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circumstances. Other years have been years of prevailing peace and advancement; the knowledge of God, which is the greatest element of the world's advancement, has increased and spread, and the minds of men been opened more than previously to the truths of divine wisdom and instruction. The Church of God has at times been honoured and respected on earth, at other times neglected, despised, and set at nought. The rulers and princes of the land have sometimes sought counsel from above, and endeavoured to rule in the fear of God; at others, they have sought advice only in the maxims and experience of human wisdom, and have arrived at no other but temporal advantages and worldly wealth. It is of God, doubtless, and of his all-wise overruling, that men are permitted to do themselves injury by their blinded perverseness, or to gain the way of peace and wisdom by ruling themselves after his word. In the one instance, there is chastisement and judicial penalty; in the other, goodness and mercy displayed, out of his abundant favour and undeserved loving-kindness. The degree of uncertainty which the servants of God in the world labour under, is such as tends to make them sensibly and humbly dependent on their heavenly Master, and disposed to earnest and unceasing prayerfulness. They cannot so sin against Him as to neglect prayer, when they know that all depends on Him, on what He will be pleased to do with themselves, with their families, with their country, with their Church; and their anxieties can find no other place of repose than his everlasting arms, no other voice to soothe them, but his who in a moment can say to every wave and storm, "Peace, be still."

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He whose mind can look forward to no threatening clouds in the future, is one who is unable to exercise the foresight which seems naturally placed in every intelligent being; just as it is true, also, that he who cannot see the rainbow of promise when it speaks hope and assurance for coming time, is destitute of lively faith and trust. It is impossible for any reflecting man to look upon a commencing year without a measure of solicitude; but it is possible for a Christian man to allay that anxiety

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in "the streams which make glad the city of God;" a privilege and inestimable comfort which the worldly man cannot have. This enables him to look forward to all the future without any mixture of fear, but with the feeling which the uncertainty of all human things forces upon him. He rejoices in hope, for he has a God whom he should be ashamed to distrust, and he has promises and assurances to resort to, which nothing can surpass nor destroy. Therefore, in all his circumstances, he looks for mercy and goodness to follow him all the days of his life. He expects the new year to be crowned with his goodness even more than any past ones have been. He believes he shall live to see more and more of that infinite fulness of wisdom and love displayed which is treasured up in God. "Day unto day uttereth speech;" and the more the days of the enlightened Christian are, the more he ought to know, to his great and endless comfort, of the God in whom he believes. "Experience worketh hope;" and that experience is growing from year to year, as new events occur, and new mercies are received from above. When he was young in faith he was weak in faith; but years make him stronger, and dispel a thousand fears he once was a slave to, deliver him from many chains of bondage which hung around him, and release him from a number of erroneous impressions which may have weighed upon his spirit. That this and much more may be the experience of all true Christians in the year now commencing may God of his great mercy vouchsafe to grant, and the new year will then be happier than the old, however happy and blessed that may have been; and if it has been troubled and darkened to any, may the clouds disperse and be lightened, through the grace and favour of God our Saviour.

"THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH."

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"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth."

IT is sad to think how far too seldom we dwell upon the magnitude and comprehensiveness of that scheme of salvation which was formed from before all time, and which pro

vided for the recovery of man from the guilt, corruption, and ruin of his most grievous fall. And yet this wondrous scheme of grace furnishes material for contemplation, which eternity itself will fail to exhaust. Let us, then, at all events, seek to quicken and enlarge our understanding of this mighty theme by considering in these words, 1. The event spoken of: "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." Here is the mystery of godliness: God was made manifest in the flesh. The eternal Son of God is here called "the Word," because He is the wisdom of God, and expresses to man the mind of God, just as our words are employed to express our thoughts. Christ is "the Word of God," because as by that word all creation sprung into higher and lower existence, so the speech and doctrine of Christ, his Gospel word, of which He Himself is the sum and substance, as also the revealer, does by the energy of his accompanying spirit new create the soul, and restore from darkness and disorder the moral and spiritual character of our fallen race. And thus is Christ eminently to man "the power of God, and the wisdom of God." In Him all doctrine centres, as from Him alone it originates. By Him patriarchs and prophets lived a life of faith, and were instructed for the kingdom of heaven. He was "the Word," who called Samuel by name; He also furnished to Solomon the wisdom with which he spake in the book of his Proverbs. He is the prophetic Word; for "to him bear all the prophets witness, that through him, whosoever believeth in his name shall have remission of sins." (Acts x. 43.) This then is the Gospel fact, the Gospel revelation: "The Word was made flesh." We thus behold the only wise God our Saviour stooping to assume our nature because verily we had sunk beneath it. Punctual to the fulness of time appointed by the Father, we behold Him hastening down to this inferior world as though it were impatient to welcome his approach; as though it were indeed the proper sphere of his glory, instead of being a land of aliens, and arrayed against Him. It is when we thus consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, calculating to a certainty the whole amount of his passion; and yet, because the salvation of man was

