come to His temple, even the Messenger of the Covenant, whom ye delight in." (Mal. iii. 1.) This prediction is applied by St. Mark, in the introduction to the Gospel which he wrote, to John the Baptist and the incarnate Saviour: "As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face, which shall prepare Thy way before Thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight." (Mark i. 2, 3.) The Jehovah of the Old Testament was the incarnate Redeemer of the New. The Second Person of the Trinity has ever been the medium of communication between God and man. He who spake to the patriarchs, and "whose Voice shook the earth" in the announcements of Sinai, was the same Person who spake, in His manifestation in the flesh, “as never man spake." The salutation of the angel to Mary was a prediction of the near approach of the event: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." (Luke i. 35.) The assuring announcement to Joseph was to the same effect: "Fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." (Matt. i. 20.) The Apostle Paul declares the fact in plain and direct terms: "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh." (1 Tim. iii. 16.) St. John is equally explicit: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God;" and though "the Word was God," He" was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John i. 1, 14.)

The history of Jesus is demonstrative that He was the God-man. It is impossible to account for the constitution of His character, the current of His teaching, and the grandeur of His acts, on any other principle than that He was Divine as well as human. If we regard Him as merely human, His person becomes a perfect enigma, involv ing the most irreconcilable contradictions; but if we admit His Divinity all difficulty vanishes. The evidence is full and conclusive: the Divine and the human were associated in the one Person of Jesus Christ. To those who accept the teachings of the New Testament, the miraculous nature of the event offers no objection: to others it is avowedly the ground on which it is called in question. The possibility of a miracle is denied; and, therefore, the impossibility of the Incarnation as boldly asserted. Such assertions are both unphilosophical and presumptuous. On what principle can man venture to declare that there can be no such event as a miracle? He may assert that, so far as he has been able to understand the operation of what are termed "natural laws," he has observed so much regularity as to preclude the supposition of any departure from this fixed order.

But this amounts to nothing more than a confession of his partial knowledge. It is now usual for our opposers to assume the impossibility of a miracle; and, from assumption, to deny the authenticity of the records in which the fact of numerous events which cannot be brought into the ordinary chain of natural sequence is declared. This is to constitute themselves judges of the whole case; which is certainly very unlike the modesty for which true philosophy has ever been remarkable. We think we have indicated the right mode of proceeding the real question is, Are the Records authentic? We have no hesitation in saying, the historical part of the New Testament is supported by an amount of evidence far exceeding that upon which the historic character of any other ancient document is based. To dispose of those documents by an assertion of their mythical origin, is violently to destroy all written history; and to make a demand upon our faith, as to the mode in which they arrived at their present form, which far exceeds that which is made by their claim to be regarded as historical verities. The most able opponents of Christianity in its earliest age, (the time in which it was easy to determine the truth or falsehood of the Record,) never ventured to deny the historical character of Christ, and the miracles which biographies of Him declared that He wrought. To have done that would have been to have closed their own case, a point which they well understood.

The ultimate question is really to be found within a very narrow compass. Whether a miraculous event is to be considered possible or not, depends upon the question whether God is still the active Governor of the world. If He is still present, holding in His hands all the powers of nature, then to deny the possibility of a miracle is simply to limit Omnipotence. An act in which ordinary physical laws are overruled in their operation is certainly no greater a thing than the original institution of those laws. Their institution necessarily implies a Power to control them. Bolder sceptics, therefore, take refuge in avowed pantheism, which is, in truth, a palpable absurdity, a self-condemned thing; for while it is a desperate attempt to escape the real and felt impossibility of naked atheism, it is nothing less than atheism in its most practical form. God is eternal, and therefore ever remains the Lord of all. The power to direct the physical order which He has originated and sustains, cannot be denied to Him without involving the denial of His existence. And if well-authenticated events are presented to us, which were accomplished in the most simple and direct manner, wrought in the presence of all classes of persons, performed for the promotion of objects the most sacred and beneficent, and which are, at the same time, events obviously above all creature-power to produce, true philosophy requires us to pronounce them Divine and miraculous. The occurrence of what may

appear to us the smallest miracle opens the way for that which we may regard as the most stupendous: to God things are not small and great in the sense in which they are so to man. If, then, the Incarnation was necessary for the working out of the purposes of God, we may certainly conclude, that in due time it would become an accomplished fact. The importance of this miracle is only justly apprehended when it is regarded as an essential part of the economy of redemption, and as necessary to constitute Jesus Christ the "one Mediator between God and man."

The fact of the Incarnation solves important questions in the relations existing between God and the human race. A vague sense of distance was felt and acknowledged by man. The very mode of approach to God was involved in the deepest obscurity: His Person seemed shrouded in an impenetrable veil; the instinctive cry of man's heart met with no satisfactory response. The voice of God could be heard in nature, but its utterances could not be understood. In the union of the Divine and human natures in the Person of Christ, the gulf is bridged; the mystery is dissipated; and God is revealed to man in palpable and appreciable form. The Redeemer is “the brightness of His Father's glory, and the express Image of His Person." That union provides the ladder by which man can ascend to the Eternal, can obtain the clearest views of His character, and can enter into the closest and happiest communion with Him. It is there seen that God and man may become eternally one. Every delusion, which arose out of the infinite distance in which God appeared, is effectually dispelled He is seen in His own light. In the Person of the Incarnate Saviour the lineaments of His character are traced with the most beautiful precision, and the Divine purity is attractively expressed in that perfect Image which was "holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners." The omnipotence of God is imposingly exhibited in the grandeur of the acts of Jesus. All nature owned His sway, Disease fled at His touch; the unconsci us elements, lashed into threatening fury, sink into repose at His command; the iron grasp of death is unloosed at the intimations of His will, and lets its captives go free; and the malignant spirits of darkness tremble at His approach, and retire at His bidding. The justice of God is magnified in His uncompromising maintenance of right; and has a special sacredness thrown over it in the consecration of Himself as the Atoning Substitute for man. The love of God appeared in Him in its richest and most tender forms. He sympathized with the suffering; shed tears of bitterness over the doomed city which was madly filling up the measure of its iniquity; implored forgiveness in behalf of His murderers in a prayer in which He showed majestic superiority to all human feeling; and so loved the world, when it letrayed its wildest enmity against Him, as to die for its redemption from sin and

