So much for the offensive weapons, the sword and the arrows. But the defensive armour demands our attention; for it has its use, no doubt, in the Messiah's war. His person, you will remember, is clad, in the third verse, "with refulgent dazzling armour." This may be understood of whatever is admirable and amiable in the external form and appearance of the Christian religion. First, the character of Jesus himself; his piety towards God - his philanthropy towards man-his meekness, humility, ready forgiveness of injuries, patient endurance of pain and death. Secondly, the same light of good works shining, in a less degree, in the lives of his disciples, particularly the apostles and blessed martyrs. Thirdly, whatever is decent and seemly in the government, the discipline, and the rites of the church. All these things, as they tend to draw the admiration and conciliate the good-will of men, and mitigate. the malice of the persecutor, are aptly.represented under the image of the Messiah's defensive armour, and had a principal share in the effect of making peoples "fall under him."

It yet remains to be explained what is meant, in the psalmist's detail of the Messiah's war, by those "wonders" which "his own right hand was to show him."

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Thy own right hand shall show thee

wonders."

Our public translation has it “terrible things." But the notion of terror is not of necessity included in the sense of the original word, as it is used by the sacred writers: It is sometimes, indeed, applied by them to frightful things; but it is also applied, with great latitude, to things extraordinary in their kind, grand, admirable, amazing, awful,—although they should not be frightful. We have no right, therefore, to take it in the strict sense of "frightful," unless something in the context points to that meaning; which is not the case in this passage. And accordingly, instead of "terrible," we find in some of the oldest English Bibles the better-chosen word " wonderful."

Now the "wonderful things" which Messiah's "own right hand" showed him, I take to be the overthrow of the Pagan

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superstition, in the Roman empire and other great kingdoms of the world, by the mere preaching of the gospel, seconded by the exemplary lives and the miracles of the first preachers, and by their patient endurance of imprisonment, torture, and death, for the sake of Christ. It was, indeed, a wonderful thing, wrought by Christ's single arm, when his religion prevailed over the whole system of idolatry, supported as it was by the authority of sovereigns, by the learning of philosophers, and most of all, by the inveterate prejudices of the vulgar, attached to their false gods, by the gratification which their very worship afforded to the sensual passions, and by the natural partiality of mankind in favour of any system, however absurd and corrupt, sanctioned by a long antiquity. It was a wonderful thing, when the Devil's kingdom, with much of its invisible power, lost at once the whole of its external pomp and splendour, when silence being imposed on his oracles, and spells and enchantments divested of their power, the idolatrous worship which by those engines of deceit had been universally established, and for ages

supported, notwithstanding the antiquity of its institutions, and the bewitching gayety and magnificence of its festivals, fell into neglect, when its cruel and lascivious rites, so long holden in superstitious veneration, on a sudden became the objects of a just and general abhorrence, when the unfrequented temples, spoiled of their immense treasures, sunk in ruins, and the images, stript of their gorgeous robes and costly jewels, were thrown into the Tyber, or into the common receptacles of filth and ordure: It was a wonderful thing, when the minds of all men took a sudden turn, kings became the nursing fathers of the church, statesmen courted her alliance, philosophy embraced her faith, and even the sword was justly drawn in her defence.

These were the "wonderful things" effected by Christ's right hand; and in these this part of the psalmist's prophecy has received its accomplishment. Less than this his words cannot mean; and to more than this they cannot with any certainty be extended, since these things satisfy all that is of necessity involved in his expressions.

If his expressions went of necessity to "terrible things," or were determined to that meaning by the context, insomuch that the inspired author could be understood to speak, not of things simply wonderful, but wonderful in the particular way of being frightful, an allusion, in that case, might easily be supposed to what is indeed the explicit subject of many other prophecies,

the terrible things to be achieved by the Messiah's own right hand, in the destruction of Antichrist and the slaughter of his armies, in the latter ages. The word of prophecy forewarns us, and we have lived to see the season of the accomplishment set in, that the apostate faction will proceed to that extreme of malice and impiety as to levy actual war against the nations professing Christianity: And after much suffering of the faithful, and bloody struggles of the contending parties, our Lord himself will come from heaven, visibly and in person, to effect the deliverance of his servants, and with his own arm cut off the antichristian armies with tremendous slaughter. This is represented in the prophecies under images that can be understood of nothing but the