There were not wanting, we may now remark, many who passed the season of attendance before the coming of the promised Mediator, with some profit to themselves and others. We have noticed this with respect to the patriarchal age and to the Israel of God; and it holds good, in some measure, with relation to the Gentile world. There were those even where the hideous darkness of idolatry prevailed, among whom truth found its seasonable culture. There were those who sustained in some sort the credit of the human race. They sought a refuge in their own reflections from false worship, and delusions gross, impious, and far below the character of man. They betook themselves accordingly to some sound principles of moral truth and moral wisdom. Thus the faculty of right discrimination, and the power of conscience, when not drowned in vice and superstition, exhibited some lines, and showed some traces of the great Creator’s image. They reduced the rule of life and of well-doing to some fixed points; prudence, justice, fortitude, the love of truth, the scorn of falsehood or deceit, self-government, with other noble qualities, exhibited plain characters of man’s first resemblance to the Author of his being. Thus things which are always true and always good, kept their place in some fair examples, and sustained the claim which such men had to be the teachers and the monitors of others, although without authority to teach or to direct—that want remained to be supplied, as the wisest of them fairly owned. Our blessed Lord, who came to bind the bruised reed, and to fan the least spark of the smoking flax, never turned with scorn from such tokens of good disposition and right judgment, or failed to give his word of commendation when they came before him. “I have not found so great faith, no not in Israel,” were words which embraced the qualities of mind which were always found to be most favourable to prepare the heart (the seat of every moral property) for any seed of truth which should be cast upon it. Such was the good ground of which our Lord made mention in his instructive parable of the Sower and the Seed. A rational acknowledgment, with a just esteem for what is good, is the soul of faith, of which the tenth leper left a memorable proof. Without such moral properties faith might be the hand for receiving any benefit, but where would be the mind to understand its value, and perceive the nature of its obligations? Let the nine lepers who were healed, but returned not to give thanks, supply the answer. But if the Gentile sages showed indeed sound judgment in reducing rules of ethics to fixed principles, our blessed Lord with the full warrant of divine authority formed the draft of faith and duty, sometimes compendiously, and sometimes with particular enumerations.