tives, and recovering of sight to the blind,—to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."

None but an inattentive reader of the Bible can suppose that these words were spoken by the prophet Isaiah of himself. Isaiah had a portion, without doubt, but a portion only, of the Divine Spirit. In any sense in which the Spirit of Jehovah was upon the prophet, it was more eminently upon him who received it not by measure. The prophet Isaiah restored not, that we know, any blind man to his sight, he delivered no captive from his chain. He predicted indeed the restoration of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, their final restoration from their present dispersion, and the restoration of man from the worse captivity of sin: but he never took upon him to proclaim the actual commencement of the season of liberation, which is the thing properly implied in the phrase of " preaching deliverance to the captives." To the broken-hearted he administered no other balm than the distant hope of one who, in future times, should bear their sorrows; nor were the poor of his own time particularly interested in his preaching. The characters, therefore, which the speaker seems to assume in this prophetic text, are of two kinds, -such as are in no sense answered by any known circumstance in the life and character of Isaiah, or of any other personage of the ancient Jewish history, but in every sense, literal and figurative, of which the terms are capable, apply to Christ; and such as might, in some degree, be answered in the prophet's character, but not otherwise than as his office bore a subordinate relation to Christ's office, and his predictions to Christ's preaching. It is a thing well known to all who have been conversant in Isaiah's writings, that many of his prophecies are conceived in the form of dramatic dialogues, in which the usual persons the sacred piece are God the Father, the Messiah, the prophet himself, and a chorus of the faithful: but it is left to the reader to discover, by the matter spoken, how

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many of these speakers are introduced, and to which speaker each part of the discourse belongs. It had been reasonable therefore to suppose, that this, like many other passages, is delivered in the person of the Messiah, had our Lord's authority been wanting for the application of the prophecy to himself. Following the express authority of our Lord, in the application of this prophecy to him, we might have spared the use of any other argument, were it not that a new form of infidelity of late hath reared its hideous head, which, carrying on an impious opposition to the genuine faith, under the pretence of reformation, in its affected zeal to purge the Christian doctrine of I know not what corruptions, and to restore our creed to what it holds forth as the primitive standard,-under that infatuation which, by the just judgment of God, ever clings to self-sufficient folly, pretends to have discovered inaccuracies in our Lord's own doctrine, and scruples not to pronounce him, not merely a man, but a man peccable and fallible in that degree as to have misquoted and misapplied the prophecies of the Old Testament. In this instance our great Lord and Master defies the profane censures of the doctors of that impious school. This text, referred to its original place in the book of Isaiah, is evidently the opening of a prophetic dialogue; and in the particulars of the character described in it, it carries its own internal evidence of its necessary reference to our Lord, and justifies his application of it to himself, as will farther appear from a more particular exposition.

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," or "over me.' The expression implies a superiority and control of the Divine Spirit, the Spirit's government and guidance of the man, and the man's entire submission, in the prosecution of the work he had in hand, to the Spirit's direction.

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me." Under the law, the three great offices of prophet, priest, and king, were conferred by the ceremony

of anointing the person. The unction of our Lord was the descent of the Holy Ghost upon him at his baptism. This was analogous to the ceremony of anointing, as it was a mark publicly exhibited, " that God had anointed him," to use St. Peter's expression," with the Holy Ghost and with power."

It will seem nothing strange that Jesus, who was himself God, should derive authority from the unction of that Spirit which, upon other occasions, he is said to give, and that he should be under the Spirit's direction, if it be remembered that our Lord was as truly man as he was truly God, that neither of the two natures was absorbed in the other, but both remained in themselves perfect, notwithstanding the union of the two in one person. The Divine Word, to which the humanity was united, was not, as some ancient heretics imagined, instead of a soul to inform the body of the man; for this could not have been without a diminution of the divinity, which, upon this supposition, must have become obnoxious to all the perturbations of the human soul,-to the passions of grief, fear, anger, pity, joy, hope, and disappointment, to all which our Lord, without sin, was liable. The human nature in our Lord was complete in both its parts, consisting of a body and a rational soul. The rational soul of our Lord's human nature was a distinct thing from the principle of divinity to which it was united; and being so distinct, like the souls of other men, it owed the right use of its faculties, in the exercise of them upon religious subjects, and its uncorrupted rectitude of will, to the influence of the Holy Spirit of God. Jesus, indeed, " was anointed with this holy oil above his fellows," inasmuch as the intercourse was uninterrupted,—the illumination by infinite degrees more full, and the consent and submission, on the part of the man, more perfect than in any of the sons of Adam; insomuch that he alone, of all the human race, by the strength and light imparted from above, was exempt from sin, and rendered superior to temptation. To him the Spirit was given

not by measure. The unmeasured effusion of the Spirit into the Redeemer's soul, was not the means, but the effect, of its union to the second person of the Godhead. A union of which this had been the means, had differed only in degree from that which is, in some degree, the privilege of every true believer,-which, in an eminent degree, was the privilege of the apostles, who, by the visible descent of the Holy Ghost upon them on the day of Pentecost, were, in some sort, like their Lord, anointed with the unction from on high. But in him the natures were united, and the uninterrupted perfect commerce of his human soul with the Divine Spirit, was the effect and the privilege of that mysterious conjunction.

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel." To preach the gospel. The original word, which is expressed in our English Bibles by the word "gospel," signifies good news, a joyful message, or glad-tidings; and our English word gospel," traced to its original in the Teutonic language, is found to convey precisely the same import, being a compound of two words, an adjective signifying good, and a substantive which signifies a tale, message, or declaration. But as this signification of the English word, by the general neglect of the parent language, is pretty much forgotten, or remembered only among the learned, it may give perspicuity to the text, if for the single word "gospel," we substitute the two words "glad-tidings." "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach glad-tidings to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind,-to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."

Our blessed Lord, in the course of his ministry, restored the sight of the corporeal eye to many who were literally blind. By his miraculous assistance in various instances of worldly affliction, far beyond the reach of any human

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aid, he literally healed the broken-heart, as in the instance of Jairus, whose breathless daughter he revived-of the widow of Nain, whose son he restored to her from the coffin-of the family of Lazarus, whom he raised from the grave of the Syrophoenician woman, whose young daughter he rescued from possession-and of many other sufferers, whose several cases time would fail me to recount. We read not, however, that, during his life on earth, he literally opened the doors of any earthly prison, for the enlargement of the captive, or that, in any instance, he literally released the slave or the convict from the burden of the galling chain. It is probable, therefore, that all these expressions of "the poor, the broken-hearted, the captive, the blind, and the bruised," carry something of a mystic meaning, denoting moral disorders and deficiencies under the image of natural calamities and imperfections; and that the various benefits of redemption are described under the notion of remedies applied to those natural afflictions and distempers. In this figurative sense, the poor are not those who are destitute of this world's riches, but those who, before our Lord's appearance in the flesh, were poor in religious treasure, without any clear knowledge of the true God, of their own duty here, and of their hope hereafter, the whole heathen world, destitute of the light of revelation. To them our Lord preached the glad-tidings of life and immortality. The broken-hearted are sinners, not hardened in their sins, but desponding under a sense of guilt, without a hope of expiation. These brokenhearts the Redeemer healed, by making the atonement, and by declaring the means and the terms of reconciliation. The captives are they who were in bondage to the law of sin, domineering in their members, and overpowering the will of the conscience and the rational faculty. The blind are the devout but erring Jews of our Lord's day's, blind to the spiritual sense of the symbols of their ritual law. The bruised are the same Jews, bruised in their consciences by the galling fetters of a religion of ex

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