other from the New; an error in which he has had too many imitators in modern times.  To see the harmony of the spirit that pervades the Holy Scriptures from beginning to end in respect to the Divine character, we should take a comprehensive instead of a partial view of their representations.  It is true that the Old Testament describes God as infinite in holiness and inflexibly just.  But it also describes him as “the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.”  It is true that God’s covenant under the Old Testament was restricted to a single nation; but this was, as has been heretofore shown, preparatory to a universal dispensation of mercy, as when a general seizes one strong position with a view to the conquest of an entire region.  Chap. 18.  It is true, on the other hand, that the New Testament is, in a peculiar sense, a revelation of God’s mercy through Jesus Christ.  But it is a discriminating mercy, through which God’s awful holiness and justice shine with dazzling brightness.  It is a mercy shown not at the expense of justice, but in perfect harmony with it; a mercy sternly restricted, moreover, to those who comply with the conditions on which it is offered.  The gospel is a plan of salvation, not of condemnation; “for God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”  John 3:17.  Yet it brings condemnation to those who reject it; for the Saviour immediately adds (ver. 18):  “He that believeth on him, is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”  It is in the New Testament, not in the Old, that we find the most awful declarations of God’s wrath against the finally impenitent, some of them proceeding, too, from the lips of the compassionate Saviour:  “The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven, with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:  who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power” (2 Thess. 1:7, 9); “He that believeth not the Son, shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36); “These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal” (Matt. 25:46).

7.  The same harmony of spirit pervades both Testaments in respect to the way of salvation.  On this momentous question the teachings of the New Testament are fuller than those of the Old, but never in contradiction with them.  The Old Testament teaches that men are saved, not from the merit of their good works, but from God’s mercy:  the New Testament adds a glorious revelation respecting the ground of this mercy in Jesus Christ.  To exhibit in a clear light the reality of this harmony, let us take a passage of the New Testament which embodies in itself the substance of the way of salvation, and compare with it the declarations of the Old Testament.  The following will be appropriate:  “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.”  Titus 3:5.