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foot, and quite throw them out of our creed. This course we have seen taken amongst us, and the church (God bless it, and those who are over it) has been hitherto profoundly silent at

concerned) will be so too, none can tell. For if some novelists may put what sense they please upon the writings of Moses, and others do the like with the articles of the Christian church also, (and the greatest encouragement attend both,) I cannot see (unless some extraordinary providence prevent it) but that both these religions are in a direct way to be run down amongst us, and that in a very short time too.

ledge with the freedom and contingency of all human acts, both good and evil, so foreknown by him. Both parts of which problem are certainly true; but how to explain and make out the accord between them, without overthrow-it; but how long God (whose honour is most ing one of them, has hitherto exceeded the force of man's reason. And therefore Socinus very roundly, or rather indeed very profanely, denies any such prescience of future contingents to be in God at all. But as profane as he was in thus cutting asunder this knot, others have been as ridiculous in pretending to untie it. For do not some, in their discourses about the divine attributes and decrees, promise the world such a clear account, such an open explicit scheme of these great things, as should make them plain and evident even to the meanest capacities? And the truth is, if to any capacities at all, it must be to the meanest; for to those of a higher pitch, and a larger compass, these things neither are, nor will, nor ever can be made evident. And if such persons could but obtain of Heaven a continuance of life, till they made good what they so confidently undertake, they would be in a sure way to outlive, not only Methuselah, but even the world itself. But then, in come some other undertakers, and promise us the same or greater wonders in Christian theology, offering, by some new whimsical explications of their own, to make the deepest mysteries of our Christian faith as plain, easy, and intelligible, forsooth, as that two and two make four; that is, in other words, they will represent and render them such mysteries as shall have nothing at all mystical in them.

And now is not this, think we, a most profound invention, and much like the discovery of some New-found-land, some O Brazil in divinity? With so much absurd confidence do some discourse, or rather romance upon the most mysterious points of the Christian faith, that any man of sense and sobriety would be apt to think such persons not only beside their subject, but beside themselves too. And the like censure we may justly pass upon all other such idle pretenders; the true character of which sort of men is, that he who thinks and says he can understand all mysteries, and resolve all controversies, undeniably shews that he really understands none.

In the meantime, we may here observe the true way by which these great and adorable mysteries of our religion come first to be ridiculed and blasphemed, and at length totally laid aside by some; and that is, by their being first innovated upon, and newmodelled, by the bold, senseless, and absurd explications of others. For first of all such innovators break down those sacred mounds which antiquity had placed about these articles, and then heretics and blasphemers rush in upon them, trample them under

Let every sober, humble, and discreet Christian, therefore, be advised to dread all tampering with the mysteries of our faith, either by any new and unwarrantable explications of them, or descants upon them. The great apostle of the Gentiles, who, I am sure, had as clear a knowldge of the whole mystery of the gospel as any in his time, and a greater plenty of revelations than any one could pretend to since him, treated these matters with much another kind of reverence, crying out with horror and amazemeut, "Oh, the depth and unsearchableness of the things of God!" (Rom. xi. 33.) And again, "Who is sufficient for these things?" (2 Cor. ii. 16.) This was his judgment, these were his thoughts of these dreadful and mysterious depths; and the same, no doubt, will be the thoughts and judgment of all others concerning them, who have any thing of depth themselves. For as the same apostle again has it in that most noted place in 1 Tim. iii. 16, “Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, believed on in the world, and received up into glory."

To which God infinitely wise, holy, and great, be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and for evermore. Amen.

SERMON XXXI.

THE LINEAL DESCENT OF JESUS OF
NAZARETH FROM DAVID BY HIS
BLESSED MOTHER, THE VIRGIN
MARY.

"I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star."- REV. xxii. 16.

THE words here pitched upon by me are the words of Christ now glorified in heaven, and seem, as it were, by the union of a double festival, to represent to us both the Nativity

