the higher and greater good that was to come. It did, however, foreshadow this-not indeed personally and formally, as if from the appearance of Abel and Enoch a personal Messiah could have been descried, or as if from the incidents in their respective lives, precisely similar ones might have been inferred as likely to happen in the eventful career of the man Christ Jesus. We could not descend thus to individual and personal marks of coincidence between the lives of those early patriarchs and the life of Messiah, without, in the first instance, anticipating the order of Providence, which had not yet directed the eye of the Church to a personal manifestation of Godhead, and then entangling ourselves in endless difficulties of practical adjustment-as in the case of Enoch's translation, who went to heaven without tasting death, while Christ could not enter into glory till he had tasted it. But let those patriarchs be contemplated as the earlier links of a chain, which, from its very nature, must have some higher and nobler termination; let them be viewed as characters that already bore upon them the lineaments, and possessed the beginnings of the new creation; what do they, then, appear but embodied prophecies of a more general kind in respect to “Him who was to come?" They heralded his future redemptive work by exhibiting in part the signs and fruits of its prospective achievements. The beginning was prophectic of the end; for if the one had not been in prospect, the other could not have come into existence. And in their selection by God from the general mass around them, their faith in God's Word, and their possession of God's favour and blessing, as outwardly displayed and manifested in their histories, we see struggling, as it were, into being the first elements of that new state and destiny, which were only to find their valid reason, and reach their proper elevation, in the person and kingdom of Messiah.

SECTION SECOND.

NOAH AND THE DELUGE.

THE case of Noah, we have already stated, embodied some new elements of a typical kind, which gave to it the character of a distinct stage in the developement of God's work of grace in the world. It did so in connection with the deluge, which had a gracious, as well as a judicial aspect, and, by a striking combination of opposites, brought prominently out the principle, that the accomplishment of salvation necessarily carries along with it a work of destruction. This was not absolutely a new principle at the period of the deluge. It had a place in the original promise, and a certain exemplification in the lives of believers from the first. By giving to the prospect of recovery the peculiar form of a bruising of the tempter's head, the Lord plainly intimated, that somehow a work of destruction was to go along with the work of salvation, and was necessary to its accomplishment. No indication, however, was given of the way in which this twofold process was to proceed, or of the nature of the connection between the one part of it and the other. But light to a certain extent soon began to be thrown upon it by the consciousness in each man's bosom of a struggle between the evil and the good-a struggle, which so early as the time of Cain drew forth the divine warning, that either his better part must vindicate for itself the superiority, or it must itself fall down vanquished by the destroyer. Still farther light appeared, when the contending elements grew into two great contending parties, which by an ever-widening breach, and at length by most serious encroachments from the evil on the good, rendered a work of judgment from above necessary to the peace and safety of the believing portion of mankind. The conviction of some approaching crisis of this nature had become so deep in the time of Enoch, that it gave utterance to itself in

the prophecy ascribed in the epistle of Jude to that patriarch: "Behold the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches, which ungodly sinners have committed against him." The struggle, it was thus announced, should ere long end in a manifestation of God for judgment against the apostate faction, and, by implication, for deliverance to the children of faith and hope.

By the period of Noah's birth, however, the necessity of a divine interposition had become much greater, and it appeared manifest to the small remnant of believers, that the era of retribution, which they now identified with the era of deliverance, must be at hand. Indication was then given of the state of feeling by the name itself of Noah, with the reason assigned for imposing it, "This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground, which the Lord hath cursed." The feeling is too generally expressed, to enable us to determine with accuracy, how the parents of this child might expect their troubles to be relieved through his instrumentality. But we hear, at least, in their words the groaning of the oppressedthe sighing of righteous souls, vexed on account of the evils which were thickening around them, from the unrestrained wickedness of those who had corrupted the earth; and, at the same time, not despairing, but looking up in faith, and even confident that in the lifetime of that child the God of righteousness and truth would somehow avenge the cause of his elect. Whether they had obtained any correct insight or not, into the way by which the object was to be accomplished, the event proved that the spirit of prophecy breathed in their anticipation. Their faith rested upon solid grounds, and in the hope, which it led them to cherish, they were not disappointed. Salvation did come in connection with the person of Noah, and it came in the way of an overwhelming visitation of wrath upon the adversaries.

