This, and this alone, is the only real difference between the religion of the faithful before, and after Christ. _Before Christ_, the living faith, was in a Messiah to come in some wonderful, but unknown way. By this faith, they stood under the blessed power of the _seed of the woman_, and from generation to generation were kept in the one true covenant of life, and union with God. _After Christ_, the same living faith, rejoiced in a Messiah made known by a miraculous birth, in the fallen human nature, redeeming it out of every evil of life, of death, of sin and hell, till it was placed, as God and man in one person, at the right hand of God in heaven. Now when in process of time, the covenant of life between God and man, had lost much of its effect, and the people of God had greatly fallen away from the faith and piety of the first patriarchs, (perhaps not more remarkably than the Christian world is fallen from the truth and faith of the apostolic ages) it pleased God by _Moses_, to introduce the descendents of the patriarchs into a new _covenant of care, and protection over them_. Which covenant was not a _new progressive state_ of that first one true religion, that alone unites God and fallen man, nor given for its own sake, or because of any intrinsic goodness in its washings and purifications, but granted to the _hardness of their hearts_, as a _temporal means_ of keeping a fallen people from falling farther under the blindness and vanity of their earthly minds. The first covenant was so perfect that nothing could be added to it, but the manifestations of that which was promised in it. It was a promise of life and redemption to mankind, to be fulfilled in and by the seed of the woman. Now the promise, and the fulfilling of it, are not (as in human matters) two _distant_, _separate_ things, that begin at different times, nor can the one ever be without the other. They both began together, and must exist together. The end, that is, the fulfilling, grows out of the beginning, goes along with it, and has all its efficacy from it; and the beginning, that is, the promise, is only so much of the end. That which Christ did, suffered, and obtained in our flesh, calling all to turn to God, to deny themselves, to enter into the strictest union with him, giving all divine graces, and yet only _according to their faith in him_; that very same, the seed of the woman from the beginning was always doing, yet solely _according to their faith in it_.