is on my right hand that I should not be moved. Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad: moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope: because thou wilt not leave my soul in hades, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou hast made known to me the way of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance." Precisely this must have been the state of our Saviour's mind, when with so much serenity, so much calm and feeling attention to surrounding persons and circumstances, so much perspicacious regard to the fulfilment of ancient predictions, he "committed his spirit" into the hands of a faithful Creator. How strongly and fully, are, first the death, the burial or interment, and then the certainty and completeness of the resurrection of Christ, insisted upon by Paul, as the sole foundations of the Christian's hope, in his long chapter upon it, without which his preaching would have been utterly vain and delusive; but with the certain assurance of which every Christian has a firm foundation whereon to erect his everlasting hopes. On this occasion, he uses the expression, "Christ died for our sins;" he voluntarily resigned his life for the express purpose of conducting us in perfect security through the valley of the shadow of death, to the gates of immortality; of becoming to us, to use his own brief form of expression as recorded by the beloved Apostle, "the way, the truth, and the life."

The true meaning of the phrase, "Christ died for our sins," cannot be correctly understood without considering the Scriptural purport of the several words of which it is composed. The term Christ (in English, Anointed) points out the person and designation of the individual who was the immediate agent of the Supreme Being, in giving origin to the Christian dispensation, and who is its supreme ruler under the Almighty. As such, he is occasionally denominated "the Prince of Life," "the Lord of the living and the dead." Now, that he who is invested with such sovereign authority over human life, should himself die, should resign his own life, for the express purpose of carrying his great design into execution, was a new and strange idea to all parties at the period of its occurrence. It was, indeed a new way to supreme dominion; and might appear peculiarly so, as applied to a power of

abolishing death itself, or of rescuing human beings from its domination. But we are next to consider, that, in the Divine appointments, the moral and the physical frailties of our nature, or, in the Scriptural phraseology, sin and death, are so closely connected that the one is constantly represented as the primary cause of the other. Could Adam, or could any other human being have maintained a steady control over his appetites and passions, persevering in a course of obedience to the will of his Creator, he might, it appears, have obtained the Divine blessing so far as to have been translated to an immortal state-a blessing which was actually realised in the case of Enoch, and in that of Elijah; but, as in almost all instances, "the things seen and temporal" obtain an influence which is disproportioned to those which "are unseen and eternal," the Divine Being hath concluded us to be all under sin, so far as, in the first instance, to subject us to the same common doom. It is, indeed, no other than a necessary result of the present constitution of our nature, insomuch, that but for Divine Revelation, we might have regarded it as the proper conclusion of our being, in common with that of all the other orders of living creatures. But, as it hath pleased God to endow us with improvable natures, capable of raising our hopes, our expectations, and pursuits, far beyond the low objects of time and sense, even to those of eternity; so, in order to forward our improvement, he hath instituted a moral government over us, making it sin, or an offence against his wise and righteous government, to proceed in the indulgence of our inferior appetites, or in the pursuit of any objects relating simply to the present transitory world, beyond certain degrees, and which, under the Christian Revelation, are to be rendered entirely subordinate to the prospects of a blessed immortality.

We have, I think, abundant reason to conclude from his history, that no human being ever advanced so high in the scale of moral excellence, attained to so complete a triumph over things seen and temporal, in subservience to those which are unseen and eternal, as Jesus Christ; but we cannot help perceiving, that this moral triumph appears in its most distinguished glory in his last sufferings and death. Nor can we, if we will be content to regard him as a fellow-creature, a mortal, but an heir of

immortality, help perceiving that the moral trial which he thus underwent, tended not only to the exhibiting, but to the perfecting of his character, or, with the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, that " though a son, yet learnt he obedience by the things that he suffered." This being admitted, it is at once evident, that to undergo the worst evils of mortality, under the Divine assurance of a complete deliverance from those evils, operates even upon the best of human minds as a preparative for its glorious destination in a future existence. Thus, our Lord's sufferings and death are of the greatest use in proving to his disciples, that to suffer and die in a righteous cause, with a spirit like that which he manifested, is, in reality, the best preparation for immortality. But since death is the attendant upon sin, and he knew no sin, the death which he underwent was voluntary on his part, and he might have been exempted from it, like two or three of the most excellent of our species in former ages; but the Divine wisdom, and love to mankind, and his own filial piety and benevolence, required that this pattern of moral excellence, in suffering and dissolution, should be exhibited: and, accordingly, he died for our sins, he underwent the common fate of erring mortals, to animate and encourage them to a similar course of obedience.

