of passion: the summer is past, the harvest is ended, and he is not saved.

Now let us briefly apply what has been said.

1. Do not attempt to date too accurately the transition

moment.

2. Understand that the "flesh," or natural state, is wrong only when out of place. In its place it is imperfection, not evil. There is no harm in leaves or blossoms in spring, but in autumn! There is no harm in the appetites of childhood, or the passions of youth, but great harm when these are still unsubdued in age. Observe therefore, the flesh is not to be exercised, but the spirit strengthened. This I say then, "Walk in the spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh."

3. Do not mistake the figurative for the literal.

Baptism is regeneration figuratively; "the like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter iii. 21).

The things to be anxious about are not baptism, not confirmation; but the spiritual facts for which baptism and confirmation stand.

CHRIST THE SON

HEBREWS i. 1.-" God, who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son."

Two critical remarks.

I. "Sundry times"-more literally, sundry portions— sections, not of time, but of the matter of the revelation. God gave His revelation in parts, piecemeal, as you teach a child to spell a word-letter by letter, syllable by syllable

-adding all at last together. God had a Word to spellHis own Name. By degrees He did it. At last it came entire. The Word was made Flesh.

2. "His Son," more correctly, "a Son"-for this is the very argument. Not that God now spoke by Christ, but that whereas once He spoke by prophets, now by a Son. The Filial dispensation was the last.

This epistle was addressed to Christians on the verge of apostacy. See those passages: "It is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame." "Cast not away our confidence." "We are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end."

Observe what the danger was. Christianity had disappointed them-they had not found in it the rest they anticipated. They looked back to the Judaism they had left, and saw a splendid temple-service-a line of priests-a visible temple witnessing of God's presence-a religion which was unquestionably fertile in prophets and martyrs. They saw these pretensions and wavered.

But this was all on the eve of dissolution. The Jewish earth and heavens, i.e. the Jewish Commonwealth and Church, were doomed and about to pass away. The writer of this epistle felt that their hour was come1-and if their religion rested on nothing better than this, he knew that in the crash religion itself would go.

To return

to Judaism was to go down to atheism and despair.

Reason alleged-they had contented themselves with a superficial view of Christianity: they had not seen how it was interwoven with all their own history, and how it alone explained that history.

1 See chap. xii. 26, 27.

Therefore in this epistle the writer labours to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the Idea latent in Judaism: that from the earliest times, and in every institution, it was implied. In the monarchy-in prophets-in sabbath days -in psalms-in the priesthood, and in temple-services, Christianity lay concealed: and the dispensation of a Son was the realization of what else was shadow. He therefore alone who adhered to Christ was the true Jew, and to apostatize from Christianity was really to apostatize from true Judaism.

I am to show, then, that the manifestation of God through a Son was implied, not realized, in the earlier dispensation.

"Sundry portions" of this Truth are instanced in the epistle. The mediatorial dispensation of Moses-the gift of Canaan―the Sabbath, &c. At present I select these:

I. The preparatory Dispensation. II. The filial and final Dispensation.

Three

I. Implied, not fulfilled in the kingly office. Psalms are quoted, all referring to kingship. In Psalm 2d it was plain that the true idea of a king was only fulfilled in one who was a Son of God. The Jewish king was king only so far as he held from God: as His image, the representative of the Fountain of Law and Majesty.

"To Him God hath said, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee."

The 45th Psalm is a bridal hymn, composed on the marriage of a Jewish king. Startling language is addressed to him. He is called God-Lord. "Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever." The bride is invited to worship him as it were a God: "He is thy Lord, and worship thou him." No one is surprised at this who remembers that Moses was said to be made a God to Aaron. Yet it is startling, almost blasphemous, unless there be a deeper meaning implied: the divine character of the real king.

In the 10th Psalm a new idea is added. The true

king must be a priest. "Thou art a priest for ever, after the order of Melchizedek." This was addressed to the Jewish king; but it implied that the ideal king, of which he was for the time the representative, more or less truly, is one who at the same time sustains the highest religious character, and the highest executive authority.

Again, David was emphatically the type of the Jewish regal idea. David is scarcely a personage, so entirely does he pass in Jewish forms of thought into an ideal Sovereign"the sure mercies of David." David is the name therefore for the David which was to be. Now David was a wanderer, kingly still, ruling men and gaining adherents by force of inward royalty. Thus in the Jewish mind the kingly office disengaged itself from outward pomp and hereditary right as mere accidents, and became a personal reality. The king was an idea.

Further still. The epistle extends this idea to man. The psalm had ascribed (Ps. viii. 6) kingly qualities and rule to manhood-rule over the creation. Thus the idea of a king belonged properly to humanity; to the Jewish king as the representative of humanity.

Yet even in collective humanity the royal character is not realized. "We see not," says the epistle, "all things as yet put under him”- -man.

Collect then, these notions.

The true king of men is a Son of God: one who is to his fellow-men, God and Lord, as the Jewish bride was to feel her royal husband to be to her one who is a priest: one who may be poor and exiled, yet not less royal.

Say, then, whence is this idea fulfilled by Judaism? To which of the Jewish kings can it be applied, except with infinite exaggeration? To David? Why, the Redeemer shows the insuperable difficulty of this. "How then doth David in Spirit call him,"-.e. the king of whom he was writing, "Lord, saying, the Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool ?"

David writing of himself, yet speaks there in the third

person, projecting himself outward as an object of contemplation, an idea.

Is it fulfilled in the human race? "We see not yet all things put under him." Then the writer goes on-" But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man." In Jesus of Nazareth alone all these fragments, these sundry portions of the revealed Idea of Royalty met.

II. Christianity was implied in the race of prophets.

The second class of quotations refer to the prophets' life and history. (Heb. ii. 11-14.) Psalm xxii. 22; Psalm xviii. 2; Isaiah xii. 2; Isaiah viii. 18.

But this is to

Remember what the prophets were. They were not merely predictors of the future. Nothing destroys the true conception of the prophets' office more than those popular books in which their mission is certified by curious coincidences. For example, if it is predicted that Babylon shall be a desolation, the haunt of wild beasts, &c., then some traveller has seen a lion standing on Birs Nimroud: or if the fisherman is to dry his nets on Tyre, simply expressing its destruction thereby, the commentator is not easy till he finds that a net has been actually seen drying on a rock. degrade the prophetic office to a level with Egyptian palmistry: to make the prophet like an astrologer, or a gipsy fortune-teller-one who can predict destinies and draw horoscopes. But in truth, the first office of the prophet was with the present. He read eternal principles beneath the present and the transitory, and in doing this of course he prophesied the future; for a principle true to-day is truefor ever. But this was, so to speak, an accident of his If for instance, he read

office not its essential feature. in the voluptuousness of Babylon the secret of Babylon's decay, he also read by anticipation the doom of Corinth, London, of all cities in Babylon's state; or if Jerusalem's fall was predicted, in it all such judgment comings were foreseen; and the language is true of the fall of the world: