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I. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IS DESCRIBED AS A NEW COVENANT. This covenant would be new, for it had predecessors, and God is said to have made a covenant with Noah when He promised that a judgment like the flood should not be repeated, and with Abraham when He promised Canaan to his descendants for an everlasting possession, and imposed the condition of circumcision. But by the phrase "the old covenant" is meant especially the covenant which God made with Israel as a people when Moses descended from Mount Sinai. At later periods in Israel's history this covenant was again and again renewed — as by Joshua, at Shechem; as by King Asa, at Jerusalem; as by Jehoida, the priest, in the temple, and by the priesthood and people together, under Hezekiah, and under the auspices of Ezra and Nehemiah in later days still, after the great captivity. It was renewed and it was continually broken. It was a Divine work, and yet, through man's perverseness, it was a continuous failure. The new "covenant": it is a phrase which sounds somewhat strange to the ears of Christians, who have been accustomed all their life to talk of the New "Testament." A covenant is a compact or agreement, and it implies something like equal fights between those who are parties to it. Monarchs make covenants or treaties with monarchs, nations with nations. Even when, as sometimes happens, the government of a great Power enters into contracts with a house of business, or with an individual, this is because the firm or the person in question is for the purposes of the contract on terms of equality with the negotiating government, as having at disposal some means of rendering it a signal service, which, for the moment, throws all other considerations into the background. And this general equality between parties to a covenant may be further illustrated by the case of the most sacred of all possible human contracts, the marriage tie — that marriage tie which, by the law of God, once made, can be dissolved only by death, and in which it is the glory of the Christian law — I do not speak of human legislation in Christian times — to have secured to the contracting parties equal rights. It is, then, a little startling to find this same word employed to describe a relation between the infinite and eternal God and the creatures of His hand. He wants nothing when He has everything to give. Man needs everything, and can do nothing that will increase the blessedness that is already infinite, or enhance a power which, as it is, knows no bounds. But here are covenants between God and man, covenants in which there seems no place for reciprocity, covenants in which indulgence or endowment is all on one side, and acknowledgment, or, rather, failure, on the other; covenants in naming which language seems to forget its wonted meaning, and to betray us into misconceptions, which bring, to say the least, bewilderment and confusion; and yet, in reality, when God speaks of making a covenant with man, He is only giving one more instance of that law of condescension of which the highest results appeared when He, the Infinite, took on Him a human form, when He, the Eternal, entered as a man into fellowship with the children of time. A covenant, then, is a contract or compact, and the question cannot but occur to us, "Might the covenant which God makes with His people not come to be called, as it is called, a testament? for the words covenant and testament" represent in our English Bibles a single word in each of the original languages. The Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, who some 200 years or more before our Lord turned the Old Testament, bit by bit, from Hebrew into Greek, as it was wanted for use in the service of their synagogue, and then made of these fragments the great version which we to-day call the Septuagint, used the Greek word for "will" to translate the Hebrew word for "covenant," because they observed that the old covenant of God with the patriarchs and with Israel did involve actual bequests such as was the possession of Canaan, which could only be inherited in a distant future. And thus the Hebrew word meaning a con. tract was strained, if you please, by its actual use to mean a testament, and the Greek word meaning primarily, although not exclusively, a will acquired by its associations the sense of a covenant or contract. He who by His providence controls the course of human events and the currents of human thought does also most assuredly take human speech so that it may do His work, and it is His doing and not any chance irregularity that the original word in the New Testament has thus come to mean both covenant and testament, for that which it was intended to describe answered to both meanings. Religion as such, and the religion of the Gospels especially, is at once a compact with God and a bequest from God. The Gospel, I say, is a compact or covenant, because its blessings are provisionally bestowed. They must be met by faith, hope, love, repentance. And it is also a will or testament more obviously than was the Mosaic covenant, for it was made by our Divine Lord when His death was in full view, and when He, who alone could use such words without folly or without blasphemy, took the cup into His blessed hands, and when He had given thanks He gave it to His followers, saying, "Drink ye all of this; for this is My blood of the New Testament, which is being poured out for you and for many for the remission of sins." And yet this very testament is so conditioned as to be a covenant too, and the solemn words to which I have just referred were but an echo in an after age of the saying in the prophets, "Behold, I make a new covenant."

II. OF THIS NEW COVENANT IN THE GOSPELS THERE WERE ACCORDING TO JEREMIAH TO BE THREE CHARACTERISTICS. We cannot suppose that he is giving us an exhaustive description. He selects these three points because they form a vivid and easily understood contrast between the new covenant and the old, between Christianity and Judaism.

1. In those who have a real part in the new covenant the law of God was not to be simply or chiefly an outward rule, it was to be an inward principle. The law was to be no longer an outward rule condemning the inward life or even rousing the spirit of rebellion: it was to be an inward operation, not running counter to the will, but shaping it and claiming obedience, not from fear but from love, and from love heightened to enthusiasm. It was to present itself, not as a summons from without the will, but as an impulse from within the soul; not as declaring that which has to be done or foregone, but as describing that which it was already a joy to forego or to do; in short, a new power, the Spirit of Christ, giving Christians s new nature; the nature of Christ would be within the soul and would effect a change.

2. The second token of a part in the new covenant is the growth of the soul in the knowledge of Divine truth. In ancient Israel, as now, men learned what they could learn about God from human teachers, but the truths which they learned, though inculcated with great industry, were, in the majority of cases, not really mastered, because there was no accompanying process of interpretation and readjustment from within. It was to be otherwise in the future. In the new covenant the Divine Teacher, without dispensing with such human instruments as we are, would do the most important part of the work Himself. He would make truth plain to the soul, and would enamour the soul with the beauty of truth by such. instruction as is beyond the reach of human argument and human language, since it belongs altogether to the world of spirits. "Ye have an unction from the Holy One," said St. John to his readers, "and ye know all things." "Listen not," cries St. , "too eagerly to the outward words: the true Master sits within.

3. A third characteristic of the new covenant was to be the forgiveness of sins. This, although stated last, is really a precedent condition of the other two. "This is a true saying., and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save stoners," and this salvation of His must begin with pardon, and this pardon is the crowning triumph of the new covenant between God and man.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:

WEB: Behold, the days come, says Yahweh, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: