundred in his pay. Beside his religious influence and authority, he is possessed of unlimited power throughout his dominions, which are very extensive. The inferior lamas, who form the most numerous as well as the most powerful body in the state, have the priesthood entirely in their hands, and, beside, fill up many monastic orders, which are held in great veneration among them. The whole country, like Italy, abounds with priests; and they entirely subsist on the rich presents sent them from the utmost extent of Tartary, from the empire of the great mogul, and from almost all parts of the Indies. The opinion of the orthodox among the Thibetians is, that when the grand lama seems to die, either of old age or infirmities, his soul, in fact, only quits a crazy habitation to enter another, younger and better; and is discovered again in the body of some child, by certain tokens, known only to the lamas, or priests, in which order he always appears. Almost all the nations of the east, except the Mohammedans, believe the metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul, as the most important article of their faith; especially the inhabitants of Thibet and Ava, the Peguans, the Siamese, the greater part of the Chinese and Japanese, and the Monguls and Kalmucks. According to their doctrine, the soul no sooner leaves her old habitation than she enters a new one. The delai lama, therefore, or rather the god Foe or Fuh, residing in the delai lama, passes to his successor; and he being a god, to whom all things are known, the grand lama is therefore acquainted with every thing which happened during his residence in his former bodies. This religion, which was early adopted in a large part of the globe, is said to have been of three thousand years’ standing; and neither time, nor the influence of men, has had the power of shaking the authority of the grand lama. This theocracy, which extends as fully to temporal as to spiritual concerns, is professed all over Thibet and Mongalia; is almost universal in Greater and Less Bucharia, and several provinces of Tartary; has some followers in the kingdom of Cashmere, in India; and is the predominant religion of China.

It has been observed that the religion of Thibet is the counterpart of the Roman Catholic, since the inhabitants of that country use holy water, and a singing service. They also offer alms, prayers, and sacrifices for the dead. They have a vast number of convents filled with monks and friars, amounting to thirty thousand, and confessors chosen by their superiors. They use beads, wear the mitre, like the bishops; and their delai lama is nearly the same among them as the sovereign pontiff was formerly, in the zenith of his power, among 567the Roman Catholics. So complete is the resemblance, that, when one of the first Romish missionaries penetrated Thibet, he came to the conclusion that the devil had set up there an imitation of the rites of the Catholic church, in order the more effectually to destroy the souls of men. Captain Turner, speaking of the religion of Thibet, says, It seems to be the schismatical offspring of the religion of the Hindoos, deriving its origin from one of the followers of that faith, a disciple of Bouddhu, who first broached the doctrine which now prevails over the wide extent of Tartary. It is reported to have received its earliest admission in that part of Tibet, or Thibet, bordering upon India, which from hence became the seat of the sovereign lamas, to have traversed over Mantchieux Tartary, and to have been ultimately disseminated over China and Japan. Though it differs from the Hindoo in many of its outward forms, yet it still bears a very close affinity with the religion of Brumha in many important particulars. The principal idol in the temples of Tibet, or Thibet, is Muha-Moonee, the Booddhu of Bengal, who is worshipped under these and various other epithets, throughout the great extent of Tartary, and among all nations to the eastward of the Brumhapootru. In the wide-extended space over which this faith prevails, the same object of veneration is acknowledged under numerous titles: among others, he is styled Godumu, or Gotumu, in Assam and Ava, Shumunu in Siam, Amida Buth in Japan, Fohi in China,” &c.

LAMBETH ARTICLES. See Predestination.

LAMECH, a descendant of Cain, the son of Mathusael, and father of Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-Cain, and Naamah, Gen. iv, 18–20, &c. He stands branded as the father of polygamy, the first who dared to violate the sacred command, Gen. ii, 24; giving way to his unbridled passion, and thus overleaping the divine mound raised by the wisdom of our great Creator; which restraint is enforced by the laws of nature herself, who peoples the earth with an equal number of males and females, and thereby teaches foolish man that polygamy is incompatible with her wise regulations. He married Adah and Zillah: the former was the mother of Jabal and Jubal, and the latter of Tubal-Cain and Naamah, his sister.

2. Lamech, the son of Methuselah, and father of Noah. He lived a hundred fourscore and two years before the birth of Noah, Gen. v, 25, 31; after which he lived five hundred and ninety-five years longer: thus the whole term of his life was seven hundred and seventy-seven years.

LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH. This book was formerly annexed to his prophecies, though it now forms a separate book. Josephus, and several other learned men, have referred them to the death of Josiah; but the more common opinion is, that they were applicable only to some period subsequent to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. But though it be allowed that the Lamentations were primarily intended as a pathetic description of present calamities, yet while Jeremiah mourns the desolation of Judah and Jerusalem during the Babylonian captivity, he may be considered as prophetically painting the still greater miseries they were to suffer at some future time: this seems plainly indicated by his referring to the time when the punishmentpunishment of their iniquity shall be accomplished, and they shall no more be carried into captivity, Lam. iv, 22. The Lamentations are written in metre, and consist of a number of plaintive effusions, composed after the manner of funeral dirges. They seem to have been originally written by their author as they arose in his mind, and to have been afterward joined together as one poem. There is no regular arrangement of the subject, or disposition of the parts: the same thought is frequently repeated with different imagery, or expressed in different words. There is, however, no wild incoherency, or abrupt transition; the whole appears to have been dictated by the feelings of real grief. Tenderness and sorrow form the general character of these elegies; and an attentive reader will find great beauty in many of the images, and great energy in some of the expressions. This book of Lamentations is divided into five chapters; in the first, second, and fourth, the prophet speaks in his own person, or by an elegant and interesting personification introduces the city of Jerusalem as lamenting her calamities, and confessing her sins; in the third chapter a single Jew, speaking in the name of a chorus of his countrymen, like the Coryphæus of the Greeks, describes the punishment inflicted upon him by God, but still acknowledges his mercy, and expresses some hope of deliverance; and in the fifth chapter, the whole nation of the Jews pour forth their united complaints and supplications to almighty God.

Every chapter, with the exception of the third, contains twenty-two verses, corresponding in number with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet; and each verse commences with a different letter, the first with aleph, the second with beth, the third with gimel, &c. The third chapter, consisting of sixty-six verses, has three verses together beginning with the same letter, the following three with the next letter, &c. This peculiarity may be seen in Psalm cxix; the first eight verses in which commence with aleph, the next eight with beth, &c, till the whole alphabet has been consecutively taken. This mode of versification, which has some distant resemblance to the modern acrostic style, seems to have been employed by the Hebrews in some of their elegiac poetry, perhaps to assist the memory.

LAMP, aµpa. There is frequent mention of lamps in Scripture, and the word is often used figuratively. The houses in the east were, from the remotest antiquity, lighted with lamps; and hence it is so common in Scripture to call every thing which enlightens the body or mind, which guides or refreshes, by the name of a lamp. These lamps were sustained by a large candlestick set upon the ground. The houses of Egypt, in modern 568times, are never without lights: they burn lamps all the night long, and in every occupied apartment. So requisite to the comfort of a family is this custom reckoned, or so imperious is the power which it exercises, that the poorest people would rather retrench part of their food than neglect it. As this custom no doubt prevailed in Egypt and the adjacent regions of Arabia and Palestine in former times, it imparts a beauty and force to some passages of Scripture which have been little observed. Thus, in the language of Jeremiah, to extinguish the light in an apartment is a convertible phrase for total destruction; and nothing can more properly and emphatically represent the total destruction of a city than the extinction of the lights: I will take from them the light of a candle, and this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment.” Job describes the destruction of a family among the Arabs, and the desolation of their dwellings, in the very language of the prophet: How oft is the candle of the wicked put out, and how oft cometh their destruction upon them!” Job xxi, 17. Bildad expresses the same idea in the following beautiful passage: Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine. The light shall be dark in his tabernacle, and his candle shall be put out with him,” Job xviii, 5, 6. A burning lamp is, on the other hand, the chosen symbol of prosperity, a beautiful instance of which occurs in the complaint of Job: O that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me; when his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness,” Job xxix, 2, 3. When the ten tribes were taken from Rehoboam, and given to his rival, Jehovah promised to reserve one tribe, and assigns this reason: That David my servant may have a light always before me in Jerusalem,” 1 Kings xi, 36. In many parts of the east, and in particular in the Indies, instead of torches and flambeaux, they carry a pot of oil in one hand, and a lamp full of oily rags in the other.

LANGUAGE, the faculty of human speech, concerning the origin of which there have been entertained different opinions among philosophers and learned men. The Mosaic history, which gives us an account of the formation and first occupations of man, represents him as being immediately capable of conversing with his Maker; of giving names to the various tribes and classes of animals; and of reasoning consecutively, and in perfectly appropriate terms, concerning his own situation, and the relation he stood in to the other creatures. As in man’s first attempt at speech, according to this account, there appear no crudeness of conception, no barrenness of ideas, and no inexpressive or unappropriate terms, we must certainly infer, that God who made and endued him with corporeal and mental powers perfectly suited to his state and condition in life, endued him, also, not only with the faculty of speech, but with speech or language itself; which latter was as necessary to his comfort, and to the perfection and end of his being, as any other power or faculty which his Creator thought proper to bestow upon him.

Among the antediluvians there was but one language; and even now the indications that the various languages of the earth have had one common source are very convincing. Whether this primitive language was the same with any of the languages of which we have still any remains, has been a subject of much dispute. That the primitive language continued at least till the dispersion of mankind, consequent upon the building of Babel, there seems little reason to doubt. When, by an immediate interposition of divine power, the language of men was confounded, we are not informed to what extent this confusion of tongues prevailed. Under the article Confusion of Tongues some reasons are given to show that the primitive language was not lost at that event, but continued in the form of the Hebrew.

There are, however, other opinions on the oft disputed subject as to the primitive language. The Armenians allege, that as the ark rested in their country, Noah and his children must have remained there a considerable time, before the lower and marshy country of Chaldea could be fit to receive them; and it is therefore reasonable to suppose they left their language there, which was probably the very same that Adam spoke. Some have fancied the Greek the most ancient tongue, because of its extent and copiousness. The Teutonic, or that dialect of it which is spoken in the Lower Germany and Brabant, has found a strenuous patron in Geropius Becanus, who endeavours to derive even the Hebrew itself from that tongue. The pretensions of the Chinese to this honour have been allowed by several Europeans. The patrons of this opinion endeavour to support it, partly, by the great antiquity of the Chinese, and their having preserved themselves so many ages from any considerable mixture or intercourse with other nations. It is a notion advanced by Dr. Allix, and maintained by Mr. Whiston, with his usual tenacity and fervour, that the Chinese are the posterity of Noah, by his children born after the flood; and that Fohi, the first king of China, was Noah. As for those which are called the oriental languages, they have each their partisans. The generality of eastern writers allow the preference to the Syriac, except the Jews, who assert the antiquity of the Hebrew with the greatest warmth; and with them several Christian writers agree, particularly Chrysostom, Austin, Origen, and Jerome, among the ancients; and among the moderns, Bochart, Heidegger, Selden, and Buxtorf. The Sanscrit has also put in its claims; and some have thought that the Pali bears the character of the highest antiquity. All these are however useless speculations. The only point worth contending for is, that language was conveyed at once to the first pair in sufficient degree for intellectual intercourse with each other, and devotional 569intercourse with God; and that man was not left, as infidel writers have been pleased to say, to form it for himself out of rude and instinctive sounds. On this subject the remarks of Delaney are conclusive: “That God made man a sociable creature, does not need to be proved; and that when he made him such, he withheld nothing from him that was in any wise necessary for his well being in society, is a clear consequence from the wisdom and goodness of God; and if he withheld nothing any way necessary to his well being, much less would he withhold from him that which is the instrument of the greatest happiness a reasonable creature is capable of in this world. If the Lord God made ‘Adam a help meet for him,’ because ‘it was not good for man to be alone,’ can we imagine he would leave him unfurnished with the means to make that help useful and delightful to him If it was not good for him to be alone, certainly neither was it good for him to have a companion to whom he could not readily communicate his thoughts, with whom he could neither ease his anxieties, nor divide or double his joys, by a kind, a friendly, a reasonable, a religious conversation; and how he could do this in any degree of perfection, or to any height of rational happiness, is utterly inconceivable without the use of speech.

“If it be said, that the human organs being admirably fitted for the formation of articulate sounds, these, with the help of reason, might in time lead men to the use of language. I own it imaginable that they might: but still, till that end were attained in perfection, which possibly might not be in a series of many generations, it must be owned that brutes were better dealt by, and could better attain all the ends of their creation. And if that be absurd to be supposed, certainly the other is not less absurd to be believed. Nay, I think it justly doubtful, whether, without inspiration from God in this point, man could ever attain the true ends of his being; at least, if we may judge in this case, by the example of those nations who, being destitute of the advantages of a perfect language, are, in all probability, from the misfortune of that sole defect, sunk into the lowest condition of barbarism and brutality. And as to the perfection in which the human organs are framed and fitted for the formation of articulate sounds, this is clearly an argument for believing that God immediately blessed man with the use of speech, and gave him wherewithal to exert those organs to their proper ends; for this is surely as credible, as that when he gave him an appetite for food, and proper organs to eat and to digest it, he did not leave him to seek painfully for a necessary supply, (till his offence had made such a search his curse and punishment,) but placed him at once in the midst of abundant plenty. The consequence from all which is, that the perfection and felicity of man, and the wisdom and goodness of God, necessarily required that Adam should be supernaturally endowed with the knowledge and use of language. And therefore, as certain as it can be, that man was made perfect and happy, and that God is wise and good; so certain is it, that, when Adam and Eve were formed, they were immediately enabled by God to converse and communicate their thoughts, in all the perfection of language necessary to all the ends of their creation. And as this was the conduct most becoming the goodness of God, so we are assured from Moses, that it was that to which his infinite wisdom determined him; for we find that Adam gave names to all the creatures before Eve was formed; and, consequently, before necessity taught him the use of speech.”

It is true that many languages bear marks of being raised to their improved state from rude and imperfect elements, and that all are capable of being enriched and rendered more exact; and it is this which has given some colour to those theories which trace all language itself up from elemental sounds, as the necessities of men, their increasing knowledge, and their imagination led to the invention of new words and combinations. All this is, however, consistent with the Scripture fact, that language was taught at first by God to our first parents. The dispersion of mankind carried many tribes to great distances, and wars still farther scattered them, and often into wide regions where they were farther dispersed to live chiefly by the chase, by fishing, or at best but an imperfect agriculture. In various degrees we know they lost useful arts; and for the same reasons they would lose much of their original language; those terms being chiefly retained which their immediate necessities, and the common affairs of a gross life, kept in use. But when civilization again overtook these portions of mankind, and kingdoms and empires were founded among them, or they became integral parts of the old empires, then their intercourse with each other becoming more rapid, and artificial, and intellectual, their language was put into a new process of improvement, and to the eye of the critic would exhibit the various stages of advancement; and in many it would be pushed beyond that perfection which it had when it first began to deteriorate. See Letters.

LANTERN. The word occurs, John xviii, 3: µet fa a aµpd: with torches and lanterns:” but both terms appear to signify torches; the former of a ruder kind than the latter, being formed of split laths bound into bundles, throwing around a strong glare of light. They came thus furnished to apprehend our Lord, lest he should escape through the darkness of the night.

LAODICEA. There were several cities of this name, but the Scripture speaks only of that in Phrygia, upon the river Lycus, near Colosse. Its ancient name was Diospolis: it was afterward called Rhoas. Lastly, Antiochus, the son of Stratonice, rebuilt it, and called it Laodicea, from the name of his wife Laodice. It became the mother church of sixteen bishoprics. Its three theatres, and the immense circus, which was capable of containing 570upward of thirty thousand spectators, the spacious remains of which (with other ruins buried under ruins) are yet to be seen, give proof of the greatness of its ancient wealth and population; and indicate too strongly that in that city where Christians were rebuked, without exception, for their lukewarmness, there were multitudes who were lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. The amphitheatre was built after the Apocalypse was written, and the warning of the Spirit had been given to the church of the Laodiceans to be zealous and repent. There are no sights of grandeur, nor scenes of temptation around it now. Its own tragedy may be briefly told. It was lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot; and therefore it was loathsome in the sight of God. And it has been blotted from the world. It is now as desolate as its inhabitants were destitute of the fear and love of God. It is, as described in his Travels by Dr. Smith, utterly desolated, and without any inhabitant except wolves, and jackals, and foxes.” It can boast of no human inhabitants, except occasionally when wandering Turcomans pitch their tents in its spacious amphitheatre. The finest sculptured fragments are to be seen at a considerable depth, in excavations which have been made among the ruins. And Colonel Lake observes, There are few ancient cities more likely than Laodicea to preserve many curious remains of antiquity beneath the surface of the soil. Its opulence, and the earthquakes to which it was subject, render it probable that valuable works of art were often there buried beneath the ruins of the public and private edifices.”

LAPWING, , Levit. xi, 19; Deut. xiv, 18. The bird intended by the Hebrew name in these places is undoubtedly the hoopoe; a very beautiful, but most unclean and filthy, species of birds. The Septuagint renders it ppa; and the Vulgate, upupa; which is the same with the Arabian interpreters. The Egyptian name of the bird is kukuphah; and the Syrian, kikuphah; which approach the Hebrew dukiphath. It may have its name from the noise or cry it makes, which is very remarkable, and may be heard a great way.

LATITUDINARIANS, a term applied to those divines who, in the seventeenth century, attempted to bring Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents, into one communion, by compromising the differences between them. The chief leaders of this party were the great Chillingworth and John Hales; to whom may be added More, Cudworth, Gale, Tillotson, and Whitchcot. They were zealously attached to the church of England, but did not look upon episcopacy as indispensable to the constitution of the Christian church. Hence they maintained that those who adopted other forms of government and worship, were not on that account to be excluded from the communion, or to forfeit the title of brethren. They reduced the fundamental doctrines of Christianity to a few points. By this way of proceeding, they endeavoured to show that neither the Episcopalians, who, generally speaking, were then Arminians, nor the Presbyterians and Independents, who as generally adopted the doctrines of Calvin, had any reason to oppose each other with such animosity and bitterness; since the subjects of their debates were matters non-essential to salvation, and might be variously explained and understood without prejudice to their eternal interests. This plan failing, through the violence of the bishops on one hand, (though sanctioned by the Lord Chancellor Clarendon,) and by the jealousy of the more rigid on the other, the name Latitudinarian became a term of reproach, as implying an indifferency to all religions, and has been generally so used ever since.

LAVER. Between the altar and the tabernacle, a little to the south, stood a circular laver, which, together with its base, was made of the brazen ornaments which the women had presented for the use of the tabernacle, and was thence called , Exodus xxx, 18; xl, 7. The priests, when about to perform their duties, washed their hands in this laver.

LAW, a rule of action; a precept or command, coming from a superior authority, which an inferior is bound to obey. The manner in which God governs rational creatures is by a law, as the rule of their obedience to him, and this is what we call God’s moral government of the world. The term, however, is used in Scripture with considerable latitude of meaning; and to ascertain its precise import in any particular place, it is necessary to regard the scope and connection of the passage in which it occurs. Thus, for instance, sometimes it denotes the whole revealed will of God as communicated to us in his word. In this sense it is generally used in the book of Psalms, i, 2; xix, 7; cxix; Isaiah viii, 20; xlii, 21. Sometimes it is taken for the Mosaical institution distinguished from the Gospel, John i, 17; Matt. xi, 13; xii, 5; Acts xxv, 8. Hence we frequently read of the law of Moses as expressive of the whole religion of the Jews, Heb. ix, 19; x, 28. Sometimes, in a more restricted sense, for the ritual or ceremonial observances of the Jewish religion. In this sense the Apostle speaks of the law of commandments contained in ordinances,” Eph. ii, 15; Heb. x, 1; and which, being only a shadow of good things to come,” Christ Jesus abolished by his death, and so in effect destroyed the ancient distinction between Jew and Gentile, Gal. iii, 17. Very frequently it is used to signify the decalogue, or ten precepts which were delivered to the Israelites from Mount Sinai. It is in this acceptation of the term that the Lord Jesus declares he came not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it,” Matt. v, 17; and he explains its import as requiring perfect love to God and man, Luke x, 27. It is in reference to this view that St. Paul affirms, By the deeds of the law shall no flesh living be justified; for by the law is the knowledge of sin,” Rom. iii, 20. The language of this law is, The soul that sinneth it shall die,” and Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things that are written,” or required, in the book of the law, to do 571them,” Gal. iii, 10. To deliver man from this penalty, Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being himself made a curse for us,” Gal. iii, 13. The law, in this sense, was not given that men should obtain righteousness or justification by it, but to convince them of sin, to show them their need of a Saviour, to shut them up, as it were, from all hopes of salvation from that source, and to recommend the Gospel of divine grace to their acceptance, Gal. iii, 19–25. Again, the law often denotes the rule of good and evil, or of right and wrong, revealed by the Creator and inscribed on man’s conscience, even at his creation, and consequently binding upon him by divine authority; and in this respect it is in substance the same with the decalogue. That such a law was connate with, and, as it were, implanted in, man, appears from its traces, which, like the ruins of some noble building, are still extant in every man. It is from those common notions, handed down by tradition, though often imperfect and perverted, that the Heathens themselves distinguished right from wrong, by which they were a law unto themselves, showing the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness,” Rom. ii, 12–15, although they had no express revelation.

The term law, is, however, eminently given to the Mosaic law; on the principles and spirit of which, a few general remarks may be offered. The right consideration of this divine institute, says Dr. Graves, will surround it with a glory of truth and holiness, not only worthy of its claims, but which has continued to be the light of the world on theological and moral subjects, and often on great political principles, to this day. If we examine the Jewish law, to discover the principle on which the whole system depends, the primary truth, to inculcate and illustrate which is its leading object, we find it to be that great basis of all religion, both natural and revealed, the self-existence, essential unity, perfections, and providence of the supreme Jehovah, the Creator of heaven and earth. The first line of the Mosaic writings inculcates this great truth: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” When the lawgiver begins to recapitulate the statutes and judgments he had enjoined to his nation, it is with this declaration: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” Deut. vi, 4; or, as it might be more closely expressed, Jehovah our Elohim, or God, is one Jehovah. And at the commencement of that sublime hymn, delivered by Moses immediately before his death, in which this illustrious prophet sums up the doctrines he had taught, the wonders by which they had been confirmed, and the denunciations by which they were enforced, he declares this great tenet with the sublimity of eastern poetry, but at the same time with the precision of philosophic truth: Give ear,” says he, O ye heavens, and I will speak: and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. My doctrine shall drop rain: my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass,” Deut. xxxii, 1, &c. What, is that doctrine so awful, that the whole universe is thus invoked to attend to it so salutary as to be compared with the principle whose operation diffuses beauty and fertility over the vegetable world Hear the answer: Because I will publish the name of Jehovah; ascribe ye greatness unto our God. He is the rock, his work is perfect: a God of truth, and without iniquity, just and right is he.”