When we look simply at the outward results produced by that remarkable visitation, they appear to have been twofold-on the one side preservation, on the other destruction. But when we look a little more closely, we perceive, that there was a necessary connection between the two results, and that there was properly but

one object aimed at in the dispensation, though in accomplishing it there was required the operation of a double process. That object was, as stated by St Peter, "the saving of Noah and hist house” (1 Pet. iii. 20)-saving them as the spiritual seed of God. But saving them from what? Not surely from the violence and desolation of the waters; for the watery element would then have acted as the preservative against itself, and instead of being saved by the water, according to the apostolic statement, the family of Noah would have been saved from it. From what, then, were they saved? Undoubtedly from that, which, before the coming of the deluge, formed the real element of danger-the corruption, enmity, and violence of ungodly men. It was this which wasted the church of God, and brought it to the verge of destruction. All was ready to perish. The cause of righteousness had at

1

'I am aware many eminent scholars give a different turn to this expression in the first epistle of Peter, and take the proper rendering to be "saved through (i. e. in the midst of) the water"-contemplating the water as the space or region through which the ark was required to bear Noah and his family in safety. So Beza, who says that "the water cannot be taken for the instrumental cause, as Noah was preserved from the water, not by it;" so also Tittmann, Bib. Cab. vol. xviii. p. 251; Steiger in his Comm. with only a minute shade of difference; Robinson, in Lex., and many others. But this view is open to the following objections: 1. The water is here mentioned, not in respect to its several parts, or to the extent of its territory from one point to another, but simply as an instrumental agent. Had the former been meant, the expression would have been "saved through the waters," rather than saved by water. But as the case stood, it mattered nothing, whether the ark remained stationary at one point on the surface of the waters, or was borne from one place to another; so that through, in the sense of passing through, or through among, gives a quite unsuitable meaning. That Noah needed to be saved from the water, rather than by it, is a superficial objection, proceeding on the supposition that the water had the same relation to Noah that it had to the world in general. For him, the water and the ark were essentially connected together; it took both to make up the means of deliverance. In the same sense, and on the same account, we might say of the Red sea, that the Israelites were saved by it; for, though in itself a source of danger, yet as regarded Israel's position, it was really the means of safety (1 Cor. x. 2). 2. The application made by the Apostle of Noah's preservation requires the agency of the water, as well as of the ark, to be taken into account. Indeed, according to the best authorities (which read % naì), the reference in the antitype is specially to the water as the type. But apart from that, baptism is spoken as a saving, in consequence of its being a purifying ordinance, which implies, as in the deluge, that the salvation be accomplished through means of a destruction. This is virtually admitted by Steiger, who, though he adopts the rendering "through the water," yet in explaining the connection between the type and the antitype, is obliged to regard the water as also instrumental to salvation. "The flood was for Noah a baptism, and as such saved; the same element, water, also saves us now-not, however, as mere water, but in the same quality as a baptism."

length but one efficient representative in the person of Noah ; and he much "like a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, like a besieged city,”—the object of profane mockery and scorn, taunted, reviled, plied with every weapon fitted to overcome his constancy, and, if not in himself, at least in his family, in danger of suffering shipwreck amid the swelling waves of wickedness around him. It was to save him—and with him, the cause of God—from this source of imminent danger and perdition, that the flood was sent; and it could only do so, by effectually separating between him and the seed of evil-doers-engulphing them in ruin, and sustaining him uninjured in his temporary home. So that the deluge, considered as Noah's baptism, or the means of his salvation from an outward form of spiritual danger, was not less essentially connected with a work of judgment than with an act of mercy. It was by the one, that the other was accomplished; and the support of the ark on the bosom of the waters, was only a collateral object of the deluge. The direct and immediate object was the extermination of that wicked race, whose heaven-daring impiety and hopeless impenitence was the real danger that menaced the cause and people of God,—" the destroying of those (to use the language that evidently refers to it in Rev. xi. 18), who destroyed the earth."

This principle of salvation with destruction, which found such a striking exemplification in the deluge, has been continually appearing anew in the history of God's dealings among men. It appeared, for example, at the period of Israel's redemption from Egypt, when a way of escape was opened for the people of God by the overthrow of Pharaoh and his host; and again at the era of the return from Babylon, when the destruction of the enemy and the oppressor broke asunder the bands with which the children of the covenant were held captive. But it is in New Testament times, and in connection with the work of Christ, that the higher manifestation of the principle appears. Here alone perfection can be said to belong to it. Complete as the work in one respect was in the days of Noah, in another it soon gave unmistakeable evidence of its own imperfection. The immediate danger was averted by the destruction of the wicked in the waters of the deluge, and the safe preservation of Noah and his family as a better seed to replenish the depopulated earth. But