whose providence over the world in general, and over Israel in particular, in the ages gone by, has been most essentially mediatorial, who has silently governed the ages and the nations till now a uniform civilization and a one national rule spreads over civilized earth, who has ordered the growth of the intellect of the world to such degree that the old religions it has fostered are without power any longer to satisfy-Jehovah, who has brought affairs to a crisis like this, the most momentous in the world's history, has produced a stage where the past is darkness and twilight to the now opening future, lightened by the sun rising to pour its mid-day glory on the ages yet to come.

The Incarnation! Here, indeed, we touch again upon the line at which revealed truth shades off into inaccessible mystery. But if faith shrinks here it may as well shrink at all mysteries with which our hourly existence is bound up; and what we take upon trust in other things may as well be surrendered too, and the vast amount of what we know, obtained only on the basis of trust, must return to blank nothingness.

But however deep the mystery here, a visible occasion now transpires to show that the highest thought we can have is that God is eternal love. By past mediatorial demonstrations we have known that God is power, and the creation is the monument of his power. But above power is love, and God can now fittingly project himself into the mind of the world as Infinite Love by a stupendous act of grace of which Incarnation is the monument. God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son; and he sends him forth to the view of the world-begotten not of man but of the Holy Ghost-born of a woman, indeed, so as to be of our humanity-born of an obscure and lowly maiden in obscure Nazareth, sheltered away there from the corrupting Judaism of the day, quietly solacing herself with the great promises of the house of David.

After the lowly birth, which, by divinely devised incident, occurs at Bethlehem, the city of David; after the flight to Egypt, and thirty years of obedient, industrious life at Nazareth; after his full miraculous investiture of office at the baptismal waters, and his forty days of fasting and temptation in the desert, he entered on his marvelous ministry," and we beheld his glory "-writes one of his disciples forty years afterward-" we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten

of the Father, full of grace and truth." Who is this mysterious person? "He is the Word made flesh that dwelt among us;" the Incarnate Word, a designation for Jehovah, the infinite personal agent of the Old Testament ages and administration. He is the God-man-of intrinsic necessity such-long prophesied of and long expected-the desire of nations. He is the one that was to come; all history in the past is a prophecy of him. The course of events, human and external, tended toward him. Mind, in its progressive development, unconsciously aspired after him. And when he came humanity found its oneness, and the history of humanity its final cause in him.

Just now his person challenges every-where the most intense interest as never before. Why is this? He has ever ruled the world, and he rules now. Human thoughts and acts are free and unconstrained entirely, but when projected he has control of them, and in his use of them they run in lines and on to ends mediatorial. Perhaps the lines cross and recross each other so repeatedly as to end in a reticulated and, to human view, a confused mass; but out of it, by a long elaboration, is evolved a result at length which becomes a great objective thought, striking, no one knows how or why, the mind of the period, and compelling attention to it. In this manner, no doubt, important mediatorial stages and crises occur. May we not have come to a time when the result, wrought in this or in some analogous manner, is the person of Christ as the great objective thought or question of the day? Obviously the question of Christ's person came to some minds with a momentum sudden and unwelcome, and because it could not be beaten back nor evaded, the attention given to it has been reluctant and unfriendly, and the subject has been treated with a criticism of unsparing severity. This has inured to increased interest, and through criticism, per contra, to firmer conviction in the infinite divinity of Christ as God-man. Attention is now universally aroused to the words of Christ himself, and the more they are pondered the stronger is the confidence accorded to them.

He ever called himself the Son of man, the meaning of which is found to be that he is the elder brother of the racein an important sense the head of the race, ordained as the

second Adam to repair the fortunes of the race which the first Adam was seduced to destroy.

He ever called himself no less the Son of God. The attempts in some quarters to make out this a designation of later times is puerile. It is his own designation, and can be denied by no one. This testimony in his own behalf is to be found in the synoptic Gospels as well as in that of John, the date of which is vainly wrested by ruthless criticism from its proper place. He calls himself the Son of God, too, in the absolute sense, the sense implying the relation of essence and nature-not the sense in which men or angels are sometimes so called by virtue of creation or of moral likeness to God. He speaks of his pre-existence-" Before Abraham was, I am." He speaks of his pre-existent glory, "Of the glory which he had with the Father before the world was." He speaks of his oneness with the Father and of his self-revelation of the Father-"No man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal him." In numerous statements like these he includes himself in the Godhead, makes himself sharer in the nature of God, and in such sense it is that he calls himself the Son of God. In a single personality, therefore, he is both the Son of man and the Son of God--the God-man-Godhead and manhood united in one person.

