the Gospels, when the mystery hidden from ages and generations was manifested in the flesh. In like manner, the Gospel pictures light up into their true expression the remarkable moral features of patriarchal and Jewish communion with Jehovah. The human sympathies manifested by the "Angel of the Lord" are similarly anomalous when read of side by side with the contemporary human notions of the Most High expressed, for example, in Solomon's language respecting the great temple Jehovah had allowed him to build to His honour: But will God in very deed dwell with man upon the earth?” They are set in recognisable position, and take their place with manifest fitness, in the love which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, when the life of Jesus of Nazareth sheds its revealing light back upon them. Faith, believing on rational grounds in an identity fixed by such an interlacing of divine names and attributes as makes the individuality of Jesus and the Angel of God's presence, Jehovah, one, rejoices with heartseeing belief and edifying satisfaction to recognise the same Jesus, from the earliest narratives of God with man, the first as well as the last Saviour of Adam's race in all their afflictions, the giver of all their blessings.

of Wisdom

Jesus.

11. Was it the same "Wisdom of God” (1 Cor. i. 24), Christ The "cry" Jesus, the heir of all things, who in the fulness of times en- and of dured the cross, despising the shame, for the joy of man's salvation set before Him? was it He who in the beginning took the same name and the same joy for His inheritance, and before the race was created rejoiced in the places where they were to dwell? (Prov. viii.) The cry of wisdom "in the top of the high places, by the way in the places of the paths: O ye simple, understand wisdom; and, ye fools, be of an understanding heart. Hear; for I will speak of excellent things," is the cry of Jehovah by His prophets to faithless Israel-the very cry of Jesus of Nazareth to the sons of men. The "joy in the habitable part of the earth, the delight with the sons of men," is properly to be placed, surely, as an early chapter of the same "life, the light of men" (John i. 4), which was manifest in flesh in the days of Pontius Pilate, and now intercedes for the sons of men in heaven-a forelooking love, as then and now-an active

love, concentrating itself on mankind so as to suggest the very words of the New Testament's description of the love of Jesus Christ: "He loved us, and gave Himself for us ; "-" O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings!""If thou hadst known, at least in this thy day, the things that concern thy peace!"-"I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!"

12. Scripture does not describe other human appearances than those above spoken of vouchsafed in the early times by the Friend of man; but faith, having familiarly before its eyes the man who appeared at Mamre, Penuel, and Jericho-the man who ate bread with Abraham in the door of his tent, who reproved Sarah forbearingly with so human-like appreciation of her state of mind, who took Abraham into His confidence as to His designs on Sodom with a seeming friendly afterthought so like our own, saying to Himself, while Abraham walked with Him part of the way from his tent, "Shall I hide from Abraham the thing which I do?" and then suffered, with endlessly-expanding fellow-feeling, the old man's persistent intercession for the cities of the plain-will be prone to associate some such visible phase of love with the earlier narratives of Him whose voice was so well known to the first pair in the garden, and with whom Enoch walked, and was taken to heaven by Him without tasting death.

13. Do we recognise the same hand which in Cana of Galilee turned water into wine-the first, and the type of all the divine deeds of His human life-preparing, long before, the garden eastward in Eden for man's dwelling-place, when "out of the ground Jehovah God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden" (Gen. ii. 9); preparing, too, the first trial of faith, "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil"? Was it the very "seed of the woman," the pitying, desirous Propitiation Himself, that hasted in the first day of fear to bring to the fallen pair the glad tidings, "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head"? as it certainly was after

wards Abraham's promised seed Himself, the blessing of all nations, that in human form gave the waiting and repeatedly wearying patriarch the distant promise of that seed, and the promise of its immediate earnest, Isaac, "born to one as good as dead" (Heb. xi. 12). In both narratives it is by the name Jehovah that the divine visitor is called-the I AM of Moses' subsequent revelation, and of Jesus' full declaration of Himself.

mercies of

those of

and the

Galilee.

