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suffering, hath been pleased to ordain that the business shall be so conducted, and the method of the business so clearly foretold, as to strike the profane with awe, and animate the humble and the timid. He hath warned us, and let them who dare to extenuate the warning, ponder the dreadful curse with which the book of prophecy is sealed" If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life;"-God hath warned us that the inquiry into every man's conduct will be public, -Christ himself the Judge, the whole race of man, and the whole angelic host, spectators of the awful scene. Before that assembly, every man's good deeds will be declared, and his most secret sins disclosed. As no elevation of rank will then give a title to respect, no obscurity of condition shall exclude the just from public honour, or screen the guilty from public shame. Opulence will find itself no longer powerful, poverty will be no longer weak; birth will no longer be distinguished, meanness will no longer pass unnoticed. The rich and poor will indeed strangely meet together; when all the inequalities of the present life shall disappear, and the conqueror and his captive-the monarch and his subject-the lord and his vassal-the statesman and the peasant-the philosopher and the unlettered hind-shall find their distinctions to have been mere illusions. The characters and actions of the greatest and the meanest have in truth been equally important, and equally public; while the eye of the omniscient God hath been equally upon them all,-while all are at last equally brought to answer to their common Judge, and the angels stand around spectators, equally interested in the dooms of all. The sentence of every man will be pronounced by him who cannot be merciful to those who shall have willingly sold themselves to that abject bondage from which he died to purchase their redemption,

who, nevertheless, having felt the power of temptation, knows to pity them that have been tempted; by him on whose mercy contrite frailty may rely-whose anger hardened impenitence must dread. To heighten the solemnity and terror of the business, the Judge will visibly descend from heaven,-the shout of the archangels and the trumpet of the Lord will thunder through the deep,-the dead will awake,—the glorified saints will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air; while the wicked will in vain call upon the mountains and the rocks, to cover them. Of the day and hour when these things shall be, knoweth no man; but the day and hour for these things are fixed in the eternal Father's counsels. Our Lord will come,-he will come unlooked for, and may come sooner than we think.

God grant, that the diligence we have used in these meditations may so fix the thought and expectation of that glorious advent in our hearts, that by constant watchfulness on our own part, and by the powerful succour of God's Holy Spirit, we may be found of our Lord, when he cometh, without spot and blameless!

SERMON IV.

PSALM xlv. 1.

I speak of the things which I have made touching the King, or unto the King.

THIS forty-fifth psalm has, for many ages, made a stated part of the public service of the church on this anniversary festival of our blessed Lord's nativity.* With God's assistance, I purpose to explain to you its application, both in the general subject, and in each particular part, to this great occasion; which will afford both seasonable and edifying matter of discourse.

It is a poetical composition, in the form of an epithalamium, or song of congratulation, upon the marriage of a great king, to be sung to music at the wedding-feast. The topics are such as were the usual ground-work of such gratulatory odes with the poets of antiquity: they all fall under two general heads-the praises of the bridegroom, and the praises of the bride. The bridegroom is praised for the comeliness of his person, and the urbanity of his address-for his military exploits-for the extent of his conquests-for the upright administration of his government-for the magnificence of his court. The bride is celebrated for her high birth-for the beauty of her person, the richness of her dress, and her numerous train of blooming bride-maids. It is foretold that

* Preached on Christmas day.

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the marriage will be fruitful, and that the sons of the great king will be sovereigns of the whole earth. In this general structure of the poem, we find nothing but the common topics and the common arrangement of every wedding song: and were it not that it is come down to us in the authentic collection of the sacred hymns of the Hebrew church, and that some particular expressions are found in it, which, with all the allowance that can be made for the hyperbolisms of the oriental style (of which, of late years, we have been accustomed to hear more than is true, as applied to the sacred writers), are not easily applicable to the parties, even in a royal marriage; were it not for such expressions which occur, and for the notorious circumstance. that it had a distinguished place in the canon of the Hebrew scriptures, we should not be led to divine, from any thing in the general structure of the poem, that this psalm had reference to any religious subject. But when we connect these circumstances with another, which cannot have escaped the observation of any reader of the Bible, that the relation between the Saviour and his church is represented in the writings both of the Old and New Testament, under the image of the relation of a husband to his wife,—that it is a favourite image with all the ancient prophets, when they would set forth the loving kindness of God for the church, or the church's dutiful return of love to him; while, on the contrary, the idolatry of the church, in her apostacies, is represented as the adultery of a married woman, that this image has been consecrated to this signification by our Lord's own use of it, who describes God in the act of settling the church in her final state of peace and perfection, as a king making a marriage for his son; the conjecture that will naturally arise upon the recollection of these circumstances will be, that this epithalamium, preserved among the sacred writings of the ancient Jewish church, celebrates no common marriage,

but the great mystical wedding,-that Christ is the bridegroom, and the spouse his church. And this was the unanimous opinion of all antiquity, without exception even of the Jewish expositors. For although, with the veil of ignorance and prejudice upon their understandings and their hearts, they discern not the comple. tion of this or of any of their prophecies in the Son of Mary, yet they all allow, that this is one of the prophecies which relate to the Messiah and Messiah's people; and none of them ever dreamed of an application of it to the marriage of any earthly prince.

It is the more extraordinary, that there should have arisen in the Christian church, in later ages, expositors of great name and authority, and indeed of great learning, who have maintained, that the immediate subject of the psalm is the marriage of Solomon with Pharaoh's daughter, and can discover only a distant reference to Christ and the church, as typified by the Jewish king and his Egyptian bride. This exposition, too absurd and gross for Jewish blindness, contrary to the unanimous sense of the fathers of the earliest ages, unfortunately gained credit, in a late age, in the reformed churches, upon the authority of Calvin; insomuch, that in an English translation of the Bible, which goes under the name of Queen Elizabeth's Bible, because it was in common use in private families in her reign, we have this argument prefixed to the psalm: "The majestie of Solomon, his honour, strength, beauty, riches, and power, are praised; and also his marriage with the Egyptian, being an heathen woman, is blessed." It is added, indeed, "Under this figure, the wonderfull majestie and increase of the kingdom of Christ, and his church now taken of the Gentiles, is described." Now the account of this matter is this: This English translation of the Bible, which is, indeed, upon the whole, a very good one, and furnished with very edifying notes

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