Holy Spirit's teaching, we find Peter shedding the full light of gospel day on the dark prophecies of the Old Testament; and proving that the great events of Christ's life, sufferings, death, and resurrection, were all fulfilments of prophecy. It is clear that Peter did not give, in this discourse, the mere results of his own acquired knowledge; for we find him afterwards entertaining many of his old Jewish prejudices-prejudices which had their origin in personal ignorance of those very truths which, on the day of Pentecost, he was inspired to declare. On that day he said, 'The promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.' Yet it required the remarkable vision in the tanner's house at Joppa to impress upon his individual understanding the full import of the words he was taught to utter. And even after that instructive vision, it required other direct revelations to bring home fully to his comprehension the meaning of the language the Holy Spirit at first instructed him To Peter, therefore, the promise of our Lord was fulfilled to the letter: Take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate; but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.'

to use.

The history of the Apostle Paul is still more strikingly illustrative of the effect of the Holy Spirit's work on the first inspired teachers. He tells the Galatian church very plainly, that the knowledge he had acquired of the gospel was not derived from human masters. He repudiates most emphatically the idea that his profound acquaintance with the great scheme of salvation was, or could be, the result of his own experience, or even the consequence of awakened spiritual life. I certify you, brethren,' he says, 'that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man; for I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.' Here we observe that Paul not merely acknowledges, but glories in the fact, that the doctrines he taught were all revealed to him by a divine agency. They were not the result of his conversion, nor of any ordinary enlightening grace. The power which enabled him to preach the truth fully, and to write it in his Epistles, was special—it was objective, and not subjective. He states this himself in terms so plain, as to leave no room for misconception.

Fortieth Week-Second Day.

A NEW APOSTLE.—ACTS I. 15-26.

THE apostles had been instructed by their Lord to remain at Jerusalem until they should receive the Holy Ghost. This promised gift they obtained ten days after the ascension. We are informed that, while waiting for the great blessing which they had been taught to expect, they employed their time chiefly in daily attendance at the temple, where their presence in a body as the known followers of the crucified Jesus, gave evidence to his enemies that his party still lived; and enabled them to satisfy the many inquirers who, doubtless, applied to them for information respecting the extraordinary circumstances of which they had been witnesses, about which there must have been many and contradictory reports current throughout the city. The rest of their time they spent mostly together in prayer, and supplication, and godly discourse, in a large upper chamber of the house which some of them occupied. Nor were they alone, it seems, in this religious meeting; for mention is made of about one hundred and twenty disciples and 'the women.' Who these women were, is not particularly stated; 'Mary, the mother of Jesus,' being the only one who is named. This is the last notice of her in Scripture ; and from it we learn that she had now cast in her lot with the apostles, to the care of one of whom she had been specially entrusted, and she seems to have thenceforth had no other house than his. It is not difficult, however, to apprehend that the other women were pre-eminently those who had been the first witnesses of the Lord's resurrection-Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome the mother of Zebedee's sons; to these we must probably add the women who had come from Galilee-Joanna and Susanna. We are unwilling to suppose that the sisters of Lazarus were not of the number, as their brother doubtless was among the one hundred and twenty male disciples. There were probably others, of whose names we are

uninformed. Most of those whom we do know were relatives of the apostles or of Jesus himself; and it is not unlikely that some of the women thus generally indicated were wives of the apostles. We know that Peter was married, and that his wife went about with him ;1 and this may have been the case with some of the other apostles, as it was a very rare circumstance among the Jews for a man to pass beyond his youth unmarried.

The only transaction recorded as having taken place during these ten days, is the election of an apostle to fill up the vacancy occasioned by the treachery and death of Judas. It devolved on Peter to explain this matter to the assembled brethren; and he took occasion to recite briefly the circumstances by which the vacancy had been created. The occasion suits us well for the same retrospection.

