little consequence when he uttered it; yet it was the announcement of those public calamities which were soon to overtake that guilty nation. He spoke of them as being at hand, since he spoke to the mothers of the children around him, and the event exactly fulfilled the prophecy. Since the world was made, no city, and no nation, have been treated as were Jerusalem, and the people of the Jews, in the time of Titus. The Romans themselves were forced to acknowledge, that such frightful misery evidently bore about it the character of Divine vengeance. In the of Josephus, we see that pages dreadful species of suffering was united, in order to fall with terrible power upon the devoted city of Jerusalem, and on the immense multitudes whom the feast of the Passover (which served as a net in which, through God's providence, they were inclosed) had drawn together from all parts of the world, in order to suffer the punishment of the sin their nation had committed, at a similar festival, in rejecting and murdering the Messiah.

every

During this dreadful siege, mothers were compelled by famine to feed upon their own infants,

while murders, dissensions among themselves, pestilence, and the unsparing cruelty of the Roman soldiers, filled the city with blood and carnage; and after eleven hundred thousand of the Jews had perished in the siege, a hundred thousand more were sold as slaves, and scattered. This exact fulfilment of the awful prediction of the Son of God, appears to many expositors as sufficient, without looking for any further accomplishment. But the words with which our Saviour concludes his discourse, lead me to think, that the woes threatened to Jerusalem, were not the only, or even the principal object of the prophecy; "for if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" Luke xxiii. 31.

The sinner, in his natural state, knows nothing of God, of his justice, or of his irrevocable decrees; he cannot judge rightly of his own iniquity, because he himself is unrighteous, and loves unrighteousness. The holiness of God is a mystery to him. He walks in darkness, and he is satisfied with his state, because the supreme rule of action in all duty is never before his eyes. He believes that God excuses all that he excuses in himself,

because his idea of God differs but little from that which he has of himself. He re-assures himself, by seeing the multitude of sinners who are in a like situation with himself, and by comparing his own offences with those of more glaring offenders. Punishment alone astonishes him; he thinks it more than sin deserves. His own sins never astonish him; he sees nothing uncommon or peculiar about any of them.

This false conception of things disappears as soon as we are brought, by faith, to fix our eyes on our blessed Saviour, when it ". pleased the Lord to bruise him," Isaiah liii. 10, as standing in the place of the sinner. If "the green tree," that is, the olive tree, from whence flows all the unction of grace, is thus treated; what can the dry wood, bearing no fruit, and fit only to be burned, expect?

No consideration is so likely to move us, and induce us to place our entire hopes upon Christ, and upon him alone, as such a contemplation.

The dry wood may receive life and fruitfulness, by being united to the green. This miracle is contrary to nature: but grace has power to effect

it. And Jesus Christ, by setting forth the terrors of the Lord, only does it to persuade men to come to him, instead of imitating the blind obstinacy of the Jews, who were brought to so frightful a state, and to the vengeance which followed it, as the consequence of their unbelief.

XXII.

JESUS NAILED TO THE CROSS.

AFTER the blessed Victim had been placed upon this altar, it was lifted up, and its base made firm, and He who was come to reconcile earth to heaven, was hung up in the sight of both. The only Mediator between God and man, was thus made a spectacle to men and to angels. It would seem, as if they had chosen a high standing cross, that from it he might behold something of that extent of territory which was about to be subjected to him. From this cross, as from a throne, the majesty of which was veiled under a temporary ignominy, he could behold all nations bowed down before him, every king humbled at his feet, every idol successively cast to the ground, and all their temples destroyed.