14. Perhaps it is instructive that in Gen. vi. and vii., in Distinctive the description of the conflict of feeling taking place in the Jehovah-divine mind over the wickedness of Noah's generation, upon Jesus. which the Flood was sent, the names God and Jehovah are both used the name of Godhead, and the name, appropriated to God's redeeming coming nigh again to mankind, by which He made Himself known to typical Israel; and while it is of God (Elohim) that we read the inexorable judgment (vi. 12, 13), it is under the name of Jehovah (the future I AM and Jesus) that the narrative places the so richly emo- The Flood tional elements exhibited in it-grief to the heart at man's towns of sins, but forbearance for yet a hundred and twenty years; repentance that He had made man, and a resolution to banish the unholiness by destruction of the race; but love still, and a new trial of the race-"Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." It is the very mixture of feelings which Judæa and Galilee often heard in the fulness of times in the lamentations over Jerusalem, and the denunciations of Chorazin and Bethsaida. Under the same name of Jehovah we read of the Babel, and Nazareth, merciful confounding of language at Babel, which restrained and Geththe quick spread of new corruption. Faith, dwelling on the compassionateness of the severity, will spontaneously associate it with the similarly unique confusion of senses at the hill of Nazareth and the garden of Gethsemane, as the work of the same long-suffering Spirit who "restraineth the remainder of man's anger."

semane.

of man

15. The history of Jehovah's communion with the father of The Friend the faithful is fitly rich in food for faith's assuring thoughts with Abrarecognising the oldness of that love which we get peace from ham. having ever before us. How often did He, who in the days

of His flesh prayed for Peter's after-days of frailty and trial that his faith might not fail, come to Abraham's help—a man of not unlike strength and weakness-in sustaining manifestations; repeating and reassuring the great but far-off promise, in the single-hearted belief of which the patriarch had left his native land for ever for his strange, blind, sojourning life! How like the same Jesus overpassing the bounds set to His mission-"the lost sheep of the house of Israel "—to heal the centurion's servant and the Sidonian mother's child, is Abraham's Angel of the Lord going after Hagar into the wilderness to recall her to duty, to uphold her with promises almost a shadow of the promise made to Abraham's self ;—and Abraham's Jehovah even appearing in visions, not of severity but of kindness, to the idolatrous Egyptian and Philistine kings for Abraham's sake, as afterwards to Laban on Jacob's account! The 18th chapter of Genesis is full of the Christian's Lord. How human-like, meek, and lowly are the incidents! First, the suffering without any confounding discovering of His real character, the freedom of Abraham's unrecognising hospitality. Then the manner of announcing Abraham's long and of late wearily wished-for child of promise, and the sympathising observation of Sarah's emotions on overhearing the intimation, and the forbearance with her wrong but confused denial of having laughed. Then the soliloquy in the very language of uniting human friendship, "And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham the thing that I do; seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, and do justice and judgment; that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which He hath spoken of him." Who can fail to see in that day's manifestations-that day's, in which Jehovah came as a man to the tent-door of his friend-the yearning after man to love and be loved by, to trust and be trusted, which appears afterwards in Him who, not for a day, but for thirty years, humbled Himself to be found in fashion as a man, and then so needed human sympathy, and sought it oftener than He found it—

that yearning which yet looks desirously for human love and reliance as the travail of His soul, the purchase of His pain? But that narrative's treasure of the thoughts needed by faith in the Saviour is most impressively rich at the close, where there stands before us so surely our Intercessor at God's right hand, showing us, in His grace to Abraham, by what unlimited measure we may think of the intercession He is prepared, by His knowledge of what is in man, to make for His own-and how without measure may be the unfainting prayer which He will hear from His own as well as make for them. The appalling persistence of Abraham's intercession for the cities of the plain almost takes away the breath to read, put as it is in a stronger light by the patriarch's own feeling of his presumption; but what shall we say of Him who, the Eternal God, stood before Abraham as a man to hear it, and rebuked it not, but yielded and yielded and yielded seven times, till Abraham ceased to intercede, not He to hear? One other such hearing of entreaty is recorded. It is that which Jesus heard, and the Syrophoenician woman, standing before Him, found courage and faith to make. The hearer and the very present helper of Abraham and of that suppliant was One-He who saw good to encourage unfainting prayer even by the strange parable of the unjust judge, but who is a nearer helper still, who "heareth the desire of the humble, and prepareth their heart, and causeth His ear to hear" (Ps. x. 17). Yet how much is His love made mighty to save in our eyes by this sight of its having been always as near to man—as perfect in sympathies, and as strongly yearning after man's love and salvation in the plains of Mamre, as, thousands of years afterwards, in the very neighbourhood of the cross! Mamre's modern name, El Khalil, The Friend, is a delicious memorial of that old grace.

faith--in

God's Love,

16. A few years later we behold, in that far-back time of Abraham foretasting revealed love, no little of the required and invited practice of Christian the very faith which Christian times were to have in the fullymanifested Saviour. That ripened faith received its best recorded illustration in the educating human experience that took place when "God did tempt Abraham." The self-deny

N