death. "All the passages of beauty and tenderness in the history of His life strengthen our felt affinity and felt confidence towards God. The effect of the representation is to soften or do away the terror and the mystery of Heaven's throne. The fellow-feelings of the humanity represent the tender regards of the Godhead towards us. We look at the aspect of Christ the Mediator, and we thence take the assurance that God is still bending in compassion over us, that He is still waiting to be gracious.” *

The Incarnation presents a no less vivid representation of what man ought to be, than of what God is. In Jesus we see the unfolding of a perfect humanity, adorned with all the graces that can render the character attractive; and dignified with a purity which proclaims the high origin of man, and his intimate relation to God. In Him we have the Great Example, whose spirit we should be ever imbibing, and the whole course of whose action it should be our highest aim to imitate. The true nobility, the lofty purity, the enduring peace, the calm and beneficent existence, which God wills for man, have their embodiment and expression in Him.

This great truth is equally adapted to correct a serious delusion which has prevailed among various classes of men concerning the nature of matter, which they have regarded as essentially and radically evil in itself. They suppose that it is the oppression of the flesh that has weighed down the spirit in man; and chained it to evil by bonds which can only be melted by the dissolution of the material body. This notion obtained extensively among the wise men of heathendom in the past. The Stoics taught that it was only necessary to be superior to the claims of the body, since it was the evil residing in it which contaminated the soul. The notion passed over into the Christianity of the early ages, and gave occasion to the austerities of numerous anchorites, who vainly thought that by macerating the body, and destroying its natural appetites, they would ascend to the highest condition of purity and spirituality; instead of which, they only produced a new type of the savage. In the absence of sound Christian truth and teaching, this freak of morbid humanity has played a great role in the history of the church. The union of the Divine and the human in Jesus, when properly understood, dissipates the wretched deception. The fact that God dwelt in human flesh confers the highest honour on the material organism of humanity; assures us that perfect purity of spirit may coexist with our physical nature; and demonstrates that it is not the flesh which of necessity vitiates the spirit of man. When the soul is rendered pure, the body becomes the innocent and ministering organ of sacred pleasure. The passing into the heavens, at the ascension of Jesus, of the same body, though glorified, with which He entered

* Dr. Chalmers.

and rose from the grave, shows us that matter may be transformed, and made meet for the highest condition of existence to which the creature can be elevated. The resurrection of the body declares that sanctified matter may unite with sanctified spirit in the eternal enjoyment of God's immediate presence. Man's true aim is to cultivate purity of spirit, to exhibit that purity through the medium of his bodily nature,-to imbibe the spirit of Jesus; and then, like Him, he may be "holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners," though he remains an inhabitant of a material frame.

Though the Incarnation is clearly taught in Scripture, and was recognised by the early Church, a considerable time elapsed before the relation of the Divine and human natures in Christ was distinctly apprehended. The eye of the Church was then naturally directed to the one Person of the Great Redeemer; and it was the erratic announcements of speculative men which originated the controversies which led to the final doctrinal issue on this subject. The fact of the union of the two natures was beyond the comprehension of those who constituted their own minds the judges of what was suitable in matters of religion. The history of Jesus was well known: living men had conversed with those who had been admitted to intimate intercourse with Him. It was impossible to ignore His historic character. But His Divinity was boldly denied by the Ebionites, who maintained, in order to give some plausibility to their notions, that the Christ descended upon the man Jesus in the act of His baptism. The evidences of the true Divinity of Him who claimed to be Son of God were too conclusive to admit of its deniers becoming a numerous body. Under the influence of a human philosophy, others embraced the idea that, if He was Divine, He could not at the same time be human; and Docetism asserted that the body which He wore was not in reality a human organism, but only such in appearance. This opinion met with a decided rejection, as being opposed to the work of redemption by an actual atonement for sin. It relegated the whole of His work to a region of shadows. Apollinaris imagined that the Divinity in the Person of Jesus occupied the place of the soul in ordinary men. Clearer and more scriptural thinkers at once saw that such an idea destroyed the real humanity of Christ, by ignoring His human soul, as certainly as Docetism did by ignoring His body. Nestorius so defined and distinguished between the two natures, as almost to necessitate the admission of two Persons, and thus to destroy the personality of Christ. The opponents of this view, in their attempt to preserve the unity of the Person, confused the distinction of the natures, and were branded as Monophysites. The mutual action of the natures, as affecting the will of Christ, was also warmly discussed; and several centuries passed away before the doctrine of Christ's Person was scripturally and satisfactorily defined.