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But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." — I CJORINTHIANS XV. 54 — 57. " Thus we have seen," continued Blancombe, " that out of the Hebrew history and literature the Christian religion has 348 PREGNANCY OF JUDAISM. grown. Judaism ought to have died, in giving birth to a child thus nobler than itself. For the lesser light is swallowed up in the greater. But the Jews in general reject Christianity ; for they rightly argue, that it does not correspond with the letter of their sacred books ; and they wrongly conclude, that therefore it can- not be what Almighty God was all along designing. Whereas, we conceive, that our eternal Ruler's forecasting thought, which was implied in the law, and became more distinct in the con- sciousness of the great preachers of righteousness, came more fully to light in the grace and truth which are manifested in Jesus Christ. It could not be, that men should always believe external rites to have a cleansing power, apart from the feeling and life of which they were significant ; or that law, which in its proper idea is restraint, and which is concerned generally about prohibitions, and always about external acts, should for ever seem to them the highest expression of the Will of Him who is a searcher of the hearts, and who by His loving-kind- ness gives every motive of attraction to the will ; nor again, as both the range of His providence and the spiritual manner of His being became evident to them, could they any longer think, that His sun shone only upon Palestine, and that His goodness was restricted to one race, or that prayer and praise would not be accepted by Him from men lifting up pure hands every- where. Yet that great Priesthood which so long worshipped Jehovah on Mount Zion, was not to die barren ; the strong fore- bodings of the Prophets, of some glorified Israel to come, must find one day a fulfilment; and when the letter of a law had educated men (whether it were through observance, or through recoil,) into a full intelligence of its meaning, they would both know its value as an instrument, and disclaim its dominion as an end, having a deeper allegiance to the thoughts which had been before, and which would be after it. Again, the slaying of animals would come to be felt a burdensome, or even a cruel, kind of worship ; yet the contrition and the consecration of life, implied in such acts, would come out in the same purer form, as CHRISTIAN FULFILMENT. 349 in the resignation of men under severe pain, or their forbearance under injury, and in their dedication of themselves to any good work required of them, with such a feeling as is expressed in the words, Not my will, hit Thine. "How far we could have anticipated beforehand such an outgrowing of the Hebrew polity, is difficult to say. For we might have dreaded instead a hardening into sacerdotal or formal scripturalism ; and this fear would have been justified by the later Rabbinism of the Jews. Still the event of Chris- tianity shews that the original framework contained, either in itself or with the aid of collateral influences, the capacity of such a growth ; and, as in human things we judge the author's design by the best of which his work is capable, rather than by its partial shortcoming, so much more we must ascribe the best of worldly events to the counsel of the Almighty. Some of you say that the very world is an embodiment of the Divine think- ing, and in a certain figurative sense I admit this to be so. But then, neither can any dispensation of things on a large scale have come about, save of that thinking, nor yet can it have reached its destiny until it fulfil the highest good to which the thinking tends ; still less is the best of its actual fulfilment to be deemed no part of the original thought. Christianity then, as we say, being the better result of Judaism, must have been its destiny, and so is prophesied in a way by whatever pre- figurements of it existed, either in germ, or under veil, in the earlier dispensation. Nor does it fulfil only what is most signi- ficant in Judaism, but even in your own religion, and perhaps in all. For it mediates between and harmonises them, adding to the strong belief of the Hebrew, something of the largeness of thought of the Hindti and of the heroic humanity of the Greek, while it sobers these with the household virtues of the Boman, and with the deeper sense of truth and right, which the Hebrew had in his consciousness of having to answer before the Judge of the whole earth. Something correspondent to each part of its £aith may be foimd in some one of the others, but none of 350 JESUS CHRIST. them 80 harmonised these as to reach its distinctive character ; for it brings God as near to man as is possible witliout con- founding the two : it fixes our gaze on immortality, yet so as not to forget the world which now is, and it abases by a deep sense of unworthiness, in order both to comfort with forgiveness, and to exalt with hallowing power. " These things may come out more clearly, if I now describe the author and the origin of our faith, the doctrines of which I have expoimded from our Lord's prayer, and which you know, as a fact, is established in the Christian Church throughout many countries of the world. It was in Judsea, — the land in which, of all others, the fear of God had been inherited through many generations, and where, in that fear, all the ties of human life had been consecrated as Divine appointments, and where all the fears of the conscience had been expressed in expiatory ritual, and all the infinite hopes of the soul in prayer and praise, while a wonderful display of providence in history had schooled the nation through glory and downfall, — there our Saviour, Jesus of Nazareth, was bom, as the Son of Man. He had in Him the fulness of human nature, and inherited with it whatever might mark the purest of His race. He was not, therefore, hostile to nature, or to humanity. He looked admiringly on the lilies of the field ; He entered into the festivities of marriage, and felt pity by the bier of death ; He remembered fondly the old glory of His country and of her kings ; He shed tears over the city, upon which He foresaw that the same immoral fanaticism and love of power, which had formerly slain righteous men, would soon, in conjunction with narrow obstinacy, bring down a crush- ing doom ; He loved especially the youngest, and many think the fairest, of His disciples ; and before He resigned His spirit into the hands of His Heavenly Father, He commended His earthly parent to afiectionate care. It is clear that there can have been no right belief amongst His countrymen, either as to the pro- vidence of God, or its manifestation in their history, which Jesus would not inherit; wliile even their temporal or local PLACE AND TIME OF INCARNATION. 351 aasociations would be things among which He grew up^ and in accordance with which His hearers would understand His language, so that we might expect Him to have employed such things in speaking, no less than the native tongue of His country. For language in its full extent comprehends popular associations no less than words. But besides all this, there dwelt in Jesus the fulness of the Divine Truth ; even as the image answers to the seal, so was the Truth in Him the ' express image*' of the very being of the High and Holy One who inhabiteth eternity ; and having without measure the indwelling of that Holy Spirit which joins the Father and the Son, He felt, alike through earthly life and in death. His perfect One-ness with the Supreme Father. He and His Father were One. " The time when Jesus appeared was when the Jews were subject to Home, under the empire of Augustus and Tiberius. The loss of their independence galled them ; the stricter sort were daily more anxious for the continuance of their sacred law, which was endangered by contact with foreign manners and literature ; hence the zealots were tempted to draw, if possible, a strictert line than ever around the circle which they thought holy in proportion as it was narrow, but which, in spite of them, widened itself in many men's conceptions : the common people were eager to hail any national deliverer who, according to the literal hopes of the prophets after the Babylonian exile, should build up the throne of David; while the more prudent, and those who had rank or Boman favour to lose, dreaded an out- break, which could only end in