subjection, by fear, by suspicion, by hatred, by crouching servility on the other. Equal only in one thing had they been, and that was ignorance of the true and only God, and Jesus Christ whom he had sent. They had parted in the bitterness of gall. The master had exercised the severity, and perhaps tyrannical caprice, of power. The slave had taken revenge with the cunning malice of weakness. They were also of different blood: Philemon, a Greek, proud of the glory of heroic and wise forefathers, who had subdued the country wherein he was settled : Onesimus, either a native Phrygian, the most despised of mankind', or a Scythian, under which name was included all that was savage and ignorant. How delightful is the contemplation of such parties thus meeting, and being at once mutually acknowledged as dear and beloved brethren in Jesus Christ, as one in him who is one with the Father. How lively is this display before our eyes of the exceeding riches of the love and mercy of the Gospel. They now met on that holy ground, where there is no difference between Greek and Jew, barbarian and Scythian, bond and free. They now met as brothers of one father, as partners in one redemption, as servants of one Master, with pure and spiritual affections, with mutual love, with mutual confidence, with mutual respect and reverence, and bound to work together, in the unity of spirit, in the labour of love which their Lord had appointed them. How earnestly did they join in offering up the sacrifice of love, and joy, and praise, and thanksgiving. Both had been de

1 Col. iv. 9. Eurip. Orest. &c.

livered from the slavery of the spirit, compared with which the slavery of the flesh is joyous freedom. Both had been subjected to the anxiety, the perplexity, the fears of the natural man, both had been bound hand and foot in the chains of sin, and bowed and kept prostrate in the dust by the abominable superstitions of debasing heathenism. And now they met free, confident, erect, sons of God, children of light, heirs of salvation, free in the liberty of the Gospel. When they parted this world was all they knew, and all they thought of. They were the fleeting beings of an hour, to be laid in due time in an irreversible everlasting equality in the dust whence they had sprung; and here was the considerate master's occasional humiliation, and here was the slave's consolation, and indulgence of the feelings of revenge. But now they met with their hopes all laid up in the world to come: they met as immortal spirits, who saw through the veil of this life into the glories of the next. To them death had been swallowed up in victory, and the equality of the grave had been anticipated by the equality of the possession of everlasting life. O what an hour was this! how seldom has earth seen such another. How precious its tears, its embraces, its mutual forgiveness, its earnest interrogatories. How did they bless their common father, Paul, through whom they now met in holiness who had separated in sin. How joyously did they compare their past with their present; how minutely did they recall to each other's mind, in order to heighten the enjoyment, the contrasted and numerous incidents of wretchedness, in body and

spirit, to which they had been subject, and return from them to the blessedness of the present hour.

Alas! we are all runaway slaves, and have erred and strayed upon our own ways; and Christ is the Philemon to whom St. Paul and Scripture remand us. We cannot too often recur to this short history. Would we deeply feel the tyranny of sin, would we arrive at an adequate view of our spiritual freedom under the Gospel, we should canvass such passages again and again. Facts such as these, appearing amid the doctrine of Scripture, contain within them a concentrated essence, as it were, of holy thought and meditation, which, as we apply our attention to them, expand, as we meditate, on every side, like a precious perfume let loose: our affections are delighted, as our senses are by delicious fragrance; all is sweetness: as men we feel nobly, warmly, and generously; as Christians we are filled with love and joy, with thankfulness, with meekness, with charity.

FELIX.

A.D. 62.

WE have been born and bred amid the full light of the Gospel; the most ignorant, the most careless of us, even the very apostate, cannot be entirely without the sense of its operation, and become altogether such as if he had never known it: as well may he endeavour, by voluntary blindness, to divest himself utterly of the effects which long years of enjoyment of the light of the sun have wrought on his imagination. It is for this reason that we cannot but regard with great interest the characters of those men who are brought forward in Scripture as hearing the Gospel for the first time: theirs is a situation which we can scarcely conceive with accuracy. We may commence a painful abstraction, and divest ourselves in imagination, one by one, of our many and manifold spiritual advantages; yet, supposing that we can in the first instance be quite aware of them all, and that we can in the end strip ourselves of them as naked as we came into the world, yet this we can do only in conception; we cannot do it in feeling and in practice, or all at once. But supposing even this done, what shall we substitute in their place? what notions shall we adopt, so as to put ourselves exactly in the situation of those persons? How are we to

let ourselves into the infinitely numerous modes of thought which resulted from habits unknown to us, from customs unpractised by us, from events of which we are ignorant; in short, from a state of things which it is impossible to comprehend, and represent to our minds? We cannot, in fact, arrive at that particular frame of mind in which the first hearers of the Gospel either accepted or refused the offer of everlasting life. Yet it is most instructive to go into such an examination as far as we can; and we can always go far enough to be enabled to return with exceeding thankfulness to our own happy position and seeing more distinctly, from the contrast, our own unmerited blissfulness, to conclude with an intense feeling of grateful self-abasement. The best suited to this purpose is the consideration of the characters of that class which heard and rejected the word of life. We are in less danger of vanity and self-delusion here by diligently tracing them, we cannot but come to some sense of our own defects. As the understanding is working out each part, the conscience is at hand to apply it to ourselves; and the faults which prevented them from listening to the Gospel may turn out to be those which prevent us from properly obeying it. Their pride, their lust, their indifference, their recklessness, their selfish indulgence, which shut them out from the light, may, in different degrees, be obscuring it to us also. It should therefore be with a salutary fear and trembling self-application, that we examine the characters of those unclean birds of darkness, which, started into the blaze of evangelical noon day, showed by their screams their painful sense of the blessed light.