This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879. Excerpt: . HOPE. Third Sunday In Advent, December 15, 1878.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul.--Heb. vi. 19. We do not know for certain who it was who wrote this Epistle to the Hebrews: perhaps it may have been Apollos, perhaps S. Luke: but whoever it was, he wrote for the Jewish Christians, who were at the time being terribly tempted under severe persecutions to give up Christianity and go back to their old religion, to Judaism. So the one main argument which runs throughout the whole Epistle (amid the intricacy of its symbolical and allegorical teaching, which to some of you may appear rather strange) is intended to shew that the Jewish religion contained of old imperfectly that which had since come to perfection in Christianity. As the author lingers in memory over the Law, the Sacrifices, the Priests, the whole round of Temple services and ordinances, it is that he may point out that each and all were the shadow cast before by the coming event of Christianity: that was the reality, of which the other was but the reflexion.

But so true a Hebrew was the author still in feeling, that though he is absorbed in contemplation of the surpassing glory of Christ and His teaching so fully, that at one moment Judaism, with its world old patriarchal traditions, its zeal, its Temple, with its mysterious ceremonies and soothing strains, seems 'decaying and waxing old and ready to vanish away, ' yet it is only that at the next moment he may behold the whole transfused with a new glory, snatched up into the Heavens, and radiant there as 'a city heavenly, ' 'not made with hands.' This, then, is the image which he presents to the Hebrew Christians, during the fierceness of the persecution they were enduring just before the fall of Jerusalem: when the hard treatment they we.