may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fuller's soap; and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness. Behold, I will send unto you Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth (land) with a curse.†

The Scriptures of the Old Testament thus explicitly testify of the Messiah. And hence the expectation of his coming has been the 'common faith of the Jews in every country and in every age. A minute comparison will subsequently be instituted between those things which were foretold concerning the Messiah, and the history of Jesus and the doctrine of the gospel. The fact is clear that a Messiah was foretold; and so unquestionably was this the faith of the Israelites before the coming of Christ, that in "the Chaldee paraphrase now extant, which was translated and read in the synagogues long prior to the Christian era, there is express mention of the Messias in above seventy places, besides that of Daniel."

It was not the exclusive purpose of the oracles of God to show that his soul would be avenged on guilty nations. Nor was the seed of Jacob chosen as a peculiar people, to be called by his name, that the Gentiles should have rule over them, that the Israelites should be carried captive into Assyria, and the Jews be scattered among all nations. Jerusalem was not chosen by him for a city that he should place his name there, in order that it might be trodden down of the Gentiles. Nor did God give ordinances and statutes for his worship, and institute a priesthood to offer sacrifice, and love the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Judah, in order that finally not one stone of the temple should be left upon another, and that the abomination of desolation should stand at last in the holy place where the God of Israel was adored. The history of the creation was not revealed to Moses, nor did the Lord bring his people by a strong hand and by a mighty arm out of the land of Egypt, and lead them through the Red Sea and through the desert, giving them bread from heaven to eat and water from the smitten rock to drink, and place them in the land promised to their fathers, and set his statutes and his judgments among them, that the end of all might be that the Romans should come and take away their place and nation. Nor yet was the law given in thunder and lightning from Sinai, that it might eventually be superseded

* Mal. iii., 1-3. † Ibid. iv., 5, 6.

Pearson on the Creed, art. 2.

by the edicts of Cæsar, or of the prince of the people that should take away the sceptre from Judah. These things, in verification of his word, showed that there was a God in Israel; but they were not the end of the work of the Lord. Kings of the earth were raised up to be the executioners of the Divine judgments; but the prophets, by predicting these, were installed into their office over the ruins of cities that strove against the Lord, in order to bear witness of the Messiah that was to come. The Jewish dispensation, as a framework, did not fall till a sure foundation was laid in Zion. The sceptre was not to depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, till Shiloh should come. The second temple was not to be laid in ruins till the desire of all nations should come into it. The genealogies of the families of Judah were not to be lost till a branch should spring forth from the root of Jesse, and a son be raised unto David, whom he called Lord. Bethlehem was not to be given up to the Gentiles till out of it he should come forth who was to be ruler in Israel. The covenant with Israel was not to be broken till a new and everlasting covenant was revealed. The city and the sanctuary were not to be destroyed, nor sacrifice and oblation to cease, nor desolations determined, until the consummation, until the Messiah should be cut off, and the covenant confirmed with many; and also till the time determined upon the Jews and upon Jerusalem had come, to finish transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy.

The promise of a Messiah is conjoined with the first denunciation against sin, and with the last threatening of judgment, recorded at the commencement and close of the Old Testament. It is the great and glorious theme of all the prophets. His coming is the creed of the Jews in every age and in every country. The assurance of it is ingrained throughout the whole Mosaic dispensation, which, without it, would have been a mass of unmeaning ceremonies and an intolerable yoke of bondage; a religion more limited even in its purposed range than any other: and the voice of prophecy would have been nothing but an anticipated tale of desolation; and, contrary to the whole analogy of nature, a work in which the hand of God is manifest would yet have been left imperfect, if abrogated statutes that merely in themselves were not good had not been succeeded by an everlasting righteousness; if sacrifice was to cease, and yet no atonement had been made for sin; if the vision and prophecy had been sealed, and yet no Messiah had come: and the worship of the God of Israel, whose word by the prophets shows that he is Lord, would, together with the precious salvation, have ceased for ever, if they had been limited at once to the seed

of Jacob and to the land of Judea. To abjure the belief of a Messiah would, on the part of any Jew, be to renounce the faith and the hope of Israel; and to deny it would, on the part of any Gentile, be to deny the proved inspiration of the prophets.