When Judas perceived the issue of his treachery in the condemnation of Jesus by the Sanhedrim, his conscience was awakened to a sense of the atrocity of the crime he had committed, and, goaded by its sharp stings, his first impulse was to cast from him with abhorrence, as an unclean thing, the bright silver which had been the fruit, as it had been in some measure at least the incitement, of his sin. The fact that his first movement, under this mental torture, was to cast away the bribe he had won so dearly, seems to denote very significantly that the possession of this had been his strongest inducement, and so far to corroborate the intimations of the evangelists that covetousness was the sin that ruined him. He hastened to the temple, and throwing down the money before the priests and elders, he cried, 'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood!' They answered him coldly, that this was his concern, not theirs. But he heeded them not; and, lashed by the scourging vengeance within, he hastened on to a self-inflicted felon's death. He went and hanged himself;' and with such angry vehemence did he cast himself off, that the rope broke, and he fell down headlong with such force, that he lay dead upon the ground, a foul, crushed, and disfigured mass. Some have concluded, from this proceeding on the part of 1 Matt. viii. 14; 1 Cor. ix. 5.

Judas, as already intimated, that, when he betrayed his Master, he did not contemplate the possibility of his being condemned to death. It may be so. It is possible that he deceived his own heart with the show of good intentions. But if this is not the impression the evangelists themselves received of his character and conduct—and we think that it is not-the explanation stands on very precarious ground. Nor is his late remorse at all favourable to that impression; for how often, in the annals of crime, we find that a conscience-stricken horror falls upon the criminal on the completion of the deed, which in the distance he had planned deliberately, and contemplated without dismay !

In supplying the deficiency in the number of the apostles caused by the downfall of Judas, Peter stated the qualification to be, that he should be one who had been their constant associate from the commencement of the Lord's ministry until his ascension, so as to be a witness of all his sayings and deeds, and especially of his resurrection. This description seems to indicate, that the selection was to be made from the seventy disciples; for it would obviously appear, that our Lord's previous choice of these from the general body of his followers for evangelical service, was in itself a recommendation for the apostleship which could not be advanced for the others. Among the number there were two whose claims, from character and standing, were so conspicuous, that the apostles felt unable to determine which of them was entitled to preference, or were perhaps divided in their judgment concerning them. One of these was Matthias, and the other Joseph, called Barsabas, who was surnamed Justus. They, therefore, referred the decision to the Lord by the lot, after solemn prayer, that He would be pleased thus to indicate the person whom He had chosen. The lot fell upon Matthias, who was thenceforth reckoned among the apostles. It is thought by some that it was not merely the difficulty of choosing between Matthias and Joseph that induced the apostles to resort to the lot, but also an unwillingness to appoint a new apostle upon their own authority; for, seeing that all the others had been specially

appointed by Jesus himself, one who had only their appointment might have seemed to occupy an inferior position to them. The text, however, favours the former opinion, seeing that they supplicated the Lord to show which of these two' He had chosen; indicating that had there been but one, they, in dependence on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, would not have hesitated to proceed to his appointment. Indeed, the ground for this reference to the lot could not have existed had there not been two persons before them; unless, perhaps, they had in that case proposed to ask whether or not (yea or nay) the Lord approved of the person whom they nominated. Still, the special ground which may have existed for this reference to the lot is very important, and receives force and illustration from the course taken by St. Paul, when he insisted that his call to the apostleship was neither of men nor by men, but from the Lord himself, though it came later than that of any of the others. This specialty, also, removes the case from being used as a precedent for reference to the lot.

Of Matthias, thus elected to the apostleship, no further record exists in Scripture; but there is an uncertain tradition that, after remaining some time in Judea, he carried the gospel into the interior of Asia, where he suffered death from the hands of a barbarous people.

Dr. Hanna, in The Last Day of Our Lord's Passion, gives a striking and thoughtful analysis of the character of Judas, and his motives for betraying our Lord. I cannot altogether agree with him. I think the sin of the betrayer was of a deeper dye than is there represented. But I fully coincide with the following practical reflections: 'He is the Judas, anywhere, everywhere, with whom his worldly interests, his worldly ambition, prevail over his attachment to Christ and to Christ's cause; who joins the Christian society, it may be not to make gain thereby, but who, when the occasion presents itself, scruples not to make what gain he can of that connection; who, beneath the garb of the Christian calling, pursues a dishonest traffic; who, when the gain and the godliness come into collision, sacrifices the godliness for the gain. How many such Judases the world has seen; how much of that Judas