This, then, is one great leading doctrine of the Jewish code. But the manner in which this doctrine is taught displays such wise accommodation to the capacity and character of the nation to whom it is addressed, as deserves to be carefully remarked. That character by which the supreme Being is most clearly distinguished from every other, however exalted; that character from which the acutest reasoners have endeavoured demonstratively to deduce, as from their source, all the divine attributes, is self-existence. Is it not then highly remarkable, that it is under this character the Divinity is described on his first manifestation to the Jewish lawgiver The Deity at first reveals himself unto him as the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob; and therefore the peculiar national and guardian God of the Jewish race. Moses, conscious of the degeneracy of the Israelites, their ignorance of, or their inattention to, the true God, and the difficulty and danger of any attempt to recall them to his exclusive worship, and to withdraw them from Egypt, seems to decline the task; but when absolutely commanded to undertake it, he said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name what shall I say unto them And God said unto Moses, I am that I am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you,” Exod. iii, 13, 14. Here we observe, according to the constant method of the divine wisdom, when it condescends to the prejudices of men, how in the very instance of indulgence it corrects their superstition. The religion of names arose from an idolatrous polytheism; and the name given here directly opposes this error, and in the ignorance of that dark and corrupted period establishes that great truth, to which the most enlightened philosophy can add no new lustre, and on which all the most refined speculations on the divine nature ultimately rest, the self-existence, and, by consequence, the eternity and immutability, of the one great Jehovah.

But though the self-existence of the Deity was a fact too abstract to require its being frequently inculcated, his essential unity was a practical principle, the sure foundation on which to erect the structure of true religion, and form a barrier against the encroachments of idolatry: for this commenced not so frequently in denying the existence, or even the supremacy, of the one true God, as in associating with him for objects of adoration inferior intermediate beings, who were supposed to be 572more directly employed in the administration of human affairs. To confute and resist this false principle was, therefore, one great object of the Jewish scheme. Hence the unity of God is inculcated with perpetual solicitude; it stands at the head of the system of moral law promulgated to the Jews from Sinai by the divine voice, heard by the assembled nation, and issuing from the divine glory, with every circumstance which could impress the deepest awe upon even the dullest minds: I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage; thou shalt have no other gods beside me,” Exod. xx, 2, 3. And in the recapitulation of the divine laws in Deuteronomy, it is repeatedly enforced with the most solemn earnestness: Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord,” Deut. vi, 4. And again: Unto thee it was showed, that thou mightest know that the Lord he is God; there is none else beside him. Know, therefore, this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the Lord he is God in heaven above, and in the earth beneath: there is none else,” Deut. iv, 35, 39.

This self-existent, supreme and only God is moreover described as possessed of every perfection which can be ascribed to the Divinity: Ye shall be holy,” says the Lord to the people of the Jews; for I the Lord your God am holy,” Lev. xix, 2. Ascribe ye,” says the legislator, greatness unto our God; he is the rock; his work is perfect; a God of truth, and without iniquity, just and right is he,” Deut. xxxii, 4. And in the hymn of thanksgiving on the miraculous escape of the Israelites at the Red Sea, this is its burden: Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods who is like unto thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders” Exod. xv, 11. And when the Lord delivered to Moses the two tables of the moral law, he is described as descending in the cloud, and proclaiming the name of the Lord: And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty,” Exod. xxxiv, 6, 7.

But to teach the self-existence, the unity, the wisdom, and the power of the Deity, nay, even his moral perfections of mercy, justice, and truth, would have been insufficient to arrest the attention, and command the obedience of a nation, the majority of which looked no farther than mere present objects, and at that early period cherished scarcely any hopes higher than those of a temporal kind,--if, in addition to all this, care had not been taken to represent the providence of God as not only directing the government of the universe by general laws, but also perpetually superintending the conduct and determining the fortune of every nation, of every family, nay, of every individual. It was the disbelief or the neglect of this great truth which gave spirit and energy, plausibility and attraction, to the whole system of idolatry. While men believed that the supreme God and Lord of all was too exalted in his dignity, too remote from this sublunary scene, to regard its vicissitudes with an attentive eye, and too constantly engaged in the contemplation of his own perfections, and the enjoyment of his own independent and all-perfect happiness, to interfere in the regulation of human affairs, they regarded with indifference that supreme Divinity who seemed to take no concern in their conduct, and not to interfere as to their happiness. However exalted and perfect such a Being might appear to abstract speculation, he was to the generality of mankind as if he did not exist; as their happiness or misery were not supposed to be influenced by his power, they referred not their conduct to his direction. If he delegated to inferior beings the regulation of this inferior world; if all its concerns were conducted by their immediate agency, and all its blessings or calamities distributed by their immediate determination; it seemed rational, and even necessary, to supplicate their favour and submit to their authority; and neither unwise nor unsafe to neglect that Being, who, though all-perfect and supreme, would, on this supposition appear, with respect to mankind, altogether inoperative. In truth, this fact of the perpetual providence of God extending even to the minutest events, is inseparably connected with every motive which is offered to sway the conduct of the Jews, and forcibly inculcated by every event of their history. This had been manifested in the appointment of the land of Canaan for the future settlement of the chosen people on the first covenant which God entered into with the Patriarch Abraham; in the prophecy, that for four hundred years they should be afflicted in Egypt, and afterward be thence delivered; in the increase of their nation, under circumstances of extreme oppression, and their supernatural deliverance from that oppression. The same providence was displayed in the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea; the travels of the thousands of Israel through the wilderness, sustained by food from heaven; and in their subsequent settlement in the promised land by means entirely distinct from their own strength. Reliance on the same providence was the foundation of their civil government, the spirit and the principle of their constitution. On this only could they be commanded to keep the sabbatic year without tilling their land, or even gathering its spontaneous produce; confiding in the promise, that God would send his blessing on the sixth year, so that it should bring forth fruit for three years, Lev. xxv, 21. The same faith in Divine Providence alone could prevail on them to leave their properties and families exposed to the attack of their surrounding enemies; while all the males of the nation assembled at Jerusalem to celebrate the three great festivals, enjoined by divine command, with the assurance that no man should desire their land when they went up to appear before the Lord their God thrice in the year, Exodus xxxiv, 24. And, finally, it is most evident, that, contrary to all 573other lawgivers, the Jewish legislator renders his civil institutions entirely subordinate to his religious; and announces to his nation that their temporal adversity or prosperity would entirely depend, not on their observance of their political regulations; not on their preserving a military spirit, or acquiring commercial wealth, or strengthening themselves by powerful alliances; but on their continuing to worship the one true God according to the religious rites and ceremonies by him prescribed, and preserving their piety and morals untainted by the corruptions and vices which idolatry tended to introduce.

Such was the theology of the Jewish religion, at a period when the whole world was deeply infected with idolatry; when all knowledge of the one true God, all reverence for his sacred name, all reliance on his providence, all obedience to his laws, were nearly banished from the earth; when the severest chastisements had been tried in vain; when no hope of reformation appeared from the refinements of civilization or the researches of philosophy; for the most civilized and enlightened nations adopted with the greatest eagerness, and disseminated with the greatest activity, the absurdities, impieties, and pollutions of idolatry. Then was the Jewish law promulgated to a nation, who, to mere human judgment, might have appeared incapable of inventing or receiving such a high degree of intellectual and moral improvement; for they had been long enslaved to the Egyptians, the authors and supporters of the grossest idolatry; they had been weighed down by the severest bondage, perpetually harassed by the most incessant manual labours; for the Egyptians made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field,” Exod. i, 14. At this time, and in this nation, was the Mosaic law promulgated, teaching the great principles of true religion, the self-existence, the unity, the perfections, and the providence of the one great Jehovah; reprobating all false gods, all image worship, all the absurdities and profanations of idolatry. At this time, and in this nation, was a system of government framed, which had for its basis the reception of, and steady adherence to, this system of true religion; and establishing many regulations, which would be in the highest degree irrational, and could never hope to be received, except from a general and thorough reliance on the superintendence of Divine Providence, controlling the course of nature, and directing every event, so as to proportion the prosperity of the Hebrew people, according to their obedience to that law which they had received as divine.

It is an obvious, but it is not therefore a less important remark, that to the Jewish religion we owe that admirable summary of moral duty, contained in the ten commandments. All fair reasoners will admit that each of these must be understood to condemn, not merely the extreme crime which it expressly prohibits, but every inferior offence of the same kind, and every mode of conduct leading to such transgression; and, on the contrary, to enjoin opposite conduct, and the cultivation of opposite dispositions. Thus, the command, Thou shalt not kill,” condemns not merely the single crime of deliberate murder, but every kind of violence, and every indulgence of passion and resentment, which tends either to excite such violence, or to produce that malignant disposition of mind, in which the guilt of murder principally consists: and similarly of the rest. In this extensive interpretation of the commandments, we are warranted, not merely by the deductions of reason, but by the letter of the law itself. For the addition of the last, Thou shalt not covet,” proves clearly that in all, the dispositions of the heart, as much as the immediate outward act, is the object of the divine Legislator; and thus it forms a comment on the meaning, as well as a guard for the observance, of all the preceding commands. Interpreted in this natural and rational latitude, how comprehensive and important is this summary of moral duty! It inculcates the adoration of the one true God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is;” who must, therefore, be infinite in power, and wisdom, and goodness; the object of exclusive adoration; of gratitude for every blessing we enjoy; of fear, for he is a jealous God; of hope, for he is merciful. It prohibits every species of idolatry; whether by associating false gods with the true, or worshipping the true by symbols and images. Commanding not to take the name of God in vain, it enjoins the observance of all outward respect for the divine authority, as well as the cultivation of inward sentiments and feelings suited to this outward reverence; and it establishes the obligation of oaths, and, by consequence, of all compacts and deliberate promises; a principle, without which the administration of laws would be impracticable, and the bonds of society must be dissolved. By commanding to keep holy the Sabbath, as the memorial of the creation, it establishes the necessity of public worship, and of a stated and outward profession of the truths of religion, as well as of the cultivation of suitable feelings; and it enforces this by a motive which is equally applicable to all mankind, and which should have taught the Jew that he ought to consider all nations as equally creatures of that Jehovah whom he himself adored; equally subject to his government, and, if sincerely obedient, entitled to all the privileges his favour could bestow. It is also remarkable, that this commandment, requiring that the rest of the Sabbath should include the man-servant, and the maid-servant, and the stranger that was within their gates, nay, even their cattle, proved that the Creator of the universe extended his attention to all his creatures; that the humblest of mankind were the objects of his paternal love; that no accidental differences, which so often create alienation among different nations, would alienate any from the divine regard; and that even the brute creation shared the benevolence of their Creator, and ought to be treated by men with gentleness and humanity.

574When we proceed to the second table, comprehending more expressly our social duties, we find all the most important principles on which they depend clearly enforced. The commandment which enjoins, Honour thy father and mother,” sanctions the principles, not merely of filial obedience, but of all those duties which arise from our domestic relations; and, while it requires not so much any one specific act, as the general disposition which should regulate our whole course of conduct in this instance, it impresses the important conviction, that the entire law proceeds from a Legislator able to search and judge the heart of man. The subsequent commands coincide with the clear dictates of reason, and prohibit crimes which human laws in general have prohibited as plainly destructive of social happiness. But it was of infinite importance to rest the prohibitions, Thou shalt not kill,” Thou shalt not commit adultery,” Thou shalt not steal,” Thou shalt not bear false witness,” not merely on the deductions of reason, but also on the weight of a divine authority. How often have false ideas of public good in some places, depraved passions in others, and the delusions of idolatry in still more, established a law of reputation contrary to the dictates of reason, and the real interests of society. In one country we see theft allowed, if perpetrated with address; in others, piracy and rapine honoured, if conducted with intrepidity. Sometimes we perceive adultery permitted, the most unnatural crimes committed without remorse or shame; nay, every species of impurity enjoined and consecrated as a part of divine worship. In others, we find revenge honoured as spirit, and death inflicted at its impulse with ferocious triumph. Again, we see every feeling of nature outraged, and parents exposing their helpless children to perish for deformity of body or weakness of mind; or, what is still more dreadful, from mercenary or political views; and this inhuman practice familiarized by custom, and authorized by law. And, to close the horrid catalogue, we see false religions leading their deluded votaries to heap the altars of their idols with human victims; the master butchers his slave, the conqueror his captive; nay, dreadful to relate, the parent sacrifices his children, and, while they shriek amidst the tortures of the flames, or in the agonies of death, he drowns their cries by the clangour of cymbals and the yells of fanaticism. Yet these abominations, separate or combined, have disgraced ages and nations which we are accustomed to admire and celebrate as civilized and enlightened,--Babylon and Egypt, Phenicia and Carthage, Greece and Rome. Many of these crimes legislators have enjoined, or philosophers defended. What, indeed, could be hoped from legislators and philosophers, when we recollect the institutions of Lycurgus, especially as to purity of manners, and the regulations of Plato on the same subject, in his model of a perfect republic; when we consider the sensuality of the Epicureans, and immodesty of the Cynics; when we find suicide applauded by the Stoics, and the murderous combats of gladiators defended by Cicero, and exhibited by Trajan Such variation and inconstancy in the rule and practice of moral duty, as established by the feeble or fluctuating authority of human opinion, demonstrates the utility of a clear divine interposition, to impress these important prohibitions; and it is difficult for any sagacity to calculate how far such an interposition was necessary, and what effect it may have produced by influencing human opinions and regulating human conduct, when we recollect that the Mosaic code was probably the first written law ever delivered to any nation; and that it must have been generally known in those eastern countries, from which the most ancient and celebrated legislators and sages derived the models of their laws and the principles of their philosophy.

But the Jewish religion promoted the interests of moral virtue, not merely by the positive injunctions of the decalogue; it also inculcated clearly and authoritatively the two great principles on which all piety and virtue depend, and which our blessed Lord recognised as the commandments on which hang the law and the prophets,--the principles of love to God and love to our neighbour. The love of God is every where enjoined in the Mosaic law, as the ruling disposition of the heart, from which all obedience should spring, and in which it ought to terminate. With what solemnity does the Jewish lawgiver impress it at the commencement of his recapitulation of the divine law: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” Deut. vi, 4, 5. And again: And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul” Deut. x, 12. Nor is the love of our neighbour less explicitly enforced: Thou shalt not,” says the law, avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord,” Lev. xix, 18. The operation of this benevolence, thus solemnly required, was not to be confined to their own countrymen; it was to extend to the stranger, who, having renounced idolatry, was permitted to live among them, worshipping the true God, though without submitting to circumcision or the other ceremonial parts of the Mosaic law: If a stranger,” says the law, sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord thy God,” Lev. xix, 33, 34.

Thus, on a review of the topics we have discussed, it appears that the Jewish law promulgated the great principles of moral duty in the decalogue, with a solemnity suited to their high preëminence; that it enjoined love to God with the most unceasing solicitude, and love 575to our neighbour, as extensively and forcibly, as the peculiar design of the Jewish economy, and the peculiar character of the Jewish people, would permit; that it impressed the deepest conviction of God’s requiring, not mere external observances, but heart-felt piety, well regulated desires, and active benevolence; that it taught sacrifice could not obtain pardon without repentance, or repentance without reformation and restitution; that it described circumcision itself, and, by consequence, every other legal rite, as designed to typify and inculcate internal holiness, which alone could render men acceptable to God; that it represented the love of God as designed to act as a practical principle, stimulating to the constant and sincere cultivation of purity, mercy, and truth; and that it enforced all these principles and precepts by sanctions the most likely to operate powerfully on minds unaccustomed to abstract speculations and remote views, even by temporal rewards and punishments; the assurance of which was confirmed from the immediate experience of similar rewards and punishments, dispensed to their enemies and to themselves by that supernatural Power which had delivered the Hebrew nation out of Egypt, conducted them through the wilderness, planted them in the land of Canaan, regulated their government, distributed their possessions, and to which alone they could look to obtain new blessings, or secure those already enjoyed. From all this we derive another presumptive argument for the divine authority of the Mosaic code; and it may be contended, that a moral system thus perfect, promulgated at so early a period, to such a people, and enforced by such sanctions as no human power could undertake to execute, strongly bespeaks a divine original.

2. The moral law is sometimes called the Mosaic law, because it was one great branch of those injunctions which, under divine authority, Moses enjoined upon the Israelites when they were gathered into a political community under the theocracy. But it existed previously as the law of all mankind; and it has been taken up into the Christian system, and there more fully illustrated. As the obligation of the moral law upon Christians has, however, been disputed by some perverters of the Christian faith, or held by others on loose and fallacious grounds, this subject ought to be clearly understood. It is, nevertheless, to be noticed, that the morals of the New Testament are not proposed to us in the form of a regular code. Even in the books of Moses, which have the legislative form to a great extent, not all the principles and duties which constituted the full character of godliness,” under that dispensation, are made the subjects of formal injunction by particular precepts. They are partly infolded in general principles, or often take the form of injunction in an apparently incidental manner, or are matters of obvious inference. A preceding code of traditionary moral law is all along supposed in the writings of Moses and the prophets, as well as a consuetudinary ritual and a doctrinal theology, both transmitted from the patriarchs. This, too, is eminently the case with Christianity. It supposes that all who believed in Christ admitted the divine authority of the Old Testament; and it assumes the perpetual authority of its morals, as well as the truth of its fundamental theology. The constant allusions in the New Testament to the moral rules of the Jews and patriarchs, either expressly as precepts, or as the data of argument, sufficiently guard us against the notion, that what has not in so many words been re-enacted] by Christ and his Apostles is of no authority among Christians. In a great number of instances, however, the form of injunction is directly preceptive, so as to have all the explicitness and force of a regular code of law, and is, as much as a regular code could be, a declaration of the sovereign will of Christ, enforced by the sanctions of eternal life and death. This, however, is a point on which a few confirmatory observations may be usefully adduced. No part of the preceding dispensation, designated generally by the appellation of the law,” is repealed in the New Testament, but what is obviously ceremonial, typical, and incapable of coëxisting with Christianity. Our Lord, in his discourse with the Samaritan woman, declares, that the hour of the abolition of the temple worship was come; the Apostle Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, teaches us that the Levitical services were but shadows, the substance and end of which is Christ; and the ancient visible church, as constituted upon the ground of natural descent from Abraham, was abolished by the establishment of a spiritual body of believers to take its place. No precepts of a purely political nature, that is, which respect the civil subjection of the Jews to their theocracy, are, therefore, of any force to us as laws, although they may have, in many cases, the greatest authority as principles. No ceremonial precepts can be binding, since they were restrained to a period terminating with the death and resurrection of Christ; nor are even the patriarchal rites of circumcision and the passover obligatory upon Christians, since we have sufficient evidence that they were of an adumbrative character, and were laid aside by the first inspired teachers of Christianity.

With the moral precepts which abound in the Old Testament the case is very different, as sufficiently appears from the different, and even contrary, manner in which they are always spoken of by Christ and his Apostles. When our Lord, in his sermon on the mount, says, Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets; I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil;” that is, to confirm or establish it; the entire scope of his discourse shows that he is speaking exclusively of the moral precepts of the law,” eminently so called, and of the moral injunctions of the prophets founded upon them, and to which he thus gives an equal authority. And in so solemn a manner does he enforce this, that he adds, doubtless as foreseeing that attempts would be made by deceiving or deceived men 576professing his religion, to lessen the authority of the moral law, Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven;” that is, as St. Chrysostom interprets, He shall be the farthest from attaining heaven and happiness, which imports that he shall not attain it at all.” In like manner St. Paul, after having strenuously maintained the doctrine of justification by faith alone, anticipates an objection by asking, Do we then make void the law through faith” and subjoins, God forbid: yea, we establish the law;” meaning by the law,” as the context and his argument clearly show, the moral and not the ceremonial law.

After such declarations, it is worse than trifling for any to contend that, in order to establish the authority of the moral law of the Jews over Christians, it ought to have been formally reënacted. To this we may, however, farther reply, not only that many important moral principles and rules found in the Old Testament were never formally enacted among the Jews; were traditional from an earlier age; and received at different times the more indirect authority of inspired recognition; but, to put the matter in a stronger light, that all the leading moral precepts of the Jewish Scriptures are, in point of fact, proposed in the New Testament in a manner which has the full force of formal reënactment, as the laws of the Christian church. This argument, from the want of formal reënactment, will therefore have no weight. The summary of the law and the prophets, which is to love God with all our heart, and to serve him with all our strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves, is unquestionably enjoined, and even reënacted by the Christian lawgiver. When our Lord is explicitly asked by one who came unto him and said, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life” the answer given shows that the moral law contained in the decalogue is so in force under the Christian dispensation, that obedience to it is necessary to final salvation:--“If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” And that nothing ceremonial is intended by this term, is manifest from what follows: He saith unto him, Which Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal,” &c. Matt. xix, 17–19. Here, also, we have all the force of a formal reënactment of the decalogue, a part of it being evidently put for the whole. Nor were it difficult to produce passages from the discourses of Christ and the writings of the Apostles, which enjoin all the precepts of this law taken separately, by their authority, as indispensable parts of Christian duty, and that, too, under their original sanctions of life and death; so that the two circumstances which form the true character of a law in its highest sense, divine authority and penal sanctions, are found as truly in the New Testament as in the Old. It will not, for instance, be contended, that the New Testament does not enjoin the acknowledgment and worship of one God alone; nor that it does not prohibit idolatry; nor that it does not level its maledictions against false and profane swearing; nor that the Apostle Paul does not use the very words of the fifth commandment preceptively, when he says, Honour thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise,” Eph. vi, 2; nor that murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness are not all prohibited under pain of exclusion from the kingdom of God. Thus, then, we have the whole decalogue brought into the Christian code of morals, by a distinct injunction of its separate precepts, and by their recognition as of permanent and unchangeable obligation; the fourth commandment, respecting the Sabbath only, being so far excepted, that its injunction is not so expressly marked. This, however, is no exception in fact; for beside that its original place in the two tables sufficiently distinguishes it from all positive, ceremonial, and typical precepts, and gives it a moral character, in respect to its ends, which are, first, mercy to servants and cattle, and, second, the worship of almighty God, undisturbed by worldly interruptions and cares, it is necessarily included in that law” which our Lord declares he came not to destroy, or abrogate; in that law” which St. Paul declares to be established by faith,” and among those commandments” which our Lord declares must be kept,” if any one would enter into life.” To this, also, the practice of the Apostles is to be added, who did not cease themselves from keeping one day in seven holy, nor teach others so to do; but gave to “the Lord’s day” that eminence and sanctity in the Christian church which the seventh day had in the Jewish, by consecrating it to holy uses; an alteration not affecting the precept at all, except in an unessential circumstance, (if indeed in that,) and in which we may suppose them to have acted under divine suggestion.

Thus, then, we have the obligation of the whole decalogue as fully established in the New Testament as in the Old, as if it had been formally reënacted; and that no formal reënactment of it took place, is itself a presumptive proof that it was never regarded by the lawgiver as temporary, which the formality of republication might have supposed. It is important to remark, however, that, although the moral laws of the Mosaic dispensation pass into the Christian code, they stand there in other and higher circumstances; so that the New Testament is a more perfect dispensation of the knowledge of the moral will of God than the Old. In particular, (1.) They are more expressly extended to the heart, as by our Lord, in his sermon on the mount; who teaches us that the thought and inward purpose of any offence is a violation of the law prohibiting its external and visible commission. (2.) The principles on which they are founded are carried out in the New Testament into a greater variety of duties, which, by embracing more perfectly the social 577and civil relations of life, are of a more universal character. (3.) There is a much more enlarged injunction of positive and particular virtues, especially those which constitute the Christian temper. (4.) By all overt acts being inseparably connected with corresponding principles in the heart, in order to constitute acceptable obedience, which principles suppose the regeneration of the soul by the Holy Ghost. This moral renovation is, therefore, held out as necessary to our salvation, and promised as a part of the grace of our redemption by Christ. (5.) By being connected with promises of divine assistance, which is peculiar to a law connected with evangelical provisions. (6.) By their having a living illustration in the perfect and practical example of Christ. (7.) By the higher sanctions derived from the clearer revelation of a future state, and the more explicit promises of eternal life, and threatenings of eternal punishment. It follows from this, that we have in the Gospel the most complete and perfect revelation of moral law ever given to men; and a more exact manifestation of the brightness, perfection, and glory of that law, under which angels and our progenitors in paradise were placed, and which it is at once the delight and the interest of the most perfect and happy beings to obey.

