Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth:  they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.”  And his direction is:  “Wash you, make you clean:  put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”  Isaiah 1:13-17.  “I hate,” says God to the covenant people through Amos, “I despise your feast-days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.  Though ye offer me burnt-offerings and your meat-offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace-offerings of your fat beasts.  Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.  But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”  Amos 5:21-24.  “Wherewith,” says Micah, “shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God?  Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?  He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” Micah 6:6-8.  Under the Old Testament, outward forms of divine service were required, and they are necessary, to a certain extent, under the New also.  But if any man puts his trust for salvation in these, to the neglect of inward faith, love, and obedience, he stands condemned at the bar of Moses and the prophets, not less than at the bar of Christ and his apostles, Under the Mosaic economy, both the rites of divine service and the succession of the priesthood were definitively prescribed by God himself, and therefore to all of binding authority.  But the man who placed his religion in these outward observances, to the neglect of his heart and life, was to God an object of abhorrence, and the severest judgments were denounced against him.  It cannot be, then, that under the gospel any system of outward forms, however right and proper in itself, can bring salvation to the soul, where inward faith, love, and obedience are wanting.

4.  The last and highest office of the prophets was to direct men’s thoughts to the end of the Mosaic economy, which was the salvation of the world through the promised Messiah.  The Spirit of Christ that spoke through them, “testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow.” 1 Pet. 1:11.  It does not appear that they understood the divine purpose to abolish the Mosaic economy, and with it “the middle wall of partition” between Jews and Gentiles—­that great mystery, the revelation of which was reserved for the days of the apostles; but they did have glorious visions of the latter days, when the law should go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, to all nations; when the whole world should submit