kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now is my kingdom not from hence. Pilate then said to him; Art thou a king, then? Jesus answered; Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice." His only power is the power of his doctrines upon the human mind. Every man who owns allegiance to truth, is naturally and necessarily his subject.

But the Messianic language, current at the time of Christ, had a more pervading and universal influence upon the forms of speech, and the modes of representation in the New Testament, than would be at first suggested. Jesus often used the figure of "the kingdom of heaven," applied to his religion. In correspondence with the general idea, he speaks of himself as a king, not only on particular occasions, but he has conforined to this idea his representation of his whole relation to the church. Much of this language is not immediately intelligible to us, because forms of government, and even monarchies, are very different at this period of the world, and in these Western parts of the earth, from what they were in the East, and in the early ages. Government was not then distributed into the legislative, the judicial, and executive departments, and allotted to different individuals, as it now is. The king was everything. He made the law, he sat in judgment on the transgressors, and he punished the guilty. To rule and to judge were nearly synonymous. The monarch

travelled from place to place, as our judges do at the present day, but with his court, with great pomp and splendor. Wherever he came, he punished the guilty, and rewarded the innocent. In the time of Christ, the king, or the governor of Judea, sat as judge. Thus Pilate sat to judge Christ, and Herod Agrippa, the king of Judea, sat to judge Paul, and Paul appealed to the personal tribunal of Cæsar at Rome. Jesus, when here on earth, as the head of the new dispensation, as king of the kingdom of God, executed that part of the functions of a king which consisted in promulgating laws. It was necessary, in order to complete the idea of a king, that he should likewise represent himself as the Judge and Rewarder of mankind. He, like the kings and judges of the Oriental world, must represent himself as coming to judgment. This is the explanation of that scenic description in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew: "When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory. And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, and the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." This is the completion of his reign as the Messiah. He has promulgated his laws, he has tried his subjects, whether they have lived agreeably to them, and pronounces sentence upon them accordingly, and then resigns his kingdom to God. That this

is a scenic, and not a personal transaction, he more than hints to us in another place. "He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him ; the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him at the last day." Those who are acquainted with the principles of the Gospel, shall be judged according to them.

Jesus, when here on earth, appeared to his disciples to be in closer communion with God, than had ever been vouchsafed to any other person. His wisdom was unerring, his character spotless, and he was endowed by God with extensive control over nature. Finally, he was raised from the dead, a distinction which alone lifted him above anything that humanity had ever attained before. After his resurrection, he did not depart into the obscure and unknown of the invisible world, but gave his disciples proofs of his continued existence, and a high state of favor with God, that he cared for his church, and had power to watch over it. Hence the language which is applied to him by the Apostles. His Messianic dignity appears in almost every page of the New Testament. During their lives, the Apostles considered him to be the heavenly patron of their great undertaking of evangelizing the world, to have obtained for them from God those miraculous powers, by which their mission was authenticated, and their authority established in the church. The position they considered him to occupy after his ascension, is exhibited in their prayer to God, after the miracle performed upon the impotent man by Peter and John, in the presence of the multitude at the temple. "Lord,

thou art God, which hast made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is, Who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. For of a truth against thy holy servant Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy council determined before to be done. And now, Lord, behold their threatenings, and grant unto thy servants that with all boldness they may speak thy word, by stretching forth thy hand to heal, and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy servant Jesus." Such a prayer as this is sufficient surely to determine the relation in which Jesus stood to the Supreme God, after his resurrection. They do not worship Christ, but God only. They do not consider him as working the miracles by which their own ministry was accompanied, but it is God who stretches forth his hand to heal, in furtherance of the cause of Jesus. He is not even called the child of God, as it is rendered in our translation, but the servant of God. And this, by the way, is one of the strongest cases in which our translators were biassed by their Trinitarian opinions. The very same word, which, two verses before, they render servant, when applied to David, two verses after, they render child, in order to avoid the unfavorable impression which the true rendering, servant, would make in regard to the doctrine. of the Trinity Such was the state of opinion, with re

spect to Jesus the Messiah, during the age of the Apostles. Such was the language they used concerning him in his state of exaltation. Hence his intimate association with God in all things that pertained to the Church. Hence they baptized in his name, into a profession of belief in his official character, as confirmed by miracles, or the Holy Ghost.

I have reserved but a small space for that part of my present lecture which was to explain the manner in which the doctrine of the Trinity was introduced into the world. We have seen that it was not contained in the Bible, and yet it was drawn from the Bible by the Christian Church, in the course of ages, although the Catholic Church of the present day does not pretend to found it on the Bible, but confesses that it rests on the authority of tradition.

The first cause that led to it, was the fact that Christianity gradually passed out of the hands of the Jews, or of converts from Judaism, into the hands of the Gentiles, that is, converted Pagans. The Jews always maintained, and have done so in all ages, to the present hour, the strictest ideas of the divine Unity; and the Trinity is, at the present moment, the greatest difficulty in the way of converting the Jews. They understood the Messianic and Oriental epithets, derived from the Jewish Theocracy, which were applied to their Messiah, and interpreted them as they ought to be interpreted, of his official character, and not of his metaphysical nature. They had read in their Psalms such language as this, applied to David, whom they knew to be nothing more than a temporal king: "Then thou spakest