the evidence in favor of Christianity possesses in common with the evidence of all the principles of natural and revealed relig ion,-in common, indeed, with the evidence of much historical and of all moral truth. I know of no obligation which the Divinity can be considered as under, to accompany any revelation he may be pleased to make with such a kind of measure of evidence as shall compel the assent of all to whom it is addressed. It is surely enough if it bring along with it such a kind of measure of evidence as is sufficient to satisfy the candid inquiring mind; and he who is aware of the nature, extent, and power of human depravity and Jewish prejudice; of the spiritual, pure, and humbling character of the doctrines of Jesus; of the entire revolution in character and conduct, in thought, feeling, and action, which the enlightened and cordial reception of these doc trines involved; and of the serious sacrifice of worldly interest, in every view of it, which such a reception inferred on the part of the Jewish believer-will by no means be surprised that, in opposition to the strongest evidence of a moral kind, many of his countrymen should have rejected him; and will rather be disposed, with the writers of the New Testament, to trace it to supernatural influence, that any of them in these circumstances cordially received him. Though to an intelligent, well-informed, reflecting mind, there is thus in the rejection of our Lord by the great body of his countrymen nothing unaccountable, and, indeed, nothing wonderful, but that depth of moral depravity which it implies, of which we may well say, "Were not this common, would it not be strange? the Jews, in reality, having done nothing but what any portion of unregenerate men in any country or any age would have done, if placed in similar circumstances; yet still, to superficial thinkers, and the great majority of mankind belong to that class, the fact of our Lord's rejection by his countrymen does wear the appearance of a formidable objection against the divinity of his mission; or, at any rate, against the sufficiency of the evidence by which his claim to such a mission was sought to be established. On such persons the satisfactory argument, the outline of which we have just traced, can make little impression. They have neither the information, nor the habits of thought, that are requisite to master it; and in many cases they are little disposed to devote to their acquisition the necessary time and mental labor. To such persons it may, perhaps, be of more use to turn their attention to the palpable and demonstrable fact, that the rejection of the Messiah by the great body of his countrymen was the subject of very distinct prediction by the Old Testament prophets; and that therefore the universal reception of Jesus by the Jews, which they insist on as the most satisfactory evidence of his Di 1 Young. vine mission, would have been, in the circumstances of the case, clear proof that he was not, that he could not be,-he who, though coming in the name of the Lord to save, was to be "despised and rejected of men," "a reproach of men, and despised of the people." What they hold to be necessary to prove his Divine mission, would have, indeed, completely disproved it. Numerous are the passages "in the volume of the book" of prophecy, in which the Messiah is represented as a sufferer, a sufferer from his own countrymen; and therefore no conclusion can be more direct than this: Had Jesus not suffered, suffered from his countrymen, he could not have been the Messiah.' Thus, what at first view to superficial minds seems a presumption against Christianity, on close examination assumes the form of a conclusive argument in its favor. When the heathens in the first ages of Christianity, urged, as they probably did, the unbelief of the Jews as an objec tion against the truth of that religion, its primitive teachers had but to point them to the Old Testament prophets, and say, ""Thus it was written, that Christ should suffer;" and had he not suffered, had he not thus suffered, we should have had one argument fewer that he was indeed the Christ; nay, we should have wanted the means of giving symmetry and completeness to our moral demonstration, that in Jesus "we have found him of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets did write." The answer would have been a satisfactory and unanswerable one, and the reply is as appropriate to the modern sceptic or infidel as to the ancient heathen. It may well appear strange and lamentable, that when the Messiah came to his own territories, his own people did not receive him, and that his wonderful and gracious miracles made so little impression on them; but the more strange an event is, it is the more surprising that it should be predicted; and the exactness of the fulfilment of the prediction, tends the more to remove every suspicion of imposture from a considerate mind. It is a striking consideration, that, in their very rejection of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, his unbelieving countrymen were unconsciously furnishing additional evidence that he was indeed the person they denied him to be. What a wonderful illustration of the Psalmist's devout reflection, "Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee!" I have been led into this train of remark by noticing that the evangelist John, in that interesting paragraph to which I am about to call your attention, finds in the Old Testament predictions, respecting the rejection of the Messiah by his countrymen, an antidote to such suspicions, as the fact of our Lord's rejection, taken by itself, might not unnaturally suggest; and shows that what seemed fitted to shake into dissolution the whole magnificent fabric of our Lord's claims, in reality but settles it more immovably on its solid foundation. 2 The paragraph, though an unusually long one, has one subject -the ministry of our Lord. It brings this ministry before our minds in its details and in its results:-its details, in the message 2 Εἰς τὰ ἴδια. 3 Οἱ ἴδιοι, he delivered, and the credentials he presented; the claims he made, and the vouchers he exhibited; the doctrine he taught, and the evidence he gave of its truth;-its results, in the hardened disbelief of the great body of his countrymen, and the cowardly silence of the small minority who were constrained inwardly to admit the justice of his claims, and the force of the evidence in their support; the first of these strange results, the hardened unbelief of the multitude, being accounted for by that blindness of mind and hardness of heart which had been the subject of Old Testament prophecy; and the second, the dastardly concealment of conviction, on the part of a portion of the better informed and upper classes, by that worldly-mindedness which leads men to prefer the suggestions of interest to the dictates of conscience, and the praise of men to the approbation of God; while in both these results, so melancholy in themselves, so threatening in their aspect, to the final success of the christian cause, and so different from what we might have been disposed to anticipate, is found, when viewed in the light of ancient oracles, a corroboration of the claims which they seemed calculated to invalidate. This is the substance of the paragraph, and the remaining part of the lecture will be occupied in the development of the various important thoughts which are folded up in the abstract I have endeavored to give of its contents. The paragraph itself is of a peculiar, I had almost said unique, structure and character. The history of our Lord's public ministry is closed. It terminates in the verse immediately preceding our text. The account of his private interviews with his friends, previously to his passion, is about to commence. It begins with the 1st verse of the following chapter. One scene in the eventful history is closed; another is about to open. The curtain is, as it were, falling before the theatre on which the public acts of Jesus were performed, and the evangelist is about to conduct us into the sacred circle of his disciples, and communicate to us the instructive, sublime, consoling conversations which the Redeemer, full of love, had with them before his final departure.