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the judgement-seat of Christ;" and that "he shall judge the quick and dead at his appearing and his kingdom," &c. "The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgement to the Son." It is however, objected by the Anti-Tri. nitarians, that Christ may be the judge of the world, and yet not be God. Here our arguinent begins, and indeed here it ends for we simply assert that if he be the judge of quick and dead, he must be the living and true God. We argue that Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and Omniscience, to say the least, are indispensably necessary to the judge of all. If a man can once persuade himself that God can invest a mere creature with these attributes, the question with him is concluded.

But as this is manifestly absurd, it is more generally objected that Omniscience, Omnipresence, &c. are not necessary to a true and proper judge of the world: for that God can set up a creature as the organ of judgement, while in fact that creature is not really judge at all. This, however, is a little unfortunate for the objector; for the Bible asserts that Christ himself is actually the judge, and it is no where said that he is merely this organ, this medium, this echo of some real judge behind the curtain. It is sometimes said that he is appointed to be the judge, and that judgement is committed to

him; but these passages refer to his Mediatorial character, in which he accepts power, and receives a delegated office; but this power and office are such as could not be exercised by a mere creature, and in the whole of his work he must be regarded in his complex character, as God and man, a voluntary Mediator, truly and necessarily Divine, no less than truly and properly man; the visible Jehovah standing between the abstract Godhead and the Church. These two ideas, viz. his human nature as man, and his assumed subserviency as God and man in the economy of the Divine Covenant, will account throughout the whole of the Christian Theology for any of those expressions, which convey in reference to Jesus the idea of delegation, commission, investiture, and the like.

Certainly I may delegate a person to an office, yet my delegation of him thereto will not qualify him for it. But you may, perhaps, communicate qualifications to him which he had not before :-granted: But can I believe that God can qualify a mere creature with his own incommunicable attributes? I will not say give his glory to another-but I will say more. Can I believe that God can annihilate himself by expending and losing his own essence? Can I believe that he can make another God? for I assume it as a principle that Omnipotence, Om

niscience, and Omnipresence, are necessary to him who can raise the dead and recal every item of the world's history, who can know every circumstance of every individual, and trace out the origin and the consequence of every thought, word, and deed, and that either of man or angel, with all the other circumstances introductory and final of the general decision. Accordingly we find in Scripture that the terms God, and the judge of the world; Jehovah, and him who is ready to judge the quick and the dead; The Great God, and he who shall bring all these things into judgment, are used as perfectly synonymous: it was left to human ingenuity to find out that any but the ever-living and true God was he before whom the nations should tremble. The Psalmist regarded the Lord Jesus as the God of Israel, the judge of quick and dead, and the great taker away of sin-thus he says, Psalm lxv. 2, 3. that the person who should "purge away our transgressions" was the God who heareth prayer, and to whom all flesh shall come.

The argument might be carried out to a great length; but we know to what it must revert:

If

you think that a mere creature can be qualified to judge the world, and that consequently the inspired writers were mistaken in speaking of God, as one and the same with the judge of

all flesh; you may then renounce this part of the evidence of Christ's Deity. If you think that Holy Prophets and inspired Apostles committed the most gross and absolute blunders when they spake of Jehovah, and the judge of all the earth, as signifying one and the same Being, you will of course pity the weakness of Paul and Peter, and restrain a smile at the well-meant rhapsodies of Solomon and David. But we have not so learned Christ.

Some of the Anti-Trinitarians, feeling the force of this reasoning, have endeavoured to dismiss the difficulty by resolving the whole into figure, and saying, that, as all men under the Gospel dispensation will be judged on Gospel principles, and as Christ is the founder of the Gospel, he may in that relation by a bold kind of figure be called the judge of quick and dead. This objection may be safely left to take care of itself.

It is worthy of notice that, in many of those passages in which Jehovah is represented as coming forth in circumstances of uncommon grandeur and majesty, some allusion is made to the day of judgement, or he is absolutely described as judging the world, to shew that, so far from the transactions of the last day being a secondary exertion of power and wisdom, and therefore easily vested in a creature, we are to

understand that of all the names Jehovah assumes, as King, Creator, Lord, Father, and the like, he designs none to be considered so grand as this, "The Judge of all the earth, &c."

I dwell on this, that it may enhance in our conception the greatness of Jesus, He is this judge it is he who hath shined out of Zion, the perfection of beauty: it is he who shall come to judge the quick and dead at his appearing and his kingdom.

But how different the scene then to that of his first Advent, when he deigned to lay his sacred head in a manger, and to hide his glories in a stable: In this awful day-stiled by way of eminence "the day of the Lord," the heaven of heavens will not contain him: tremendous horror shall look down from on high, and the whole universe grow pale. When he first trod over the earth, during his incarnation, the tenderest violet was not broken under his footstep; but now the ploughshare of ruin shall rush before him, and the pillars of heaven tremble at his reproof: it shall not then be questioned whether he be God, when he shall spread in middle air the great white throne: it shall not then be argued whether he be an equal person in the Godhead, when by his understanding he shall smite through the proud and illustrate all the shadows of moral midnight;

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