The irrepressible vanity of human reason clamors against the possibility of such a conception. But why not possible? The authority of Holy Scripture, admitted ever as at least a possible authority, assures that the world and all things were created by him and for him, with reference especially to man. He made man in his own image, with the purpose that he should receive God into his nature and have him for the indwelling object of his thoughts and desires, and of his whole inner life. Since this indwelling object has been lost from the soul of the race, in all parts of the earth there has been an indefinite craving for it; there has been at least an ignorant seeking for something, an earnest but often grievously mistaken aim for the real thing that should meet the real moral wants of man. Every-where, and in all ages, heathenism has illustrated the cry of Job, "O that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!" and all fitting is it that out of things possible with God the fullness

of the Godhead shouid dwell bodily with Jesus, in order that from his fullness man should receive grace upon grace. The possibility of Incarnation, therefore, seems required by the nature and wants of the human race. Added to this, not the possibility alone, but the necessity of the incarnation is required as a measure on God's part by which to project from himself impulses of condescension and love in behalf of man. The Incarnation of the Son of God becomes, hence, a postulate of which the human soul cannot be deprived. The relation between man's absolute wants and the proceeding by which they are to be met on the part of man's Creator, fixes a necessity that can be answered only by incarnation. The soul's remedy for its deep-down darkness and guilt could not be met but by a Redeemer as much man as God, as much God as man, both natures in one accessible, sympathizing, omnipotent Person.

And such was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in the fullness of time sent forth, made of a woman, that is, begotten of the Holy Ghost, but born of and from our nature. He was made also under the law, was of the Old Testament dispensation, but at its summit, and all the prophetic, priestly, and kingly elements centralized and terminated in him. It is a mistake to suppose law and grace dissevered, the latter merely supplementing the former. The system of the Gospel, indeed, is at the foundation of that of law. Law and grace are inseparably and eternally one. But law in its ritualistic character is an expedient-the schoolmaster pointing, in all its observances and restrictions, to Christ and his salvation. Justification under the law was impossible except through faith in the Christ, the world's great sacrifice, of whom all sacrifices in the Old Testament are but the one and ever continuous type.

Abundantly he magnified and made honorable the law, for no teacher on earth ever rescued the law so searchingly from false glosses that had been put upon it. He kept it perfectly himself; he was not chargeable with the least sin, nor had he the least taint of it; and, after two or three years of indefatigable labor, of teaching, and beneficence, he submitted to die. upon the cross, an instrument of torture and death inflicted only on malefactors and slaves. But he went willingly to death, though the preliminary suffering, and that endured on the cross, were doubtless such as fall not within the imagina

tion to conceive. In the midst of it, however, he prayed for his persecutors; proclaimed pardon and a place in his kingdom to the thief, his fellow-sufferer; commended his mother to the disciple whom he loved; and was to the last a completed revelation of love. The waves of wrath for man's sin were going over him, but perfectly unsullied remained his mighty integrity as the God-man. He sought propitiation, and shrank not from unheard-of agony to accomplish it. He yielded his life, but by his own power resumed it on the third day, as he had predicted; and in glorified visitations taught his disciples forty days, then ascended above into the holy of holies, man's High Priest and King forever. Never need men to suffer want of his companionship and aid, for he said, as he went up, "I am with you alway, even to the end of the world." Never need they lack the atonement of any, the darkest sin, for he has completed all in himself, and is forever in his own person Priest, Altar, Victim, Mercy-Seat.

ART. V. JEPHTHAH'S VOW.

It may seem bootless to add another essay to the discussion of a subject on which volumes have been already written; but a large proportion of the expositions of Jephthah's vow most commonly accessible, advocate a theory which it is the purpose of the present article to controvert, and it is only by repeated investigations that many disputed passages of Holy Writ will be likely to reach a final settlement. In the October number of this Quarterly for 1855 appeared an article maintaining that Jephthah never meant to vow a human sacrifice to the Lord, and did not offer his daughter as a burntoffering, but consecrated her to a life of perpetual celibacy. It is proper that the same Review contain as full and fair a presentation of the other side of the question.

The writer of the article referred to correctly resolves the various expositions of Judges xi, 29-40, into two opposing theories, that of immolation and that of consecration. According to the one Jephthah literally sacrificed his daughter as a burnt-offering to Jehovah; according to the other the daugh