Page:Bible testimony, on abstinence from the flesh of animals as food.pdf/28

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ADDRESS ON ABSTINENCE.

the value of the animal with whose image they were impressed, and by whose name they were designated.

We come now to the testimony as it is recorded in the Gospel Dispensation in relation to the subject of our investigation. And here my Christian Friends, let us not deceive ourselves by imagining as some have done, that Jesus Christ, the Author and Finisher of our Salvation, came into the world, to abrogate or destroy the law or the Prophets, as given under a previous dispensation. "I came not to destroy, but to fulfil." Neither let us erroneously conclude, that the Gospel developes a system of legislation, differing in any of its essential principles from that order instituted by Infinite Wisdom from the very creation of the world. "With him there is no variableness nor even a shadow of changing." He never departs from the laws of Divine order, which he immutably established at the beginning. The Gospel, in our apprehension, is simply the manifestation of those means, always provided of the Divine mercy of the Lord, by which the children of men, degenerate as they had even then become, might be restored to that felicity, w^hich, through transgression, they had unhappily lost; that they might be re-exalted to that estate, from which, through sin, they had lamentably fallen. The effect of those means, in the renewal and restoration of Human Nature, are fully exemplified in the history of the "Redemption and Glorification of that nature by Jesus Christ. "He came that he might save, and that he might save unto the uttermost." But you will call to mind that in the renovation of our nature, which he assumed, he observed the Law, he fulfilled even that primitive law first given to man. "He was a Nazarite from the womb." "Butter and Honey shall he eat" says the Prophet, "that he may know to choose the good, and to reject the evil." If such is the kind of testimony presented in the Gospel, is it not the duty of his followers to