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Creator; but to see that God of spirits invested with flesh, was such a wonder, as had been enough, if their nature could have been capable of it, to have astonished even glory itself; and whether to see him that was their God so humbled below themselves, or to see humanity thus advanced above themselves, were the greater wonder to them, they only know.

It was your foolish misprision, O ye ignorant Lystrians, that you took the servants for the Master: here only it is verified, which you supposed, that God is come down to us in the likeness of man, and as man conversed with men.

What a disparagement do we think it was for the great monarch of Babylon for seven years together, as a beast to converse with the beasts of the field! Yet, alas, beasts and men are fellow-creatures; made of one earth; drawing in the same air; returning, for their bodily part to the same dust; symbolizing in many qualities, and in some mutually transcending each others; so that here may seem to be some terms of a tolerable proportion; since many men are in disposition too like unto beasts, and some beasts are in outward shape somewhat like unto men; but for him that was, and is, "God blessed for ever," eternal, infinite, incomprehensible, to put on flesh and become a man amongst men, was to stoop below all possible disparities that heaven and earth can afford. O Saviour, the lower thine abasement was for us, the higher was the pitch of thy divine love to us.

Bp. Hall.

THE circumstances which attended the birth of the blessed Redeemer, characterized, to a considerable extent, the dispensation of religion he came to introduce. In the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, we find the outlines so plain to the capacity, that he who runs

may read, and the way-faring man need not err. But at the same time, in that very religion, there are truths the most sublime, and mysteries the most profound; so that no man on earth, or perhaps angel in heaven, is able fully to comprehend them. In the like manner, in the circumstances which attended the birth of Christ, we behold a meanness apparently unworthy of such an event, and yet, a majesty which at once proclaims the Son of God. The Saviour was not born of noble, but of humble parents; he was not born in a palace, but in a stable; he was not laid in a cot of state, decorated with crimson and gold cloth, and ornamented with precious stones, but his cradle was a manger; his attendants were not grandees and courtiers, but oxen and asses. On the other hand, God was pleased to create, or for the first time to render visible and conspicuous in the eastern regions of the sky, a star which struck the attention, and engaged the peculiar study of great men. Guided and directed

by its beams, they were led precisely to the spot where the little stranger lay; and great, illustrious, and wise as they were, they paid him homage with their property, their bodies, and their minds. No sooner had he appeared in the world, than a celestial messenger was despatched to announce his birth; and no sooner had he made his proclamation, than heaven opened, a rush of mighty seraphim descended, and heaven resounded with the most animated and animating strains of "Glory to God in the highest," and "on earth peace, good-will toward men."

In this divine anthem we are taught, that the incarnation of the Saviour was a bright exhibition of the glory of God.

For thousands of years angels had beheld the unveiled glory of the Deity; but they never saw the divine glory with any thing like the clearness with

which they saw and felt the subject now. They had seen the glory of the divine justice in the punishment of their compeers; and something like mercy in the suspension of the sentence pronounced on guilty man. But O, when they saw Christ, the coequal and coeternal Son of God, take upon him a body, that he might suffer and die to atone for the sins of men, and redeem them from the curse of the law, when they could not be redeemed by silver and gold, by slaughtered hecatombs. by human blood, by angelic interference, or by any thing short of the inestimably precious blood of the Son of God; here they saw JUSTICE shining in all its awful brightness, tremendous glory, and affecting majesty, in a way they had never seen it before. And when they saw that the love of God was ready to make such a sacrifice, that he spared not his own Son, but began to give him up for all-here was a display of MERCY indeed; here mercy appeared to be his darling attribute; here mercy flowed in a deeper, wider, more majestic channel, than they had ever before formed any just conception of. And though they were gradually prepared for this august event; yet, as it opened up, as it advanced towards completion, and they were commissioned to convey the transporting intelligence to man, they were rapt in transport, and were obliged to give vent to their angelic ecstacies in the noble, the sublime strains-"Glory to God in the highest !"

John Stephens.

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HUMANITY OF CHRIST.

The Word was "made flesh," not by the transmutation of one nature into the other, but by "taking the manhood unto God," to form of God and man one Christ-and dwelt among us." The Greek word here is the same which, in Heb. viii. 2, is translated "the tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man." In this tent of human flesh Christ tabernacled, as an instance of unbounded condescension in one who 66 was God." This tabernacle was reared, not according to the laws of ordinary generation, but by the supernatural operation of "the Lord" the Spirit ; that the human nature of Christ, formed by an extraordinary conception in the womb of a virgin, might be exempt from that moral contamination which is inherent in the nature of all "naturally engendered of the offspring of Adam." In this tabernacle the Logos dwelt in his humiliation. The allusion is, doubtless, to the mode of Jehovah's inhabitation by the shekinah in the earthly tabernacle. As that cloud, from which there issued an irradiation of bright effulgence, was called "the glory of the Lord," and "dwelt between the cherubim on the mercy-seat; so the glory of the only-begotten of the Father dwelt, in all its essential fulness, in the human nature of the Messiah. And the passage, whether considered in itself, or in allusion to the cloud of the divine presence, points out clearly an obvious distinction between the pre-existent state of the Logos and the nature which he subsequently assumed; between the glory of the former and the humble tabernacle of the latter. A distinction, so necessary to be observed in interpreting the writings of the Apostles, that, upon no other supposition is it possible to reconcile the humble language in which they

sometimes speak of him, with that sublime description, in which they so frequently exalt him above "all principalities and powers, and every thing that is named both in heaven and earth."

De Courcy.

THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST.

THE inspired writers attribute to Christ the glory of all the divine attributes: eternity a parte ante, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. He is "from everlasting," (Prov. viii. 23,) and "was in the beginning with God." (John i. 1.) He "knoweth all things. (John xxi. 17, and xvi. 30.) He searcheth the heart," (Rev. ii. 23,) to do which, is, according to the prophet, the peculiar prerogative of Jehovah: "I the Lord search the heart." (Jer. xviii. 10.) He “knoweth the THOUGHTS." (Matt. ix. 4.) "Wherever two or three are met in his name, there is he in the midst." (Matt. xviii. 20.) At the moment of his existence on earth, as the Son of man, "he was in heaven," by virtue of that nature, whose presence no situation can confine, and no space circumscribe. "No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven." (John iii. 13.) The right of ascension, founded on perfect personal righteousness, is the exclusive claim of him who first descended, as the prerogative of being present in heaven and earth at the same time is his also, by right of divine nature. As to the extent of his power: "He is able to subdue all things to himself." (Phil. iii. 21.) His knowledge too of the divine essence is equally extensive with that of the Father, in the comprehension which they have, reciprocally, of

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