and Epiphany, while they lead us to the birth of Christ by the direction of a star; though with this difference, I confess, that both the means directing, and the term directed to, do in this place coincide; and Christ the person speaking, as well as spoken of, is here the only star to direct us to himself. The nativity of Christ is certainly a compendium of the whole gospel, in that it thus both begins and ends it, reaching from the first chapter of Saint Matthew to this last of the Revelation; which latter, though it be confessedly a book of mysteries, and a system of occult divinity, yet surely it can contain nothing more mysterious and stupendous than the mystery here wrapt up in the text; where we have Christ declaring himself both the "root and the offspring of David." For that any one should be both father and son to the same person, produce himself, be cause and effect too, and so the copy give being to its original, seems at first sight so very strange and unaccountable, that, were it not to be adored as a mystery, it would be exploded as a contradiction. But since the gospel has lifted us above our reason, and taught us one of the great arcana of heaven, by assuring us that divinity and humanity may cohabit in one subsistence, that two natures may concur in the same person, and heaven and earth mingle without confusion; we being thus taught and persuaded, shall here endeavour to exhibit the whole economy of Christ's glorious person, and to shew what a miracle he was, as well as what miracles he did, by considering him under these three several respects,

First, as the "root ;" secondly, as the "offspring of David ;" and thirdly, as he is here termed, "the bright and morning star."

And first for the first of these:Christ was the "root of David ;" but how? Certainly in respect of something in him which had a being before David. But his humanity had not so, being of a much later date, and therefore, as a mere man, he could not be the "root of David;" whereupon it follows that he must have been so in respect of some other nature; but what that nature was will be the question. The Arians, who denied his divinity, but granted his preexistence to his humanity, (which the Socinians absolutely deny,) held him to be the first-born of the creation; the first and most glorious creature which God made, a spiritual substance produced by him long before the foundation of the world, and afterwards, in the fulness of time, sent into a body, and so made incarnate. This is what they hold; whereby it appears how much they differ from the school of Socinus, though some with great impertinence confound them. Arius taught that Christ had a spiritual subsistence before the world began ; Socinus held that he was a mere man, and had no subsistence or

being at all, till such time as he was conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary. I shall not much concern myself about these two opinions, as they stand in opposition to one another; but only remark this of them, that Socinus asserts a thing, considered barely in itself, more agreeable to reason, which can much better conceive of Christ as a man naturally consisting of soul and body, than as such a heterogeneous composition of a body, and (I know not what) strange spiritual substance existing before the creation, as the Arians represent him; but then, on the other side, the opinion of Arius is, of the two, much more difficult to be confuted by Scripture; for as to Socinus, the chief arguments brought from thence against him, are not such as are taken from the name or actions of God, attributed to Christ, which he thinks he easily answers by asserting that God is a name, not of nature, but of power and dominion; and that Christ is called God, because of the power and government of all things put into his hands; as earthly kings also, in their proportion, have in Scripture the same title upon the same account. But the arguments which bear hardest upon Socinus are such as are taken from those scriptures, which, beyond all possibility of rational contradiction, declare the pre-existence and precedent being of Christ to his conception; such as John, viii. 58, "Before Abraham was, I am ;" and in John, xvii. 5, "Glorify me, O Father, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was ;" which all the Socinians in the world could never yet give any clear, proper, and natural exposition of; but unnaturally and illogically pervert and distort them, in defiance of sense and reason, and all the received ways of interpretation. But now, as for Arius, the allegation of these and the like scriptures prejudice not his hypothesis at all; who grants Christ to have been a glorious spiritual substance, of an existence not only before Abraham, but also before Adam, and the angels themselves, and the whole host of the creation. But what? Was Christ then the "root of David" only in respect of this spiritual, pre-existing, created substance, first found out and set up by Arius? No, certainly; for the Scripture, and (the best comment upon the Scripture) a general council, and that also the first and most famous, even the council of Nice, have condemned this. And all those scriptures which make Christ either one with or equal to the Father, clearly confute aud overthrow so absurd as well as blasphemous an assertion. Let this, therefore, be fixed upon, that Christ was the root, or original, of David, as he was of all mankind besides ; namely, in respect of his divinity; of that infinite, eternal power, which displayed itself in the works of the creation, "for by him all things were made," as

the evangelist tells us, (John, i. 3.) But how ready natural reason will be to rise up against this assertion, I am not ignorant; and how that Jesus of Nazareth, a man like ourselves, should be accounted by nature God, the Creator of the world, omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal, is looked upon by many as a proposition, not only false, but foolish, and fitter to be laughed than disputed out of the world; this also is no surprise to us. But then, on the other side, that this is a thing not to be founded upon, or to take its rise from the bare discourses of reason, he must be very much a stranger to reason himself, who shall venture to deny ; for if it may be proved by reason, (as I doubt not but it may,) that the Scripture is the word of God, addressed to men, and consequently ought to be understood and interpreted according to the familiar natural way of construction proper to human writings; then I affirm, that to deny Christ to be naturally God is irrational, when his being so is so frequently asserted throughout the whole Scripture, and that in as clear terms as it is possible for one man to express his mind by to another, if it were his purpose to declare this very thing to him.