LAZARUS, brother to Martha and Mary. He dwelt at Bethany with his sisters, near Jerusalem; and the Lord Jesus did him the honour sometimes of lodging at his house when he visited the city. See the account of his resurrection related at large in John xi, 5, &c.

LEAD, , Exod. xv, 10; Num. xxxi, 22; Job xix, 24; Jer. vi, 29; Ezek. xxii, 18; xxvii, 12; Zech. v, 7, 8; a mineral of a bluish white colour. It is the softest next to gold, but has no great tenacity, and is not in the least sonorous. It is mentioned with five other species of metal, Num. xxxi, 22; and there is no doubt but that this is the meaning of the word; so the Septuagint render it throughout, µd or µ.

LEAVEN. The Hebrews were forbidden by the law to eat leavened bread, or a food with leaven in it, during the seven days of the passover, Exod. xii, 15–19; Lev. ii, 11. They were very careful in purifying their houses from all leaven before this feast began. God forbad either leaven or honey to be offered to him in his temple; that is, in cakes or in any baked meats. But on other occasions they might offer leavened bread or honey. St. Paul, 1 Cor. v, 7, 8, expresses his desire that the faithful should celebrate the Christian passover with unleavened bread; which, figuratively, signifies sincerity and truth. In this he teaches us two things; first, that the law which obliged the Jews to a literal observance of the passover is no longer in force; and, secondly, that by unleavened bread, truth and purity of heart were denoted. The same Apostle alludes to the ceremony used at the passover, when he says, A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump;” that is, a small portion of leaven, in a quantity of bread or paste, corrupts the whole, and renders it unclean. Our Saviour, in the Gospel, Matthew xvi, 11, warns his Apostles to beware of the leaven of the Herodians and Pharisees; meaning their doctrines.

LEBANON, or LIBANUS, signifying white, from its snows,--the most elevated mountain or mountain chain in Syria, celebrated in all ages for its cedars; which, as is well known, furnished the wood for Solomon’s temple. This mountain is the centre, or nucleus, of all the mountain ridges which, from the north, the south, and the east, converge toward this point; but it overtops them all. This configuration of the mountains, and the superiority of Lebanon, are particularly striking to the traveller approaching both from the Mediterranean on the west, and the desert on the east. On either side, he first discovers, at a great distance, a clouded ridge, stretching from north to south, as far as the eye can see; the central summits of which are capped with clouds, or tipped with snow. This is Lebanon, which is often referred to in Holy Writ for its streams, its timber, and its wines; and at the present day the seat of the only portion of freedom of which Syria can boast.

The altitude of Lebanon is so considerable, that it appears from the reports of travellers to have snow on its highest eminences all the year round. Volney says, that it thus remains toward the north-east, where it is sheltered from the sea winds and the rays of the sun. Maundrell found that part of the mountain which he crossed, and which in all probability was by no means the highest, covered with deep snow in the month of May. Dr. E. D. Clarke, in the month of July, saw some of the eastern summits of Lebanon, or Anti-Libanus, near Damascus, covered with snow, not lying in patches, as is common in the summer season with mountains which border on the line of perpetual congelation, but do not quite reach it, but with that perfect white, smooth, and velvetlike appearance, which snow only exhibits when it is very deep,--a striking spectacle in such a climate, where the beholder, seeking protection from a burning sun, almost considers the firmament to be on fire. At the time this observation was made, the thermometer, in an elevated situation near the sea of Tiberias, stood at 102½° in the shade. Sir Frederic Henniker passed over snow in July; and Ali Bey describes the same eastern ridge as covered with snow in September. Of the noble cedars which once adorned the upper parts of this mountain but few now remain, and those much decayed. Burckhardt, who crossed Mount Libanus in 1810, counted about thirty-six large ones, fifty of middle size, and about three hundred smaller and young ones: but more might exist in other parts of the mountain. The wine, especially that made about the convent of Canobin, still preserves its ancient celebrity; and is reported by travellers, more particularly by Rauwolff, Le Bruyn, and De la Roque, to be of the most exquisite kind for flavour and fragrance. The rains which fall in the lower regions of Lebanon, and the melting of the 578snow in the upper ones, furnish an abundance of perennial streams, which are alluded to by Solomon, Cant. iv, 15. On the declivities of the mountain grew the vines which furnished the rich and fragrant wine which Hosea celebrated, xiv, 7, and which may still be obtained by proper culture.

The cedar of Lebanon has, in all ages, been reckoned as an object of unrivalled grandeur and beauty in the vegetable kingdom. It is, accordingly, one of the natural images which frequently occur in the poetical style of the Hebrew prophets; and is appropriated to denote kings, princes, and potentates of the highest rank. Thus, the Prophet Isaiah, whose writings abound with metaphors and allegories of this kind, in denouncing the judgments of God upon the proud and arrogant, declares that the day of the Lord of Hosts shall be upon all the cedars of Lebanon that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan,” Isaiah ii, 13. The king of Israel used the same figure in his reply to the challenge of the king of Judah: The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trod down the thistle,” 2 Kings xiv, 9. The spiritual prosperity of the righteous man is compared by the Psalmist to the same noble plant: The righteous shall flourish as the palm tree; he shall grow as the cedar in Lebanon.” To break the cedars, and shake the enormous mass on which they grow, are the figures that David selects to express the awful majesty and power of Jehovah: The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars: yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon. He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn,” Psalm xxix, 4–6. This description of the divine majesty and power possesses a character of awful sublimity.

The stupendous size, the extensive range, and great elevation of Libanus; its towering summits capped with perpetual snow, or crowned with fragrant cedars; its olive plantations; its vineyards, producing the most delicious wines; its clear fountains, and cold-flowing brooks; its fertile vales, and odoriferous shrubberies,--combine to form in Scripture language, the glory of Lebanon.” But that glory, liable to change, has, by the unanimous consent of modern travellers, suffered a sensible decline. The extensive forests of cedar, which adorned and perfumed the summits and declivities of those mountains, have almost disappeared. Only a small number of these trees of God, planted by his almighty hand,” which, according to the usual import of the phrase, signally displayed the divine power, wisdom, and goodness, now remain. Their countless number in the days of Solomon, and their prodigious bulk, must be recollected, in order to feel the force of that sublime declaration of the prophet: Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt-offering,” Isaiah xl, 16. Though the trembling sinner were to make choice of Lebanon for the altar; were to cut down all its forests to form the pile; though the fragrance of this fuel, with all its odoriferous gums, were the incense; the wine of Lebanon pressed from all its vineyards, the libation; and all its beasts, the propitiatory sacrifice; all would prove insufficient to make atonement for the sins of men; would be regarded as nothing in the eyes of the supreme Judge for the expiation of even one transgression. The just and holy law of God requires a nobler altar, a costlier sacrifice, and a sweeter perfume,--the obedience and death of a divine Person to atone for our sins, and the incense of his continual intercession to secure our acceptance with the Father of mercies, and admission into the mansions of eternal rest. The conversion of the Gentile nations from the worship of idols and the bondage of corruption, to the service and enjoyment of the true God, is foretold in these beautiful and striking terms: The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them: and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing; the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon: they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God,” Isaiah xxxv, 4.

LEEK, , in Numbers xi, 5, translated leek;” in 1 Kings xviii, 5; 2 Kings xix, 26; Job xl, 15; Psalm xxxvii, 2; xc, 5; ciii, 15; civ, 14; cxxix, 6; cxlvii, 8; Isaiah xxxv, 7; xxxvii, 27; xl, 6, it is rendered grass;” in Job viii, 12, herb;” in Prov. xxvii, 25; Isaiah xv, 6, hay;” and in Isaiah xxxiv, 13, a court.” It is much of the same nature with the onion. The kind called karrat by the Arabians, the allium porrum of Linnæus, Hasselquist says, must certainly have been one of those desired by the children of Israel, as it has been cultivated and esteemed from the earliest times to the present in Egypt. The inhabitants are very fond of eating it raw, as sauce for their roasted meat; and the poor people eat it raw with their bread, especially for breakfast. There is reason, however, to doubt whether this plant is intended in Num. xi, 5, and so differently rendered every where else: it should rather intend such vegetables as grow promiscuously with grass. Ludolphus supposes that it may mean lettuce and sallads in general; and Maillet observes, that the succory and endive are eaten with great relish by the people in Egypt: some or all of these may be meant.

LEGION. The Roman legions were composed each of ten cohorts; a cohort, of fifty maniples; a maniple, of fifteen men; consequently, a full legion contained six thousand soldiers. Jesus cured one who called himself legion,” as if possessed by a legion of devils, Mark v, 9. He also said to Peter, who drew his sword to defend him in the olive garden: Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, who shall presently give me 579more than twelve legions of angels” Matt. xxvi, 53.

LEMUEL. See Agur.

LENTIL, , Gen. xxv, 34; 2 Sam. xvii, 28; xxiii, 11; Ezek. iv, 9, a sort of pulse; in the Septuagint fa, and Vulgate lens. The lentils of Egypt were very much esteemed among the ancients. St. Austin says, they grow abundantly in Egypt, are much used as a food there, and those of Alexandria are considered particularly valuable. Dr. Shaw says, beans, lentils, kidney beans, and garvancos are the chief of their pulse kind. Beans, when boiled and stewed with oil and garlic, are the principal food of persons of all distinctions. Lentils are dressed in the same manner as beans, dissolving easily into a mass, and making a pottage of a chocolate colour. This, we find, was the red pottage” which Esau, from thence called Edom, exchanged for his birthright.

LEOPARD, , Cant. iv, 8; Isaiah xi, 6; Jer. v, 6; xiii, 23; Hosea xiii, 7; Hab. i, 8; Dan. vii, 6; da, Rev. xiii, 2; Ecclus. xxviii, 23. There can be no doubt that the pard or leopard is the animal mentioned. Bochart shows that the name is similar in the Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic. The LXX uniformly render it by da; and Jerom, pardus. Probably, these animals were numerous in Palestine; as we find places with a name intimating their having been the haunts of leopards: Nimrah, Num. xxxii, 3; Beth-Nimrah, Num. xxxii, 36; Joshua xiii, 27; and waters of Nimrim,” Isa. xv, 6; Jer. xlviii, 34; and mountains of leopards,” Cant. iv, 8. Nimrod might have his name from this animal: He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord,” Gen. x, 9. It is supposed, however, that his predations were not confined to the brute creation. Dr. Geddes remarks, that the word hunter” expresses too little. He was a freebooter, in the worst sense of the word; a lawless despot:

Isaiah, describing the happy state of the reign of Messiah, says, The leopard shall lie down with the kid,” Isaiah xi, 6. Even animals shall lose their fierceness and cruelty, and become gentle and tame. Jeremiah, v, 6, mentions the artful ambuscades of this animal; and in xiii, 23, alludes to his spots: Can a Cushite change his skin; or a leopard his spots Then may ye prevail with them to do good who are habituated to do evil;” and Habakkuk, i, 8, refers to its alertness.

LEPROSY. See Diseases.

LETTERS, marks for the purpose of expressing sounds, used in writing. Few subjects have given rise to more discussion than the origin of alphabetic characters. If they are of human invention, they must be considered as one of the most admirable efforts of the ingenuity of man. So wonderful is the facility which they afford for recording human thought; so ingenious, and at the same time so simple, is the analysis which they furnish for the sounds of articulate speech, and for all the possible variety of words; that we might expect the author of this happy invention to have been immortalized by the grateful homage of succeeding ages, and his name delivered down to posterity with the ample honours it so justly merited. But the author and the era of this discovery, if such it be, are both lost in the darkness of remote antiquity. Even the nation to which the invention is due cannot now be ascertained. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Phenicians, the Persians, the Indians, have all laid claim to the honour of it; and each has named its inventor among the remote, and probably fabulous, personages that figure in the earlier ages of their history. In consequence of this uncertainty respecting the author of alphabetic writing, and the high value and extreme difficulty of the invention itself, many have been inclined to attribute this art to an immediate revelation from the Deity; contending that it was communicated with other invaluable gifts from above, in remote ages, to the descendants of Abraham, and probably to the Patriarch Moses, who was the author of the most ancient compositions in alphabetical writing that we at present possess. The arguments which are brought in support of the divine revelation of the alphabet, are chiefly these: 1. The high antiquity of the use of letters; the Hebrew characters having existed in a perfect state when Moses composed the Pentateuch, the most ancient writing now known to be extant. 2. The similarity between the various alphabets of different nations, which, for the most part, are the same, in the order, power, and even form, of their letters with the Hebrew. 3. The complete want of alphabetic characters among those nations, which have been cut off from all communication with the ancient civilized world, as the aboriginal Americans; or that part of the human race which had no opportunity of borrowing the system of written characters revealed to the Hebrews, as China.

Had man been left to himself, the first and most natural way of making his thoughts visible to the eye would be by pictorial representations. The second step would, for convenience’ sake, be to invent an abbreviated form of these pictures, sufficiently legible to call to mind the original picture in full, and yet so reduced and intermixed with a few easily remembered arbitrary characters, or symbols, as to be more extensively useful. The next and most difficult step would be the alphabet so formed as to express all the sounds of the language, by convenient combination. The Egyptian monuments show specimens of each; the hieroglyph, the mixed and abbreviated, and the alphabetical. The magnificent ruins of Persepolis, the capital of ancient Persia, exhibit also the pure pictorial style, and tablets of abbreviated emblems. The characters on the bricks dug up from the ruins of ancient Babylon have characters, which are supposed to be, not alphabetic, but abbreviated symbols, and therefore suppose the existence of the larger picture writing, whether the people 580possessed a proper alphabet or not. All the savage tribes of America had their picture writings, and this style was carried to great perfection by the Mexicans. The latter had, likewise, abbreviated marks, which were used as symbols; and thus made an approach to letters, although they never reached this discovery. It is a curious fact, that in our day a Cherokee chief has actually invented an alphabet, and that in the process he commenced with a pictorial representation of animals which uttered sounds somewhat like those of his own tongue; which thought seems not to have entered into the picture writing of the ancients, whose delineations spoke wholly to the eye, and not at all to the ear. Finding this method imperfect and cumbersome, he at last hit upon the expedient of arbitrary characters, which he gradually reduced in number, and so perfected, that, with a few European improvements, books are now printed in them for the use of his nation. In China the language is a complete system of abbreviated pictures, emblems, or symbols; and there is no proper alphabet to this day.

These facts are urged as direct proofs or strong presumptions that all alphabetical characters have been preceded by picture or imitative characters; and that as the whole is within the compass of human ingenuity, the notion of a divine suggestion of letters, or of the important art of alphabetical writing, is bringing in the divine agency without necessity. But the assumption that alphabets have in all cases been formed through this process, is wholly hypothetic. Certain it is that we can prove from the Scriptures that literal writing was in use at an earlier period than can be assigned to any picture writing whatever. Writing and reading were familiar to Moses and the Israelites when the law was given, and must have long previously existed among them, and, probably, among the Egyptians of the same age too; which is much earlier than any of those monuments bearing hieroglyphical characters reach. We have given sufficient reason to conclude that Job lived at an earlier period still, and as he expresses a wish that his words should be written in a book, and engraven on the rock, the knowledge of reading as well as writing must have been pretty general in his country, or the book and the inscription could not have been a testimony of his faith and hope to his countrymen, as he passionately desired it to be. Here, too, it is to be observed, that in the early Mosaic history we have not the least intimation of writing by pictures or symbols, nor any that the art of writing had been revealed from heaven in the days of Moses, preparatory to the giving of a written law and the introduction of inspired books for the religious instruction of the people. We must trace it up higher; though whether of divine revelation, or human invention, cannot certainly be determined. Its importance was assuredly worthy of the former; and if this was not done by particular revelation, doubtless we may reasonably and piously ascribe it to a divine suggestion.

It may, indeed, be asked, How then is it that in other nations we can so accurately trace the progress from the picture to the symbol, and thence on to the alphabet; as for instance in Egypt We answer, that if this were allowed, still it might be, and probably was, a part of the divine procedure with reference to the preservation of the true religion, that the knowledge of letters should be early given to the Abrahamic family, or, at least, preserved among them, while many others of the more dispersed branches of the human race becoming barbarous, as stated under the article Language, might lose it; because picture writing was easily convertible to idolatrous purposes, and in reality was greatly encouraged from that source. The same care would be exerted to prevent pictorial representations of spiritual beings and things as the forming of images; and the race of true worshippers of God was never therefore placed under the necessity of thus expressing their thoughts by such delineations. But it is, in fact, far from being proved, that the hieroglyph, or picture writing, of Egypt for example, was more ancient among that people than alphabetic writing. One of the most recent writers on this side is the Marquis Spineto, in his Lectures on Egyptian Hieroglyphics.” His theory is, in fact, that of Warburton; and he thinks that the recent discoveries as to the hieroglyphics of Egypt fully establish it. The opinion of this learned prelate was, that the primitive mode of writing among the Egyptians was by figurative delineations or hieroglyphics; that this becoming too tedious and voluminous, by degrees they perfected another character, which he calls the running-hand of hieroglyphics, resembling the Chinese characters; which being at first formed only by the outlines of figures, became at length a kind of marks; and at last led to the compendious use of letters by an alphabet. His argument against the knowledge of letters by the immediate descendants of Noah is as follows: For, if the invention of the alphabet had preceded the dispersion, we should have found the use of it generally established among mankind, and hieroglyphics and picture writing entirely lain aside. But this is not the case. The Mexicans and the Peruvians, up to the fifteenth century, and, to this day, the Chinese, have no knowledge of the alphabet. They all, like the Egyptians, made use of hieroglyphics, more or less abridged, more or less symbolical, or, if you please, more or less arbitrary; but they had no knowledge of the alphabet. The invention of letters, therefore, must have happened after the dispersion, at a time when picture or hieroglyphical writing was generally used; it was thus imported into the respective countries, by the primitive inhabitants, as they separated themselves from the common society, carrying in their migrations those partly true and partly false notions of the Deity, and of the great event which had submerged the world; notions which, in fact, are to be found in the theology and ritual of all the nations in the universe, although more or less disfigured and altered.”

581But as the running-hand hieroglyphics, spoken of by Warburton, were no more alphabetical than the hieroglyphics themselves, still we are left to make the inquiry, Who was the inventor of the Egyptian alphabet This is supposed by the Marquis on the authority of a passage in Plato, to be a secretary of one of the kings of Egypt. This king is called Thamus; who forbade his ingenius secretary, Thouth, or Theuth, to make the invention public; lest the people should no longer pay attention to the hieroglyphics, which would then be soon forgotten. The secret, however, soon escaped; and as it diminished to a prodigious degree the difficulty of writing, it was generally adopted by the Egyptians, and from them passed into other nations. The first,” says the Marquis, who seem to have got a knowledge of this system, were the Phenicians; they imparted it to the Arabians, to the Jews, and carried it over to Greece. From that country it was exported to the several islands, carried to the continent, and reached the northern nations. The Chinese alone refused to adopt the valuable discovery; proud of the antiquity of their social establishment, believing themselves superior to the rest of mankind, they still adhered to their ancient mode of writing. This, as I have already observed, though originally the same with that used by the Egyptians, became, in process of time, materially different, being made up of arbitrary marks, which are for the most part ideographical. With the discovery of the alphabet, however, a very material change took place in regard to hieroglyphics. Originally, as we have seen, they had been the common, nay, the sole mode of writing, employed by the nation at large, in all the transactions of life, and through the policy of King Thamus, the alphabetical letters were kept secret: but, as soon as this discovery became known, the contrary happened; alphabetical writing became common, and hieroglyphics mysterious, not because they were purposely hidden in mystery, but simply because they required greater application and greater trouble. They indeed still continued to be used in matters of religion, funerals, public monuments, and the like; but in all business, and common transactions, the alphabetical writing was employed. This was a necessary consequence of the general use of hieroglyphics in their primitive state; for although the Egyptians might, and, in fact, did, give the preference to the alphabet, yet they did not think it necessary to erase the old hieroglyphical characters from their temples, from their obelisks, from their tombs, and religious vases. The priests, therefore, still continued to study and preserve the knowledge of hieroglyphics; and these, partly by their showy nature, partly by the continuation of the old custom, continued still to be used in public monuments of a votive and funeral nature. To distinguish them, therefore, from the alphabetical letters newly invented, they obtained the name of sacred, on the score of their being employed only in matters of religion. The priests, however, who had already invented a new set of arbitrary marks, as a shorter way of hieroglyphical writing, which they employed exclusively in transactions which concerned their body and their pursuits, after the invention of the alphabet turned these marks into letters, and thus they formed another set of characters, or mode of writing, to which they gave the appellation of hieratic, as belonging exclusively to their order. In these characters they wrote all historical, political, and religious transactions. And as the common, or demotic letters were employed in all the common business of life, and hieroglyphics confined to public monuments, and funereal and votive ceremonies, the Egyptians became possessed of at least three different modes of writing, or sets of characters, which were hieroglyphic, demotic, and hieratic. Whether the priests had invented another set of characters, unknown to the people, and in which they concealed their doctrine and their knowledge, is a question which cannot be solved at present. The want of monuments disables us from saying any thing of a decisive nature on this subject. One thing alone we can suppose with certainty, that if such a mode of writing did ever exist, and for the purpose for which it is supposed to have existed, the knowledge of it must have been confined to the priests only, and the records so written concealed with the greatest care from the eye of the nation. If, therefore, such records exist, they must be sought for in the dwelling of the hierophant, in the most recondite places of the temples; perhaps in those subterraneous passages which now lie hidden under mountains of sand, and in which no one but the priests were ever permitted to enter.”

