OR, DAILY EXPOSITIONS OF THE GOSPELS. BY THE REV. BARTON BOUCHIER, A.M., CURATE OF CHEAM, SURREY. St. Mark. LONDON: JOHN FARQUHAR SHAW, 27, SOUTHAMPTON ROW, RUSSELL SQUARE, AND EDINBURGH J. MENZIES. DUBLIN: J. ROBERTSON. MDCCCLII. 101.0.21. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MARK. SECTION I. (Chapter i. verses 1-11.) ST. MARK, the author of this Gospel, was not, like Matthew, one of the twelve apostles: it is even questionable whether he was one of the Seventy. "There are diversities of operations," and there are diversities of callings; "but it is the same God which worketh all in all.” “To one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom," by immediate calling and personal intercourse with Him, who is the Truth; to another is vouchsafed by the same Spirit the same effectual calling, and the same blessed teaching, but through human instrumentality and from Peter, in his First Epistle, calling Mark "his son," it is most probable that he was converted to the faith by that apostle. In the Epistle to the Colossians he is designated as "sister's son to Barnabas;" and it was at the house of his mother, Mary, that many were gathered together in prayer on that night when Peter was miraculously delivered from prison by an angel. It is not necessary now to go through B the other few particulars of this evangelist's life, as we find them recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, because they will meet us in the regular course of the history: suffice it to say, that this Gospel is supposed to have been written under the superintendence, and with the revision of, Peter, and has undisputed claims to its position as one of the four Evangelists'. This Gospel gives no account of the birth of Jesus: passing by all the antecedent events, whether of the life of Jesus, or of John the Baptist, during the thirty years of their mutual privacy, till the time of their showing unto Israel, it commences at once with the public ministry of John, and the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan. There is a peculiarity in the expression used by St. Mark in the first verse: "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." And what is that beginning? It begins not with the annunciation of the angel to His virgin mother-it begins not with His birth, or infancy, or childhood; it goes far beyond this, and takes us back to Old Testament times, and the pages of the prophets. is, indeed, only to Isaiah and Malachi that we are here directed, but the web of prophecy spreads through the whole volume: its unbroken thread extends from the Garden of Eden to the very close of the Old Testament canon; and we shall read with very imperfect vision, unless we read by the mutually reflective light of both Testaments. We may say of the pages of the Old Testament, as It the prophets said of John, that they are "the voice of one crying in the wilderness of olden time, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight." They, too, were sent as the Lord's forerunners, to prepare both His way, and men's minds to receive Him. It was of Jesus that Moses in the Law, and David in his Psalms, and the prophets in their books, did speak; and when St. Mark here says, "The beginning of the gospel," he refers us to the time when these good tidings, however obscurely, were first revealed to man. "The beginning," indeed, was before all time. "The Word was in the beginning with God," "when there were no depths," "when there were no fountains," in the everlasting councils and love of the Triune Jehovah: but "the beginning" to us was when man sinned, and the Lord dimly assured the guilty pair that "the Seed of the Woman should bruise the serpent's head." "By man came death," but "by man came also the resurrection of the dead." St. Mark follows very much in the track of the preceding evangelist, though it is evident that they both wrote without connection with each other; and that, as St. Matthew's Gospel was intended chiefly for the instruction and comfort of his own countrymen, so St. Mark's was designed for circulation among the Gentile converts. He therefore studiously passes over that portion of the Baptist's ministry. which had more immediate reference to the children of Abraham, and proceeds at once to that |