and

in the flesh; and this I shall do in the very words of inspiration, wherein the example of Christ's love and humility is proposed for our imitation, and the consequent glories of his exaltation are made a pledge and instance of our reward: "Let this mind be in you,” says St Paul to the Philippians, "which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a Name which is above every name; that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

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SERMON VII.

SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE, WAS CRUCIFIED

DEAD.

ACTS iv. 26, 27, 28.-The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.

THE subsequent lot of that Divine Person, who, in the lowest earthly obscurity, but surrounded by the tokens of a heavenly interest and interference, was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary, contradicted not these most unequal presages. Whatever was weak and painful in his first reception of the breath of life, in the earliest nourishment of his human frame, was soon succeeded by the utmost bitterness of scorn and enmity, and was terminated only by ignominy, violence, tortures, and death. And as all might see the child in his weakness lying in

the manger, so was his after lowliness and woe visible to all alike—to those who did but look on his fragile form and marred visage; as well as to those who, with the hardihood and recklessness of thoughtless or malicious cruelty, beat him on the face, or crowned his head with thorns, or pierced his hands and his feet, or thrust the spear into his side. Even his friends, (unless, indeed, standing afar off, or forsaking him in his utmost need, they avoided the sight,) were not spared the pain of beholding the sad signs of his weakness and suffering; nor forbidden to learn the reality of his wants by their success in relieving them: to them also were manifest the sorrow which overwhelmed him, and the agonies which he endured; and while they prepared his body for the burial, their pious tears flowed afresh, as they beheld the questionless proof of his suffering humanity. While those, out of whom Jesus had cast devils, and to whom he had restored a brother from the grave, were thus witnessing and relieving his sufferings or mourning over his corpse; while a sword pierced the side of her who bare him; it was, to the external sense, as if he who had saved others could not save himself, but had been left forsaken of his God, to suffer and to die, helpless and hopeless.

But while the germs of weakness and of pain had thus ripened into the bitter fruits of contempt and persecution, and been pressed into a last cup of ignominy and death; whatever was great and glorious in the promise of the child's miraculous conception, and

of his birth, with all its attendant circumstances, was not less fully justified by the event. His sufferings, as well as the presages of his sufferings, being externally visible, had been seen by all; while that glory whose precursive splendour had been seen by few, was by a few only fully recognised and thus, equally in its perfect manifestation to the faithful, and in its partial obscuration from the wicked, did the future glory of Jesus fulfil its early promise: and what had been foreshewn not to all alike, but to the ever blessed Virgin and to her holy spouse; to the just attendants on the services of the Lord's house; to the devout shepherds in the field; and to the Magi worshipping in the East, was fulfilled in the eyes of those who in heart were prepared to receive the revelation of God manifest in the flesh. For though, indeed, his very gainsayers must have seen and confessed his miracles, or they could not have attributed them to Beelzebub; although, while he spake as never man spake, his divine power and wisdom put to silence his captious interrogators; although the darkening of the sun, and the shaking of the earth, and the rending of the temple's veil, could not be unnoted by the faithless, nor, even by the cunning of a crafty priesthood, be tortured into a mark of divine approval to themselves; yet certainly it was to those who kept all these things and pondered them in their heart, that the glories of Jesus were most fully manifested, even in those things which were externally manifest to all alike; while they alone, in

other and more stupendous signs of his glorious nature and office, "saw his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

These reflections seem to belong peculiarly to that part of our Saviour's earthly career which we recount in the fourth article of the Apostles' Creed; Jesus Christ SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE, WAS CRUCIFIED, AND DIED: for no where is Jesus more manifestly the "man of sorrows;" no where is he more truly the Lord of life and glory, than at his crucifixion, and in the events immediately preceding and subsequent. While those sorrows and sufferings, which are the fulfilment of the presages of his misery, are here external and manifest to all alike; that majesty, which is equally fulfilling the promises of his glory, is rendered clear as the day to those who compare his very sufferings with the comment afforded by the text. Throughout the whole of the eventful scenes at Gethsemane, in the judgment hall, on Calvary, the very beings, men and Satan, who least thought to do him honour, were hurried on with strange fatuity to the fulfilment of his intentions, and to the acceleration of their own ruin: while every additional circumstance of indignity that they devised, and in the short moments of an apparent triumph executed, did but the more clearly expose their folly, and illustrate his sovereignty. Looking, in these events, beyond the agency of creatures to the purposes of God, we find the former as certainly subservient as if angels and men were necessary instead of