The whole of this account, we may however observe, is far from being satisfactory. Whether the early Egyptians wrote hieroglyphics at all, no monuments yet discovered are so ancient as to prove; since all such characters now known must have been written subsequently to the advancement of the kingdom into great power, and after considerable progress had been made in architecture and other arts. The passage, too, in Plato, on which the argument is made to depend, may just as well refer to the running-hand or abridged hieroglyphical signs, as to alphabetical writing; and the supposition, that the priests gave an alphabetical character to this kind of abridged pictorial writing after the discovery of the real alphabet, (and alphabetical Ackerblad and Dr. Young have proved it to be,) is quite hypothetic. We think it more probable that alphabetical writing is much older than the hieroglyphics; that the phonetic hieroglyphics were fanciful representations of the alphabetic characters, intermingled with those symbols which idolatry and the natural peculiarities of Egypt would suggest; that the whole was originally easy to be deciphered by those who knew letters at all; and that the leading motive of fixing them on public monuments in preference to literal inscriptions, was the taste of the day, which custom, 582and antiquity, and superstition at length consecrated. We have thus an easy way of accounting for the alphabetical, though obscure, character of the hieroglyphic running-hand, or hieratic writing, so much used in manuscripts. As an abridged form of the hieroglyphical outline, it would at least be phonetic wherever the hieroglyphic was so; and where that was symbolical, it would naturally present greater difficulty in deciphering, which, in fact, has been proved to be the case, by modern students in the art. It is, indeed, acknowledged by those who advocate the priority of the hieroglyphic to the alphabetic signs, that the number of ideas which could thus be expressed is few; and this the Marquis Spineto considers as a presumptive proof of his theory. In these early ages, the position of mankind after the flood,” he observes, was such as to preclude the possibility of supposing that they had many ideas and many wants; therefore we may reasonably conclude, that their language consisted of words only which were intended to express the things most necessary to life, and consequently contained a small number of words.” We know, indeed, that it is the notion of many infidel writers, that the original race or races of mankind were a sort of savages; and that a state of society gradually increased the ideas, and enriched the language of those who at first were capable of uttering but a few simple articulate sounds; but that any person should talk in a similar strain, who professes to receive the Mosaic history, is absurd. The antediluvians had surely much knowledge. Many arts were invented before the flood; and the ark itself is a vast monument of mechanical skill. Arts, science, morals, legislation, theology, were all known before the flood; and were all transmitted from the old world to the new, by Noah and his sons. These were not men of few ideas,” nor was the pastoral mode of life incompatible with great moral knowledge, eloquence, and the highest and richest poetry, as we see in the book of Job. Men were not then, as many moderns have supposed, a race of babies, able only to ask for what they needed to eat and drink, or childishly to play with; and we may therefore rest assured that they had a language so copious, and enunciations of ideas so various in their respective tongues, that picture writing neither was nor could be adequate to their full expression. The true origin of hieroglyphic writing is still unexplained; and will, after all, probably, remain inexplicable: but it has little claim to be considered as the first mode of expressing the sounds of language. As for the Chinese language, it is evident that it cannot be urged in proof of alphabetical writing having in all cases passed through the process above mentioned; for to this day the Chinese have no alphabet. As a language it is indeed peculiar, as being wholly monosyllabic; and we must be better acquainted with the early circumstances of that people before we can account for either. See Writing.

LEVIATHAN, , Job iii, 8; xli, 1; Psalm lxxiv, 14; civ, 26; Isa. xxvii, 1. The old commentators concurred in regarding the whale as the animal here intended. Beza and Diodati were among the first to interpret it the crocodile: and Bochart has since supported this last rendering with a train of argument which has nearly overwhelmed all opposition, and brought almost every commentator over to his opinion. It is very certain that it could not be the whale, which does not inhabit the Mediterranean, much less the rivers that empty themselves into it; nor will the characteristics at all apply to the whale. The crocodile, on the contrary, is a natural inhabitant of the Nile, and other Asiatic and African rivers; of enormous voracity and strength, as well as fleetness in swimming; attacks mankind and the largest animals with most daring impetuosity; when taken by means of a powerful net, will often overturn the boats that surround it; has, proportionally, the largest mouth of all monsters whatever; moves both its jaws equally, the upper of which has not less than forty, and the lower than thirty-eight sharp, but strong and massy, teeth; and is furnished with a coat of mail, so scaly and callous as to resist the force of a musket ball in every part, except under the belly. Indeed, to this animal the general character of the leviathan seems so well to apply, that it is unnecessary to seek farther.

LEVITES. Under this name may be comprised all the descendants of Levi; but it principally denotes those who were employed in the lowest ministries of the temple, by which they were distinguished from the priests, who, being descended from Aaron, were likewise of the race of Levi by Kohath, but were employed in higher offices. The Levites were descendants of Levi, by Gershom, Kohath, and Merari, excepting the family of Aaron; for the children of Moses had no part in the priesthood, and were only common Levites. God chose the Levites instead of the first-born of all Israel, for the service of his tabernacle and temple, Num. iii, 6, &c. They obeyed the priests in the ministrations of the temple, and brought to them wood, water, and other things necessary for the sacrifices. They sung and played on instruments, in the temple, &c; they studied the law, and were the ordinary judges of the country, but subordinate to the priests. God provided for the subsistence of the Levites, by giving them the tithe of corn, fruit, and cattle; but they paid to the priests the tenth of their tithes; and as the Levites possessed no estates in the land, the tithes which the priests received from them were looked on as the first-fruits which they were to offer to the Lord, Num. xviii, 21–24. God assigned them for their habitations forty-eight cities, with fields, pastures, and gardens, Num. xxxv. Of these thirteen were given to the priests, six of which were cities of refuge, Joshua xx, 7; xxi, 19, 20, &c. While the Levites were actually employed in the temple, they were subsisted out of the provisions in store there, and out of the daily offerings there made; and if any Levite quitted the place of his abode, to serve the temple, even out of the time of his half-yearly 583or weekly waiting, he was received there, kept and provided for, in like manner as his other brethren, who were regularly in waiting, Deut. xviii, 6–8. The consecration of Levites was without much ceremony. They wore no particular habit to distinguish them from the other Israelites, and God ordained nothing particularly for their mourning, 2 Chron. xxix, 34. The manner of their consecration may be seen in Num. viii, 5–7, &c.

Josephus says, that in the reign of Agrippa, king of the Jews, about A. D. 62, six years before the destruction of the temple by the Romans, the Levites desired permission from that prince to wear the linen tunic like the priests; and this was granted. This innovation was displeasing to the priests; and the Jewish historian remarks, that the ancient customs of the country were never forsaken with impunity. He adds, that Agrippa permitted likewise the families of the Levites, whose duty it was to guard the doors, and perform other troublesome offices, to learn to sing and play on instruments, that they might be qualified for the temple service as musicians. The Levites were divided into different classes: Gershonites, Kohathites, Merarites, and Aaronites or priests, Num. iii, &c. The Gershonites, whose number was seven thousand five hundred, were employed in the marches through the wilderness in carrying the veils and curtains of the tabernacle; the Kohathites, whose number was eight thousand six hundred, in carrying the ark and sacred vessels of the tabernacle; the Merarites, whose number was six thousand two hundred, in carrying the several pieces of the tabernacle which could not be placed upon the chariots; and the Aaronites were the priests who served the sanctuary. When the Hebrews encamped in the wilderness, the Levites were placed around the tabernacle; Moses and Aaron at the east, Gershon at the west, Kohath at the south, and Merari at the north. Moses ordained that the Levites should not begin in the service of the tabernacle till they were five-and-twenty years of age, Num. viii, 24–26; or, as he says elsewhere, from thirty to fifty years old, Num. iv, 3. But David, finding that they were no longer employed in these grosser offices of transporting the vessels of the tabernacle, appointed them to enter on service at the temple at twenty years of age. The priests and Levites waited by turns, weekly, in the temple. They began their weeks on one Sabbath day, and on the Sabbath day in the following week went out of waiting, 1 Chronicles xxiii, 24; 2 Chron. xxi, 17; Ezra iii, 8. When an Israelite made a religious entertainment in the temple, God required that the Levites should be invited to it, Deut. xii, 18, 19.

LEVITICUS, a canonical book of Scripture, being the third book of the Pentateuch of Moses; thus called because it contains principally the laws and regulations relating to the Levites, priests, and sacrifices; for which reason the Hebrews call it the law of the priests, because it includes many ordinances concerning their services. See Pentateuch.

LIBATION. This word is used in sacrificial language, to express an affusion of liquors, poured upon victims to be sacrificed to the Lord. The quantity of wine for a libation was the fourth part of a hin, rather more than two pints. Libations among the Hebrews were poured on the victim after it was killed, and the several pieces of it were laid on the altar, ready to be consumed by the flames, Lev. vi, 20; viii, 25, 26; ix, 4; xvi, 12, 20. These libations consisted in offerings of bread, wine, and salt. The Greeks and Latins offered libations with the sacrifices, but they were poured on the victim’s head while it was living. So Sinon, relating the manner in which he was to be sacrificed, says he was in the priest’s hands ready to be slain, was loaded with bands and garlands; that they were preparing to pour upon him the libations of grain and salted meal:--

[And now the horrible day being come, they began to prepare for me the sacred rites.]

And Dido, beginning to sacrifice, pours wine between the horns of the victim:--

St. Paul describes himself, as it were, a victim about to be sacrificed, and that the accustomed libations of meal and wine were already, in a manner, poured upon him: For I am ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand,” 2 Tim. iv, 6. The same expressive sacrificial term occurs in Phil. ii, 17, where the Apostle represents the faith of the Philippians as a sacrifice, and his own blood as a libation poured forth to hallow and consecrate it: “Yea, and if I be offered, spdµa, upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, p t s a et, I joy and rejoice with you all.”

LIBERTINES. Mention is made of the synagogue of the Libertines, Acts vi, 9; concerning whom there are different opinions, two of which bid fairest for the truth. The first is that of Grotius and Vitringa, that they were Italian Jews or proselytes. The ancient Romans distinguished between libertus and libertinus. Libertus was one who had been a slave, and obtained his freedom; libertinus was the son of a libertus. But this distinction in after ages was not strictly observed; and libertinus also came to be used for one not born, but made free, in opposition to ingenuus, or one born free. Whether the libertini mentioned in this passage of the Acts were Gentiles, who had become proselytes to Judaism, or native Jews, who having been made slaves to the Romans were afterward set at liberty, and in remembrance of their captivity called themselves 584libertini, and formed a synagogue by themselves, is differently conjectured by the learned. It is probable the Jews of Cyrenia, Alexandria, &c, built synagogues at Jerusalem at their own charge, for the use of their brethren who came from those countries; as the Danes, Swedes, &c, build churches for the use of their own countrymen in London; and that the Italian Jews did the same; and because the greatest number of them were libertini, their synagogue was therefore called the synagogue of the Libertines. The other opinion, which is hinted by Œcumenius on the Acts, and mentioned by Dr. Lardner, as more lately advanced by Mr. Daniel Gerdes, professor of divinity in the university of Groningen, is this, that the Libertines are so called from a city or country called Libertus, or Libertina, in Africa, about Carthage. Suidas, in his Lexicon, on the word ßet, says it was µa e, nomen gentis. [The name of a nation.] And the glossa interlinearis, of which Nicolas de Lyra made great use in his notes, hath over the word libertini, e regione, denoting that they were so styled from a country. In the acts of the famous conference with the Donatists at Carthage, A. D. 411, there is mentioned one Victor, bishop of the church of Libertina: and in the acts of the Lateran council, which was held in 649, there is mention of Januarius gratiâ Dei episcopus sanctæ ecclesiæ Libertinensis; [Januarius by the grace of God bishop of the holy church of Libertina;] and therefore Fabricius, in his Geographical Index of Christian Bishoprics,” has placed Libertina in what was called Africa Propria, or the proconsular province of Africa. Now, as all the other people of the several synagogues, mentioned in this passage of the Acts, are denominated from the places from whence they came, it is probable that the Libertines were so too; and as the Cyrenians and Alexandrians, who came from Africa, are placed next to the Libertines in that catalogue, it is probable they also belonged to the same country. So that, upon the whole, there is little reason to doubt of the Libertines being so called from the place from whence they came; and the order of the names in the catalogue might lead us to think, that they were farther off from Jerusalem than Alexandria and Cyrenia, which will carry us to the proconsular province in Africa about Carthage.

LIBNAH, a city in the southern part of the tribe of Judah, Joshua xv, 42, of which a cession was made to the priests for their habitation, and which was declared a city of refuge, 1 Chron. vi, 57.

LIBYA. The name, in its largest sense, was used by the Greeks to denote the whole of Africa. But Libya Proper, or the Libya of the New Testament, the country of the Lubims of the Old, was a large country lying along the Mediterranean, on the west of Egypt. It was called Pentapolitana Regio by Pliny, from its five chief cities, Berenice, Arsinoe, Ptolemais, Apollonia, and Cyrene; and Libya Cyrenaica by Ptolemy, from Cyrene its capital. Libya is supposed to have been first peopled by, and to have derived its name from, the Lehabim, or Lubim. These, its earlier inhabitants, appear in the times of the Old Testament, to have consisted of wandering tribes, who were sometimes in alliance with Egypt, and at others with the Ethiopians of Arabia; as they are said to have assisted both Shishak and Zerah in their expeditions into Judea, 2 Chron. xii, xiv, xvi. They were for a time sufficiently powerful to maintain a war with the Carthaginians, by whom they were in the end entirely overcome. Since that period, Libya, in common with the rest of the east, has successively passed into the hands of the Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Turks. The city Cyrene, built by a Grecian colony, was the capital of this country, in which, and other parts, dwelt many Jews, who came up to Jerusalem at the feast of pentecost, together with those dispersed among other nations, and are called by St. Luke dwellers in the parts of Libya about Cyrene,” Acts ii, 10.

LICE. Swarms of lice was the third plague with which God punished the Egyptians, Exod. viii, 16. The Hebrew word , which the LXX render sfe, some translate flies,” and think them the same as gnats. Origen says that the sciniphe is so small a fly, that it is scarcely perceptible to the eye, but that it occasions a sharp stinging pain. However, the original, according to the Syriac, and several good interpreters, signifies lice.”

But Josephus, the Jewish rabbins, and most of the modern translators render the Hebrew word at large lice; and Bochart and Bryant support this interpretation. The former argues that gnats could not be meant. 1. Because the creatures here mentioned sprang from the dust of the earth, and not from the waters. 2. Because they were both on men and cattle, which cannot be spoken of gnats. 3. Because their name comes from the radix , which signifies to make firm, fix, establish, which can never agree to gnats, flies, &c, which are ever changing their place, and are almost constantly on the wing. 4. Because is the term by which the talmudists express the term louse, &c. To which may be added, that if they were winged and stinging insects, as Jerom, Origen, and others have supposed, the plague of flies is unduly anticipated; and the next miracle will be only a repetition of the former. Mr. Bryant, in illustrating the aptness of this miracle, has the following remarks: “The Egyptians affected great external purity, and were very nice both in their persons and clothing; bathing and making ablutions continually. Uncommon care was taken not to harbour any vermin. They were particularly solicitous on this head; thinking it would be a great profanation of the temple which they entered, if any animalcule of this sort were concealed in their garments.”garments.” The priests, says Herodotus, are shaved, both as to their heads and bodies, every third day, to prevent any louse, or any other detestable creature, being found upon them when they are performing their duty to the gods. The same is mentioned by another author, who 585adds, that all woollen was considered as foul, as from a perishable animal; but flax is the product of the immortal earth, affords a delicate and pure covering, and is not liable to harbour lice. We may hence see what an abhorrence the Egyptians showed toward this sort of vermin, and what care was taken by the priests to guard against them. The judgments, therefore, inflicted by the hands of Moses, were adapted to their prejudices. It was, consequently, not only most noisome to the people in general, but was no small odium to the most sacred order in Egypt, that they were overrun with these filthy and detestable vermin.

LIGHT, f, is used in a physical sense, Matt. xvii, 2; Acts ix, 3; xii, 7; 2 Cor. iv, 6; for a fire giving light, Mark xiv, 54; Luke xxii, 56; for a torch, candle, or lamp, Acts xvi, 29; and for the material light of heaven, as the sun, moon, or stars, Psalm cxxxvi, 7; James i, 17. Figuratively taken, it signifies a manifest or open state of things, Matt. x, 27; Luke xii, 3; also prosperity, truth, and joy.

God is said to dwell in light inaccessible, 1 Tim. vi, 16. This seems to contain a reference to the glory and splendour which shone in the holy of holies, where Jehovah appeared in the luminous cloud above the mercy seat, and which none but the high priest, and he only once a year, was permitted to approach unto, Lev. xvi, 2; Ezek. i, 22, 26, 28; but this was typical of the glory of the celestial world. It signifies, also, instruction, both by doctrine and example, Matt. v, 16; John v, 35; or persons considered as giving such light, Matt. v, 14; Rom. ii, 19. It is applied figuratively to Christ, the true Light, the Sun of Righteousness, who is that in the spiritual, which the material light is in the natural, world; who is the great Author, not only of illumination and knowledge, but of spiritual life, health, and joy to the souls of men.

The images of light and darkness, says Bishop Lowth, are commonly made use of in all languages to imply or denote prosperity and adversity, agreeably to the common sense and perception which all men have of the objects themselves. But the Hebrews employ those metaphors more frequently and with less variation than other people: indeed, they seldom refrain from them whenever the subject requires or will even admit of their introduction. These expressions, therefore, may be accounted among those forms of speech, which in the parabolic style are established and defined; since they exhibit the most noted and familiar images, and the application of them on this occasion is justified by an acknowledged analogy, and approved by constant and unvarying custom. In the use of images, so conspicuous and so familiar among the Hebrews, a degree of boldness is excusable. The Latins introduce them more sparingly, and therefore are more cautious in the application of them. But the Hebrews, upon a subject more sublime indeed, in itself, and illustrating it by an idea which was more habitual to them, more daringly exalt their strains, and give a loose rein to the spirit of poetry. They display, for instance, not the image of the spring, of Aurora, of the dreary night, but the sun and stars as rising with increased splendour in a new creation, or again involved in chaos and primeval darkness. Does the sacred bard promise to his people a renewal of the divine favour, and a recommencement of universal prosperity In what magnificent colours does he depict it! Such, indeed, as no translation can illustrate, but such as none can obscure:--

But even this is not sufficient:--

In another place he has admirably diversified the same sentiment:--

On the other hand, denouncing ruin against the proud king of Egypt:--

These expressions are bold and daring; but the imagery is well known, the use of it is common, the signification definite: they are therefore perspicuous, clear, and truly magnificent.

LIGN-ALOES. See Aloe.

LIGURE, , Exod. xxviii, 19; xxxix, 12, a precious stone of a deep red colour, with a considerable tinge of yellow. Theophrastus and Pliny describe it as resembling the carbuncle, of a brightness sparkling like fire.

LILY, , 1 Kings vii, 19, 22, 26; 2 Chron. iv, 5; Cant. ii, 2, 16; iv, 5; v, 13; vi, 2, 3; vii, 2; Hosea xiv, 5; , Matt. vi, 28; Luke xii, 27; a well known sweet and beautiful flower, which furnished Solomon with a variety of charming images in his Song, and with graceful ornaments in the fabric and furniture of the temple. The title of some of the Psalms upon Shushan,” or Shoshanim,” Psalms xlv; lx; lxix; lxxx, probably means no more than that the music of these sacred compositions was to be regulated by that of some odes, which were known by those names or appellations. By the lily 586of the valley,” Cant. ii, 2, we are not to understand the humble flower, generally so called with us, the lilium convallium, but the noble flower which ornaments our gardens, and which in Palestine grows wild in the fields, and especially in the valleys. Pliny reckons the lily the next plant in excellency to the rose; and the gay Anacreon compares Venus to this flower. In the east, as with us, it is the emblem of purity and moral excellence. So the Persian poet, Sadi, compares an amiable youth to the white lily in a bed of narcissuses,” because he surpassed all the young shepherds in goodness. As, in Cant. v, 13, the lips are compared to the lily, Bishop Patrick supposes the lily here instanced to be the same which, on account of its deep red colour, is particularly called by Pliny rubens lilium, and which, he tells us, was much esteemed in Syria. Such may have been the lily mentioned in Matt. vi, 28–30; for the royal robes were purple: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these:” so in Luke xii, 27. The scarcity of fuel in the east obliges the inhabitants to use, by turns, every kind of combustible matter. The withered stalks of herbs and flowers, the tendrils of the vine, the small branches of rosemary, and other plants, are all used in heating their ovens and bagnios. We can easily recognize this practice in that remark of our Lord, If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith” Matt. vi, 30. The grass of the field, in this passage, evidently includes the lilies of which he had just been speaking, and, by consequence, herbs in general; and in this extensive sense the word t is not unfrequently taken. Those beautiful productions of nature, so richly arrayed, and so exquisitely perfumed, that the splendour even of Solomon is not to be compared to theirs, shall soon wither and decay, and be used as fuel. God has so adorned these flowers and plants of the field, which retain their beauty and vigour but for a few days, and are then applied to some of the meanest purposes of life: will he not much more take care of his servants who are so precious in his sight, and designed for such important services in the world This passage is one of those of which Sir Thomas Browne says, The variously interspersed expressions from plants and flowers elegantly advantage the significancy of the text.”

Mr. Salt, in his Voyage to Abyssinia,” says, “At a few miles from Adowa, we discovered a new and beautiful species of amaryllis, which bore from ten to twelve spikes of bloom on each stem, as large as those of the belladonna, springing from one common receptacle. The general colour of the corolla was white, and every petal was marked with a single streak of bright purple down the middle. The flower was sweet scented, and its smell, though much more powerful, resembled that of the lily of the valley. This superb plant excited the admiration of the whole party; and it brought immediately to my recollection the beautiful comparison used on a particular occasion by our Saviour: ‘I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’” And Sir James E. Smith observes, “It is natural to presume the divine Teacher, according to his usual custom, called the attention of his hearers to some object at hand; and as the fields of the Levant are overrun with the amaryllis lutea, whose golden lilaceous flowers in autumn afford one of the most brilliant and gorgeous objects in nature, the expression of ‘Solomon in all his glory not being arrayed like one of these,’ is peculiarly appropriate. I consider the feeling with which this was expressed as the highest honour ever done to the study of plants; and if my botanical conjecture be right, we learn a chronological fact respecting the season of the year when the sermon on the mount was delivered.”

LIME, , Deut. xxvii, 2, 4; Isaiah xxxiii, 12; Amos ii, 1; a soft friable substance, obtained by calcining or burning stones, shells, or the like. From Isa. xxxiii, 12, it appears that it was made in a kiln lighted with thorn bushes; and from Amos ii, 1, that bones were sometimes calcined for lime. The use of it was for plaster or cement, the first mention of which is in Deut. xxvii, where Moses directed the elders of the people, saying, Keep all the commandments which I command you this day. And it shall be on the day when you shall pass over Jordan unto the land which the Lord your God giveth you, that you shall set up great stones, and plaster them with plaster, and shall write upon them all the words of this law,” &c. The book of the law, in order to render it the more sacred, was deposited beside the ark of the covenant. The guardians of the law, to whom was entrusted the duty of making faithful transcripts of it, were the priests. But Moses did not account even this precaution sufficient for the due preservation of his law in its original purity; for he commanded that it should beside be engraven on stones, and these stones kept on a mountain near Sichem, in order that a genuine exemplar of it might be transmitted even to the latest generations.

LION, , or , Genesis xlix, 9; Deut. xxxiii, 22; Psalm vii, 2; xxii, 13; Hosea xiii, 8; Micah v, 8; a large beast of prey, for his courage and strength called the king of beasts. This animal is produced in Africa, and the hottest parts of Asia. It is found in the greatest numbers in the scorched and desolate regions of the torrid zone, in the deserts of Zaara and Billdulgerid, and in all the interior parts of the vast continent of Africa. In these desert regions, from whence mankind are driven by the rigorous heat of the climate, this animal reigns sole master. His disposition seems to partake of the ardour of his native soil. Inflamed by the influence of a burning sun, his rage is tremendous, and his courage undaunted. Happily, indeed, the species is not numerous, and is said to be 587greatly diminished; for, if we may credit the testimony of those who have traversed those vast deserts, the number of lions is not nearly so great as formerly. Mr. Shaw observes that the Romans carried more lions from Libya in one year for their public spectacles, than could be found in all that country at this time. The lion was also found in Palestine, and the neighbouring countries. The length of the largest lion is between eight and nine feet, the tail about four, and its height about four feet and a half. The female is about one-fourth part less, and without a mane. As the lion advances in years, his mane grows longer and thicker. The hair on the rest of the body is short and smooth, of a tawny colour, but whitish on the belly. Its roaring is loud and dreadful. When heard in the night it resembles distant thunder. Its cry of anger is much louder and shorter. The attachment of a lioness to her young is remarkably strong. For their support she is more ferocious than the lion himself; makes her incursions with greater boldness; destroys, without distinction, every animal that falls in her way, and carries it reeking to her cubs. She usually brings forth in the most retired and inaccessible places; and when afraid that her retreat should be discovered, endeavours to hide her track by brushing the ground with her tail. When much disturbed or alarmed, she will sometimes transport her young, which are usually three or four in number, from one place to another in her mouth; and, if obstructed in her course, will defend them to the last extremity. The habits of the lion and the lioness afford many spirited, and often sublime, metaphors to the sacred writers.

