Jew, who taught just fifty years before the birth of Christ, assured his students, that Christ, or the Messiah, which signifies the same thing, must certainly come at the end of those years. Nay, Zechariah, or Jeremiah (for it may be either), predicts the very number of silver pieces for which Christ should be sold by the traitor. It would be endless to quote all the prophecies in the Old Testament, which speak of, and foretell the birth, the life, the preachings, the sufferings, the miracles, the divinity of our great Redeemer. Of these prophets not a few died martyrs to Christ before he was born, and are so called by St. Stephen, who, speaking to the unbelieving Jews, saith, Acts vii. Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One, of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers.' It would also be needless in this work, which, if it shall not prevail on you to search the Scriptures for such inestimable jewels, comes to nothing, and must prove, that I am not appealing to men of common sense. Two or three observations, however, made here, may not be useless to a rational man, who hath favoured me, or rather himself, with his company and attention, so far.

In the first place, these prophecies, as preserved pure and uncorrupted by the Jews, which they all affirm, at the same time that they bear so full a testimony for our blessed Saviour, bear equal witness to the blindness and obstinacy of those Jews in rejecting him and his religion. In this they shew themselves to be but the same stupid and backsliding people they were in the days of their judges, and latter kings; and yet, in spite of themselves, become the instruments of Providence to testify, in the character of enemies to our religion, the truth and divinity of that religion.

In the next place, as many of the prophecies foretell the sufferings of Christ, and not fewer his triumphs, the Jews, fixing their ambitious eyes on the latter only, expected to be made lords of this world by the Messiah, and therefore as they beheld him only in his poverty, and heard him declare, his kingdom was not of this world,' they treated his

miracles and doctrines, as their forefathers did those of Moses and the prophets, and his person, with contempt. Yet, after all his sufferings, and his death at last, he did triumph first over them in the destruction of their nation, and over his other enemies and persecutors, as we have since seen. They knew not how to conceive the possibility of the lowest humility and distress with the noblest victories, and the highest glory, concurring in one and the same Messiah, and therefore took it into their heads, without the smallest degree of prophetical authority for so doing, that two Messiahs, one a suffering, and another a conquering Messiah, were to be expected. They had no notion that the same Messiah might suffer in a bodily or worldly sense, and triumph in a spiritual, or at different times. Much less did they imagine, that his very sufferings and death could be the triumph predicted, which in reality they were, for by his death he overcame death,' and destroyed him that had the power of death,' and 'having destroyed principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them.' You will probably be surprised when I tell you, that, to this day, the Jews allow, he wrought the miracles recorded by his evangelists, but fly to the old miserable shift of their obstinate forefathers, who saw them wrought, but said, he wrought them by the power of the devil; although in so doing they complimented the devil with the attributes of infinite goodness and power, for who of less goodness would do and suffer so much to establish a scheme of universal piety and virtue? Or who of less power could raise the dead, and raise himself to life after he had been dead?

In the third place, of all nations, it is very remarkable, that the Israelites, or the Jews were most frequently carried into captivity. Their repeated revolts from God were thus punished by his providence for this reason, I firmly believe, because, when or wherever they were thus carried by their conquerors, they soon repented of their wickedness in departing from the service of their God, soon talked to their masters of the wonders their God had wrought for them, and of their innumerable revolts, as the causes of their subjection and misery. This and their almost unhoped-for recovery of their liberty and country, could hardly fail to

spread some knowledge of the true God, and some expectation of a redeemer, among the neighbouring nations, with whom they had to do. In the Old Testament we now and then hear them twitted with this revolt by their enemies, and an expectation founded thereon of a people easily subdued, under the circumstance of infidelity to their God. Under the Babylonian captivity, in particular, God so favoured them by the wisdom given to Daniel, and by the miracles wrought for him, and for the three Jewish children, as they are called, that their liberty and return to their country were decreed by Cyrus and Artaxerxes. These things could hardly have happened without leaving some impression on the minds of their late masters in favour of that God, who could do so much, in preference to their own gods, who could do just nothing at all; and probably in favour of the redeemer, expected, and possibly mentioned by Daniel, who, while at Babylon, had by a particular revelation been made acquainted with the time of his coming, connected with, and to be computed from a certain future event in their history.

