things yet remote. We may venture, however, to apply this conducting of the queen to the palace of her lord, to some remarkable assistance which the Israelites will receive from the Christian nations of the Gentile race, in their resettlement in the Holy Land; which seems to be mentioned under the very same. image by the prophet Isaiah, at the end of the eighteenth chapter, and by the prophet Zephaniah, chapter third, verse tenth; and is clearly the subject of more explicit prophecies. "Thus saith Jehovah," speaking to Zion, in the prophet Isaiah, "Behold I will lift up my hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the peoples; and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.' And in another place, "They (the Gentiles, mentioned in the preceding verse) shall bring all your brethren, for an offering unto Jehovah, out of all nations, upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem."

But the psalmist is struck with the

appear

ance of a very remarkable band which makes a part in this procession.

"She is conducted in procession to the

King.

"Virgins follow her, her companions,' "Coming unto thee:

"They are conducted in procession, with festivity and rejoicing:

66

They enter the palace of the King." These virgins seem to be different persons from the kings' daughters of the ninth verse. Those "kings' daughters" were already distinguished ladies of the monarch's own court: these virgins are introduced to it by the queen; they follow her as part of her retinue, and are introduced as her companions. The former represent, as we conceive, the churches of Gentile origin, formed and established in the period of the wife's disgrace: these virgins we take to be new churches, formed among nations not sooner called to the knowledge of the gospel and the faith in Christ, at the very season of the restoration of Israel, in whose conversion the restored Hebrew church may have a principal share. This is that fulness of the Gentiles of which St. Paul speaks as

coincident in time with the recovery of the Jews, and, in a great degree, the effect of their conversion. "Have they stumbled that they should fall?" saith the apostle, speaking of the natural Israel: "God forbid: but rather; through their fall, salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to emulation. Now, if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and their loss the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness? For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?" In these texts, the apostle clearly lays out this order of the business, in the conversion of the whole world to Christ: first, the rejection of the unbelieving Jews: then, the first call of the Gentiles: the recovery of the Jews, after a long season of obstinacy and blindness, at last provoked to emulation, brought to a right understanding of God's dispensations,.. by that very call which hitherto has been one of their stumbling-blocks: and lastly, consequence of the conversion of the Jews, a prodigious influx from the Gentile nations yet unconverted, and immersed in

in

the darkness and corruptions of idolatry; which make little less than two thirds, not of the civilized, but of the inhabited world. The churches of this new conversion seem to be the virgins, the queen's bridemaids, in the nuptial procession.

In the next verse (the sixteenth), the psalmist again addresses the queen.

Thy children shall be in the place of thy fathers;

“Thou shalt make them princes in all the earth."

Thy children shall be what thy fathers were, God's peculiar people; and shall hold a distinguished rank and character in the earth.

The psalmist closes his divine song with a distich setting forth the design and predicting the effect of his own performance.

"

I will perpetuate the remembrance of

thy name to all generations; "Insomuch that the peoples shall praise

thee for ever."

By inditing this marriage-song, he hoped to be the means of celebrating the Re

deemer's name from age to age, and of inciting the nations of the world to join in his praise. The event has not disappointed the holy prophet's expectation. His composition has been the delight of the congregations of the faithful for little less than three thousand years. For one thousand and forty, it was a means of keeping alive in the synagogue the hope of the Redeemer to come: For eighteen hundred since, it has been the means of perpetuating in Christian congregations the grateful remembrance of what has been done, -anxious attention to what is doing, and the cheering hope of the second coming of our Lord; who surely cometh to turn away ungodliness from Jacob, and to set up a standard to the nations which yet sit in darkness and the shadow of death. "He that witnesseth these things saith, Behold I come quickly. And the Spirit saith, Come! and the bride saith, Come! and let every one that heareth say, Amen! Even so! Come, Lord Jesus!"

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