creation is to continue groaning, and expecting, and hoping, till He returns to end its bondage, and to begin its liberty and glory.

66

“Here, then, are three passages—and there are many such-affirming most unambiguously, that this great creation-line of prophecy consists of two parts or divisions—a dark and a bright-and that the intersecting event is the Lord's second coming. It is that event which removes the darkness, and introduces the brightness-which sweeps off the curse, and replaces it with the blessing. The conclusion from this, as to pre-millennialism, is obvious. There is no glory for creation, no deliverance from the curse, no loosening of the fetters of bondage, no millennial blessedness, until the Lord himself arrives. And who save He can claim the honour of wiping off creation's curse, and as the last Adam, undoing the wrong which the first Adam wrought to this material earth, the seat of His royal dominion, which God at first pronounced so good? It was creation's curse as well as man's that He bore. The symbol of that curse was the thorn; and therefore it was with thorns that He allowed Himself to be crowned, that He might show Himself to be the Redeemer of man's earth, as well as of man himself; the breaker of creation's bonds as well as of the fetters of the flesh; not merely the restorer of man to Paradise, but the restorer of Paradise to man.

"II. Our second prophetical line is that relating to the Son of God, Messiah, Christ. His history divides itself, like the former, into two great sections-the dark and the bright-the intersecting event being His own advent in glory. Of these two parts the first promise spoke, when it predicted Him as the woman's seed, the man with the bruised heel, the bruiser of the serpent's head. Of the same two parts our Lord himself spoke, when He said, 'Ought not [the] Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into His glory?' And of these same Peter spoke, when he made mention of the sufferings of [the] Christ, and the glory that should follow;' and when he added, 'Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy ;' and when he speaks of himself as a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed.' Such are the two welldefined divisions of Christ's history, marked off thus, not in a few such texts, but in passages too numerous to be cited.

6

"That the dark period of this prophetic line continues till He appear, and that not till then does His day of glory begin, is evident from several considerations and passages. The apostle Peter, in the portions already cited, identifies the day of His glory with the day when the Chief Shepherd shall appear' (ver. 4), and with the day of the revelation of Jesus Christ; ' intimating that, not till that Chief Shepherd appear, not till the Lord be revealed, will His glory be entered on. His ascension to the Father's right hand, though in one sense it invested Him with glory, and ended the shame of His earthly humiliation, yet did not introduce Him into that peculiar glory of which all the prophets had borne witness-a glory in connection with His Church-a glory in connection with restored Israel-a glory in connection with resurrection—a glory in connection with earth more than with heaven. Assuredly this peculiar glory ascribed to Messiah has not yet begun. In His members, if not in Himself, He is still the suffering, persecuted, humbled Jesus. In His members, if not in Himself, He is still put to shame, reviled, buffeted, crucified. Nay more, He is still personally the rejected One-rejected of men, rejected of the world, rejected of Israel, rejected of multitudes, who give Him the outward homage of the lip and knee. Nor shall He be otherwise than the rejected One till the day when He returns in His glory. He has gone into the far country, to receive for Himself a kingdom, and to return (Luke xix. 11-27). Meanwhile the cry is raised, We will not have this man to reign over us. During the whole time of His absence, this cry is heard ascending, till at His return, He summons His servants,

He sits in judgment, He rewards the faithful, and issues the command for the slaughter of His enemies. And that this is at His second coming is evident from the intention of the whole parable, and still more from the warn ing words of the 13th verse-Occupy till I come.' Until He comes, then, He is the rejected One. His coming is to end the day of His long rejection, and to introduce the day of His acceptance-the day when He shall be owned by Israel, and by the world, as He is now by His saints-the day when He shall be owned on earth, as now He is owned in heaven. As the great Judge of all, His glory is yet to come; as the King of kings and Lord of lords, His glory is yet to come; as the last Adam, His glory is yet to come; as the Church's Head and Bridegroom, His glory is yet to come; as Israel's monarch, His glory is yet to come; as Antichrist's destroyer and Satan's dethroner, His glory is yet to come.'

The Recovery of Jerusalem; a Narrative of Exploration and Discovery in the City and the Holy Land. By Capt. WILSON, R.E., Capt. WARREN, R. E., &c. &c. &c. With an Introduction by ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, Dean of Westminster. Edited by WALTER MORRISON, M.P., Honorary Treasurer to the Palestine Exploration Fund.