The lion has several names in Scripture, according to his different ages or character: 1. , a little lion, a lion’s whelp, Deut. xxxiii, 22; Jer. li, 38; Ezek. xix, 2; Nahum ii, 13. 2. , a young lion that has done sucking the lioness, and, leaving the covert, begins to seek prey for himself. So Ezekiel xix, 2, 3: The lioness hath brought up one of her whelps; it became a chephir; it learned to catch the prey; it devoured men.” See Psalm xci, 13; Prov. xix, 12. 3. , a grown and vigorous lion, having whelps, eager in pursuit of prey for them, Nahum ii, 12; valiant, 2 Sam. xvii, 10; arrogantly opposing himself, Num. xxiii, 24. This is, indeed, the general name, and occurs frequently. 4. , one in the full strength of his age; a black lion, Job iv, 10; x, 16; Psalm xci, 13; Prov. xxvi, 13; Hosea v, 14; xiii, 7. 5. , a fierce or enraged lion, Job iv, 11; Prov. xxx, 30; Isaiah xxv, 6. A regard to these characteristics and distinctions is very important for illustrating the passages of Scripture where the animal is spoken of, and discovering the propriety of the allusions and metaphors which he so often furnishes to the Hebrew poets. The lion of the tribe of Judah, mentioned Rev. v, 5, is Jesus Christ, who sprung from the tribe of Judah, and overcame death, the world, and the devil. The lion from the swelling of Jordan, Jer. l, 44, is Nebuchadnezzar marching against Judea, with the strength and fierceness of a lion. Isaiah, describing the happy time of the Messiah, says, that then the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling should lie down together; and that a little child should lead them; and that the lion should eat straw like the ox, Isaiah xi, 6, 7, which is hyperbolical, and signifies the peace and happiness which the church of Christ should enjoy. The lion hath roared, and who shall not fear” Amos iii, 8. “The king’s wrath is as the roaring of a lion. Who provoketh him to anger sinneth against his own soul,” Prov. xix, 12; xx, 2; that is, he seeketh his own death. Solomon says, A living dog is better than a dead lion,” Eccles. x, 4; showing that death renders those contemptible who otherwise are the greatest, most powerful, and most terrible.

Then went Samson down and, behold, a young lion roared against him, and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand,” Judges xiv, 5, 6. An instance in quite modern times of an unarmed man attempting to combat a lion is related by Poiret: “In a douar, or a camp of Bedouin Arabs, near La Calle, a French factory, a young lion had seized a cow. A young Moor threw himself upon the savage beast, to tear his booty from him, and as it were to stifle him in his arms, but he would not let go his prey. The father of the young man hastened to him, armed with a kind of hoe; and aiming at the lion, struck his son’s hand, and cut off three of his fingers. It cost a great deal of trouble to rescue the prey from the lion. I saw this young man, who was attended by Mr. Gay, at that time surgeon to the hospital of La Calle.” David, according to 1 Sam. xvii, 34, had, when a shepherd, once fought with a lion, and another time with a bear, and rescued their prey from them. Tellez relates, that an Abyssinian shepherd had once killed a lion of extraordinary size with only two poles. Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan against the habitation of the strong,” Jer. xlix, 19. The comparison used by the prophet in these words will be perfectly understood by the account which Mr. Maundrell gives of the river Jordan: After having descended,” says he, “the outermost bank of Jordan, you go about a furlong upon a level strand, before you come to the immediate bank of the river. This second bank is so beset with bushes and trees, such as tamarisks, willows, oleanders, &c, that you can see no water till you have made your way through them. In this thicket anciently, and the same is reported of it at this day, several sorts of wild beasts were wont to harbour themselves, whose being washed out of the covert by the overflowings of the river gave occasion to that allusion: ‘He shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan.’”

He shall be cast into the den of lions,” Dan. vi, 7. In Morocco,” says Höst, “the king has a lions’ den, into which men, particularly Jews, are sometimes thrown; but the latter generally come off unhurt, because the 588keepers of these animals are Jews, who may safely be with them, with a rod in the hand, if they only take care to go out backward, as the lion does not suffer any one to turn his back upon him. The other Jews do not let their brethren remain longer than a night among the lions, as they might otherwise become too hungry; but ransom them with money, which is, in fact, the king’s object.” In another place in the same work we find the following description of the construction of this lions’ den: “At one end of the royal palace there is a place for ostriches and their young; and beyond the other end, toward the mountains, there is a large lions’ den, which consists of a large square hole in the ground, with a partition, in the middle of which there is a door, which the Jews, who are obliged to maintain and keep them for nothing, are able to open and shut from above, and can thus entice the lions, by means of the food, from one division to the other, to clean the other in the mean time. It is all in the open air, and a person may look down over a wall, which is a yard and a quarter high.”

LITANY, a solemn form of supplication to God. The word is derived from taea, supplication. At first the use of litanies was not fixed to any stated time; but they were employed only as exigencies required. They were observed in imitation of the Ninevites with ardent supplications and fastings, to avert the threatened judgments of fire, earthquake, inundations, or hostile invasions. The days on which they were used were called rogation days. Several of these days were appointed by the canons of different councils, till the seventeenth council of Toledo decreed that litanies should be used in every month. Thus, by degrees, these solemn supplications came to be used weekly, on Wednesdays and Fridays, the ancient stationary days in all churches. As to the form in which litanies are made, namely, in short petitions by the priest with responses by the people, St. Chrysostom derives the custom from the primitive ages, when the priest began and uttered by the Spirit some things fit to be prayed for, and the people joined the intercessions, saying, We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.” When the miraculous gift of the Spirit began to cease, they wrote down several of these forms, which were the original of our present litanies. St. Ambrose has left us one, which agrees in many particulars with that of our own church. About the year 400, litanies began to be used in processions, the people walking barefoot, and repeating them with great devotion. It is pretended that several countries were delivered from great calamities by this means. About the year 600, Gregory the Great, from all the litanies extant, composed the famous sevenfold litany, by which Rome, it is said, was delivered from a grievous mortality. This has served as a pattern to all the western churches since; and to it ours of the church of England comes nearer than that of the Romish missal, in which later popes have inserted the invocation of saints, which our Reformers properly expunged. These processional litanies having occasioned much scandal, it was decreed that in future the litanies should be used only within the walls of the church. Before the last review of the Common Prayer, the litany was a distinct service by itself, and used some time after the morning prayer was ended. At present it forms one office with the morning service, being ordered to be read after the third collect for grace, instead of the intercessional prayers in the daily service.

LITURGY denotes all the ceremonies in general belonging to divine service. The word comes from the Greek, eta, public service, or public ministry; formed of et, public, and , work. In a more restrained signification, liturgy is used among the Romanists to signify the mass; and among us, the common prayer. All who have written on liturgies agree that, in primitive days, divine service was exceedingly simple, clogged with very few ceremonies, and consisted of but a very small number of prayers; but, by degrees, they increased the number of ceremonies, and added new prayers, to render the office more awful and venerable to the people. At length, things were carried to such a pitch that a regulation became necessary; and it was found needful to put the service, and the manner of performing it, into writing; and this was what they called a liturgy. Liturgies have been different at different times and in different countries. We have the liturgy of St. Chrysostom, of St. Peter, the Armenian liturgy, Gallican liturgy, &c. The properties required in a public liturgy,” says Paley, are these: it must be compendious; express just conceptions of the divine attributes; recite such wants as a congregation are likely to feel, and no other; and contain as few controverted propositions as possible.” The liturgy of the church of England was composed A. D. 1547, and established in the second year of King Edward VI. In the fifth year of this prince, it was reviewed, because some things were contained in that liturgy which showed a compliance with the superstitions of those times; and exceptions were taken against it by learned men at home, and by Calvin abroad. Some alterations were made in it, which consisted in adding the general confession and absolution, and the communion service, to begin with the commandments. The use of oil in confirmation and extreme unction, was left out, and also prayers for souls departed, and what related to a belief of the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. The liturgy, so reformed, was established by the acts of 5th and 6th of Edward VI., chap. 1. However, it was abolished by Queen Mary, who enacted that the service should stand as it was commonly used in the last year of King Henry VIII. That of Edward VI. was reëstablished, with some few alterations, by Elizabeth. Some farther alterations were introduced, in consequence of the review of the Common Prayer Book, by order of King James, in the first year of his reign; particularly in the office of private baptism, in several rubrics, and other passages, with the 589addition of five or six new prayers and thanksgivings, and all that part of the catechism which contains the doctrines of the sacraments. This Book of Common Prayer, so altered, remained in force from the first year of King James to the fourteenth of Charles II. The last review of the liturgy was in the year 1661. It is an invidious cavil, says Dr. Nichols, that our liturgy was compiled out of popish books. Our reformers took nothing from them, but what was taken before from the oldest writers. We have many things out of the Greek liturgies of Basil and Chrysostom; more out of the litanies of Ambrose and Gregory; very much out of the ancient forms of the church dispersed in the works of the fathers, who wrote long before the Roman Breviary, and Canon of the Mass. Our Reformers added many prayers, and thanksgivings, and exhortations, to supply the defect.

LIZARD, , Levit. xi, 30. All interpreters agree that the original word here signifies a sort of lizard. Bochart takes it for that kind which is of a reddish colour, lies close to the earth, and is of a venomous nature.

LOCUST, . The word is probably derived from , which signifies to multiply, to become numerous, &c; because of the immense swarms of these animals by which different countries, especially in the east, are infested. See this circumstance referred to, Judges vi, 5; vii, 12; Psalm cv, 34; Jer. xlvi, 23; li, 14; Joel i, 4; Nahum iii, 15; Judith ii, 19, 20; where the most numerous armies are compared to the arbeh, or locust.

The locust, in entomology, belongs to a genus of insects known among naturalists by the name of grylli. The common greatsfe brown locust is about three inches in length, has two antennæ about an inch long, and two pairs of wings. The head and horns are brown; the mouth, and insides of the larger legs, bluish; the upper side of the body, and upper wings, brown; the former spotted with black, and the latter with dusky, spots. The back is defended by a shield of a greenish hue; the under wings are of a light brown hue, tinctured with green, and nearly transparent. The general form and appearance of the insect is that of the grasshopper so well known in this country. These creatures are frequently mentioned in the Old Testament. They were employed as one of the plagues for the punishment of the Egyptians; and their visitation was threatened to the Israelites as a mark of the divine displeasure. Their numbers and destructive powers very aptly fit them for this purpose. When they take the field, they always follow a leader, whose motions they invariably observe. They often migrate from their native country, probably in quest of a greater supply of food. On these occasions they appear in such large flocks as to darken the air; forming many compact bodies or swarms, of several hundred yards square. These flights are very frequent in Barbary, and generally happen at the latter end of March or beginning of April, after the wind has blown from the south for some days. The month following, the young brood also make their appearance, generally following the track of the old ones. In whatever country they settle, they devour all the vegetables, grain, and, in fine, all the produce of the earth; eating the very bark off the trees; thus destroying at once the hopes of the husbandman, and all the labours of agriculture: for though their voracity is great, yet they contaminate a much greater quantity than they devour; as their bite is poisonous to vegetables, and the marks of devastation may be traced for several succeeding seasons. There are various species of them, which consequently have different names; and some are more voracious and destructive than others, though all are most destructive and insatiable spoilers. Bochart enumerates ten different kinds which he thinks are mentioned in the Scripture.

Writers in natural history bear abundant testimony to the Scriptural account of these creatures. Dr. Shaw describes at large the numerous swarms and prodigious broods of those locusts which he saw in Barbary. Dr. Russel says, Of the noxious kinds of insects may well be reckoned the locusts, which sometimes arrive in such incredible multitudes, that it would appear fabulous to give a relation of them; destroying the whole of the verdure wherever they pass.” Captain Woodroffe, who was for some time at Astrachan, a city near the Volga, sixty miles to the north-west of the Caspian Sea, in latitude 47°, assures us, that, from the latter end of July to the beginning of October, the country about that city is frequently infested with locusts, which fly in such prodigious numbers as to darken the air, and appear at a distance as a heavy cloud. As for the Mosaic permission to the Jews of eating the locusts, Lev. xi, 22, however strange it may appear to the mere English reader, yet nothing is more certain than that several nations, both of Asia and Africa, anciently used these insects for food; and that they are still eaten in the east to this day. Niebhur gives some account of the several species of locusts eaten by the Arabs, and of their different ways of dressing them for food. The Europeans,” he adds, do not comprehend how the Arabs can eat locusts with pleasure; and those Arabs who have had no intercourse with the Christians will not believe, in their turn, that these latter reckon oysters, crabs, shrimps, cray-fish, &c, for dainties. These two facts, however, are equally certain.” Locusts are often used figuratively by the prophets, for invading armies; and their swarms aptly represented the numbers, the desolating march of the vast military hordes and their predatory followers, which the ancient conquerors of the east poured down upon every country they attacked.

LOG, Lev. xiv, 12, a Hebrew measure for things liquid, containing five-sixths of a pint.

LOLLARDS, the supposed followers of Walter Lollard, or rather of Walter the Lollard, who, according to Dr. Mosheim, was a Dutchman of remarkable eloquence and piety, though tinctured with mysticism, and who, for teaching sentiments contrary to the church of 590Rome, and nearly corresponding with those of Wickliffe, was burned alive at Cologne in 1322. But before this there existed, in different parts of Germany and Flanders, various societies of Cellites, to whom the term Lollards was applied, and who were protected by the magistrates and inhabitants, on account of their usefulness to the sick, and in burying the dead. They received the name Lollards, from the old German or Belgic word lullen, (Latin, lallo,) to sing with a low voice,” to lull to sleep,” (whence lullaby,) because when they carried to the grave, the bed of death, such as died of the plague, which at that period ravaged all Europe, they sung a dirge or hymn, probably, in a soft and mournful tone. These Lollards obtained many papal grants, by which their institution was confirmed, their persons exempted from the cognizance of the inquisitors, and subjected entirely to the jurisdiction of the bishops; and, at last, for their farther security, Charles, duke of Burgundy, in 1472, obtained a bull from Pope Sixtus IV., by which they were ranked among the religious orders, and delivered from the jurisdiction of their bishops; which privileges were yet more extended by Pope Julius II. in 1506.

In England the followers of Wickliffe were called Lollards by way of reproach, either on account of the humble offices of the original Lollards, (the Cellites,) or from the attachment of the Wickliffites to singing hymns. Their enemies probably meant to describe them as poor melancholy creatures, only fit to sing psalms at a funeral.

LOOKING GLASS. Moses states that the women who waited all night at the door of the tabernacle, cheerfully offered their looking glasses, to be employed in making a brazen laver for the purification of the priests, Exod. xxxviii, 8. These looking glasses were doubtless of brass, since the basin here mentioned, and the basis thereof, were made from them. The ancient looking glasses were mirrors, not made of glass as ours; but of brass, tin, silver, and a mixture of brass and silver, which last were the best and most valuable.

LORD’s DAY. See Sabbath.

LORD’s SUPPER, an ordinance instituted by our Saviour in commemoration of his death and sufferings. The institution of this sacrament is recorded by the first three evangelists, and by the Apostle Paul, whose words differ very little from those of his companion St. Luke; and the only difference between St. Matthew and St. Mark is, that the latter omits the words, for the remission of sins.” There is so general an agreement among them all, that it will only be necessary to recite the words of one of them: Now, when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve,” to eat the passover which had been prepared by his direction; and as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins,” Matt. xxvi, 20, 26–28. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper being thus instituted, was adopted by all the early Christians, with very few exceptions; and no modern sect rejects it, except the Quakers and some mystics, who make the whole of religion to consist of contemplative love.

In the early times of the Gospel the celebration of the Lord’s Supper was both frequent and numerously attended. Voluntary absence was considered as a culpable neglect; and exclusion from it, by the sentence of the church, as a severe punishment. Every one brought an offering proportioned to his ability; these offerings were chiefly of bread and wine; and the priests appropriated as much as was necessary for the administration of the eucharist. The clergy had a part of what was left for their maintenance; and the rest furnished the repast called p, or love-feast, which immediately followed the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and of which all the communicants, both rich and poor, partook. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper greatly resembled the religious feasts to which the Jews were accustomed. At those feasts they partook of bread and wine in a serious and devout manner, after a solemn blessing or thanksgiving to God for his manifold mercies. This was particularly the case at the feast of the passover, which our Saviour was celebrating with his Apostles when he instituted this holy sacrament. At that feast, they commemorated the deliverance of their own peculiar nation from the bondage of Egypt; and there could not be a more suitable opportunity for establishing an ordinance which was to commemorate the infinitely more important deliverance of all mankind from the bondage of sin. The former deliverance was typical of the latter; and instead of keeping the Jewish passover, which was now to be abrogated, they were to commemorate Christ, their passover, who was sacrificed for them; the bread broken was to represent his body offered upon the cross; and the wine poured out was to represent his blood, which was shed for the salvation of men. The nourishment which these elements afford to our bodies is figurative of the salutary effects which the thing signified has upon our souls. And as the celebration of the passover was not only a constant memorial of the deliverance of the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, but also a symbolical action, by which they had a title to the blessings of the old covenant; so the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is not only a constant memorial of the death of Christ, but also a pledge or earnest to the communicant of the benefits promised by the new covenant. As the passover was instituted the night before the actual deliverance of the Israelites, so the Lord’s Supper was instituted the night before the redemption of man was accomplished by the crucifixion of the blessed Jesus. It is to be partaken of by all who look for remission of sins by the death of Christ; we are not only to cherish that trust in our minds, and express it in our devotions, but we are to give an outward proof of our reliance 591upon the merits of his passion as the means of our salvation, by eating that bread, and drinking that wine, which are typical representations of the body and blood of Christ, who by his one oblation of himself once offered, made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” See Sacraments.

LOT, the son of Haran, and nephew to Abraham. He accompanied his uncle from Ur to Haran, and from thence to Canaan; a proof of their mutual attachment, and similarity of principles respecting the true religion. With Abraham he descended into Egypt, and afterward returned with him into Canaan: but the multiplicity of their flocks, and still more the quarrels of their servants, rendered a friendly separation necessary. When God destroyed the cities of the plain with fire and brimstone, he delivered just Lot” from the conflagration, according to the account of the divine historian. The whole time that Lot resided there was twenty-three years. During all this period he had been a preacher of righteousness among this degenerate people. In him they had before their eyes an illustrious example of the exercise of genuine piety, supported by unsullied justice and benevolent actions. And doubtless it was for these purposes that Divine Providence placed him for a time in that city. The losses which Lot sustained on this melancholy occasion were very great; his wife, property, and all the prospects of the future settlement of his family blasted. Pity must therefore draw a friendly veil over the closing scene of this man of affliction; and let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall into deeds more reprehensible than those of Lot, without having equal trials and sufferings to plead in his favour. Respecting his wife, whether grieving for the loss of her property, or inwardly censuring the severity of the divine dispensation, or whether moved by unbelief or curiosity, cannot now be known; but, looking back, she became a pillar of salt, Gen. xix, 26. It would be endless to present the reader with all the opinions on this subject. Some contend that nothing more is meant than that she was suffocated: others, that a column or monument of metallic salt was erected upon her grave: others affirm that she became encrusted with the sulphur, insomuch that she appeared like an Egyptian mummy, which is embalmed with salt. Our Lord warns his disciples to remember Lot’s wife in their flight from Jerusalem, and not to imitate her tardiness, Luke xvii, 32.

2. Lot, any thing cast or drawn in order to determine any matter in question, Proverbs xviii, 18. We see the use of lots among the Hebrews in many places of Scripture: God commands, for example, that lots should be cast upon the two goats which were offered for the sins of the people, upon the solemn day of expiation, to know which of the two should be sacrificed, and which liberated, Lev. xvi, 8–10. He required also that the land of promise should be divided by lot as soon as it was conquered; which command Joshua accordingly executed, Num. xxvi, 55, 56; xxxiii, 54; xxxiv, 13, &c; Joshua xiv-xvi; hence the term lot” is used for an inheritance, Thou maintainest my lot;” and figuratively for a happy state or condition. The priests and Levites had their cities appointed by lot. Lastly, in the time of David, the four and twenty classes of the priests and Levites were distributed by lot, to determine in what order they should wait in the temple, 1 Chron. vi, 54, 61; xxiv, 5; xxv, 8. In the division of the spoil, after victory, lots were likewise cast, to give every man his portion, Obadiah 11; Nahum iii, 10, &c. In the New Testament, after the death of Judas, lots were cast to decide who should occupy the place of the traitor, Acts i, 26. From the above instances, it is clear that when men have recourse to this method, the matter ought to be of the greatest importance, and no other apparent way left to determine it; and the manner of making the appeal should be solemn and grave, if we would escape the guilt of taking the name of God in vain. It unquestionably implies a solemn appeal to the Most High to interpose by his decision; and so every thinking man will be very careful that he has a true and religious ground for so serious a proceeding; and few if any cases can now occur in which it can have any justification. The ancient manner of casting lots, was either in some person’s lap,” or fold of the robe; into a helmet, or urn, or other vessel, in which they might be shaken before they were drawn or cast.

LOVE-FEASTS. It is Godwin’s opinion, that the agapæ, or love-feasts, of the primitive Christians, were derived from the or feasts upon the sacrifices, at which the Jews entertained their friends, and fed the poor; Deut. xii, 18; xxvi, 12. There were also feasts of much the same kind in use among the Greeks and Romans. The former were wont to offer certain sacrifices to their gods, which were afterward given to the poor. They had likewise public feasts for certain districts, suppose for a town or a city, toward which all who could afford it, contributed, in proportion to their different abilities, and all partook of it in common. Of this sort were the sssta of the Cretans; and the fdta of the Lacedæmonians, instituted by Lycurgus, and so called a t fa, (the being changed into d according to their usual orthography,) as denoting that love and friendship which they were intended to promote among neighbours and fellow citizens. The Romans likewise had a feast of the same kind, called charistia; which was a meeting only of those who were akin to each other; and the design of it was, that if any quarrel or misunderstanding had happened among any of them, they might there be reconciled. To this Ovid alludes in the second book of his Fasti:--

[The feasts next in order beloved relatives called charistia, at which the kindred throng assembled under their family household gods.]