In the fourth place, not less remarkable is the history of this singular people, descended from Abraham, in regard to the great empires with which they had to do. Ambition and conquest raised the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and Roman empires to the absolute dominion of all the countries wherewith the Israelites or Jews had any concern, and of far distant countries, with which they had none, and of which they had not then the smallest knowledge. All this, I am convinced, and you, if you consider it, will be convinced, was permitted and disposed by the providence of God to unite the nations, hitherto separated in customs and language, that when his Son should arrive in this fulness of time, his religion might find a more open and easy passage among mankind, which it actually did. Thus Shalmoneser, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander, Lucullus, Pompey, and Cæsar, without knowing it, fought for Christ; and thus Isaiah, after describing the sufferings of Christ, foretold, that he should divide the spoil with the strong.' Can we now believe, that this unworthy, despicable people, the Jews, do yet survive all the great and powerful empires under which they groaned, for no provi

dential purpose? Common sense cannot so much as suppose it. They still breathe the same fury against Christ and his religion, that possessed them when they persecuted both; but at the same time, among all mankind, there are none who more effectually serve him, or promote the cause of his religion. Since the death of Jacob to this hour, they have not been more distinguished from other nations by their living apart from the rest of mankind, than by their irreligious disposition. When they crucified the Son of God, and Saviour of men, they prayed, his blood might fall upon their heads, and the heads of their children;' and hath it not, after a most frightful destruction of their temple, city, and nation, in their dispersion through all nations, and a captivity of more than seventeen hundred years, under circumstances of universal contempt and abhorrence?

Lastly, if a number of men, interested in some particular affair, are got together, as in a parliament or council, they may possibly agree on some scheme for the management of that affair, and it is as likely they will not. But howsoever this may be, common sense must call it impossible for men, living in countries considerably remote from each other, and at the distance in point of time, of more than three thousand years, to combine for the promotion of any one expedient in acting or writing; especially still, if not a few of them, had they been acquainted with that expedient, must have done all they could to defeat it. It may here be objected, that men, acquainted with it, and wishing well to its prosperity, might have successively endeavoured to promote it. True, but not, if they were ignorant both of it, and its end; much less if they were enemies to that end. Such exactly hath been the case of the means and expedients made use of to bring about our happy redemption. These means were set on foot immediately after the fall, by a promise to the first man in words of double interpretation, that his seducer might not see into their purport. It was worded in general terms also, when renewed to Abraham and Moses. If from this dawn, it rose to still clearer and clearer lights in David, and onward to Malachi through all the prophets, the death of the Redeemer, and his victorious successes, were always so intermixed as to leave enough for the completion to clear up. Some very few of the Hebrews, to whom these pro

phecies were intrusted, saw into the grand design. The devil and the rest did not. That he did not, is, I think, intelligible from the confession of such evil spirits as Christ dispossessed, whom he would not suffer to proceed in that confession, lest it should discredit his mission, and from the change of the devil's measures, who failing in this attempt, still made use of by the Scribes and Pharisees, had recourse to persecution and murder, wherein he was aided by Judas, Caiaphas, Pilate, Jews, and Romans, all ignorantly acting on motives of infernal malice, but at the same time promoting the great atonement. Behold how good and bad men, friends, enemies, and devils, were all employed in offering up the great sacrifice and atonement for the sins of mankind. What then produced the uniformity of this mysterious work, so long pursued, and by so many different actors? It must have been one mind, and that infinitely the wisest and best of all minds.

In this chain of references to Moses and the prophets, I have, with due humility, followed the example of Christ, who, in his walk to Emmaus, expounded to two of his disciples, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, in all the Scriptures,' then in being, the things concerning himself.' In doing this, I trust I have not departed from his method, when I so often endeavoured to turn your eyes on the neighbouring nations, wherewith the Israelites were concerned, since, to me at least, it was impossible to render the prophecies, and historical transactions, recorded in those Scriptures, intelligible to you, without pointing to you the light of divine revelation, reflected, though dimly, from those adjacent nations, as that of a candle from the walls of a room, in which it is placed. To this end, I but repeat the very words of Christ, when I say to you, Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me.' It hath been my endeavour to shew you, what you may see with your own eyes, that the Scriptures of the Old Testament did continually, for near four thousand years, bear testimony to him, and do still in the most full and ample manner, as do now likewise those of the New.

The Jews, from their return out of Babylonia to their own country, never departed from the worship of the true God, nor his law; but so far from the latter only, as their learned