oblem unsolved, renounces its own
calling. "The Son of God" was to be manifested in the flesh,
manifested through suffering, to go to his glory through death and
the Cross, to bring life and the immanent presence of the Godhead,
such is here and there the leading idea. Existing before the
foundation of the world, the Lord of the world, the sender of the
prophets, the object of their prophecies, beheld even by Abraham,
in the person of Moses himself typified as the only centre of
Israel's hopes, and in so far already revealed and glorified in
type before his incarnation, he was at last to appear, to dwell
among us, to be seen, not as son of David but as Son of God, in
the garment of the flesh, by those who could not even endure the
light of this world's sun. So did he come; nay, so did he die to
fulfil the promise, in the very act of his apparent defeat to
dispense purification, pardon, life, to destroy death, to overcome
the devil, to show forth the Resurrection, and with the Resurrection
his right to future judgment; at the same time, it is true, to fill
up the measure of the sins of Israel, whom he had loved exceedingly
and for whom he had done such great wonders and signs, and to prepare
for himself again a new people who should keep his commandments,
his new law. The mission that his Father gave him he has accomplished,
of his own free will and for our sake--the true explanation of his
death--did he suffer. "The Jews" have not hoped upon him, clearly
as the typical design of the Old Testament and Moses himself pointed
to him, and, in opposition to the spiritual teaching of Moses, they
have been seduced into the carnal and sensual by the devil; they
have set their trust and their hopes, not upon God, but upon the
fleshly circumcision and upon the visible house of God, worshipping
the Lord in the temple almost like the heathen. But the Christian
raises himself above the flesh and its lusts, which disturb the
faculties of knowledge as well as those of will, to the Spirit
and the spiritual service of God, above the ways of darkness to
the ways of light; he presses on to faith, and with faith to
perfect knowledge, as one born again, who is full of the Spirit
of God, in whom God dwells and prophesies, interpreting past and
future without being seen or heard; as taught of God and fulfilling
the commandments of the new law of the Lord, a lover of the brethren,
and in himself the child of peace, of joy, and of love. For this