Irrespective of the testimony given in the New Testament as to the fulness of the time of the Redeemer's advent, other evidence plainly shows that the opinion was prevalent over the whole East that the predicted time of his appearing had come at the beginning of the Christian era. Tacitus, in describing the fearful signs which preceded the destruction of Jerusalem, relates that "many were persuaded that it was contained in the old writings of the priests, that at that very time the East should prevail, and the Jews should have dominion," l. v., c. 13. And Suetonius, in the life of Vespasian, c. i., n. 4, says, "That it was an ancient and constant opinion throughout the whole East, that at that time those who came from Judea should obtain the dominion." And certain it is, as an historical fact, that, from the days of Abraham to the present hour, there never was any other period in the whole history of the Hebrew race, during which, in indication of the credited fulness of the predicted time, so many false Christ's appeared and deceived many, as at the very season when Christianity arose and Judaism fell; and immediately subsequent to which, believers in Jesus spread his gospel, and the Jews were scattered throughout the world, in similar and simultaneous verification of the word of the Lord by the prophets. And from whatever source it originated, the prediction or opinion that nature was about to bring forth a king to the Romans,* may here, at least, demand an appropriate allusion, seeing that it so wrought on the fears of the Romans that the senate decreed that no child born that year should be brought up, but be exposed. This remarkable decree-which was rendered inoperative in a manner which farther exemplifies the credit attached to the oracle, through the influence of those senators whose wives cherished the hope of giving birth to the great king-was passed in the very year in which Pompey took Jerusalem; and no sooner had the holy city yielded to the imperial, than the conquest was thus associated with the fear which agitated Rome, that Nature, or, to adopt a more just and intelligible phraseology, the God of Nature, was about to give a king to the Romans, though a child that had not then been born. Nor, in rigid scrutiny of concurring evidence as to the belief of the peculiar or precise time when the Messiah was to come, or a greater than any other king to appear, should the fact be overlooked, of which tens of thousands of

* Suetonius, lib. ii., sect. 92. Quoted by Leslie.

witnesses are to be found throughout all the classical schools of Europe, that the first of the Latin poets, touching for once on a nobler theme than his wont, paulo majora canamus, proclaimed the approaching birth of a great deliverer of the human race a few years before the birth of Christ; and, as if copying Isaiah rather than Homer, portrayed the blessings of his Divine kingdom in strains unmatched by heathen poesy; as if Jesus had had a messenger to prepare his way in the capital of the world, as well as in the wilderness of Judea.

While such striking coincidences, peculiar to the time, and unprecedented or unparalleled in history, may, on reflection, astound the reader, if prejudiced against the Messiahship of Jesus, the direct testimony of Josephus among the Jews, and of Tacitus and Suetonius among the Gentiles, confirms the fact of the general expectation of the coming of the promised Messiah about the very period of the commencement of the Christian era.

CHAPTER V.

OF THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF CHRISTIANITY.

THE inspiration of the prophets of Israel being visibly and incontestibly demonstrated by existing facts; the credibility of genuine miracles being established, and the great argument against the adequacy of any testimony in their confirmation being transferred into a direct evidence of inspiration; the antiquity of the Old Testament Scriptures being undeniable, on the slightest investigation, their authenticity being illustrated even by modern discoveries, and confirmed by irrefragable proof, and their testimony of a coming Messiah being explicit and abundant, we may enter on the kindred question of the credibility of the New Testament in the full knowledge that faith in the Messiah is not left to stand alone on the testimony of man.

The birth, the life, the miracles, the death, and resurrection of Jesus-who professed to be the Messiah spoken of by the prophets, whose coming the Divine Mosaic dispensation predicted and prefigured-derive not the full measure of credibility which pertains to them from all that men have recorded or could have recorded concerning these marvellous events. Human testimony may singly accredit mere human things, for which no. other guarantee can be given than the word or the writing of man, and the certainty of which, as

affecting only temporary and perishing interests, needs not to be tried by any other test than the corresponding narratives of fallible historians. But as such a charge never otherwise devolved on human testimony as that which was committed to the witnesses of Jesus, the tidings which they bear lay claim to a warrant as high above that of all others as their importance excels theirs, and as sure and sufficient for the confirmation of things that in their nature and order are Divine, to all who will hear the word of God or see the evidence which he gives, as any testimony of man could be in accrediting things that are natural. The spirit of prophecy, saith the Scripture, is the testimony of Jesus. And the testimony of man is not, unaided and alone, to be put in its place, or to be made chargeable with the full execution of that which it is the avowed object and office of the prophetic testimony to fulfil.

Reverting, then, for a moment, to the professed connexion between the inspiration of the prophets and the credibility of the gospel, a connexion so close and inseparable that the doctrine of the gospel is, that Jesus is the Messiah of whom the prophets testified; and also to the connexion between the Old Testament and the New, similarly close, in that the one is professedly the completion of the other, it may, merely for the present, be in the remembrance of the reader that, prophecy being true and the Bible being genuine, there is thus a power of evidence prepared for bearing on the truths of the gospel such as no testimony of man could ever have imparted.

It hath seemed meet unto Him with whom wisdom dwelleth-and the truth of whose word, confirmed in all past experience by the very changes of human things, shall stand, though the foundations of the earth be shaken-to make the history of the world the witness of his word, and to show, from those events themselves which have come to pass upon the earth, and which have not only been recorded by historians, but which any man, without the testimony of another, may now see with his own eyes, that the words of the prophets were truly the oracles of God. And it becomes us, therefore, in investigating the credibility of the gospel, not to rest alone on the testimony of man while Jesus appealed to a higher, or to strain a part beyond its natural powers or limits to execute singly the office of the whole, or to trench on the peculiar province of the testimony of God, as if he, by his prophets, had never once testified of the Messiah or borne witness of his Son. It is not even alleged in the New Testament that the faith of primitive Christians, who were the witnesses of miracles, and who were converted by apostles, rested on their testimony alone. And the Jews of Berea were declared to be more noble than those of Thessalonica,