592In imitation either of these Jewish or Gentile love-feasts, or probably of both, the primitive Christians, in each particular church, had likewise their love-feasts, which were supplied by the contribution of the members, according to their several abilities, and partaken of by all in common. And whether they were converts from among the Jews or Gentiles, they retained their old custom with very little alteration, and as their pa had been commonly annexed to their sacrifices, so they were now annexed to the commemoration of the sacrifice of Christ at the Lord’s Supper; and were therefore held on the Lord’s day before or after the celebration of that ordinance. It would seem at Corinth, in the Apostles’ days, they were ordinarily held before; for when the Corinthians are blamed for unworthily receiving the Lord’s Supper, it is partly charged upon this, that some of them came drunk to that ordinance, having indulged to excess at the preceding love-feast: Every one taketh before, aµae, his own supper, and one is hungry, and another is drunken,” 1 Cor. xi, 21. This shows, says Dr. Whitby, that this banquet, namely, the love-feast, was celebrated before the Lord’s Supper. But Chrysostom gives an account of it, as being in his time kept after it. It is commonly supposed, that when St. Jude mentions certain persons, who were spots in the feasts of charity, ta pa, verse 12, he means in the Christian love-feasts; though Dr. Lightfoot and Dr. Whitby apprehend the reference in this passage is rather a custom of the Jews, who, on the evening of their Sabbath, had their a, or communion, when the inhabitants of the same city met in a common place to eat together. However that be, all antiquity bears testimony to the reality of the Christian pa, or love-feasts.

The most circumstantial account, says Dr. Townley, of the manner in which the ancient agapæ were celebrated, is given by Tertullian, in his Apology,” written in the second century: Our supper,” says he, which you accuse of luxury, shows its reason in its very name, for it is called p, that is, love. Whatever charge we are at, it is gain to be at expense upon the account of piety. For we therewith relieve and refresh the poor. There is nothing vile or immodest committed in it. For we do not sit down before we have first offered up prayer to God. We eat only to satisfy hunger, and drink only so much as becomes modest persons. We fill ourselves in such a manner, as that we remember still that we are to worship God by night. We discourse as in the presence of God, knowing that he hears us. Then, after water to wash our hands, and lights brought in, every one is moved to sing some hymn to God, either out of Scripture, or, as he is able, of his own composing, and by this we judge whether he has observed the rules of temperance in drinking. Prayer again concludes our feast; and thence we depart, not to fight and quarrel; not to run about and abuse all we meet; not to give up ourselves to lascivious pastime; but to pursue the same care of modesty and chastity, as men that have fed at a supper of philosophy and discipline, rather than a corporeal feast.” Ignatius, in his epistle to the church of Smyrna, in the first century, affords us the additional information, that it was not lawful to baptize, or celebrate the love-feasts, without the bishop, or minister.” Lucian, the epicurean, has also a passage which seems to refer to the agapæ. He tells us that when Peregrinus, a Christian, was in prison, you might have seen, early in the morning, old women, some widows, and orphans, waiting at the prison. Their presidents bribed the guards, and lodged in the prison with him. Afterward (that is, in the evening) various suppers (that is, suppers consisting of various dishes, and various kinds of meat, brought thither by various persons of the company) were brought in, and they held their sacred conversations, e , or their sacred discourses were delivered.” Pliny, in his celebrated epistle to Trajan, mentions the “cibus promiscuus et innoxius,”--“common and harmless meal” of the Christians, which they ate together after the celebration of the eucharist. This primitive practice, though under a simpler form, and more expressly religious, is retained in modern times, only by the Moravians, and by the Wesleyan Methodists.

LOVE TO GOD. To serve and obey God on the conviction that it is right to serve and obey him, is in Christianity joined with that love to God which gives life and animation to service, and renders it the means of exalting our pleasures, at the same time that it accords with our convictions. The supreme love of God is the chief, therefore, of what have sometimes been called our theopathetic affections. It is the sum and the end of the law; and though it has been lost by us in Adam, it is restored to us by Christ. When it regards God absolutely, and in himself, as a Being of infinite and harmonious perfections and moral beauties, it is that movement of the soul toward him which is produced by admiration, approval, and delight. When it regards him relatively, it fixes upon the ceaseless emanations of his goodness to us all in the continuance of the existence which he at first bestowed; the circumstances which render that existence felicitous; and, above all, upon that great love wherewith he loved us,” manifested in the gift of his Son for our redemption, and in saving us by his grace; or, in the forcible language of St. Paul, upon the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness to us through Christ Jesus.” Under all these views an unbounded gratitude overflows the heart which is influenced by this spiritual affection. But the love of God is more than a sentiment of gratitude: it rejoices in his perfections and glories, and devoutly contemplates them as the highest and most interesting subjects of thought; it keeps the idea of this supremely beloved object constantly present to the mind; it turns to it with adoring ardour from the business and distractions of life; it connects it with every scene of majesty and beauty in nature, and with every event of general and 593particular providence; it brings the soul into fellowship with God, real and sensible, because vital; it moulds the other affections into conformity with what God himself wills or prohibits, loves or hates; it produces an unbounded desire to please him, and to be accepted of him in all things; it is jealous of his honour, unwearied in his service, quick to prompt to every sacrifice in the cause of his truth and his church; and it renders all such sacrifices, even when carried to the extent of suffering and death, unreluctant and cheerful. It chooses God as the chief good of the soul, the enjoyment of which assures its perfect and eternal interest and happiness: Whom have I in heaven but thee and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee,” is the language of every heart, when its love of God is true in principle and supreme in degree.

If, then, the will of God is the perfect rule of morals; and if supreme and perfect love to God must produce a prompt and unwearied, a delightful subjection to his will, or rather an entire and most free choice of it as the rule of all our principles, affections, and actions; the importance of this affection in securing that obedience to the law of God in which true morality consists, is manifest; and we clearly perceive the reason why an inspired writer has affirmed, that love is the fulfilling of the law.” The necessity of keeping this subject before us under those views in which it is placed in the Christian system, and of not surrendering it to mere philosophy, is, however, an important consideration. With the philosopher the love of God may be the mere approval of the intellect; or a sentiment which results from the contemplation of infinite perfection, manifesting itself in acts of power and goodness. In the Scriptures it is much more than either, and is produced and maintained by a different process. We are there taught that the carnal mind is enmity to God,” and is not, of course, capable of loving God. Yet this carnal mind may consist with deep attainments in philosophy, and with strongly impassioned poetic sentiment. The mere approval of the understanding, and the susceptibility of being impressed with feelings of admiration, awe, and even pleasure, when the character of God is manifested in his works, as both may be found in the carnal mind which is enmity to God, are not therefore the love of God. They are principles which enter into that love, since it cannot exist without them; but they may exist without this affection itself, and be found in a vicious and unchanged nature. The love of God is a fruit of the Holy Spirit; that is, it is implanted by him only in the souls which he has regenerated; and as that which excites its exercise is chiefly, and in the first place, a sense of the benefits bestowed by the grace of God in our redemption, and a well grounded persuasion of our personal interest in those benefits, it necessarily presupposes our reconciliation to God through faith in the atonement of Christ, and that attestation of it to the heart by the Spirit of adoption. We here see, then, another proof of the necessary connection of Christian morals with Christian doctrine, and how imperfect and deceptive every system must be which separates them. Love is essential to true obedience; for when the Apostle declares love to be the fulfilling of the law,” he declares, in effect, that the law cannot be fulfilled without love; and that every action which has not this for its principle, however virtuous in its show, fails of accomplishing the precepts which are obligatory upon us. But this love to God cannot be felt so long as we are sensible of his wrath, and are in dread of his judgments. These feelings are incompatible with each other, and we must be assured of his reconciliation to us, before we are capable of loving him. Thus the very existence of love to God implies the doctrines of atonement, repentance, faith, and the gift of the Spirit of adoption to believers; and unless it be taught in this connection, and through this process of experience, it will be exhibited only as a bright and beauteous object to which man has no access; or a fictitious and imitative sentimentalism will be substituted for it, to the delusion of the souls of men.

LUCIAN, a philosopherphilosopher and wit, who appeared as one of the early opposers of the Christian religion and its followers. The hostile sentiments of the Heathens toward Christianity, says Dr. Neander, were different according to the difference of their philosophical and religious views. There entered then upon the contest two classes of men, who have never since ceased to persecute Christianity. These were the superstitious, to whom the honouring God in spirit and in truth was a stumbling stone, and the careless unbeliever, who, unacquainted with all feelings of religious wants, was accustomed to laugh and to mock at every thing which proceeded from them, whether he understood it or not, and at all which supposed such feelings, and proposed to satisfy them. Such was Lucian. To him Christianity, like every other remarkable religious phenomenon, appeared only as a fit object for his sarcastic wit. Without giving himself the trouble to examine and to discriminate, he threw Christianity, superstition, and fanaticism, into the same class. It is easy enough, in any system which lays deep hold on man’s nature, to find out some side open to ridicule, if a man brings forward only that which is external in the system, abstracted from all its inward power and meaning, and without either understanding, or attempting to understand, this power. He, therefore, who looked on Christianity with cold indifference, and the profane every-day feelings of worldly prudence, might easily here and there find objects for his satire. The Christian might indeed have profited by that ridicule, and have learned from the children of darkness to join the wisdom of the serpent with the meekness of the dove. In the end the scoffer brings himself to derision, because he ventures to pass sentence on the phenomena of a world of which he has not the slightest conception, and which to his eyes, buried as they are in the films of the earth, is entirely closed. Such was Lucian. He sought to bring 594forward all that is striking and remarkable in the external conduct and circumstances of Christians, which might serve for the object of his sarcastic raillery, without any deeper inquiry as to what the religion of the Christians really was. And yet even in that at which he scoffed, there was much which might have taught him to remark in Christianity no common power over the hearts of men, had he been capable of such serious impressions. The firm hope of eternal life which taught them to meet death with tranquillity, their brotherly love one toward another, might have indicated to him some higher spirit which animated these men; but instead of this he treats it all as delusion, because many gave themselves up to death with something like fanatical enthusiasm. He scoffs at the notion of a crucified man having taught them to regard all mankind as their brethren, the moment they should have abjured the gods of Greece; as if it were not just the most remarkable part of all this, that an obscure person in Jerusalem, who was deserted by every one, and executed as a criminal, should be able, a good century after his death, to cause such effects as Lucian, in his own time, saw extending in all directions, and in spite of every kind of persecution. How blinded must he have been to pass thus lightly over such a phenomenon! But men of his ready wit are apt to exert it with too great readiness on all subjects. They are able to illustrate every thing out of nothing; with their miserable nil admirari,” they can close their hearts against all lofty impressions. With all his wit and keenness, with all his undeniably fine powers of observation in all that has no concern with the deeper impulses of man’s spirit, he was a man of very little mind. But hear his own language: The wretched people have persuaded themselves that they are altogether immortal, and will live for ever; therefore they despise death, and many of them meet it of their own accord. Their first lawgiver has persuaded them also to regard all mankind as their brethren, as soon as they have abjured the Grecian gods, and, honouring their crucified Master, have begun to live according to his laws. They despise every thing Heathen equally, and regard all but their own notions as profaneness, while they have yet embraced those notions without sufficient examination.” He has no farther accusation to make against them here, except the ease with which they allowed their benevolence toward their fellow Christians to be abused by impostors, in which there may be much truth, but there is, nevertheless, some exaggeration.

LUDIM. There were two Luds; the one the son of Shem, from whom the Lydians of Asia Minor are supposed to have sprung, and the other the son of Mizraim, whose residence was in Africa. The descendants of the latter only are mentioned in Scripture: they are joinedjoined by Isaiah, lxvi, 19, with Pul, whose settlement is supposed to have been about the island Philoe, near the first cataract of the Nile; by Jeremiah, xlvi, 9, with the Ethiopians and Libyans; by Ezekiel, xxvii, 10, with Phut, as the mercenary soldiers of Tyre, and xxx, 5, with the Ethiopians and Libyans; all plainly denoting their African position; but in what particular part of that continent this position was, is not known.

LUKE. The New Testament informs us of very few particulars concerning St. Luke. He is not named in any of the Gospels. In the Acts of the Apostles, which were, as will hereafter be shown, written by him, he uses the first person plural, when he is relating some of the travels of St. Paul; and thence it is inferred, that at those times he was himself with that Apostle. The first instance of this kind is in the eleventh verse of the sixteenth chapter; he there says, Loosing from Troas, we came up with a straight course to Samothracia.” Thus, we learn that St. Luke accompanied St. Paul in this his first voyage to Macedonia. From Samothracia they went to Neapolis, and thence to Philippi. At this last place we conclude that St. Paul and St. Luke separated, because in continuing the history of St. Paul, after he left Philippi, St. Luke uses the third person, saying, Now when they had passed through Amphipolis,” &c, Acts xvii, 1; and he does not resume the first person till St. Paul was in Greece the second time. We have no account of St. Luke during this interval; it only appears that he was not with St. Paul. When St. Paul was about to go to Jerusalem from Greece, after his second visit into that country, St. Luke, mentioning certain persons, says, These going before tarried for us at Troas; and we sailed away from Philippi,” Acts xx, 5, 6. Thus again we learn that St. Luke accompanied St. Paul out of Greece, through Macedonia to Troas; and the sequel of St. Paul’s history in the Acts, and some passages in his epistles, 2 Tim. iv, 11; Col. iv, 14, Philemon 24, written while he was a prisoner at Rome, informs us that St. Luke continued from that time with Paul, till he was released from his confinement at Rome; which was a space of about five years, and included a very interesting part of St. Paul’s life, Acts xx-xxviii.

Here ends the certain account of St. Luke. It seems probable, however, that he went from Rome into Achaia; and some authors have asserted that he afterward preached the Gospel in Africa. None of the most ancient fathers having mentioned that St. Luke suffered martyrdom, we may suppose that he died a natural death; but at what time, or in what place, is not known. We are told by some that St. Luke was a painter, and Grotius and Wetstein thought that he was in the earlier part of his life a slave; but I find, says Bishop Tomline, no foundation for either opinion in any ancient writer. It is probable that he was by birth a Jew, and a native of Antioch in Syria; and I see no reason to doubt that Luke, the beloved physician,” mentioned in the Epistle to the Colossians, iv, 14, was Luke the evangelist.

Lardner thinks that there are a few allusions to this Gospel in some of the apostolical 595fathers, especially in Hermas and Polycarp; and in Justin Martyr there are passages evidently taken from it; but the earliest author, who actually mentions St. Luke’s Gospel, is Irenæus; and he cites so many peculiarities in it, all agreeing with the Gospel which we now have, that he alone is sufficient to prove its genuineness. We may however observe, that his testimony is supported by Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Jerom, Chrysostom, and many others. Dr. Owen and Dr. Townson have compared many parallel passages of St. Mark’s and St. Luke’s Gospels; and Dr. Townson has concluded that St. Luke had seen St. Mark’s Gospel, and Dr. Owen, that St. Mark had seen St. Luke’s; but there does not appear to be a sufficient similarity of expression to justify either of these conclusions. There was among the ancients a difference of opinion concerning the priority of these two Gospels; and it must be acknowledged to be a very doubtful point.

There is also great doubt about the place where this Gospel was published. It seems most probable that it was published in Greece, and for the use of Gentile converts. Dr. Townson observes, that the evangelist has inserted many explanations, particularly concerning the scribes and Pharisees, which he would have omitted if he had been writing for those who were acquainted with the customs and sects of the Jews. We must conclude that the histories of our Saviour, referred to in the preface to this Gospel, were inaccurate and defective, or St. Luke would not have undertaken this work. It does not, however, appear that they were written with any bad design; but being merely human compositions, and perhaps put together in great haste, they were full of errors. They are now entirely lost, and the names of their authors are not known. When the four authentic Gospels were published, and came into general use, all others were quickly disregarded and forgotten.

St. Luke’s Gospel is addressed to Theophilus; but there was a doubt, even in the time of Epiphanius, whether a particular person, or any good Christian in general, be intended by that name. Theophilus was probably a real person, that opinion being more agreeable to the simplicity of the sacred writings. We have seen that St. Luke was for several years the companion of St. Paul; and many ancient writers consider this Gospel as having the sanction of St. Paul, in the same manner as St. Mark’s had that of St. Peter. Whoever will examine the evangelist’s and the Apostle’s account of the eucharist in their respective original works, will observe a great coincidence of expression, Luke xxii; 1 Cor. xi. St. Luke seems to have had more learning than any other of the evangelists, and his language is more varied, copious, and pure. This superiority in style may perhaps be owing to his longer residence in Greece, and greater acquaintance with Gentiles of good education, than fell to the lot of the writers of the other three Gospels. This Gospel contains many things which are not found in the other Gospels; among which are the following: the birth of John the Baptist; the Roman census in Judea; the circumstances attending Christ’s birth at Bethlehem; the vision granted to the shepherds; the early testimony of Simeon and Anna; Christ’s conversation with the doctors in the temple when he was twelve years old; the parables of the good Samaritan, of the prodigal son, of Dives and Lazarus, of the wicked judge, and of the publican and Pharisee; the miraculous cure of the woman who had been bowed down by illness eighteen years; the cleansing of the ten lepers; and the restoring to life the son of a widow at Nain; the account of Zaccheus, and of the penitent thief; and the particulars of the journey to Emmaus. It is very satisfactory that so early a writer as Irenæus has noticed most of these peculiarities; which proves not only that St. Luke’s Gospel, but that the other Gospels also, are the same now that they were in the second century.

LUNATICS, seaµ, lunatici, Matt. iv, 24. Thus those sick persons were called, who were thought to suffer most severely at the changes of the moon; for example, epileptical persons, or those who have the falling sickness, insane persons, or those tormented with fits of morbid melancholy. Mad people are still called lunatics, from an ancient, but now almost exploded, opinion, that they are much influenced by that planet. A sounder philosophy has taught us, that, if there be any thing in it, it must be accounted for, not in the manner the ancients imagined, nor otherwise than by what the moon has in common with other heavenly bodies, occasioning various alterations in the gravity of our atmosphere, and thereby affecting human bodies. However, there is considerable reason to doubt the fact; and it is certain that the moon has no perceivable influence on our most accurate barometers. It has been the fashion to decry and ridicule the doctrine of demoniacal possessions, and to represent the patients merely as lunatics or madmen. And some think that this is countenanced by the calumny of the unbelieving Jews concerning Christ, He hath a demon, and is mad,” John x, 20; both possession and madness often producing the same symptoms of convulsions, paralysis, &c, Matt. xvii, 15–18. But that they were distinct diseases, may be collected from the following considerations: 1. The evangelists, enumerating the various descriptions of patients, distinguish daµµe, demoniacs, seaµe, lunatics, and aat, paralytics, from persons afflicted with other kinds of diseases, Matt. iv, 24; Mark i, 34; Luke vi, 17, 18. 2. That a real dispossession took place, seems to follow from the number of these impure inmates. Mary of Magdala, or the Magdalene, was afflicted with seven demons, Mark xvi, 9. A legion” besought Christ’s permission to enter into a numerous herd of two thousand swine; which they did, and drove the whole herd down a precipice into the sea, where they were all drowned. This remarkable case is noticed by the three evangelists 596most circumstantially, Matt. viii, 28; Mark v, 1; Luke viii, 26. 3. The testimony of the demoniacs to Christ was not that of madmen or idiots. It evinced an intimate knowledge both of his person and character, which was hidden from the wise and prudent” of the nation, the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees. Their language was, What hast thou to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth Art thou come to torment us before the time” I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God:” thou art the Christ, the Son of God, the Son of the most high God,” Matt. viii, 29; Mark i, 24; iii, 11; Luke iv, 34–41. And they repeatedly besought him not to torment them, not to order them to depart into the abyss, Luke viii, 28–31. See Demoniacs.

LUTHERANS, or the LUTHERAN CHURCH, the disciples and followers of Martin Luther, an Augustine friar, who was born at Isleben, in Upper Saxony, in the year 1483. He possessed an invincible magnanimity, and uncommon vigour and acuteness of genius. He first took offence at the indulgences which were granted in 1517, by Pope Leo X., to those who contributed toward finishing St. Peter’s church at Rome, Luther being then professor of divinity at Wittemberg. Those indulgences promised remission of all sins, past, present, and to come, however enormous their nature, to all who were rich enough to purchase them. At this Luther raised his warning voice; and in ninety-five propositions, which he maintained publicly at Wittemberg, September 30, 1517, exposed the doctrine of indulgences, which led him to attack also the authority of the pope. This was the commencement of that memorable revolution in the church which is styled the Reformation; though Mosheim fixes the era of the Reformation from 1520, when Luther was excommunicated by the pope.

In 1523 Luther drew up a liturgy, that, in many things, differed but little from the Mass Book; but he left his followers to make farther reforms, as they saw them necessary; and, in consequence, the forms of worship in the Lutheran churches vary in points of minor importance: but they agree in reading the Scriptures publicly, in offering prayers and praises to God through the Mediator in their own language, in popular addresses to the congregation, and the reverend administration of the sacraments.

The Augsburgh Confession (see Confessions) forms the established creed of the Lutheran church. The following are a few of the principal points of doctrine maintained by this great reformer, and a few of the Scriptures by which he supported them.

1. That the Holy Scriptures are the only source whence we are to draw our religious sentiments, whether they relate to faith or practice, John v, 39; 1 Cor. iv, 16; 2 Tim. iii, 15–17. Reason also confirms the sufficiency of the Scriptures; for, if the written word be allowed to be a rule in one case, how can it be denied to be a rule in another

2. That justification is the effect of faith exclusive of good works; and that faith ought to produce good works purely in obedience to God, and not in order to our justification; for St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, strenuously opposed those who ascribed our justification, though but in part, to works: If righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain,” Gal. ii, 21. Therefore it is evident we are not justified by the law, or by our works; but to him that believeth, sin is pardoned, and Christ’s righteousness imputed. This article of justification by faith alone, Luther used frequently to call articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ;” that by which the church must stand or fall.

3. That no man is able to make satisfaction for his sins; for our Lord teaches us to say, when we have done all things that are commanded us, We are unprofitable servants,” Luke xvii, 10. Christ’s sacrifice is alone sufficient to satisfy for sin, and nothing need be added to the infinite value of his atonement.

Luther also rejected tradition, purgatory, penance, auricular confession, masses, invocation of saints, monastic vows, and other doctrines of the church of Rome. Luther differed widely from Calvin on matters of church discipline; and on the presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament. His followers also deviated from him in some things; but the following may be considered as a fair statement of their principles, and the difference between them and the Calvinists: 1. The Lutherans in Germany reject both Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, but appoint superintendents for the government of the church, who preside in their consistories, when that office is not supplied by a delegate from the civil government; and they hold meetings in the different towns and villages, to inquire into the state of the congregations and the schools. The appointment of superintendents, and the presentation to livings, is generally in the prince, or ecclesiastical courts. The Swedes and Danes have an ecclesiastical hierarchy, similar to that of England. 2. They differ in their views of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. All the Lutherans reject trans-substantiation, but affirm that the body and blood of Christ are materially present in the sacrament, though in an incomprehensible manner: this they called con-substantiation. The Calvinists hold, on the contrary, that Jesus Christ is only spiritually present in the ordinance, by the external signs of bread and wine. 3. They differ as to the doctrine of the eternal decrees of God respecting man’s salvation. The modern Lutherans maintain that the divine decrees, respecting the salvation and misery of men, are founded upon the divine prescience. The Calvinists, on the contrary, consider these decrees as absolute and unconditional.

