to Christ. We shall consider it as containing descriptions,

metaphorical undoubtedly, but not the less comforting and instructive, of what the Redeemer is to the Church; and dismissing all regard to kings or kingdoms, which may have prefigured the sovereignty of Jesus, shall examine only how this man is "as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

Now the first thing, which may justly strike you as remarkable in this description of Christ, is the emphasis which seems laid on the word "man." "A man" shall be this or that; and Bishop Lowth renders it, “the man,” as if He were man in distinction from any other, which is, indeed, St. Paul's statement, when he thus writes to the Corinthians: "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven." As though there had never been but two men-the first Adam and the second-every other, as having been born in sin, and the heir of death, appearing to the Apostle undeserving the name. The verse, preceding our text, runs thus: "Behold a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment." But this mention of a king, and of princes, only makes more memorable the mention of "a man:" there is the more evident design of fixing attention on the fact of its being a man, who was to bear certain offices, or perform certain deeds; as if we were likely to overlook this fact, or, at all events, to lay on it less stress than it was intended to bear. You readily perceive, that, if the prediction had been, " And this king shall be as a hidingplace from the wind," it would not only have seemed to follow more naturally on the foregoing verse, but, by

keeping up the mention of royalty, would have suggested an agency adequate perhaps to the great things predicted. Whereas, by suddenly changing the title, by dropping the king, and speaking merely of the man, the Prophet must be considered as directing us especially to the truth, that the king should be a man; yea, and that it should be in consequence of his manhood, that He would prove Himself a hiding-place and a covert.

There is thus, in the prediction before us, when applied to Christ, the strongest possible assertion of the human nature of Christ, and of its being that nature which renders Him a Saviour suited to our wants. There is no exclusion of the great doctrine of the divinity of Christ; rather, by changing the title of a king for that of a man, the Prophet may be considered as expressing a fear, that we might dwell on Christ as divine, till we came comparatively to forget Him as human: what need to remind us so emphatically of the king being man, if He were nothing more than man, if He were not also God, and therefore likely, in this his higher nature, to draw off unduly attention from Him in his lower? But whilst it is thoroughly consistent with the truth of Christ's divinity, that his humanity should be so explicitly mentioned-nay, whilst so explicit a mention may even be taken as an argument for our Lord's having been the Son of God, as well as the Son of man-there can be no debate that it is the humanity of Christ, to which our text gives the prominence, that it is this humanity to which seems ascribed the suitableness of Christ for the offices prophetically assigned. Before, therefore, we examine these offices in detail, we ought to pause on the fact of our Lord's being man, and

consider its indispensableness to the whole scheme of our redemption.

And this indispensableness is quickly perceived, forasmuch as what our blessed Saviour undertook was the reconciliation of our offending nature to God; and this, it is perhaps hardly too much to say, could not have been effected in any nature but itself. In the nature which had sinned, must suffering be endured and obedience perfected; otherwise, so far as we can see, there could have been no satisfaction made to the violated law: that law, having been imposed upon man, and broken by man, must have had demands against man which no angel, no being acting in any other nature but that of man, would seem to have been capable of answering. We do not, of course, mean that any mere man could have made satisfaction to justice on our behalf: it was the divine nature in the person of Christ, which gave infinite worth to the endurances of the human, and made the single sacrifice immeasurably more than a ransom for the world: but we do not see (though let us speak with all humility on such mysterious things) how the junction of the divine nature with, for example, the angelic, in the person of the Redeemer, would have qualified Him to act as our surety: what was done and suffered in the angelic nature might have procured the reconciliation of fallen angels to God, but could have had no discoverable connection with that of fallen man. It is then the fact, that the eternal "Word was made flesh," that He who was "the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of his person," consented to be born, in the fulness of time, of a pure virgin, and thus to be "found in fashion as a man," on which we ground

our confidence that the curse is removed, that we are no longer necessarily under condemnation, but that God is willing to welcome us, as the father welcomed back his prodigal son. Forasmuch as He was man, I can feel of the Mediator, that He suffered and obeyed in my. stead: I have found a being who, in regard of God and of myself, is what Job, in the infancy of Revelation, seems vainly to have sought for, pathetically exclaiming, "Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, who might lay his hand upon us both."

And, of course, if it be indispensable to the general scheme of Redemption that the Mediator should be man, you cannot take, as our text does, detached parts, or separate views of the work, without bringing in Christ's manhood as essential to each. He must have been man, in order to his making the atonement: and He must have been man, in order to his entering into all our wants, understanding our circumstances, and having a fellow feeling with us in our infirmities. And we need hardly point out to you, that, in giving such prominence to the fact of Christ's manhood, our text not only insists on that without which the Gospel could not meet our necessities, but exhibits the feature which, of all others, is adapted to comfort and encourage us. The weak and the sinful, like ourselves, shrink, and must shrink, from absolute Deity. So soon at least as we become convinced of our wickedness and danger, there is so thorough a feeling of the vast distance at which we stand from God, and the barrier interposed by his righteous and immutable attributes, and of the necessity that He be always "a consuming fire" to the rebellious and unholy, that, to tell us of our Creator,

and not to tell us of our Mediator, is but to cover us with confusion, or to drive us to despair. It is the man who is still spiritually blind, who can think without apprehension of God, or regard Him as a Being to be approached and entreated. Where the spiritual eyesight has been in any measure purged, God will be viewed as terrible in his majesty, a Being whose holiness renders Him so awfully inaccessible to the sinful, that it were even better to attempt the fleeing from his presence, than to dare the endeavouring to address Him with petition. And if there had been made to us a Revelation, that God was willing to receive and pardon the penitent, no specification being given as to the nature of the arrangement, but the simple fact being stated that the Almighty could and would forgive, indeed it may be doubted whether they, who most longed for reconciliation, would have ventured on the seeking it; whether the tremendousness of having to address themselves to a Being, whose very nature armed Him for their utter destruction, would not have overpowered the encouragement derived from the gracious but indefinite communication.

How different is it now, when there is a daysman, a Mediator, betwixt us and God. There is no diminished representation of the divine holiness or justice. God is not made to appear less fearful in his attributes. But it is a man to whom we have to flee, a man to whom we may address ourselves, a man, with all a man's sympathy, and all a man's experience-oh, how can the sinner fear to come to the Saviour, when that Saviour can be "touched with the feeling of our infirmities," having been "tempted in all points, like as we are, yet without sin?" I do not