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 infusion of the Spirit into the Re deemer's soul, was not the means, but the effect, of its union to the second person of the Godhead. An 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,

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is found to carry 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 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 brokenhearted, 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 broken hearts 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 days, 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 external ordinances, whom our Lord released by the promulgation of his perfect law of liberty. But notwithstanding that the expressions in my text may easily bear, and in the intention of the inspiring Spirit, certainly, I think, involved this mystic meaning, yet since the prophecy, in some of these particulars, had a literal accomplishment in our Lord's miracles, the literal meaning is by no means to be excluded. Indeed, when of both meanings of a prophet's phrase, the literal and the figurative, either seems clearly and equally admissible, the true rule of the interpretation seems to be, that the phrase is to be understood in both. This seems a clear conclusion from the very nature of our Lord's miracles, which, for the most part, were actions distinctly symbolical of one or other of the spiritual benefits of the redemption: as such, they were literal com

pletions of the prophecies, taking the place, as it were, of the prophecies so completed, pointing to another latent meaning, and to a higher completion, and thus forming a strict and wonderful union between the letter and the spirit of the prophetic language.

This text is not the only passage in the prophetic writings, in which the preaching of glad tidings to the poor is mentioned as a principal branch of the Messiah's office. That in the exposition of these prophecies, the figurative sense of the expression is not to exclude the literal, is evident from this consideration, that the discoveries of the Christian revelation are in fact emphatically glad tidings to the poor, in the literal acceptation of the word, -to those who are destitute of worldly riches. To those who, from their present condition, might be likely to think themselves forsaken of their Maker,—to doubt whether they existed for any other purpose than to minister to the superfluous enjoyments of the higher ranks of society, by the severity of their own toil,--to persons in this low condition, and under these gloomy apprehensions, was it not glad tidings to be told that they had a hope, beyond the infidel's expectation, of a perpetual cessation of sorrow in the grave?-hope of a day, when all shall rise, to meet before the common Lord, high and low, rich and poor, one with another!-when, without regard to the distinctions of this transitory life, each man shall receive his proper portion of honour or shame, enjoyment or misery, according to the degree of his moral and religious worth!-that he whose humble station excluded him, in this life, from the society and the pleasures of the great (now fallen from their greatness), shall become the companion and the fellow of angels and of glorified saints! shall stand for ever in the presence of his Redeemer and his God, and partake of the pleasures which are at God's right-hand!

Again, the discoveries of Christianity were made in