obedient passion, no refractory habit or practice? Jesus, though a king, yet bore His cross. Are we ready and willing to take up our cross daily and follow Him? If so, if we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him.

SECTION LXXXVI.

(Chapter xxvii. verses 27-45.)

WHEN Jesus made His entry into Jerusalem in that semblance of triumph, amid the acclamations and hosannas of the people, it was to fulfil an important prediction, which had foretold that He should so come. I then stated that that prophecy headed a series, which, for minuteness of detail, in almost every incident which occurred during the period of our Lord's trial, condemnation, and crucifixion, might well be deemed a narrative of events after they had happened, rather than a prediction of what should hereafter occur. It has often struck me, to how little purpose these priests and elders, and scribes and Pharisees, must have read their own Scriptures; how little conscious they were, that in every act of cruelty or malice, of insult or of taunt, which they heaped on Jesus, they were fulfilling each prediction as it arose, with an accuracy which, one would have thought, must at last have startled their own minds with the resemblance. But the veil was indeed upon their hearts; they knew

their Scriptures perfectly-by rote: they read them continually, but never read them aright; they used the very words which God, by His Holy Spirit, a thousand years before, had declared they should use; the very gestures He had assigned to them, they adopt; and yet, oh, blind infatuation! it never once occurred to them that they were but instruments in the hands of God to fulfil all that His prophets had spoken! They might have said, "Our lips are our own," and no doubt exulted in the thought that they were quoting Scripture to condemn Jesus, and not themselves; and yet those lips could only utter what He who formed them had declared they should utter. And as they passed beside the cross on which Jesus hung, and saw, as they believed, their victim powerless to save Himself or others, their hearts, no doubt, swelled with triumph, as if they had won the victory, and all had happened as they intended, and not as God foretold. It was, indeed, a blind infatuation; but even the very infatuation had been foretold, and "well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet, unto their fathers, The heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them." But is this infatuation of this people no warning to ourselves? They read their Scriptures;

but they read to no purpose; and may not we be chargeable with reading our Bibles, and not applying their truths? Many a one hears God's solemn truths delivered, and is, perhaps, struck with their extreme suitableness to his neighbour's case: he may hear his own character sketched or filled up in the preacher's discourse, and may go home and express his wonder how such and such a neighbour can by any possibility of self-delusion evade its application to himself. Alas! the veil is upon our hearts too, till the Spirit of God takes of the things of Jesus, and shows them unto us. We shall read to as little purpose as these priests and elders, till the eyes of our understanding are opened, and shall hear with as little benefit, unless a power beyond that of prophet or preacher shall say to us, "Thou art the man." It was, perhaps, more painful to the tender heart of Jesus to receive the cruel taunts and insults of His Jewish torturers, than those of the Roman soldiery: they were His countrymen; He had gone amongst them doing good continually; to them especially had His mission been confined, as to the lost sheep of the house of Israel; and for them had His eyes filled with tears, as but a few days before he had recounted the desolations of Jerusalem. The cruelties of the Roman soldiery were indeed painful, but not a sigh, not a complaint, not a word, escapes his lips: as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so opened He not His mouth. And thus these soldiers in their

ignorance, as the priests in their malice, were alike unconscious agents in the overruling hand of God; and "those things which God before had showed by the mouth of all His prophets, that .Christ should suffer, He hath fulfilled," even while, and by the very means, they thought they were working their own ends and purposes. Little did these heathen persecutors think that by the very act they were thus helping to accomplish, they were breaking down the partitionwall that kept out the Gentile world from the covenanted mercies of God; and that from that cross which they were so eager to rear, that voice of mercy should issue forth, "Look unto Me, all the ends of the earth, and be ye saved." It has been well said, "Man proposes, but God disposes;" and blessed be His name for that truth!

SECTION LXXXVII.

(Chapter xxvii. verses 45—54.)

WE read in the Gospel of St. Luke of the miraculous events that attended the birth of Jesus; how the glory of the Lord, in all its resplendent brightness, shone round about the shepherds on the plains of Bethlehem, and how a star, or luminous appearance, of peculiar brilliance, gave notice to the wise men of the birth of Him that was born King of the Jews. And it was most fitting that the advent of Jesus should

be heralded with such glorious light, for "He was the true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." But now that Light was to be for a season quenched; and the fitting emblem of that deed of guilt which was enacted. on Calvary was that miraculous darkness which overspread the land for the space of three hours. Whether that darkness of three hours was like the Egyptian darkness of three days," in which they saw not one another, neither rose any from his place," I cannot say. It was assuredly preternatural, arising from no passing storm, no eclipse of the sun, but a deep, lurid gloom settling over the whole land, while that awful conflict with the powers of darkness was taking place: not a single event is recorded to have occurred during those three eventful hours, nor a single word to have passed the lips of Jesus, till, towards its close, He gave utterance to that cry of deep and bitter agony, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" The words, we know, are taken from the 22nd Psalm, that most extraordinary accumulation of minute prophecy of almost every incident of the crucifixion; and it is a striking testimony to the value of Scripture, that the Son of God Himself, in His darkest sorrow, turned rather to the recorded words of the Psalmist, than to any of His own, for His communings with His Father. And how many a dying one of Christ's, since, has found David's Psalms, and David's words, the most consolatory to his own spirit, as he, too,