Jehovah is upon all the heathen,” saith Isaiah," and his fury upon all their armies. He hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter; and the mountains shall be melted down in their blood.” The prophet Ezekiel summons all ravenous birds, and all beasts of prey,

to assemble and come to the slaughter which Jehovah should make for them,-a great slaughter on the mountains of Israel, (the stage, as it should seem, of Antichrist's last exploits, and of his excision); and ye shall eat flesh and drink blood. The flesh of warriors ye shall eat, and the blood of the princes of the earth ye shall drink. Ye shall eat fat till ye be cloyed, and drink blood till ye be drunken (the fat and the blood) of the slaughter which I have made for you.” In the Apocalypse, when the Son of God comes forth, to make an end of the beast and the false prophet, and of the armies of kings their confederates, an angel standing in the sun “cries with a loud voice to

a all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together to the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all, freemen and slaves, both small and great.” Men of all conditions, it seems, will be united in the impious coalition, to make war against the irresistible conqueror on the white horse, and his army, and will be involved in the great destruction. In a former vision, relating to the same subject, St. John had seen the “great wine-press of God's wrath trodden; and the blood came out of the winepress even unto the horses' bridles."

Such terrible things will be; and if the psalmist had spoken explicitly of terrible things, I should think an allusion was indeed intended to those scenes of terror, yet future, which, however, in the appointed season, must overtake the wicked world. But as terrible things

a

are not of necessity included in the import of his words, which goes not necessarily farther than “wonderful,”

“ and as he mentions those wonderful things before the thread of his prophecy is brought down to the second advent, the season of those exploits of terror, it becomes us to be cautious how we force a sense upon the psalmist's words which might not be intended by him, or rather by the inspiring Spirit. It will be safer to rest in those wonderful things which actually came to pass within the period he is yet upon, and were undoubtedly brought about by Messiah's power, as the true accom. plishment of this part of the prophecy. The suppression of idolatry in the Roman empire, and the establishment of the Christian church upon its ruins, was an event the most wonderful in the history of the Gentile world, to which nothing but the power of God was adequate, and comes up to the whole necessary import of the psalmist's expressions.

The war of this period of the prophecy is finished: the battles have been fought, and the victory is gained. The psalmist; in the two next verses, the sixth and seventh, exhibits the king seated on the throne of his Mediatorial kingdom, and governing with perfect justice. He addresses him as God, whose throne is everlasting, and sceptre straight; as a monarch, whose heart is set upon righteousness, whose antipathy is wickedness. 6. Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever;

"A straight sceptre is the sceptre of thy royalty. 7. “ Thou hast loved righteousness and hated wick

edness; Therefore God hath anointed thee, thy own God, “ With the oil of gladness above thy fellows." It was shown, in my first discourse upon this psalm, how inapplicable this address is to Solomon; and it is obvious, that it is equally inapplicable to any earthly monarch: for of no throne but God's can it be affirmed with truth, that it is for ever and ever; of no king, but of God and of his Christ, it can be said, that he loves righteousness with a perfect love, and hates wickedness with a perfect hate, of no sceptre, but the sceptre of God and of his Christ, that it is a straight sceptre. The sceptre has been, from the earliest ages, a badge of royalty. It was originally nothing more than a straight slender rod, studded sometimes for ornament with little nails of gold. It was an emblem of the perfect integrity of the monarch in the exercise of his power, both by himself and by his ministers, inflexibly adhering to the straight line of right and justice, as a mason or carpenter to his rule. The perfection of the emblem consisted in the straightness of the stick; for every thing else was ornament. The straightness, therefore, ascribed by the psalmist to Messiah's sceptre, is to be understood of the invariable justice of the administration of his government. Now, certainly there have been many kings, both in ancient and in modern times, to whom the praise is due of a cordial regard in general to righteousness, and of a settled principle of dislike to wickedness, many who, in the exercise of their authority, and the measures of their government, have been generally directed by that just sense of right and wrong: but yet kings are not exempt from the frailties of human nature; the very best of them are, at least in an equal degree with other good men, liable to the surprises of the pas. sions, and the seductions of temptation ; insomuch, that that predominant love of righteousness and hatred of iniquity, maintaining an absolute ascendancy in the mind, in all times, and upon all occasions, which the psalmist attributes to his heavenly King, has belonged to none that ever wore an earthly crown; much less is the perfect straightness of the sceptre, a perfect conformity to the rule of right, to be found in the practice and ex. ecution of the governments of the world. It will hap

pen, in namberless instances, and from an infinite complication of causes, all reducible to the general head of the infirmity of human nature, and the depraved state of fallen man,-from an endless multiplicity of causes it will happen, that the government of the very best king will, in execution, fall far short of the purity of the king's intentions, and this in governments that are ever so well administered : for, if we suppose every one of those who are put in authority under him to be as upright in their intentions as we have supposed the king himself to be -- which must appear a very large and liberal supposition, if we consider the variety of departments into which the administration of any great government must necessarily be divided, and the great number of persons that must be employed in the affairs of each separate department, but if we make the supposition, that all the officers, from the highest to the lowest, in all the departments, are as good as men can be, still they will be men, and, as men, liable every one of them to error and deception; and, for this reason, they will often fail in the execution, in what they mean to do the best. This gives no colour to the detestable principle, propagated from democratic France over the Continent of Europe, of what is profanely called “the sacred right of insurrection;" nor to similar doctrines broached by sectarian teachers in our own country. It is merely the ivant of perfection in human nature, of which government and governors, with all things and with all persons liuman, must partake. Still, with all these imperfections, government is the source of the highest blessings to mankind; insomuch, that the very worst government is preferable to a state of anarchy: and for this reason, the peaceable submission of the subject to the very worst of kings, is one of the most peremptory precepts of Christianity. But I contend, that the perfect undeviating rectitude of intention, and the perfect justice of ad. ministration, of which the psalmist speaks, cannot be ascribed, without impiety, to any earthly monarch.

The throne of God, whether we understand it of God's natural dominion over the whole creation, or more particularly of his providential government of the moral world, or, in a still more restricted sense, of Christ's Mediatorial kingdom, is everlasting; and the government, both in the will of the governor and in the execution, is invariably good and just. But the kingdom of the God-man is in this place intended. This is evident from what is said in the seventh verse: “God, even thine own God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows;" i. e. God hath advanced thee to a state of bliss and glory above all those whom thou hast vouchsafed to call thy fellows. It is said too, that the love of righteousness and hatred of wickedness is the cause that God hath so anointed him, who yet, in the sixth verse, is himself addressed as God. It is ma. nifest, that these things can be said only of that person in whom the Godhead and the manhood are united, in whom the human nature is the subject of the unction, and the elevation to the Mediatorial kingdom is the reward of the man Jesus: for, in his divine nature, Christ being equal with the Father, is incapable of any exaltation. Thus, the unction with the oil of gladness, and the elevation above his fellows, characterize the ipanhood, and the perpetual stability of the throne, and the unsullied justice of the government, declare the Godhead. It is therefore with the greatest propriety that this text is applied to Christ, in the epistle to the Hebrews, and made an argument of his divinity; not by any forced accommodation of words which, in the mind of the author, related to another subject, but, according to the true intent and purpose of the psalmist, and the li. teral sense and only consistent'exposition of his words,