converts from among them ? Would none of them have been stirred up to make inquiry into the evidences of our religion, and to seek its blessings ? But be it so, They are blind and obdurate. And what were we, when in our Gentile state ? yea, what should we at this very instant have been, if their fathers had done no more for us, than we have for them ? But the same grace that has wrought in us, can work in them; and the same divine power that converted myriads of their forefathers, can work effectually in the hearts of men in the present day : the power that first " commanded the light to shine out of darkness, can shine into the hearts of the very darkest among them ; to give them the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."
By some it will be said, The time is not come. But who is authorized to say that the time is not come ? We have rather reason to hope, that the time is come, or at least is near at hand : for there is confessedly at this present moment a greater zeal among Christians for the conversion of the Gentile world, and for the dissemination of God's word throughout the habitable globe, than has been at any other period since the apostolic age : and this gives reason to hope, not only that God is about to do great things among the Gentiles, but that he is about to visit the Jews also : for as, on the one hand, " blindness in part is happened to Israel until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in," that is, till the period for the fuller diffusion of divine light among the Gentiles be arrived ; so, on the other hand, it is the fulness of the Jews, or the general conversion of them to Christianity, that is to be the riches of the Gentile world : according as it is written, " If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the fall of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness1?" Here is a fulness of the Jews, as well as a fulness of the Gentiles : and each is to be subservient to the completion of the other. In neither case is it to be understood as the completion of the work of divine
* Rom. xi. 12, 25.