WE do not mean to enter into an examination of this interesting volume. It well deserves the careful study of all who love Jerusalem, and who are looking for the day when the Lord will rebuild its broken walls and restore its waste places. It is difficult to give an extract relating to the excavations of the city, without occupying more space than we can afford. So we prefer giving the following paragraphs relating to Tel Hum, or Capernaum, and its ruined synagogue :—

"We were soon amongst those ruins which, if they are, as we believe them to be, those of Capernaum, must always have such a lasting interest. The season was favourable for an examination, the tall thistles which hide the ruins in early summer not having yet reared their heads; and we readily made our way to the White Synagogue,' and the more conspicuous building at the water's edge. It needed but a glance to show that the latter had been almost entirely built with limestone blocks taken from the Synagogue, and to this, therefore, we principally turned our attention. A party of Arabs, brought down from Safed, were set to work, and cleared out a large portion of the interior, sufficient to enable a plan to be made. Excavation with no means but those the country could provide was no easy matter; no picks or shovels, not even a crowbar or a piece of wood large enough to be of any use, could be procured; the earth was laboriously scraped into baskets, and carried away, whilst the heavy stones were turned over by our living crowbar, a man of great strength, with a short neck, who appeared to have been born for the purpose. He would dig a hole at the foot of the great limestone blocks to receive his head and shoulders, and then raising his feet against the face of the stones, exert all his power to move them, rarely failing to do what he attempted.

"The Synagogue, built entirely of white limestone, must once have been a conspicuous object, standing out from the dark basaltic background; it is now nearly level with the surface, and its capitals and columns have been for the most part carried away or turned into lime. The original building is 74 feet 9 inches long, by 56 feet 9 inches wide; it is built north and south, and at the southern end has three entrances. In the interior we found many of the pedestals of the columns in their original positions, and

several capitals of the Corinthian order buried in the rubbish; there were also blocks of stone which had evidently rested on the columns, and supported wooden rafters. Outside the Synagogue proper, but connected with it, we uncovered the remains of a later building, which may be those of the church which Epiphanius says was built at Capernaum, and was described by Antoninus, A.D. 600, as a Basilica, enclosing the house of Peter. It may be asked what reason there is for believing the original building to have been a Jewish synagogue, and not a temple or church. Seen alone there might have been some doubt as to its character, but compared with the number of ruins of the same character which have lately been brought to notice in Galilee, there can be none. Two of these buildings have inscriptions in Hebrew over their main entrances; one in connection with a seven-branched candlestick, the other with figures of the paschal lamb, and all, without exception, are constructed after a fixed plan, which is totally different from that of any church, temple, or mosque in Palestine. For a description of the very marked peculiarities which distinguish the synagogues from other buildings, I would refer the reader to an article on the subject in the Second Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund. If Tel Hum be Capernaum, this is without a doubt the synagogue built by the Roman centurion (Luke vii. 4, 5), and one of the most sacred places on earth. It was in this building that our Lord gave the well-known discourse in John vi., and it was not without a certain strange feeling that on turning over a large block we found the pot of manna engraved on its face, and remembered the words, I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.'

Round the Synagogue, and stretching up the gentle slope behind, are the ruins of the ancient town, covering a larger extent of ground than we had been led to expect. The whole area, half a mile in length by a quarter in breadth, was thickly covered with the ruined walls of private houses, amongst which we thought we could trace a main street, leading in the direction of Chorazin. At the northern extremity of the town two remarkable tombs were found, one constructed with limestone blocks below the surface of the ground, which must have been a work of great labour, as the hard basalt on the surface had first to be cut away; the other, a rectangular building, capable of holding a large number of bodies, which is above ground, and appears to have been whitewashed within and without. It is possibly this description of tomb to which our Lord refers in Matthew xxiii. 27, where He compares the Scribes and Pharisees to 'whited sepulchres,' beautiful in outward appearance, but within 'full of dead men's bones;' a similar building may also have been the home of the demoniac at Gergesa. "The shore was eagerly searched, but without success, for traces of an artificial harbour. The boats which formerly belonged to the town must always have taken shelter at Et Tabigah, or, as is just as probable, have been drawn up on the bank when not in use. There are, however, along the shore several fish-traps, made by the Bedawin, which some travellers have taken for the remains of piers; they consist of enclosures, made with large stones, in the shallow water, an opening being left for the fish to enter by; in this manner a few fish are caught each night.

"Before leaving Capernaum, we cannot help drawing attention to the additional force and beauty which our Lord's words in Matthew xi. 23 derive by adopting the reading of the two oldest known MSS. of the New Testa ment (the Sinaitic and Vatican): And thou, Capharnaum! shalt thou be exalted unto heaven? thou shalt be brought down to hell.' There is a reproach conveyed in this question to His own city,' which is lost in the rendering of the authorised version; and it is impossible to draw from it the fanciful conclusion that Capernaum was on a hill, as a late writer has done from the words,' And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven.'"