the great design of his mission, determining upon the work at all its cost, it is then that we best begin to appreciate, though inestimable, the gift of that Divine, that well-beloved Son, who was born in the city of David; a Saviour, even Christ the Lord. But let us contemplate more closely the incarnation of the Word of God: "The Word was made or became flesh;" not that Jesus Christ exchanged the Godhead for the manhood, the Divine nature for the human; not that He became a Demi-god, having really debased the Divine nature by this humiliation, but He took upon Him as a shroud of sackcloth, as a veil of penance for our sins,—He took upon Him our nature. When He came in the likeness of sinful flesh, Christ personally united his Deity with our humanity. He was verily the son of Mary, born for infancy, and all the other slow and tedious gradations of human life, until He became a man at length, but a man of infirmities, in this respect made in all points like as we are, yet without sin. Upon Him came the cravings of hunger in a wilderness; as He journeyed through Samaria, the itinerant Apostle of his own Gospel, He came to Jacob's well, and being wearied with his journey, He sat down by the well; "there cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink." (John iv. 6, 7.) "He was also a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." He wept human tears at the tomb of Lazarus, and over reprobate Jerusalem. But, my dear readers, this was not the passion; the deep suffering of Christ in the flesh. His whole life may be called an agony. When He was made flesh, his senses were not blunted but quickened, no doubt, into the keenest perception of all the anguish He underwent. "He was

made flesh;" He was composed for suffering; a brother born for adversity, not only as a sharer of our sorrows, but conspicuously, as a mark for the infliction of adversity, which in untempered severity, and unmeasured degree, had never before alighted on any son of man.

But description must fail. I would therefore only add before I proceed, What think ye of Christ, in this his incarnation? Is it a light thing that the Word was made flesh? If truly the Son of God had come down to our

earth in the nature of angels, it would have been condescension deep if He had taken to Himself in human form his hereditary kingdom on earth as its rightful Sovereign, we should fitly say, that He had indeed bowed the heavens and come down: and if He had lived here awhile in all the splendour, and amid all the homage of a loyal and tributary universe, we should have done well to admire. Or if, solicited by our great necessities, He had visited us as the physician of those difficult bodily maladies, which defy mere human skill, and altogether require the interposition of a Divine Omnipotence, we should have called Him, by way of pre-eminence, the good Samaritan. But behold! He comes in great humility! The Angel of the covenant descends to be Emmanuel,God with us. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt He tabernacled among us.

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among us. Christ's human nature is thus spoken of as a tabernacle (Heb. viii. 2) where the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ, is called "a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man." And again (Heb. ix. 11, 12), “Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us." The reference in these passages, and also, though more indirectly in the text, is evidently made to the Jewish tabernacle in the wilderness, where the Shechinah or Divine. glory rested for the consolation of Israel. Thus, then, the Eternal Word, the Son of God, came down to dwell awhile on earth in the form of a man; to perform his wonders of might and mercy before the very eyes of mankind; to inculcate and instil the doctrines of his grace and truth; to found his Church upon the firm rock of his own Messiahship. Nor did He take leave of those whose nature He had associated with his own, until, with the seal of his own most precious blood, He had crowned and attested the deed of his everlasting love: nor even then did He leave them comfortless. Still on earth, in the virtue of his Almighty Spirit, He is present and re

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