The Lutherans are generally divided into the moderate and the rigid. The moderate Lutherans are those who submitted to the Interim published by the Emperor Charles V. Melancthon was the head of this party, and they were called Adiaphorists. The rigid Lutherans are those who would not endure 597any change in their master’s sentiments, of whom M. Flaccius was the head. The Lutherans are partial to the use of instrumental music in their churches, and admit statues and paintings, as the church of England does, without allowing them any religious veneration; but the rigid Calvinists reject these, and allow only the simplest forms of psalmody. The modern Lutherans, about the close of the seventeenth century, enlarged their liberality toward other sects, and gave up the supposed right of persecution; confessing that Christians are accountable to God only for their religious faith. They admit, also, into their sacred canon the Epistle of St. James, which Luther rashly rejected, because he could not reconcile it with St. Paul’s doctrine of justification; and the Revelation of St. John, which Luther also rejected, because he could not explain it.

On some of the doctrines of the early German reformers the following remarks by Archbishop Laurence are entitled to high consideration:--Against the church of Rome, which always, when attacked, fled for protection to the shield of scholastical sophistry, Luther had waged a dauntless, unwearied, and effectual warfare. He entered the field of contest without distrust or apprehension, under a rooted persuasion that the victory over superstition would prove easy at an era when learning had already begun to extend itself in every direction, and was become closely allied to theological attainments. When the light of day appeared, the genuine doctrines of Scripture and the primitive opinions of antiquity began to be more distinctly perceived, and more accurately investigated. With an attachment to classical pursuits arose a zeal for Biblical inquiries. Taste and truth went hand in hand. Luther, than whom no one was more capable of infusing energy into the cause in which he had embarked, was of all men the worst adapted to conduct it with moderation: he was calculated to commence, but not to complete, reformation. Prompt, resolute, and impetuous, he laboured with distinguished success in the demolition of long established error; he also hastily threw together the rough and cumbrous materials of a better system. But the office of selecting, modelling, and arranging them was consigned to a correcter hand. Melancthon was of a character directly opposite to that of Luther, possessing every requisite to render truth alluring and reformation respectable; and hence upon him, in preference, the princes of Germany conferred the honour of compiling the public profession of their faith. But it ought not to be concealed, that, previously to the time when Lutheranism first became settled upon a permanent basis, and added public esteem to public notice, tenets were advanced, which retarded the progress of truth more than all the subtleties of scholastic argument, or the terrors of papal anathema. At the beginning of the Reformation, as Melancthon frankly observed to Cranmer, there existed among its advocates stoical disputations respecting fate, offensive in their nature, and noxious in their tendency. The duration, however, of these stoical disputations was but short; and the substitution of a more rational as well as practical system, for the space of more than twenty years before the appearance of our Articles, prevented the founders of our church from mistaking, for the doctrines of the Lutherans, those which they themselves wished to forget, and were anxious to obliterate. As we descend to particulars, it will be necessary to keep our eye upon one prominent doctrine, which was eminently conspicuous in all the controversies of the Lutherans,--the doctrine of complete redemption by CHRIST, which in their idea their adversaries (the Papists) disregarded, who denied in effect the depravity of our nature, believed the favour of Heaven in this life recoverable by what was denominated merit of congruity, and, in the life to come, by that which was termed merit of condignity, and founded predestination upon merits of such a description; thus in every instance, while retaining the name of Christians, rendering Christianity itself superfluous. In opposition to opinions so repugnant in many respects to reason, and in almost all so subversive of Scripture, the Lutherans constantly pressed the unsophisticated tenet of the atonement, not contractedly in a Calvinistical, but comprehensively in a Christian, point of view,--in one in which both Calvinists and Arminians alike embrace it.

Upon original sin the doctrine of the schoolmen was no less fanciful and remote from every Scriptural idea, than flattering to human pride. They contended that the infection of our nature is not a mental but a mere corporeal taint; that the body alone receives and transmits the contagion, while the soul in all instances proceeds immaculate from the hands of her Creator. This disposition to disease, such as they allowed it to be, was considered by some of them as the effect of a peculiar quality in the forbidden fruit; by others, as having been contracted from the poisonous breath of the infernal spirit which inhabited the serpent’s body. On one point they were all united; by preserving to the soul the bright traces of her divine origin unimpaired, they founded on a deceitful basis an arrogant creed, which, in declaring peace and pardon to the sinner, rested more upon personal merit than the satisfaction of a Saviour. In commenting upon the celebrated Book of Sentences, a work once not much less revered than the Scriptures themselves, the disciples of Lombard never failed to improve every hint which tended to degrade the grace of God and exalt the pride of man. Original sin the Romish schoolmen directly opposed to original righteousness; and this they considered not as something connatural with man, but as a superinduced habit or adventitious ornament, the removal of which could not prove detrimental to the native powers of his mind. When, therefore, they contemplated the effects of the fall, by confining the evil to a corporeal taint, and not extending it to the nobler faculties of the soul, they regarded man 598as an object of divine displeasure, not because he possessed that which was offensive, but because he was defective in that which was pleasing to the Almighty. Adam, they said, received for himself and his posterity the gift of righteousness, which he subsequently forfeited; in his loins we were included, and by him were virtually represented: his will was ours, and hence the consequence of his lapse is justly imputable to us his descendants. By our natural birth, therefore, under this idea, we are alienated from God, innocent in our individual persons, but guilty in that of him from whom we derived our existence; a guilt which, although contracted through the fault of another, yet so closely adheres to us that it effectually precludes our entrance at the gate of everlasting life, until the reception of a new birth in baptism. Thus they contended, that the sin of Adam conveys to us solely imputed guilt; the corporeal infection which they admitted not being sin itself, but only the subject matter of it,--not peccatum, but, according to their phraseology, fomes peccati, a kind of fuel which the human will kindles or not at pleasure. Such was the outline of the doctrine maintained in the church of Rome. The tenet of the Lutherans, on the other hand, is remarkable for its simplicity and perspicuity. Avoiding all intricate questions upon the subject, they taught that original sin is a corruption of our nature in a general sense, a depravation of the mental faculties and the corporeal appetites; that the resplendent image of the Deity, which man received at the creation of the world, although not annihilated, is nevertheless greatly impaired; and that, in consequence, the bright characters of unspotted sanctity, once deeply engraven on his mind by the hand of the living God, are become obliterated, the injury extending to his intellect, and affecting as well his reason and his will as his affections and passions. To conceive that inclination to evil incurs not in itself the disapprobation of Heaven, appeared to them little better than an apology for crime, or at least a dangerous palliation of that which the Christian’s duty compels him not only to repress but abhor.

The case of Cornelius, whose prayers and alms are said to have ascended up for a memorial before God, was often quoted, by the advocates of the church of Rome, to prove the merit of works before the reception of grace; to prove the human will capable, by its own inherent rectitude, of deserving the favour and approbation of Heaven. The Lutherans, on the other hand, contended, that the argument supported not the conclusion drawn from it, and was therefore irrelevant; that the works of Cornelius were not the causes but the effects of grace; and that this is sufficiently apparent from the context, in which he is described as a devout man, who feared God and prayed continually.” The disciples of Lombard, in whatever mode disposed to pervert reason and annihilate Scripture, universally held, that neither before nor after the fall was man in himself capable of meriting heaven; that by the gratuitous endowments of his creation, even in paradise, he was only enabled to preserve his innocence, and not to sin; and that he was utterly incompetent to proceed one step farther, efficaciously to will a remunerable good, and by his natural exertions to obtain a reward above his nature; original righteousness being reputed not a connate quality, but a supernatural habit. Thus, he could resist evil, but not advance good to perfection; could in some sense live well, by living free from sin, but could not without divine aid so live as to deserve everlasting life. For such a purpose they asserted that grace was necessary, to operate upon his will in its primary determinations, and to co-operate with it in its ultimate acts. It was, therefore, in the loss of this celestial aid, this superadded gift, and not in any depravity of his mind, that they supposed the principal evil derivable from his lapse to consist; a loss, however, which, by a due exertion of his innate abilities, they deemed to be retrievable; and hence sprung that offensive doctrine of human sufficiency which, in the Lutheran’s eye, completely obscured the glory of the Gospel, and which, when applied to the sinner’s conscience, taught the haughty to presume, and the humble to despair. According, then, to the system under consideration, the favour of God in this life, and his beatific vision in the life to come, are both attainable by personal merit; the former by congruous, as it was termed, the latter by condign; the one without, the other with, the assistance of grace. By our natural strength, it was said, we can fulfil the commands of God as far as their obligation extends; yet was it added, that we cannot fulfil them according to the intention of the divine Legislator; an intention of rewarding only those who obey them in virtue formed by charity, under the influence of a quality rather regulating the tendency, than augmenting the purity, of the action. They stated, that we may so prepare ourselves for grace as to become entitled to it congruously, not as to a debt which in strict justice God is bound to pay, but as to a grant which it is congruous in him to give, and which it would be inconsistent with his attributes to withhold. This favourite doctrine was supported by every denomination of scholastics, and by every individual of the church of Rome. Congruous merit was universally esteemed a pearl above all price, the intrinsic value of which attracted the regard, and conciliated the benevolence, of the Almighty. According to their conception, we are endowed with an innate propensity to good, which vice itself can never obliterate, and are able not only to reverence and adore the supreme Being, but to love him above other objects. They supposed man competent no less to the efficient practice, than to the barren admiration, of holiness; enabled as well to obey the laws, as to love the goodness, of the Almighty; and, if not to deserve the rewards, at least to discharge the obligations, of religion. Impressed, therefore, with such 599exalted notions of human ability, and forgetful of the Christian propitiation for sin, the sophists of the schools maintained, that the soul of man possesses in the freedom, or rather in the capacity, of her WILL a faculty almost divine. Stimulated by the most upright propensities, and undepraved in her noblest powers, she directs her progress in the path of truth and the road to bliss, by the pure and inextinguishable light of an unperverted reason. Although mutable in her decisions, nevertheless complete controller of her conduct, she becomes at pleasure either the servant of righteousness or the slave of sin; and, disdaining to be anticipated by God himself, prevents him in his supernatural gifts by a previous display of her own meritorious deeds, challenging, as a congruous right, that which only could have been otherwise conferred as a favour undeserved. By the bare observance of my holy order,” exclaimed the secluded devotee, I am able not solely to obtain grace for myself, but, by the works which I then may do, can accumulate merit sufficient both to supply my own wants and those of others; so that I may sell the superabundance of my acquired treasure.” Can we be surprised that a reformer of Luther’s manly disposition, who wrote without reserve and reasoned without control, when adverting to opinions of so noxious a tendency, should sometimes, from excess of zeal, lose sight of moderation in his censures The Lutherans commenced the attack upon these unscriptural dogmas, under a persuasion that the position of their opponents militated against the leading principles of Christianity. If man,” they said, be capable of pleasing God by his own works abstractedly considered, without divine assistance, where is the necessity, and what is the utility, of that assistance” They argued, that, were it possible for the moral virtues of the mind by their own efficiency to render our persons acceptable to God and obtain his lost favour, no need would exist of any other satisfaction for sin, and thus the whole scheme of Gospel redemption would have been fruitless, and Christ have died in vain. While, therefore, the doctrine of the atonement presented nothing but a cloud and darkness to their adversaries, it gave light by night to these; on them it shone, amidst surrounding gloom, with lustre unobscured. Luther advanced a proposition which proved highly offensive to the Papists, and which they never ceased to condemn and calumniate. His assertion was, that he who exerts himself to the utmost of his ability still continues to sin. On the other side, unassisted man was thought incapable of performing an action remunerably good, or, as it was usually termed, condignly meritorious, even before his lapse; and that consequently, in his fallen state, all to which he was conceived competent by his innate strength was not to sin. When Luther therefore drew up his thesis for public disputation against the tenet of congruous works, if little delicacy, yet some caution, and much discrimination, appeared requisite. Had he stated them to be thus good in a scholastic sense, he would have completely lost sight of his object, and allowed more than even his opponents themselves. Had he described them as not demeritorious, or, in other words, not sinful, he would have precisely maintained the adverse position, and might consequently have spared his labour, at the same time that he would have tacitly acknowledged them to possess, what he could not consistently with truth attribute to them, every natural perfection of virtue and holiness. Under what denomination, then, could he class them, except under that of sinful a denomination which he the more readily adopted because, even among his adversaries themselves, the words SIN and GRACE, as he remarked, were in general immediately opposed to each other. Anxious to rescue Christian theology from the grasp of those who embraced only to betray, the Lutherans laboured to restore that importance to the doctrine of redemption with which the Scriptures invest it, but of which, by a subtle perversity, it had been deprived. The principal object, therefore, in their view evidently was, to Christianize the speculations of the schools; and the principal drift of their argument is to prove, that human virtue, how extravagantly soever extolled by a vain philosophy, is wholly insufficient (because imperfect) to merit the favour of Heaven. Allowing no medium between righteousness and unrighteousness, the approbation and disapprobation of the Almighty, characterizing that as sinful which is confessedly not holy, and thus annihilating every ground of self-presumption, they inculcated the necessity of contemplating with the eye of faith those means of reconciliation which Christianity alone affords. But it has been insinuated, that the Lutheran doctrine went to prove man’s total inability to extricate himself from crime, until the arrival of some uncertain moment, which brings with it a regeneration from on high, the sudden transfusion of a new light and new virtues. But those who thus conceive of it are not probably aware, that Melancthon, the venerable author of the Augsburgh Confession, warmly reprobates this precise idea, which he denominates a Manichean conceit and a horrible falsehood. Upon the abstract question of free will it is indeed true, that Melancthon, no less than Luther, at first held opinions which he was happy to retract. But when this is acknowledged it should be added, that he made ample amends for his indiscretion by not only expunging the offensive passages from the single work which contained them, but by introducing others of a nature diametrically opposite. And although the more inflexible coadjutor of Melancthon was too lofty to correct what he had once made public, and too magnanimous to regard the charge of inconsistency which his adversaries urged against him; yet what his better judgment approved clearly appears from a preface written not long before his death; in which, while he expressed an anxiety to have his own chaotic labours, as he styled them, buried in 600eternal oblivion, he recommended in strong terms, as a work admirably adapted to form the Christian divine, that very performance of his friend which was remarkable for something more than a mere recantation of the opinions alluded to. It was not against any conceived deficiency in the quality of our virtue that they argued, but against its supposed competency, whether wrought in or out of grace, with greater or less degrees of purity, to effect that which the oblation of Christ alone accomplishes. Upon both points Luther treated the doctrine of his adversaries as altogether frivolous, and incapable of corroboration by a single fact. Futile, however, as the scholastical tenet appeared to be, although deficient in proof and unsupported by example, upon this, he remarked with indignation and grief, was founded the whole system of papal delusion.

Justification was on both sides supposed to consist entirely in the remission of sins. The popish scholastics, on this head, were remarkably distinct in their ideas, and express in their language. They represented it as an effect produced by the infusion of divine grace into the mind; not as a consequent to a well spent life, but as preceding all remunerable obedience, as the intervening point between night and day, the gloom of a guilty and the light of a self-approving conscience; or, in other words, and to adopt their own phraseology, as the exact boundary where merit of congruity ends and where merit of condignity begins, the infallible result of a previous disposition on our part, which never fails of alluring from on high that supernatural quality which, being itself love, renders the soul beloved. While the Lutherans, however, adhered to the general import of the term as understood in the schools, they waged an incessant warfare upon another point; while they allowed that justification consists in the remission of sin, they denied that this remission is to be acquired by the merit of the individual. Their scholastic opponents maintained that man is justified in the sight of God in consequence of his own preparation, and on account of his personal qualities. They, on the other band, argued with an inflexibility which admitted of no compromise, that, possessing not merits of his own to plead, man freely received forgiveness through the mercy of God solely on account of the merits of Christ. The effective principle, therefore, or meritorious cause of justification, was the great point contested. The doctrine of the popish divines, explained more at large, was this: When the sinner, conscious of his past transgressions, inquired where he was to seek the expiation of his crime, and deliverance from the dreadful consequences of it, the general answer was, In the merit of penitence; a merit capable of annihilating guilt, and appeasing the anger of incensed Omnipotence. He, they argued, who, having disobeyed the laws of Heaven, is desirous of returning into that state of acceptance from which he has fallen, must not expect free forgiveness; but previously by unfeigned sorrow of heart deserve the restoration of grace, and, with it, the obliteration of his offences. To effect this desirable purpose he is bound strictly to survey and detest his former conduct, accurately to enumerate his transgressions and deeply feel them; and, impressed with a due sense of their magnitude, impurity, and consequences, to condemn his folly and deplore his fault, which have made him an outcast of Heaven, and exposed him to eternal misery. So far he can proceed by that operation of the mind which they denominated ATTRITION, and which, being within the sphere of his natural powers, they regarded as congruous piety meritorious of justification, as a preparation of the soul more or less necessary to receive and merit justifying grace. When, therefore, he is arrived at this point, ATTRITION ceases and CONTRITION commences; the habit of sin is expelled, while that of holiness is superinduced in its stead, and with the infusion of charity, the plastic principle of a new obedience, justification becomes complete. But even here it was not conceived that a total deliverance takes place; a liberation from guilt and eternal punishment is effected, but not from temporal, which is never remitted unless either by the infliction of some personal suffering or satisfactory compensation required of him who is already justified and approved by Heaven. However, to accomplish this remaining object, nothing more is wanting than a continuation, to a sufficient intensity, of that compunction of heart which is now denominated CONTRITION, grace supplying the defects of nature, and enabling penitential merit not only to justify, but to obtain exemption from punishment of every species. But so great appeared to the popish scholastics the frailty of man and the severity of God, that no inconsiderable difficulty occurred in the due application of this favourite doctrine to individuals; for the means of expiation, they imagined, ought always to be proportionate to the magnitude of the offences. How,” they reasoned, are we to be assured that our contrition has been either sufficient or sincere, and whether it has been so in the obliteration not only of one crime, but of all; whether it has atoned for past transgressions of every kind, the number of which may perplex, as well as their guilt confound, us” Instead, therefore, of penitence in its strictest acceptation as a perfect virtue, God, they said, in condescension to human infirmity, has substituted for general practice the sacrament of penitence, which, for the attainment of full remission, requires only a moderate compunction of soul, with confession to the priest, and the discharge of such satisfaction as he may enjoin. And, still lower to reduce the terms of acceptance, they even argued that it is not absolutely necessary for the penitent to experience an entire conversion of heart, but only not to oppose the impediment of mortal crime, to feel some displeasure at his past conduct, and to express a resolution of amending it in future. But, after all, and in spite of the boasted authority of the keys, complete confidence in divine forgiveness was never inculcated; for it was neither the 601interest nor the inclination of the church of Rome to teach the simple doctrine of Christian faith, but rather to involve it in metaphysical obscurity. Under the pretext, therefore, of relieving the throbbing breast from its apprehensions, they had recourse to numerous inventions for propping the insecure fabric of penitential hope; asserting, among other extravagancies, that the sacraments are in themselves efficacious by virtue of their own operation, exclusively of all merit in the recipient; and that the sacrament of the altar, in particular, acts so powerful in this respect as to communicate grace not only to those who partake of it, but to others from whom it is received by substitution, provided its operation be not hindered by confessedly flagrant immorality. So deeply rooted in the minds of the papists had become the persuasion of its thus effecting the best of purposes, and that even without the necessity of an actual participation of it by him upon whom the benefit is conferred, that the celebration of the mass was universally regarded as the means of appeasing the anger of Heaven, and obtaining pardon and peace, of procuring divine assistance for the living, and, for the dead, deliverance from the bitter pains of purgatory. Nor by the sacraments alone, but by every good external work, as well as internal disposition, was justifying grace supposed to be merited congruously, and satisfaction for sin to be made condignly. In monastical institutions, likewise, were found no mean materials for similar purposes; for in those feigned religions,” as the homily On Good Works describes them, the devotees boasted of having lamps which ran always over, able to satisfy not only for their own sins, but also for all other their benefactors, brothers and sisters of religion, as most ungodly and craftily they had persuaded the multitude of ignorant people; keeping in divers places marts or markets of merits, being full of their holy relics, images, shrines, and works of overflowing abundance, ready to be sold.” Yet, whether the dubious penitent was instructed to derive consolation from the efficacy of the sacraments, from his own personal qualities, or from any of what Cranmer aptly termed “the fantastical works of man’s invention,” it should be observed that he was not directly taught to consider these as wholly superseding the virtue of repentance, but as supplying his deficiencies in the performance of it; an incongruous system of atonement, fabricated by the avarice of Rome, and the obsequiousness of scholastical philosophy, to augment the treasures and extend the influence of the church, to extinguish the light of Gospel truth, and, while keeping the world at large in ignorance, to hold the conscience of the individual in slavery. Upon the whole, then, the scholastics maintained that justification is unattainable without repentance, at least, without some degree of attrition on our part; but in the common apprehension of the doctrine even this seems to have been forgotten, and merit of congruity considered in a general point of view as alone efficacious. Thus good works of every species preceding grace were said to deserve it, and, by deserving grace, to deserve the justifying principle. And always were they careful to impute the cause of forgiveness, not to the mercy of God in Christ, but to the sole change in the individual, to his transmutation from a state of unrighteousness to one of righteousness, to his possession of a quality which renders him a worthy object of divine approbation. For in every instance personal merit was conceived to be the solid basis upon which rests the complete remission of sin. Upon no one point, perhaps, has the opinion of Luther been more misrepresented than upon this. Some have ascribed to it a solifidian tendency, if not of the most enthusiastical, at least, of the most unqualified, description. But it seems indeed impossible accurately to comprehend the position which he maintained, if we examine it in an insulated point of view, unless we connect it with that of which in the church of Rome it properly formed a part, and from which he never intended to separate it,--the doctrine of penitence. In opposing the absurdity of papal indulgences, (the first impiety against which his manly mind revolted,) a ray of light, before unnoticed, darted upon him, and opened a completely new scene, which, while it stimulated his efforts as a reformer, animated his hopes as a Christian. Hence, averting with disdain from the speculations of sophists, and turning to the sacred page of revelation, he there beheld an affiance very different from what the schools inculcated; and thus, while their vain language was, Repent, and trust to the efficacy of your contrition, either with or without extraneous works, according to the degree of its intensity, for the expiation of your offences;” his, more Scriptural and more consoling, became simply this: Repent, and trust not for expiation to your own merits of any kind, but solely to those of your Redeemer.” Rejecting the dreams of their adversaries with respect to the nature and effects of this important duty, they represented it as consisting of two essential parts, CONTRITION and FAITH, the latter as always associated with the former. Hence, in the Apology of their Confession, they repeatedly declared a disavowal of all faith, except such as exists in the contrite heart. Far was it from their intention to encourage the presumptuous or fanatical sinner in a false security; their object was very different and laudable,--they laboured to fix the eye of him who both laments and detests his offences, upon the only deserving object of human confidence and divine complacency. Properly, then, as they frequently remarked, their doctrine of justification was appropriated to troubled consciences, at every period of true repentance, and particularly at the awful hour of death, when the time for habitual proofs of amendment has elapsed, and when the past appears replete with guilt and the future with terror. At such moments, they taught not, with the schools, an affiance in human merit, but in the gratuitous mercy of God through Christ: to contrition, as a preparatory qualification 602or previous requisite, they added faith; and from faith they deemed every principle of real piety and virtue inseparable. Good works, or the outward fruits of an inward renovation of mind, were said to follow remission of sins; internal necessarily preceding external reformation. For the individual, they argued, must himself be good before the action can be so denominated, be justified before it can be deemed just, and accepted before it can prove acceptable,--distinguishing between the primary admission into God’s favour, and the subsequent preservation of that favour.