And therefore I have often wondered at the preposterous tenets of Socinus, and that, not so much for his denying the natural deity of our Saviour, as that he should do it after he had wrote a book for the authority of the Scripture. For upon the same reasons that he and his sect deny the deity of Christ, I should rather deny the Scripture to be of divine authority. They say, for Christ to be God is a thing absurd and impossible; from which I should argue, that that writing or doctrine which affirms a thing absurd and impossible, cannot be true, and much less the word of God. And that the Gospel affirms so much of Christ, we may appeal to the judgment of any impartial heathen, who understands the language in which it is written. But he who first denies the deity of Christ as absurd and impossible, and thereupon rejects the divine authority of the Scriptures for affirming it, may be presumed, upon the supposal of the former, to do the latter very rationally. So that he who would take the most proper and direct way to convince such an one of his heresy, (if there be any convincing of one who first takes up his opinion, and then seeks for reasons for it,) must not, I conceive, endeavour in the first place to convince him out of Scripture, that Jesus Christ is God, but turn the whole force and stress of his disputation to the proof of this, that the Scripture is the word of God to mankind, and upon that account ought to be interpreted as the writings of men use and ought to be; and if so, he who will make sense of them must grant the divinity of Christ to be clearly asserted in them, and irrefragably inferred

from them. In short, if the adversaries of Christ's divinity can prove Christ not to be God, they must, by consequence, prove that the Scriptures, naturally and grammatically interpreted, are not the word of God; but, on the contrary, the church being assured that the Scriptures, so interpreted, are the word of God, is consequently assured also, that Christ is and must be God. Nevertheless, if, according to the unreasonable demands of the men of this sect, this and all other mysteries of our religion, should be put to answer for themselves at the bar of human reason, I would fain know, wherein consists the paradox of asserting Christ to be God? For no man says that his human nature is his divine, or that he is God as he is man. But we assert, that he who is God is also man, by having two natures united into one and the same subsistence. And if the soul, which is an immaterial substance, is united to the body, which is a material; though the case is not altogether the same, yet it is so very near, that we may well ask, what repugnancy there is, but that the divine nature may as well be united to the human? I believe, if we reduce things to our way of conception, we shall find it altogether as hard to conceive the conjunction of the two former, as of the two latter; and this, notwithstanding that other difference also of finite and infinite between them; for why a finite and an infinite being may not be united to one another by an intimate and inseparable relation, and an assumption of the finite into the personal subsistence of the infinite, I believe it will be hard for any one to give a solid and demonstrative reason; for scoffs and raillery (the usual arguments brought against it) I am sure are not so. But I forget myself; for the persons here disputed against believe not the soul to be either immaterial or naturally immortal ;* but are much the same with the Sadducees, and upon that account fitter to be crushed by the civil magistrate, as destructive to government and society, than to be confuted as merely heretics in religion.

I conclude, therefore, against the scoffs of the heathens, the disputations of the Jews, the impiety of Arius, and the bold, blasphemous assertions of Socinus, that the man Christ Jesus, born at Bethlehem, of the Virgin Mary, is God, God by nature, the Maker of all things, the Fountain of being, the Ancient of Days, the First and the Last, of whose being there was no beginning, and of whose

*Tantum id mihi videtur statui posse, post hanc vitam, hominis animam sive animum non ita per se subsistere, ut ulla

præmia pœnasve sentiat, vel etiam illa sentiendi sit capax.

And again: In ipso primo homine totius immortalitatis rationem uni gratiæ Dei tribuo; nec in ipsa creatione quicquam immortalis vitæ in homine agnosco. Socin. Ep. 5. ad Joh. Volkelium. See more of the like nature, cited by the learned Dr Ashwell, in his Dissertation de Socino et Socinianismo, pp. 187-189, &c.

kingdom there shall be no end. And in this one proposition the very life and heart of Christianity does consist. For as, that there is a God, is the great foundation of religion in general; so, that Jesus Christ is God, is the foundation of the Christian religion; and I believe it will one day be found, that he who will not acknowledge Christ for his Creator, shall never have him for his Redeemer.

