have had the wisdom to consult it, and became, through the blessing of God, a principal instrument in turning from an evil heart of unbelief a nobleman, who had continued through youth: and manhood one of the most bitter and determined enemies of our religion. St. Peter also preached Jesus Christ, testifying that "to him give all the prophets witness." And we learn from the same unerring source, the Acts of the Apostles, that a reference to the completion of the prophetic parts of the Old Testament, in the ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection of our Saviour, was the general method employed, in those primitive days, in propagating the Gospel as the religion of the Messiah, and was ever considered by impartial judges as satisfactory, if not irresistible, to those who agreed in the truth of the miracles of Jesus, and acknowledged him to have been a prophet sent from God. Apollos mightily convinced the Jews, and that publicly, shewing, from the Scriptures, that Jesus is Christ. It was moreover the manner, the common, if not the universal, custom of St. Paul,' to reason in the synagogue out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Jesus must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead, that is, must needs have done those things which it was foretold that

• See Burnet's Life of Lord Rochester.

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the Messiah should do, and that, consequently, that Jesus whom he preached unto them was Christ. He took it for granted that they confided in his testimony as to what Jesus of Nazareth had really done and suffered in support of his sincerity and claims, because his credibility, as a chosen witness and Apostle of that Jesus, was openly confirmed to their senses, by his possession and exercise of miraculous powers. He assumed it as a fact, that they believed our Lord to have been at any rate a divine prophet, and then shewing them the various things which the prophets had declared that the Messiah should do, he drew, from the fulfilment of those predictions in his person and character and life, the inevitable conclusion that in the Son of Mary was to be found this child of promise.

But the strongest confirmation of the correctness of our views, as to the proper method of applying the fulfilment of prophecy to the defence of Christianity, is to be found in the evidence of our Saviour himself. Having first of all referred his unbelieving countrymen to a consideration of his works for a proof that the Father had sent him, our Lord afterwards commended them to an examination of the Scriptures, in order that they might learn the justice of his pretensions to the character of the Messiah.

"Search the Scriptures," says he, “for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and these be they which testify of me." The part of that evidence, however, upon which I would venture to lay the greatest stress, is the relation, which St. Luke has so happily left us, of the conversation which Jesus held on the day of his resurrection with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. He overtook them sad and sorrowful, and communing together, in doubtful reasonings and dissatisfied conjectures upon the various events which had happened in Jerusalem. Upon one point they were both agreed. They both determined that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet mighty in word and deed; for they had seen and heard too much of the wonder of his workings upon the afflicted, and the gracious doctrines which fell from his mouth upon the poor, to permit them for a moment to turn away from their reliance upon his divine authority. But they had looked to him as something more than a simple prophet, however mighty, and they verily began to think that they had been disappointed in their views; for the rumours which had reached them of his resurrection in the morning were but the slender and doubtful tidings of an event so strange and joyful that it could not be admitted without much hesitation and the severest scrutiny. Luke xxiv. 13-36.

John v. 39.

They had trusted, as they said, that Jesus had been he which should have redeemed Israel; but their holy confidence had been miserably shaken, and almost dissipated, by the sudden calamity of his death. For they thought it impossible, that he whose kingdom was to be an everlasting kingdom, and whose throne was to be for ever and ever, should yet be delivered to his enemies, and by wicked hands be crucified and slain. Such, then, being the causes of their uncertainty, and finding that they acknowledged him as a divine. prophet and doubted only of his pretensions to be the Messiah, our Saviour entered upon the task of their conversion, not by any reference to his miracles or his doctrines, but " beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself."

Directed then in our views upon this subject, by him whose judgment was correct upon every subject, we also must shew from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.-We must do this in imitation of our blessed Lord, and we must do it for the same reason too; because those to whom we address our words are presumed, from the consideration of the arguments which have been already advanced, to have an implicit faith in the reality of his miracles, and in the perfection of his

religion, and in the holiness of his life, and, therefore, also, in the truth of his divine mission.

Here the arduous nature of the task we have undertaken first and most forcibly strikes us. So various and innumerable are the references in the Old Testament, direct and implied, to the great bruiser of the serpent's head, that to detail them all would be an impossible attempt. It would only be to range the larger part of the law on one side and compare it with the larger part of the Gospel on the other. Even to give a connected history of the gradual rise and progress of prophecy would far exceed the limits of any single Discourse. Nor would the difficulty be lessened by endeavouring, amidst such a multiplicity of proofs almost equally pertinent, to select the most commanding and useful. I shall therefore content myself with a few general remarks upon some of the most prominent and distinguishing features of those predictions which relate to the Messiah.

1. In addition to their number and variety, to which we have already alluded, the first point of view in which the prophecies respecting the Messiah become particularly worthy of our consideration, is from their express and unequivocal nature, and their universal reference to his life. They