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The law taught, as a schoolmaster teaches, the elements of true religion and right morals. It therefore prepared men for Christianity, or was the introduction to Christianity, which supposes and embraces those elements, though it carries them forward into further and higher developments, and surrounds them with more mature and heavenly sanctions than were before revealed; just as the schoolmaster prepares a pupil by the studies of the school-room, for the studies and pursuits of life, and furnishes the knowledge which is absolutely necessary for the attainment of the superior knowledge of future years, and which can never be entirely dispensed with. The pupil is not required to remain in the school-room, amenable to all the minor regulations of the school-room, and indeed would not be justified in doing so, when the time has come for his entrance upon the advanced discipline and broader duties and prospects of maturity and the world; and yet he must never slight or forget the real knowledge and true habits which have been instilled and formed within those humbler precincts, for these are always available and useful, and are indeed indispensable to his progress. "The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ." It could not have brought us unto Christ, unless it had taught us much that is intrinsically and permanently true and good, and of Divine authority. Such aa introduction could have been made by no unworthy or unauthorized hand. "Holiness unto the Lord" must have been engraved upon the forehead of that instructor, who performed the high office of leading us into the presence of the Son of God. Let us see how this truth may be confirmed. Let us refer to what may be gathered of the mind of Jesus on this subject. First and chiefly, he always speaks of the God by whose commission Moses gave the law to the Israelites, aa his own God and Father, by whom he was sanctified and sent into the world. It is impossible for any man of common-sense and a clear and unprejudiced head, who shall read the Old Testament and then proceed to read the New, to entertain any other idea than that the Supreme Being and Almighty God of the one is the Supreme Being and Almighty God of the other, though more chiefly revealed and. brought nearer to us in the second than in the first. Jesus refers also to the patriarchs and prophets of the former dispensation not as strangers, or belonging to a hostile order or communion, but as His own predecessors and forerunners, who had seen His day and intimated His coming, and He often repeats and applies their sayings and predictions. The proposition is further confirmed by a view of those characters of the law which are evidently intrinsic and unchangeable. The primary truth of the Unity of God is declared in it with a distinctness and a grandeur which no words and no imagination can surpass. The "Hear, O Israel! the Lord our God is one Lord," is a proclamation which sounds, as with trumpet voice, from one dispensation to the other, from the Tabernacle and the Temple to the Church, and from the Church into the depths of time. Those infinite attributes of God, which, when proposed to the mind, are in perfect conformity with the best exercises of our reason, and are yet so high that our highest reason cannot reach or measure them, are revealed in the law with all the clearness which human language can command, and with an original sublimity which is to be found nowhere else. As in the doctrinal, so in the ethical part of the law, there is a height and a purity which might fitly introduce the moral system of the gospel, and be blended and incorporated with it, because it is in unison with it, and speaks of a common origin. The ten commandments, which are the condensation of this part of the law, are unquestionably permanent and irreversible. Finally, two important inferences must be kept in mind.

1. That we should never take one part of the conclusion, when the apostle is pressing it upon our attention with all his innate zeal, without a reference to the other part, which, under different circumstances, he would have pressed as warmly, and which was never really absent from his mind. He must be interpreted by himself; what he says at one time compared with what he says at another.

2. We ourselves are bound to pay becoming reverence to that ancient law, whose office it was to introduce men to the knowledge and enjoyment of gospel privileges and blessings. There is little danger at present of our falling back under the yoke against which St. Paul warns his converts; but there is some danger of our erring on the opposite side, and treating the law, and the books which contain it, with an undeserved and unbecoming irreverence. Let us remember that the law was a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, and that, as such, its instructions were necessary and are still to be revered. Having entered a higher institution, we do not go back to school; but having been well taught in those elements which prepared us for that institution, we will remember the teacher with respect and gratitude. While the Saviour of men appears before us in all his transfigured glory, though we shall give to His person our longest and intensest regards, we shall not shut our eyes to the venerable forms of Moses, and Elias, who appear with Him and talk with Him.

(F. W. P. Greenwood, D. D.)

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KJV: Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.

WEB: So that the law has become our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.