Now let us take the other question,—­which may indeed be called a question as to the allowableness of resting confidently in truth already gained, without consenting to examine the claims of something asserting itself to be a new truth, yet which seems to interfere with the old.  Is nothing within us to be safe from possible doubt, or is everything?  Or is it here, as in the former case, that there are truths so tried and so sacred that it were blasphemy to question them; while there are others, often closely intermixed with these, which are not so sacred, because they are not eternal; which may and ought to be examined when occasion requires; and which may be laid aside, or exchanged rather, for some higher truth, if it shall reasonably appear that their work is done, and that if we retain them longer they will change their character, and become no longer true but false.  “David having served his own generation by the will of God, fell asleep, and was gathered unto his fathers, and saw corruption; but He whom God raised again saw no corruption.”  This is the difference between positive ordinances and moral:  the first serve their appointed number of generations by the will of God, and then are gathered to their fathers, and perish; the latter are by the right hand of God exalted, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.

“We know,” said the Jews, “that God spake to Moses; but for this fellow, we know not from whence he is.”  There was a time when their fathers had held almost the very same language to Moses:  “they refused him, saying Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us?” But now they knew that God had spoken to Moses, but were refusing Him who was sent unto them after Moses.  God had spoken unto Moses, it was most true:  he had spoken to him and given him commandments which were to last for ever; and which Christ, so far from undoing, was sent to confirm and to perfect; he had spoken to him other things, which were not to last for ever, but yet which were not to be cast away with dishonour; but having, in the fulness of time, done their work, were then, like David, to fall asleep.  All that was required of the Jews, was not to reject as blasphemy a doctrine which should distinguish between these two sorts of truths:  which in no way requires to believe that God had not spoken to Moses,—­which, on the contrary, maintained that he had so spoken,—­but only contended that he has also, in these last days, spoken unto us by his Son; and that his Son, bearing the full image of Divine authority, might well be believed if he spoke of some parts of Moses’s law as having now fulfilled their work, seeing that they were such parts only as, by their very nature, were not eternal:  they had not been from the beginning, and therefore they would not live on to the end.