Our Saviour had now exhibited a complete pattern of obedience unto death, in the faith of a resurrection to life everlasting; and it is the more extraordinary, that he should have been so wholly under the influence of this faith, this fulness of reliance on the Almighty, in thus resigning every vital power, inasmuch as no such event had yet been realised, and as the idea of obtaining the greatest of triumphs through the medium of a most ignominious death, was altogether foreign and adverse from the views of his countrymen and of all mankind, at the period of its occurrence. Indeed it afterwards appeared, that not all the evidence that could be presented in proof of a dying Messiah, could work conviction in the minds of the majority of the Jewish nation; and that nothing but the overwhelming power of the evidences could avail in bringing over a portion of the Gentiles to that conviction." Christ crucified, was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness." The passions

of the Jews were all enlisted on the side of a worldly conqueror of this description; and, though they had a very strong confidence that the Israelites would be raised from the dead and advanced to life everlasting under his kingdom, no miracles either on his part or on that of his apostles, could convince them that the Messiah must first die on behalf of the world at large, and then be raised to eternal life in token of a similar event to all who should follow in his course of suffering virtue, without regard to ceremonial or national distinctions, instead of conducting the Jews to victory, and either obliging the whole Gentile world to conform to the temple worship at Jerusalem, and acknowledge the continued obligation of the Mosaic ceremonial, or condemning them to destruction. Had Jesus pursued up the apparent direct design of his numerous saving miracles, by a transformation of his own person and those of the worshippers of God in general from this mortal to an immortal state, leaving an idolatrous world to die and perish forever without hope of a revival, he would have offered no violence to the sentiments and feelings of his countrymen,-those cherished prejudices which appear to have taken possession and obtained a most commanding influence over the Jewish mind, and almost to have actuated the whole people, as one man, at that period, and, indeed, for many subsequent ages. And how gratifying to an ordinary mind, actuated by those feelings, must have been the apparently easy elevation, by the full exercise of his saving powers, of himself and his fellow-worshippers to immortal glory and felicity, with perhaps a further privilege of extending the like blessings to all who should from that time forward become worshippers of the true God. But instead of thus precipitating the exercise of his saving authority, or even applying the blessing, which, to a certain extent, he so freely imparted to thousands of others, to his own protection on this side the grave, he allows the arrows of death to expend their full fury upon him, and by the admirable spirit with which he meets them, evinces that the noblest of all triumphs is to be achieved, the greatest of all blessings is to be obtained, by calmly resigning our lives into the hands of "Him who gave them."

Nothing, however, is more certain, than that the great purpose of our Lord's sufferings and death, could never

have been accomplished, but for his resurrection. It was this event which formed the great object of his hopes, the ground of his confidence in resigning his every power into the hands of his Creator. By his resurrection, he was both restored to life and elevated above the power of corruption. Here was the great evidence that man is destined for two successive states of being-mortal and immortal; or such respectively as the Apostle Paul has described in the following verses:- "That which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain, it may be of wheat or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed its own body. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is [that which is] sown in corruption, is raised in incorruption; [that which] is sown in dishonour is raised in glory; [that which] is sown in weakness, is raised in power; that which is sown a natural [an animal] body, is raised a spiritual body. There is an animal body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam, was made a living soul [such as are all living creatures in this state]; the second Adam, was made a quickening spirit."* These verses are thus paraphrased by Mr. Locke: "That which thou sowest is the bare grain of wheat, or barley, or the like; but the body which it has when it rises up, is different from the seed that is sown. For it is not the seed that rises up again, but a quite different body, such as God has thought fit to give it, viz. a plant of a particular shape and size, which God hath appointed to each sort of seed. And so shall the resurrection of the dead be [rather, has been exemplified in our Lord's person]. That which is sown in this world, and comes to die, is a poor, weak, corruptible thing; when it is raised again, it shall be powerful, glorious, and incorruptible. The body that we have here, surpasses not the animal nature; at the resurrection it shall be spiritual and immortal. There are both animal and spiritual bodies. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul, i. e. made of an animal constitution, endowed with an animal life; the second (Adam) was made of a spiritual constitution, with a power to give life to others."

(To be continued.)

* 1 Cor. xv. 37, 38, 42-44.