The unfathomable depths of divine predestination and predetermination human reason in vain attempts to sound, finite faculties to scan infinite, or the limited intellect of man to comprehend the immensity of the Godhead. Erasmus, a peculiar favourite with the reformers of our own country, when contemplating this inexplicable subject, observed, that in the Holy Scriptures there are certain secret recesses, which God is unwilling for us too minutely to explore; and which, if we endeavour to explore, in proportion as we penetrate farther, our minds become more and more oppressed with darkness and stupefaction; that thus we might acknowledge the inscrutable majesty of the divine wisdom, and the imbecility of the human mind.” Congenial, also, with the feelings and sentiments of Erasmus upon this point were those of Luther. To acquire any knowledge,” he remarked, of a deity not revealed in Scripture, to know what his existence is, his actions and dispositions, belongs not to me. My duty is only this; to know what are his precepts, his promises, and his threatenings. Pernicious and pestilent is the thought of investigating causes, and brings with it inevitable ruin, especially when we ascend too high, and wish to philosophize upon predestination.” How differently Calvin felt upon the same subject, and with what little reserve, or rather with what bold temerity, he laboured to scrutinize the unrevealed Divinity, is too well known to require any thing beyond a bare allusion to the circumstance. His sentiments, however, were much less regarded than some are disposed to allow; and upon this particular question, so far were they from having attained their full celebrity at the period when the articles of the church of England were framed, that they were not taught without opposition even in his own unimportant territory of Geneva. For at that precise era he was publicly accused (by Sebastian Castellio) of making God the author of sin; and although, not contented with silencing, he first imprisoned and afterward banished his accuser, yet he could not expel the opinions of his adversary. While the church of Rome maintained a predestination to life of one man in preference to another individually on account of personal merit, the Lutherans taught a gratuitous predestination of Christians collectively, of those whom God has chosen in Christ out of mankind; and by this single point of difference were the contending opinions principally contradistinguished. With us the system of Calvin still retains so many zealous advocates, that to a modern ear the very term PREDESTINATION seems to convey a meaning only conformable with his particular system. It should, however, be observed that this word was in familiar use for centuries before the Reformation, in a sense, very different from what Calvin imputed to it, not as preceding the divine prescience, but as resulting from it, much in the same sense as that in which it has since been supported by the Arminians. Yet, obvious as this appears, writers of respectability strangely persuade themselves, that, immediately prior to the Reformation, the doctrines of the church of Rome were completely Calvinistical; a conclusion to which, certainly, none can subscribe who are sufficiently conversant with the favourite productions of that time. So far, indeed, was this from being the fact, that Calvin peculiarly prided himself on departing from the common definition of the term, which had long been adopted by the adherents of the schools, and retained with a scrupulous precision. For while they held that the expression predestinati is exclusively applicable to the elect, whom God, foreknowing as meritorious objects of his mercy, predestinates to life; and while they appropriated that of præsciti to the non-elect, whose perseverance in transgression is simply foreknown; Calvin, on the other side, treating the distinction as a frivolous subterfuge, contended that God, decreeing the final doom of the elect and non-elect irrespectively, predestinates both, not subsequently but previously to all foreknowledge of their individual dispositions, especially devotes the latter to destruction through the medium of crime, and creates them by a fatal destiny to perish. Whatever, therefore, modern conjecture may have attributed to the popish scholastics, it is certain that, abhorring every speculation which tends in the remotest degree to make God the author of sin, they believed that only salutary good is predestinated; grace to those who deserve it congruously, and glory to those who deserve it condignly. They maintained that almighty God, before the foundations of the world were laid, surveying in his comprehensive idea, or, as they phrased it, in his prescience of simple intelligence, the possibilities of all things before he determined their actual existence, foresaw that, if mankind were created, (although he willed the salvation of all, and was inclined to assist all indifferently, yet) some would deserve eternal happiness, and others eternal misery; and that therefore he approved and elected the former, but disapproved or reprobated the latter. Thus, grounding election upon foreknowledge, they contemplated it, not as an arbitrary principle, separating one individual from another under the influence of a blind chance or an irrational caprice; but, on the contrary, as a wise and just principle, which presupposes a diversity between those who are accepted and those who are rejected. Hence it was, that in order to systematize upon this principle of election, and to show how consistent it is as well with the justice as the benevolence of the Deity, the 603will of God was considered in a double point of view, as absolute and conditional, or, in the technical language of the schools, as antecedent and consequent. In the first instance, by his absolute or antecedent will, he was said to desire the salvation of every man; in the latter, by his conditional or consequent will, that only of those whom he foresaw abstaining from sin and obeying his commandments: the one expressed his general inclination, the other his particular resolution upon the view of individual circumstances and conditions. To the inquiry, why some are unendowed with grace, their answer was, Because some are not willing to receive it, and not because God is unwilling to give it.” He,” they said, offers his light to all. He is absent from none; but man absents himself from the present Deity, like one who shuts his eyes against the noon-day blaze.” To the foregoing statement it should be added, that they held an election, or rather an ordination, to grace (which they expressly asserted to be defectible) distinct from an election to glory; that according to them, a name may be written in the book of life at one period, which at another many be erased from it; and that predestination to eternal happiness solely depends upon final perseverance in well doing. On the whole it is evident, that they considered the dignity or worthiness of the individual as the meritorious basis of predestination; merit of congruity as the basis of a preordination to grace, and merit of condignity as that of a preordination to glory. Thus, not more fastidious in the choice of their terms than accurate in the use of them, while they denied that the prescience of human virtue, correctly speaking, could be the primary cause of the divine will, because nothing in time can properly give birth to that which has existed from eternity, they strenuously maintained it to be a secondary cause, the ratio or rule in the mind of the Deity which regulated his will in the formation of its ultimate decisions. Although in the established confession of their faith the Lutherans avoided all allusion to the subject of predestination, it was nevertheless introduced into another work of importance, and of considerable public authority, the Loci Theologici of Melancthon, a production which was every where received as the standard of Lutheran divinity. Both Luther and Melancthon, after the Diet of Augsburgh, kept one object constantly in view,--to inculcate only what was plain and practical, and never to attempt philosophizing. But to what, it may be asked, did the Lutherans object in the theory of their opponents when they themselves abandoned the tenet of necessity Certainly, not to the sobriety and moderation of that part of it which vindicated the justice, and displayed the benevolence, of the Almighty; but, generally, to the principles upon which it proceeded; to the presumption, in overleaping the boundary which Heaven has prescribed to our limited faculties, and which we cannot pass without plunging into darkness and error; and to its impiety in disregarding, if not despising, the most important truths of Christianity. A system of such a nature they hesitated not to reject, anxious to conduct themselves by the light of Scripture alone, nor presuming to be wise above what God has been pleased to discover. Maintaining not a particular election of personal favourites, either by an absolute will, or even a conditional one, dependent upon the ratio of merit, but a general election of all who, by baptism in their infancy, or by faith and obedience in mature years, become the adopted heirs of Heaven; they conceived this to be the only election to which the Gospel alludes, and, consequently, the only one upon which we can speak with confidence, or reason without presumption. If it be observed, that the selection of an integral body necessarily infers that of its component parts, the answer is obvious: The latter, although indeed it be necessarily inferred by the former, is nevertheless not a prior requisite, but a posterior result of the divine ordination. What they deemed absolute on the part of God was his everlasting purpose to save his elect in Christ, or real Christians considered as a whole, and contrasted with the remainder of the human race; the completion of this purpose being regulated by peculiar circumstances, operating as inferior causes of a particular segregation. For, persuaded of his good will toward all men without distinction, of his being indiscriminately disposed to promote the salvation of all, and of his seriously (not fictitiously, as Calvin taught) including all in the universal promise of Christianity, they imputed to him nothing like a partial choice, no limitation of favours, no irrespective exclusion of persons; but assuming the Christian character as the sole ground of individual preference, they believed that every baptized infant, by being made a member of Christ, not by being comprised in a previous arbitrary decree, is truly the elect of God, and, dying in infancy, certain of eternal happiness; that he who, in maturer years, becomes polluted by wilful crime, loses that state of salvation which before he possessed; that nevertheless by true repentance, and conversion to the Father of mercy and God of all consolation, he is again reinstated in it; and that, by finally persevering in it, he at length receives the kingdom prepared for every sincere Christian before the foundation of the world. Can any man, whom prejudice has not blinded, rank these sentiments with those of Calvin It may seem almost unnecessary to subjoin, that the Lutherans held the defectibility of grace; its indefectibility being a position supported but by those who think that the Redeemer died for a selected few alone. Upon the whole then it appears, that the Lutherans, affecting not in any way to philosophize, but committing themselves solely to the guidance of Scripture, differed from the church of Rome in several important particulars. For, although on some points they coincided with her, although they inculcated, with equal zeal and upon a better principle, both the universality and the defectibility of grace, as well as a conditional admission into the number of the elect, they nevertheless were entirely at variance 604with her upon the very foundation of the system. Thus while their opponents taught, that predestination consists in the prospective discrimination of individuals by divine favour, according to the foreseen ratio of every man’s own merit,--works of congruity deserving grace here, and works of condignity eternal life hereafter, and that in this way it principally rests upon human worth; the Lutherans, disclaiming every idea of such a discrimination, placed it upon the same basis as they assumed in the case of justification,--that of an effectual redemption by Christ. Instead, therefore, of holding the election of individuals as men on account of personal dignity or worthiness, they maintained the election of a general mass as Christians on account of Christ alone; adding that we are admitted into that number, or discarded from it, in the eye of Heaven, proportionably as we embrace or reject the salvation offered to all, embracing it with a faith inseparable from genuine virtue, or rejecting it by incredulity and crime. For neither in this, nor in the instance of justification, did they exclude repentance and a true conversion of the heart and life, as necessary requisites, but only as meritorious causes, from the contemplation of God’s omniscient intellect. Let those,” said Luther, who wish to be elected avoid an evil conscience, and not transgress the divine commandments.” Instructed then by the unerring page of truth, they asserted no other predestination than what is there expressly revealed; that of the good and gracious Father of mankind, who from eternity has been disposed to promote the happiness and welfare of all men, has destined Christ to be the Saviour of the whole world, and withholden from none the exalted hope of the Christian calling. Convinced that this is the only predestination which Christianity discloses, and consequently the only one which we can either with safety or certainty embrace, they discouraged every attempt at investigating the will, out of the word, of God; every attempt at effecting impossibilities, at unveiling the secret counsels of Him who shrouds his divine perfections in darkness impervious to mortal eyes. With such investigations, indeed, the world had already been sufficiently bewildered by the scholastics, who, endowed with a ready talent at perplexing what before was plain, and at rendering abstruseness still more abstruse, had made the subject totally inexplicable, vainly labouring to develope with precision that mysterious will upon which the wise must ever think it folly, and the good impiety, to speculate. Disquisitions of this presumptuous nature, from a personal experience of their mischievous tendency, Luther abjured himself, and deprecated in others. Are we, miserable men,” he exclaimed, “who as yet are incapable of comprehending the rays of God’s promises, the glimmerings of his precepts and his works, although confirmed by words and miracles, are we, infirm and impure, eager to comprehend all that is great and glorious in the solar light itself, in the incomprehensible light of a miraculous Godhead Do we not know, that God dwells in splendour inaccessible And yet do we approach, or rather do we presume to approach it Are we not aware, that his judgments are inscrutable And yet do we endeavour to scrutinize them And these things we do, before we are habituated even to the faint lustre of his promises and precepts, with a vision still imperfect, blindly rushing into the majesty of that light which, secret and unseen, has never been by words or miracles exhibited. What wonder, then, if, while we explore its majesty, we are overwhelmed with its glory” For a farther account of the Lutheran views on predestination, see the last pages of the article Calvinism.

After this very ample exposition of the sentiments of the German reformers on the chief points of Christian doctrine, it is only necessary to give a few additional particulars in corroboration of some portions of the preceding statement. The high estimation in which Luther held the productions of the judicious Melancthon is apparent from a passage in the preface to the first volume of Luther’s works, dated 1545. In that year also appeared the last amended edition of Melancthon’s Common Places,” to which he alludes. Long and earnestly,” he says, have I resisted the importunity of those who have wished me to publish my works, or, to speak more correctly, my confused and disorderly lucubrations; not only because I was unwilling that the labours of the ancients should be turned aside by my novelties, and that the reader should be hindered from perusing them, but likewise because now, by the grace of God, a great number of methodical books are extant; among which the Common Places of our Philip claim the preference, for by them a divine and a bishop may be abundantly and satisfactorily confirmed, so as to become powerful in the word of the doctrine of piety, especially when the Holy Bible itself can now be procured in almost every language. But the want of order in the matters to be discussed in my books induced, nay compelled, me to render them a sort of rude and indigested chaos, which it would now require even on my part no small exertion to digest into a methodical form. Under the influence of such motives as these, I was desirous that all my productions should be buried in perpetual oblivion, that they might give place to others of a better description.” In this preface Luther also gives the following testimony to the general usefulness of Melancthon’s labours: In the same year Philip Melancthon had been called to this university by Prince Frederick to fill the chair of Greek professor, but no doubt with the intention that I should have him as my colleague in the labours of the divinity professorship. For his works are sufficiently in proof of what the Lord hath effected by this his choice instrument, not only in polite literature, but in theology, although Satan be enraged and all his party.” Though the early opinions of Luther upon the doctrine of a philosophical necessity appear to have been occasionally expressed in a harsh 605and repulsive manner, yet his followers pertinaciously contend that even the harshest of them cannot, with propriety, be construed into a sense favourable to the Calvinistical system. Those of Melancthon in the first edition of his Loci Theologici, although occurring but in one or two instances, were nevertheless still more offensive, and less capable of a mitigated interpretation. So far indeed did he carry the doctrine of divine predetermination as to degrade man to a level with the brutes, as will be obvious from the following passage in the edition of 1525. Lastly, divine predestination takes away human liberty. For all things come to pass according to divine predestination, not only external works, but also internal thoughts in all creatures.” After the Diet of Augsburgh in 1530, we hear no more of this obnoxious tenet. Indeed so early as 1527 these reformers seem to have abandoned it. At least, when in that year a form of doctrine was drawn up for the churches of Saxony, free will in acts of morality was thus inculcated: The human will is so far free as to be able in some sort to perform the righteousness of the flesh, or civil justice, when it is obliged by the law and by force not to steal, not to kill, not to commit adultery, &c. Therefore let ministers teach, that it is in a measure in our own hands to restrain carnal affections, and to perform civil justice; and let them diligently exhort men to a strict and proper course of life, because God also requires this kind of righteousness, and will grievously punish those men who live so negligent of their duty. For as we are bound to make a good use of the other gifts of God, so is it likewise our duty to employ to good purpose those powers which God has bestowed on nature.” For God takes no delight in that ferocious mode of life which is adopted by some men, who, after having heard that we are not justified by our own powers and works, foolishly dream that they will wait until they be drawn by God, and in the mean time their course of life is most impure. Such persons God will most severely punish; and they must therefore be earnestly reprehended and admonished by those whose province it is to teach in the churches.” This work, which is generally termed, Libellus Visitationis Saxonic, was first composed in German by Melancthon in 1527, and afterward republished by Luther with a preface, in which he thus expresses himself: We do not publish these as rigorous precepts, nor do we again employ ourselves in drawing up pontifical decrees, but we relate matters of history and public deeds, and present the confession and symbol of our belief.” The previous controversy between Luther and Erasmus, on the topic of free will, had probably tended to produce an amelioration of the doctrinal system of the Lutheran church. In this view it was not without reason that Erasmus made the following reflections in a letter dated 1528, soon after he had seen this production: The Lutheran fever, every succeeding day, assumes a milder form; so that Luther himself now writes recantations on almost every thing, and on this account he is considered by the rest as a heretic and a madman.” Similar caustic remarks occur in other letters of Erasmus; and as, in those days of high religious excitement, taunts of this kind were considered too good to be confined as secrets within the breast of the correspondents to whom they were addressed, it is not improbable that Luther might be prevented through them, among other reasons, from making farther doctrinal concessions; it being no uncommon circumstance in the history of the human mind for persons of otherwise strong understandings to be under the influence of this pitiable weakness. That Melancthon not only abandoned but reprehended the doctrine in 1529, we cannot doubt, because his own express testimony in proof of it remains on record. In a letter to Christopher Stathmio, dated March 20th, 1559, which was not long before his death, he notices the subject in these words: Thirty years ago, not through the desire of contention, but on account of the glory of God, and for the sake of discipline, I sharply reprehended the Stoical paradoxes concerning necessity, because they are reproachful toward God and injurious to morals. At this time the legions of the Stoics are waging war against me; but in the answer which I have written in opposition to the Bavarian inquisition, I have once more pointed out in a modest manner that opinion (on fate or predestination) in which anxious minds may acquiesce and be at rest.” On consulting the tract to which his letter alludes, we find him employing this strong and unequivocal language: I also openly reject and abhor those Stoical and Manichean furies who affirm that all things necessarily happen, evil as well as good actions. But concerning these I refrain at present from any lengthened discussion; only I entreat young people to avoid these monstrous opinions, which are contumelious against God, and pernicious to morals.” From the Loci Theologici, in which Melancthon had first introduced this obnoxious tenet, he expunged necessity in the edition of 1533, and inserted in its place the opposite one of contingency. The following are extracts from this amended work: The discussion on the cause of sin and that on contingency have sometimes greatly agitated the church, and excited mighty tragedies. Men of acute minds collect multitudes of inextricable and absurd things about both these subjects. Because there is some danger in them, young people must be warned to abstain from these interminable disputes, and in preference to search out a simple and pious opinion, beneficial to religion and morals, in which they may abide, nor suffer themselves to be withdrawn from it by those fallacious tricks of disputations. But this is a pious and true sentiment to be embraced with both hands, and to be retained rather by the whole heart,--that God is not the cause of sin, and that he does not will sin. But the causes of sin are the will of the devil, and the will of man.” But this sentiment being once laid down, that God is not the cause of sin, it evidently follows that contingency 606must be granted. The freedom of the will is the cause of the contingency of our actions.” Neither must the delirious doatings about Stoical fate, or about necessity, be conveyed into the church, because they are inextricable and sometimes injurious to piety and morals.” From these opinions it becomes the pious to be abhorrent in their ears and in their hearts.” These extracts serve to prove, that Melancthon reprobated the idea of introducing into the church the doctrine of Stoical fate, before Calvin had distinguished himself either as an author or a reformer. Into his subsequent productions of almost every description Melancthon introduced the doctrine of contingency, and strenuously defended it, particularly in the amended edition of his Loci Theologici in 1545. Luther never formally revoked any of his own writings; but on this last corrected production of his friend, as we have shown, he bestowed the highest commendations. Yet he did not scruple publicly to assert, that at the beginning of the Reformation he had not completely settled his creed. In the seventh volume of his works this sentence is found: I have also published the confession of my faith; in which I have openly testified what and how I believe, and in what articles I think myself at length to be at rest.” He seems, indeed, to have generally avoided the subject, from the period of his controversy with Erasmus, to the publication of his Commentary on Genesis,--his last work of any importance. But in this, after a long argument to prove that, as we have no knowledge of the unrevealed Deity, we have nothing to do with those things which are above our comprehension; and that we are not to reason upon predestination out of Christianity; he thus apologizes for his former opinions: “It has been my wish diligently and accurately to deliver these charges and admonitions; because, after my death, many persons will publish my books to the world, and by that course will confirm errors of every kind and their own delirious ravings. But among other matters I have written, that all things are absolute and necessary; but at the same time I added, that we must behold God as he is revealed to us, as we sing in the Psalm, ‘Jesus Christ is the Lord of sabaoth, nor is there any other God.’ In several other passages I have used similar expressions. But these people will pass by all such passages, and will only seize upon those concerning a hidden Deity. You, therefore, who now hear me, recollect that I have taught this,--We must not inquire concerning the predestination of a hidden God, but we must abide and acquiesce in those things which are revealed by calling and by the ministry of the word.” But in other passages of my different works I have inculcated the same sentiments, and I now deliver them again with an audible voice; therefore I am excused.” For the more modern state of the Lutheran church see Neology.

The following account of the union between the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches, as given in the advertisement to Baron Von Wessenberg’s Correspondence with the Court of Rome,” may not be uninteresting to the reader: The Germans have just set the noble example of forming a union between these two branches of the Protestant faith. This union, which originated, we believe, in the grand duchy of Nassau, has taken place almost universally throughout Germany; and the separate appellations of Lutheran and Calvinistic churches have merged in the common appellation of the Evangelical church. The Lutheran and Reformed churches of Prussia met in synod together, on the invitation of their monarch, the first of October, 1817, and soon came to an agreement; and the union was celebrated on the day of the tri-centenary festival of the Reformation. A similar synod of the Lutherans and Calvinists in Hesse-Cassel was held at Hanau in May and June, 1818, and attended with the same result. The royal confirmation was given to the Bavarian union on the first of October following. Saxe-Weimar, and most of the other small states have followed this example. The Protestant Germans have now, therefore, only one Gospel, one temple, one divine Instructer, and one mode of communion; and, what is singular, and highly honourable to their liberality, this union was every where accomplished with the greatest ease, and without a dissentient voice having been raised against it.” How different was this result from that of the synods and councils of other times; and what a change in the state of public opinion does it indicate! And yet it is to be feared that the liberality from which this union has resulted, is rather indifference to the grand peculiarities of the Christian faith than mutual charity.

LYCAONIA, a province of Asia Minor, accounted a part of Cappadocia, having Pisidia on the west, and Cilicia on the south. In it were the cities of Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, mentioned in the travels of St. Paul. The former was the capital, and the country itself at that time a Roman province. The speech of Lycaonia,” mentioned Acts xiv, 11, is supposed to have been a corrupt Greek, intermingled with many oriental words.

LYCIA, a country of Asia Minor, having Phrygia on the north, Pamphylia on the east, the Mediterranean on the south, and Caria on the west. The greatest part of the country, however, is a peninsula projecting into the Mediterranean. Lycia derived its name from Lycus, the son of Pandion, who settled here. It was conquered by Crœsus, king of Lydia, and passed with his kingdom into the hands of the Persians. It afterward, in common with the neighbouring countries of Asia Minor, formed part of the Macedonian empire, under Alexander; then of that of the Seleucidæ, his successors in those countries; and, at the time of the Apostles, was reduced to the state of a Roman province.

LYDDA, by the Greeks called Diospolis. It lay in the way from Jerusalem to Cæsarea, four or five leagues to the east of Joppa. Lydda belonged to the tribe of Ephraim. It seems to have been inhabited by the Benjamites, 607at the return of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity, Neh. xi, 35. St. Peter coming to Lydda, cured a sick man of the palsy named Eneas, Acts ix, 33, 34.

LYDIA, a woman of Thyatira, a seller of purple, who dwelt in the city of Philippi, in Macedonia. She was converted to the faith by St. Paul, and both she and her family were baptized. She offered her house to the Apostle, and pressed him to abide there so earnestly, that he yielded to her entreaties. She was not a Jewess by birth, but a proselyte, Acts xvi, 14, 15, 40.

2. Lydia, an ancient celebrated kingdom of Asia Minor, which, in the time of the Apostles, was reduced to a Roman province. Sardis was the capital.

LYSTRA, a city of Lycaonia, the native place of Timothy. The Apostle Paul and Barnabas having preached here, and healed a cripple, were taken for gods. But so fickle are human praise and popular encomiums, that, in the space of a few hours, those who had been deemed gods were regarded as less than mortals, and were stoned by the very persons who so lately deified them. See Acts xiv.