system of discipline and worship which offered little or nothing that could please the senses, but much that was the reverse,—would doubtless require the exercise of especial faith, and a constantly-sustained patience. Against these numerous temptations St. Paul fortified the Hebrew believers, in a strain of high instruction, that carried them beyond the things that were seen and transient, to those which are celestial and eternal; while he showed the reality and transcendent excellence of the priesthood of the Son of God; the intrinsic, infinite, and unalterable value of his atoning sacrifice, and the glories of the eternal redemption which had been procured by it. The most brilliant characteristics of the Levitical economy waned and were lost before the dawning splendours of the New Covenant; and the mediation of their great legislator, the ministry of angels, the gloomy grandeurs of Sinai, the long successions of the priesthood, and the hecatombs which had fallen around their altars, all vanished into worthless shadows, in the presence of that "better hope," which brought them at once "to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first born which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel." (Heb. xii. 22.)
James was succeeded by Simeon, who, as the son of Cleophas, was also a kinsman of our Lord. And now it was that the flock at Jerusalem began to be tried by the introduction of heretical opinions. For even in that early day, the mystery of iniquity, which, in so many forms, has been subsequently employed by Satan for the repression of the Christian cause, became manifest in the
