SERMON XVIII.

RAHAB'S FALSEHOOD.

JOSHUA, CHAP. II. VER. 3, 4, 5.

"And the King of Jericho sent unto Rahab, saying, Bring forth the men that are come to thee, which are entered into thine house; for they be come to search out all the country. And the woman took the two men, and hid them, and said thus-There came men unto me, but I wist not whence they were. And it came to pass, about the time of shutting the gate, when it was dark, that the men went out: whither the men went, I wot not: pursue after them quickly, for ye shall overtake them."

UPON the first reading of this passage, an impression is naturally produced in our minds against Rahab, as guilty of falsehood, and we become somewhat startled, upon a hasty consideration of the matter, that for such a direct violation of moral order, she should have been commended by holy and inspired men, necessarily scrupulous in according their approbation, and, indeed, only bestowing it upon persons" after God's own heart." Now, the result of this commendation is, and solely in consequence of it,

Y

that the hostess of Jericho has been held up to all succeeding generations, as a pattern of faith and works, from the earliest promulgation of Christianity to the present hour. This has been made an occasional ground of cavil with those who think superficially and examine partially, though without the slightest foundation; for Rahab, in spite of the falsehood with which she may unquestionably be charged, was one of the brightest examples among the primitive worthies, as I trust has been already shown. In estimating human worth, before Christianity was proclaimed, we are not only to balance it against human infirmity, but many circumstances are to be considered operating in favour, or against it, according to the aids arising from superior intelligence, or the checks opposed by a contrary character of mind, not under the guidance of revelation. We can only form our judgments relatively to those circumstances. The same character, influenced by few or many moral advantages, will be, more or less, good according to those advantages. Though naturally the same in both cases, the amount of advantages, whether few or otherwise, will determine its comparative excellence.

If Rahab be examined by this test, she must rise high in the estimation of every candid judge. Let us take the trouble to examine the fact of her imposition upon the messengers of the king of Jericho, a little nearer than the generally rash, but presumptuous, objector is wont to do. We must bear in mind, in order to entertain a

fair view of this perplexed question, and pursue an impartial examination of it, that, up to the period when the Law was declared from Mount Sinai, the Hebrew races, so signally favoured of God in the issue, had lived under a very imperfect dispensation; and that, even subsequently to the promulgation of the divine law, from "the mount that burned with fire," this dispensation was much inferior to that by which it was ultimately superseded, when the glad tidings of the Gospel were proclaimed to the whole world. The direct revelations previously made, were only to a few eminent individuals; and those revelations were narrowed to the moral requirements of a simple age, when the vast, but uncomplicated frame of civil government, was divided into almost as many sections, as there were families to be governed. In those primitive times, there was no legislative system established, based upon revelation, or the declared will of God. The law of nature, which had descended from Adam, but was in its descent corrupted from its original purity by the wickedness of men, was the only authentic guide. So that, even in ages more advanced, when the primitive families united and swelled into communities bound by natural confederation, the law of government,-being but in its incipient state, and therefore, so to speak, a practical exposition of the elementary law of nature, which merely defined the broad distinctions between right and wrong was not based upon fixed statutory enactments, by which the dispensations of justice

could be fairly measured or correctly ascertained, such enactments, even where they existed, being few and vague;-but was administered exclusively in accordance with the despotic bias of the governor towards the governed. These, thus every-where subject to a stern and capricious despotism, wherever they formed large political bodies, consisted almost entirely of disjointed and disorganized masses, inadequately ruled, by the application of loose, but arbitrary ordinances, ill defined and tyrannically dispensed, established and repealed at the mere whim of the ruler, and among whom there was no positive standard of moral obligation, but such only as the better regulated reason of individuals dictated, and by which some comparatively pure minds spontaneously bound themselves. In a state of things so incompletely organized, we cannot expect to find a perfect system of moral behaviour developed for popular guidance, when the wisest, and even the best, of men were but imperfectly informed in the science of practical virtue.

At this rude period of incipient legislation, the heathens were under no especial dispensation. That revealed Word, which was "written for our learning," had not been communicated to them. Apart, therefore, from their idolatrous services in the temples dedicated to their dumb divinities, which services were profane in the last degree, the dark and far-projected shadows of a once pure but limited worship, they had nothing to guide them in "spiritual discern

ment," save the initial, and thus incomplete, law of natural religion. This, being liable to many various interpretations, or at least to many varieties of modification in practice, was, in fact, a law rather suggestive than positive, and which could only discriminate the one wide division between good and evil, without defining the exact boundary line fixing the limits of either. It was, indeed, sufficient to withhold men from the approval and commission of the very grossest offences; to unfold the general principles of virtuous behaviour; but was altogether insufficient to the establishment of that sublimer scheme of abstract, as well as of high practical morality, which the Christian law has so wisely determined and laid open.

Under so defective a system of religious government, as the mere law of nature supplied, all social and civil obligation, that is, the duties of man towards his kind,—no less than his spiritual obligations, that is, his duties towards his Creator must necessarily have been vaguely defined, imperfectly understood, and therefore equivocally practised. The almost imperceptible influences of virtue and of vice, in their more minute and delicate ramifications, were yet to be discovered. They were hidden under the broad but opaque surface of general principles. All motives of action being drawn from these principles, and thence brought, for the most part, rather to the test of will than of reason, were, by consequence, generally doubtful, if not universally