Having thus shewn how Christ was "the root and original of David," pass we now to the next thing proposed, which is to shew,

Secondly, That he was his "offspring" too, and so, having asserted his divinity, to clear also his humanity. That the Christian religion be true, is the eternal concernment of all those who believe it, and look to be saved by it; and that it be so, depends upon Jesus Christ's being the true promised Messias, (the grand and chief thing asserted by him in his gospel ;) and lastly, Christ's being the true Messias depends upon his being the son of David, and King of the Jews. So that unless this be evinced, the whole foundation of Christianity must totter and fall, as being a cheat, and an imposture upon the world. And therefore let us undertake to clear this great important truth, and to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth was the true seed of David, and rightful king of the Jews.

His pedigree is drawn down by two of the evangelists; by Saint Matthew in his first chapter, and by Saint Luke in his third, from whence our adversaries oppose us with these two great difficulties,

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First, that these two evangelists disagree in deducing of his pedigree.

Secondly, that supposing they were proved to agree, yet both of their pedigrees terminate in Joseph, and therefore belong not to Jesus, who was not indeed the son of Joseph, but of Mary.

In answer to which we are to observe, that concerning this whole matter there are two opinions.

First, That both in Saint Matthew and Saint Luke only the pedigree of Joseph is recounted; in the first his natural, in the other his legal; for it being a known custom among the Jews, that a man dying without issue, his brother should marry his widow, and raise up seed to him, Eli hereupon dying without any child, Jacob took his wife, and of her begat Joseph; who by this means was naturally the son of Jacob, as Saint Matthew deduces it, and legally or reputedly the son of Eli, as Saint Luke. And then to make Jacob and Eli brothers, who are there set down in different lines, it is said that Matthan, of the line of Solomon, and Melchi, of the line of Nathan, successively married the same woman, (Estha by name,) of whom Matthan begat Jacob, and Melchi begat Eli: whereupon

Jacob and Eli being brothers by the mother, though of different fathers, Eli dying without issue, Jacob was obliged by law to marry his relict, and so to raise up seed to his brother Eli.

Now all this is grounded upon an ancient story of one Julius Africanus, recorded by Eusebius, in his first book and seventh chapter. And of late Faustus Socinus; (who, having denied Christ's divine nature, was resolved to cut him short both root and branch, and to deny his human too, at least as to the most considerable circumstance of it, which concerned the credit of his being the true Messias;) he, I say, catches at this forlorn story, and ascribes much to it in that book of his called his Lectiones Sacræ; and though generally a professed despiser of antiquity, yet when he thinks it may make any thing for his purpose, he can catch at every fabulous scrap of it, and thereupon vouches this as authentic, even for its antiquity. From which opinion it follows, that Christ was only the reputed son of David, that is to say, because his mother was married to one who was really of David's line. And this the whole sect of Socinus affirms to be sufficient to denominate and make Christ the son of David, and accordingly allow him so to be upon no other or nearer account.

But of the authors and assertors of this opinion we may well demand, that admitting Christ might upon this account be called the son of David, in the large and loose way of that denomination, yet how could he for this only reason be called the seed of David? nay, and, what is yet more full and express, be said to be "made of the seed of David," as it is in Romans, i. 3, and farther, to be "the fruit of his loins," as it is in Acts, ii. 30. I say with what propriety, or accord with the common use of speaking, could one man be said to be another man's seed, and "the fruit of his loins," when he had no other relation to him in the world, than that his mother only married with a person who stood so related to that other? I believe the Jews would desire no greater a concession from us than this, whereby to conclude and argue Jesus of Nazareth not to have been the true Messiah. Let us therefore leave this opinion to itself, as destructive to the main foundation of our religion, and fit to be owned by none but the mortal enemies of Christ and Christianity, the Jews and the Socinians; and so pass to the

Second opinion, which is, that both Joseph and Mary came from David by true and real descent, and that, as Joseph's genealogy and pedigree is set down in that line which Saint Matthew gives an account of, so the Virgin Mary's lineage is recited in that which is recorded by Saint Luke: which opinion, as it has been generally received by divines of the greatest note, and best answers those diffi

culties and objections which the other is beset with, so I shall endeavour fully to clear and set it down in these following propositions,