Extracts.

The Church's False Hopes.

LET us see the reason why God withholds His blessing from all attempts to set up His kingdom on the earth before His time. The Roman Church, which has just crowned a long career of folly and of blasphemy in this direction by the arrogant, yet consistent, assumption that its Head is infallible, is the most conspicuous instance in point. But Protestant Christendom is by no means free from this sin. Its history is almost as full of providential warnings and rebukes of the great and criminal mistake of supposing that the kingdom of God can ever take possession of this world as at present constituted, or find upon the earth a suitable platform on which to erect itself, before her Lord shall arise to judge it (Ps. lxxxii. 8). And this we believe has been the great weakness of her missionary efforts. They have too often been begun and prosecuted on this false basis. It has, for example, long been the effort and almost the vain boast of the Evangelical Church in these United States that she intended to take possession of this land for Christ. And with what success? The census of 1860 revealed the fact that the proportion of members of all evangelical denominations in this country was less than in 1850. There had been increase, but only of about twenty-eight per cent., while the population had increased about thirty-two. The world had gained upon the Church, or, to use the language of an intelligent anti-Millenarian brother who made the examination, and reported to the writer this result, "This country is relapsing into infidelity." If we mistake not, the census of 1870 will show no better result. In the narrative of the State of Religion, read before the Synod of New Jersey at its last meeting in October, it was stated, as the result of an elaborate and minute investigation of the statistics of all the leading denominations in that State, that while its population had increased in the last decade about forty per cent., the growth of the churches was much behind this. No more favoured portion of the country for such a comparison could be selected. Here, then, we have the Lord's signal rebuke of the vain pretence of conquering for Him a kingdom in this world. It was never meant that His Church should be anything more than a toiler and a stranger in a world that disowned Him, and necessitated its own future judgment, when its princes hung Him on a cross. And she should be ashamed to strive for any crown here other than the one which she shall one day receive from her Lord's own hands.

And so far as the foreign missionary work has been stimulated by this vain hope of the "conversion of the world" before the Lord come to bind and cast out its Prince (Rev. xx.), it has been vitiated. The

Lord, indeed, often blesses the labours of His servants, even where there is ignorance of His purposes and misapprehension of that "sure word" in which they are revealed. He can bear much with the mistakes of His children, and even work with them for the salvation of men where the heart is right. And yet if the apprehension of the truth be faulty, the result must be thereby marred and hindered. We have not the least doubt that far greater triumphs would have been witnessed on the foreign field, as also at home, if our missionaries had regarded themselves as sent of God to visit the Gentiles, "to take out of them a people for His name" (Acts xv. 14), and if they had preached to them the gospel of the kingdom as well as of the grace of God. The first missionaries that went out from Pentecost preached to the nations the kingdom of God, and the gospel of His grace as a preparation for it. They baptized their converts into the hope of a kingdom to be realised, not by a slow process of conversion of the nations, but to be revealed, with its Lord, from heaven, and to be bestowed not upon a world all converted and waiting for it, but upon a little flock, who, amid the darkness and wickedness of a world that knows not God, and desires not the knowledge of His ways, patiently wait and suffer for it. We are quite sure that if our modern missionaries had put "that blessed hope" of Christ's appearing into the same place of prominence in their preaching as did the apostles, and if the Church at home had proposed to herself not to reap this world-wide harvest, but to gather her sheaf of first-fruits, the pledge and harbinger of the coming harvest when the Lord shall put in the sickle, and as an offering to be presented to Him on that day of glory (1 Thess. i. 19), far greater blessing would have been witnessed abroad, and far less of this poverty and languor with which the work is sustained at home. And here again, although it is with sorrow that we allude to the facts, we have an instructive example at hand.

Some months ago the Presbyterian Church in this country consummated its reunion. On every hand great expectations were aroused of the work it was to do at home and abroad. Was it not nearer the realisation of its idea of the Kingdom of God? Had it not become a greater power in the land and in the world? Now, the reunion may have been right, so far as it was a testimony to the world that all Christians are one in Christ, but so far as it was fostered and brought about by the desire of a great Church Establishment (we use the word in no technical sense), deriving power in the world from weight of numbers or the aggregation of wealth and talent, so far, in other words, as the false idea that it is the Church's mission now to set up a kingdom of God on earth, and to aid its universal triumph by such means and agencies, so far the spirit that prompted it was not from above. And that this secular spirit did enter as an element into the result cannot be denied. That it was relied upon as a great stimulant to missionary enterprise was openly confessed,-and what has been thus far the result? The Presbyterian of November 12th gives the state