* But before he does this, he makes a pause in the narrative, and, as it were, looks back and around; and, in the paragraph before us, presents us in a few sentences with a brief but very comprehensive view of all that our Lord had taught and done during the course of his public ministry, and of the effects which his discourses and miracles had produced on the minds of the great body of his countrymen; connecting with this an equally brief but satisfactory account of the true cause why such doctrines, accompanied by such evidence, instead of being universally received and openly professed, had been generally discredited; and why conviction, even where it had been reluctantly yielded, had been unworthily concealed, "held," to use the apostle's striking expression," "held," confined "in unright eousness." Such pauses in the narrative, such interposed brief 4 Tholuck. 5 Ἐν ἀδικία κατεχόντων. Rom. i. 18. reviews (resumés, as the French call them), are not uncommon among profane historians. This is, I believe, the only instance of the kind in the evangelical history, and I do not recollect more than two instances of a similar kind in the Old Testament history-the short reviews given, by the inspired writers of the Second Book of Kings, and the Second Book of Chronicles, of the history of God's mercies to Israel and Judah, and of their ingratitude and disobedience, previously to entering on the narrative of the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, in which this ingratitude and disobedience found merited punishment. Instead of examining exegetically the verses as they stand, I shall take up in succession the two great subjects which they bring before our minds, our Lord's ministry and its consequences; or, to speak more accurately perhaps, the two aspects of the one great object they present to us, THE MINISTRY OF OUR LORD IN ITS DETAILS AND IN ITS RESULTS. The following is the account of the DETAILS of our Lord's ministry, his words and his works. We are told what he said. We have a very condensed abridgment of his doctrine from the 44th to the 50th verses. We are told how he said it." "He cried and said," he said it publicly, earnestly, and fearlessly. We are told what he did, verse 37.' He did miracles, great miracles, many great miracles, and he did them publicly, "before them." This is the accouut of our Lord's ministry in its details. This was his message, these his credentials, these were his claims, these his vouchers. This was his doctrine, and this the evidence in support of it. As to its RESULTS, we are told (verses 37-41), that the great body of those who heard his doctrines and witnessed his miracles, did not believe on him, and their unbelief is accounted for; and we are informed (verses 42, 43), that a considerable portion of the chief rulers were convinced of the justice of his claims, but declined to ackowledge them, and their unworthy cowardice is also accounted for. 1. OF THE DETAILS OF OUR LORD'S MINISTRY. Let us first, then, consider the view here given us of the details of our Lord's ministry. Our attention is here called to three things: the doctrines he taught; the manner in which he taught them; and the miracles by which he confirmed them. 1. The doctrines he taught. The summary of his doctrines is as follows: "He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him who sent me; and he that seeth me, seeth him that sent me. I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me, should not abide in 62 Kings xvii. 7-23. 2 Chron. xxxvi. 14-17. 7 Πάντκ, as Luke has it, ὧν ἤρξατο ὁ Ἰησοῦς ποιεῖν τε καὶ διδάσκειν. 8 Έκραξε καὶ εἶτεν. 9 Τοσαῦτα σημεία πεποίηκε, ἔμπροσθεν αὐτῶν. darkness; and if any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day: for I have not spoken of myself, but the Father which hath sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say and what I should speak. And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak." That these words are not the record of a statement made consecutively by our Lord on some particular occasion, but an abridged statement by the evangelist of our Lord's doctrines, in his own words, uttered at different times and on different occasions, seems all but absolutely certain. At the 36th verse we are told, that, having uttered the impressive words contained in that and the preceding verse, "he departed," apparently finally, refraining henceforth from all public intercourse with his unbelieving countrymen, "and hid himself" from them. The words before us cannot without extreme violence be considered either as having been uttered immediately after those recorded in the 35th and 36th verses, before he retired finally from public intercourse with the Jews, or as having been spoken to his disciples in private. Nothing can be more unnatural than to suppose, that after John had recorded a discourse which seems to come to a natural close, and then stated that, on having said these things, Jesus departed and hid himself, and then entered on an account of the reasons of the little success of our Lord's ministry-nothing can be more unnatural than to suppose he should then introduce, without any intimation, what had formed the concluding part of our Lord's discourse; nothing can be more unnatural than this, except to hold the second supposition, that it is to a private communication to his disciples that the evangelist applies the words, "Jesus cried, and said." Considered as a summary of our Lord's doctrine, they are just what was to be expected, in such a brief retrospective view of our Lord's ministry, as (after Morus, who has been fol lowed by Tittmann, Kuinoel, and Tholuck) we have endeavored to show that paragraph to be. In this case the aorist" has the sense of the pluperfect. These sentences, uttered, probably often, by our Lord at different times, and in various circumstances, contain in them the sum and substance of all that He taught. They will be found, on examination, to teach the divinity of his mission; the divinity of his doctrine; the divinity of his person; the design of his mission` -to save; the manner in which individuals are to be interested in his salvation-by believing in him; and the final doom of those who, refusing to believe in him, necessarily exclude themselves from all interested in his salvation. These, according to this abstract made by the evangelist, as we apprehend, in the very words 10 “Epiphonema totius historie.”—GROTIUS. "Epicrisis Generalis."-BENGEL 11 Έκραξεν. |