1. The first proposition is this, That the designs of the two evangelists, in their respective deductions of our Saviour's pedigree, are very different. For Saint Matthew intends only to set down his political or royal pedigree, by which he had right to the crown of the Jews; but Saint Luke shews his natural descent through the several successions of those from whom he took flesh and blood. And that this is so, besides that natural reason taken from the impossibility of one and the same person's having two several fathers, as Saint Matthew and Saint Luke seem at first sight to import; we have these farther arguments, for the said assertion; as, first, that Saint Matthew begins his reckoning only from Abraham, to whom the first promise of the kingdom was made, (Gen. xvii. 6.) But Saint Luke runs his line up to Adam, the first head and fountain of human nature; which fairly shews that one deduced only his title to the crown, the other the natural descent of his humanity. And then, in the second place, that Saint Matthew used the word begat only in a political sense, is farther clear from this, that he applies it to him who had no child, even to Jeconiah, of whom it is expressly said (Jer. xxii. 30,) that "God wrote him childless." Whereupon, being deposed by the king of Babylon, Zedekiah his uncle was made king, and afterwards, upon the removal of him also for his rebellion, (there remaining no more of the line of Solomon,) Salathiel, being next of kin, was declared king of the Jews; which Salathiel, upon that account, is said to be begot by Jeconiah, in Saint Matthew; not because he was naturally his son, but legally and politically so, as succeeding him in the inheritance of the crown. For though in 1 Chron. iii. 17, there is mention of Assir and of Salathiel, as it were of two sons of Jeconiah, yet, in truth, Assir there is not the proper name of a person, nor of any son of Jeconiah, but is only an appellative of Jeconiah himself, signifying one under captivity, or in bonds, as Jeconiah then was in Babylon, when Salathiel was declared king. And that Salathiel is not there set down as his son in a natural sense, is evident from the 16th verse of the same chapter, where Zedekiah is likewise said to be his son, though naturally he was his uncle; yet because Zedekiah first succeeded him in the kingdom, and Salathiel next, Jeconiah still surviving, therefore both of them, in that political sense I spoke of, are said to be his sons, whom, in the natural sense, the prophet Jeremy, as has been shewn, declares to have been childless.

*

2. The second proposition is this, That as · As it stands rectified by Junius and Tremellius, who place the comma after Assir, and not between Jeconiah and that.

David had several sons by former wives, so by Bathsheba also he had three, besides Solomon, of which the eldest next to him was Nathan; and that Christ descended naturally from David, not by Solomon, but by Nathan. And accordingly, that Saint Luke deduces only Nathan's line; upon which account it is, that the Jews at this day, in opposition to the Christians, make it one main article of their creed, that the Messias was to descend naturally from Solomon ; and accordingly pronounce a curse upon all those who assert the contrary; thougli to this very hour they have not been able to assign who was the son of Jeconiah, whom "God wrote childless;" nor to shew any solid reason why, if Jeconiah had any natural issue of his own, the crown and sceptre of Judah came to be devolved upon the line of Nathan, as it actually was in Salathiel and his successors. to this, (which is a thing well worth observing,) that although it is frequently said in Scripture, that the Messias should descend from David, yet it is never said that he should descend from Solomon. For though it is said of Solomon, (1 Chron. xxii. 10,) that God would "establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel for ever," yet it is not said that he would establish it in his seed or line; and besides, the kingdom here spoken of and intended, was the spiritual kingdom over the church of God, typified in that temporal one of Solomon; which spiritual kingdom was established only in the person of the Messias, whom we believe to have been Jesus of Nazareth, the great king and head of the church, God blessed for ever.

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3. The third proposition is this, That the crown of Judah being now come into the line of Nathan in Salathiel, (whose immediate son was Pedaiah, (though not mentioned in the succession, because he died before his father's assumption to the crown,) and next to Salathiel, the great and renowned Zorobabel,) forasmuch as Saint Matthew and Luke agree from Jeconiah to Zorobabel, (after whom they divide, each ascribing to him a different successor, namely, one of them Abiud, and the other Rhesa,) we are rationally to suppose, that these two were the sons of Zorobabel; and that from Abiud, the elder brother, (who only had right to the crown and kingdom,) lineally descended Joseph, according to the calculation of Saint Matthew; and that from Rhesa, the younger brother, descended Mary, of whom Jesus was born, according to Saint Luke's description: for though in the above mentioned third chapter of 1 Chron. (where there is an account given of Zorobabel's sons,)

Note, that those four sons of David by Bathsheba, mentioned in 1 Chron. iii. 5, are not there set down according to the order of their birth. For Solomon, though last named, was certainly born first; and Nathan (as he is generally reckoned) immediately next.

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