d, as all divine things do, death and
resurrection, and lived with a new and divine life in a new and
regenerated world. "_God, who at sundry times and in divers manners
spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last
days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all
things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of
his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things
by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat
down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better
than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent
name than they._" (Heb. i. 1-4.)

It ought not to be hard for us to understand and enter into the sore
perplexities of the Hebrew believers when they found their ancestral
kingdom uprooted, while no sign of the new Messiah's kingdom appeared,
except the sway which a shameful cross was wielding over individual
human hearts. Can this be the beginning of the kingdom? Can Christ be
reigning there, and we His subjects here, the objects of His tenderest
care and love, be so harried and tormented for our truth and
righteousness as never men have been harried and tormented for lies and
sins? Is it credible that God's sons in the world should be the world's
outlaws; that those whom the hand of Omnipotence shields should be the
helpless victims of the most puny foes? Are slaves and beggars the chief
subjects of Messiah's kingdom? Does the fellowship of this new realm
draw us into loving, tender communion with the saddest, the poorest, the
most ignorant, the most wretched of mankind? Is the life of this new
regenerate state a ceaseless struggle, a constant pain, with no issue
but by the gate of death, whose apparitors may be a lion's jaws or a
headsman's axe? Is the symbol of this splendid empire a cross? The
answer to these questions is the text. The question is the sin which so
easily besets humanity, you and me quite as intensely as the Hebrews;
and the cure for the sin, the answer to the question, is the faith which
draws from the writer this splendid eulogy, a faith which scans the
bounds of the invisible universe, and measures the range of the Divine
thought from the height of the Divine throne. It is as though the writer
had said, Looked at on the lower level, by the measures of the things
seen and temporal, the lot is dark enough and sad enough: "_If in this
life only we h