have been much divided. Some have imagined that a new personage is introduced; that the King's wife is, as I have all along maintained, the figure of the Hebrew church; but that this "daughter of the king" is the Christian church in general, composed of Jews and Gentiles indiscriminately, considered as the daughter of the King Messiah by his Hebrew queen. This was Martin Luther's notion. Others have thought that the wife is th Hebrew church by itself, and the daughter the church of the Gentiles by itself. But neither of these explanations are perfectly consistent with the imagery of this psalm. Far to be preferred is the exposition of the late learned and pious Bishop Horne, who rejects the notion of the introduction of a new personage, and observes, "that the connexion between Christ and his spouse unites in itself every relation and every affection." She is, therefore, daughter, wife, and sister, all in one. The same seems to have been the notion of a learned Dominican of the seventeenth century, who remarks that the Empress Julia, in the legends of some ancient coins, is called the daughter of Augustus, whose wife she was.

But, with much general reverence for the opinions of these learned commentators, I am persuaded that the stops have been misplaced in the Hebrew manuscripts, by the Jewish critics, upon the last revision of the text,—that translators have been misled by their false division of the text, and expositors misled by translators. The stops being rightly placed, the Hebrew words give this sense:

"She is all glorious"

She, the consort of whom we have been speaking, is glorious in every respect—

"Daughter of a king!"

That is, she is a princess born (by which title she is saluted in the Canticles): she is glorious, therefore, for her high birth. She is, indeed, of high and heavenly extraction! She may say of herself, collectively, what the apostle has taught her sons to say individually, "Of his own

will begat he us with the word of his truth." Accordingly, in the Apocalypse, the bride, the Lamb's wife, is "the holy Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God." The Psalmist goes on:

"Her inner garment is bespangled with gold;

Her upper garment is embroidered with the needle."

These two lines require little comment. The spangles of gold upon the consort's inner garment, are the same thing with the standard gold of Ophir, of the ninth verse,--the invaluable treasure with which the church is endowed, with the custody and distribution of which she is entrusted. The embroidery of her upper garment is, whatever there is of beauty in her external form, her discipline, and her rites.

The Psalmist adds:

"She is conducted in procession to the King."

Our Public translation has simply, "She is brought;" but the original word implies the pomp and conduct of a public procession. The greatest caution is requisite in attempting to interpret, in the detail of circumstances, the predictions of 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, chap. iii. 10, 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 appearance 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;
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, in consequence of the conversion of the Jews, a prodigious influx from the Gentile nations yet unconverted, and immersed 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 Redeemer'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 of 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!"

SERMON VIII.

This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ;-not by water only, but by water and blood.-I JOHN v. 9.

FOR the surer interpretation of these words, it will be necessary to take a general view of the sacred book in which we find them written, and to consider the subject matter of the whole, but more particularly of the two last chapters.

The book goes under the title of The General Epistle of St. John. But in the composition of it, narrowly inspected, nothing is to be found of the epistolary form. It is not inscribed either to any individual, like St. Paul's to Timothy and Titus, or the second of the two which follow it, "to the well-beloved Gaius,"-nor to any particular church, like St. Paul's to the churches of Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, and others,-nor to the faithful of any particular region, like St. Peter's first epistle "to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bythynia," nor to any principal branch of the Christian church, like St. Paul's to the Hebrews,-nor to the Christian church in general, like the second of St. Peter's, "to them that had obtained like precious faith with him," and like St. Jude's, "to them that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called." It bears no such inscription. It begins without salutation, and ends without benediction. It is true, the writer sometimes speaks, but without naming himself in the first person,--and addresses his reader, without naming him in the