made them " partakers of the root and fatness of the olive-tree" which his own right hand had planted. What he might have done for the Gen- tiles, if the Jews had not provoked him to cut them off, we cannot say : but the Apostle, speaking on this subject, says, that " they became enemies for our sakes," and " were broken off that we might be graffed in." Doubtless, the stock was sufficient to bear both them and us ; for the time is coming when the whole world, Jews and Gentiles, shall grow together upon it, seeing that it is God's in- tention to engraff on it again the natural branches, which for the present he has broken off: but so has he ordained, that they should be cast out of his Church, and we be introduced into it, and that the one event should be preparatory to the other; that so the fall and ruin of the Jews should be the riches and salvation of the Gentile world u. And it is plain, that this appointment of his is carried into effect ; for they are broken off, and are no longer his Church, since there is not one amongst them that either does, or can, serve God according to their law : and we, on the contrary, are his Church ; and millions of us, through the world, are rendering to him the service he requires ; and, if we are not his Church, then God has not at this hour, nor has he had for above seventeen hundred years, a Church upon earth. God, however, has not cast off his people fully or finally : not fully, for he brought multitudes of them into his Church in the apostolic age : nor finally ; for though, through the shameful remissness of the Christian world, he has done but little for the Jews in these latter ages, yet is he, we trust, shewing mercy to them now, and sowing seeds among them, which shall one day bring forth a glorious harvest. Moreover as, by breaking off the Jews, God made room for the Gentiles, so has he ordained, that the bringing in the fulness of the Gen- tiles shall contribute to the restoration of the Jews themselves ; and that, at last, the whole collective body
« Rom. xi. 11, 12, 15.