our independence as a nation, but we will assert it and vindicate it again into greater grandeur and more enduring magnificence. "The people turneth not unto him that smiteth them, neither do they seek the Lord of hosts. Therefore the Lord will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day. He shall have no joy in their young men, neither shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows. Through the wrath of the Lord is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire; no man shall spare his brother. And he shall snatch on the right hand, and be hungry; and he shall eat on the left hand, and shall not be satisfied; they shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm.” All this seems to me the record of a series of desolating judgments predicted to come upon a race that rejected the Light that lightens the Gentiles, and Him who is meant to be the glory of his people Israel. If at all applicable to anything cotemporaneous with the prophet himself, it certainty contains a constantly allusive reference to judgments of a yet severer stamp; and those judgments we know overtook that nation when neither widow nor orphan was spared, but a million of the Jewish race sunk amid the ruins of their once magnificent capital, and from that day to this the shadow of a great curse is upon them, the traces of a heavy ancestral crime; and that shadow shall not be turned into sunshine, nor those traces be effaced, until they. shall say, what we trust they are now near the time of saying, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."

DAWNING GLORIES.

ISAIAH XI.

THE preceding chapter tells us of the birth of Him whose name is Wonderful, Counseller, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace. This chapter contains the prophetic portrait of the glory of his approaching reign. It begins first by stating, "There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse," like a root out of a dry ground, destitute of all such beauty and comeliness as the world admires, " and a Branch shall grow out of its roots." If we turn to Jeremiah we find him speak of one who is the righteous Branch, whose name is the Lord our Righteousness. If we refer to our blessed Lord himself, he says, "I am the root and offspring of Jesse;" I am both his Maker and his son; that is to say, as God manifest in the flesh. "That this verse and the subsequent parts of the chapter refer to the Messiah, may be argued from the following considerations: 1. The fact that it is expressly applied to him in the New Testament. Thus Paul, in Rom. xv. 12, quotes the tenth verse of this chapter as expressly applicable to the times of the Messiah. 2. The Chaldee Paraphrase shows that this was the sense which the ancient Jews put upon the passage. That paraphrase is of authority only to show that this was

the sense which appeared to be the true one by the ancient interpreters. 3. The description in the chapter is not applicable to any other personage than the Messiah. Grotius supposes that the passage refers to Hezekiah, though in a more sublime sense,' to the Messiah. Others have referred it to Zerubbabel. But none of the things here related apply to either, except the fact that they had a descent from the family of Jesse; for neither of those families had fallen into the decay which the prophet here describes. 4. The peace, prosperity, harmony, order, etc., described in the subsequent portions of the chapter are not descriptive of any portion of the reign of Hezekiah. 5. The terms and descriptions here accord with other portions of the scripture as applicable to the Messiah. Thus Jeremiah xxiii. 5; xxxiii. 15, describes the Messiah under the similitude of a branch, a geim or shoot-using, indeed, a different Hebrew word, but retaining the same idea and image. Comp. Zech. iii. 8. It accords also with the description by Isaiah of the same personage in chap. iv. 2. 6. I may add, that nearly all commentators have referred this to the Messiah; and perhaps it would not be possible to find greater unanimity in regard to the interpretation of any passage of Scripture than on this."-Barnes. The next feature is, that “the spirit of the Lord," the Holy Spirit in his sevenfold gift, "shall rest upon him; the spirit of wisdom," enabling him to speak as never man spake; "the spirit of understanding," enabling him to understand all mysteries and unfold them as never man could; "the spirit of counsel," or advice, when they came to him in Judea and asked what they should do, he told

What did Jesus to do mine own

"that

"And he shall not

them on every occasion what was right, and dutiful and true; "the spirit of might," where he spoke to the waves of the sea, and there was a great calm; he addressed the fierce winds, and they were still; he spoke to death, and he let go his victim, and the dead came forth and mingled again with the multitude of living men. "And the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord." constantly say? "I am come not will, but the will of him," that is, the Father, sent me," as the great Mediator. judge after the sight of his eyes:" we usually do so, and we form most unjust and uncharitable judgments wherever we attempt to do so; what seems is not always what is; we should never interpret motives by appearances if it be possible to solve the appearances on better, more charitable, and Christian grounds. The common defect is, that instead of judging righteous judgment in the spirit of love, of forbearance, of sympathy, of tenderness, we judge after what seems bad to the eye, and we reprove after the hearing of the ear, and this not always the original hearing, but the traditional echoes of a remote hearing, distorting actual facts the further it is moved from the original. Our blessed Lord shall not thus judge; "with righteousness," infinite, infallible and perfect, "shall he judge the poor; and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth." What does he say? "I come not to send peace upon the earth, but a sword;" not the cause of the sword, but the occasion of it. His gospel preached is to some the savour of death; judgment is his strange work, yet it is his prerogative and his attribute.

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Righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins;" that is, all that he does shall be righteous, all he bestows shall be in faithfulness, all that we receive from him is in righteousness. And then, what shall be the result of his reign? "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox." Is this figurative or is it literal? The best canon of interpretation is this: when the literal sense involves inevitable absurdity, justly and naturally to infer that it must be figurative; but where no absurdity is involved, nothing contrary to sense, to reason, to what God can do, then I think the literal interpretation is the truth, and should be accepted. In the first place we know the fruits of sin were felt by and set forth in the brute creation some six thousand years ago. The instant man rose up against God all the animals rose up against man. There is no reason to believe that during the short and sunny day that was spent in Paradise the lion devoured the lesser animals, or that the wolf preyed and fed upon flesh that he had torn to pieces. Surely such a spectacle in Eden would have been incompatible with its peace, its blessedness, and its harmony. If then we can show, as we can by the highest possible probabilities, that the wolf becoming ravenous, that the lion becoming a beast of prey, were the results of the primeval fall, it is logical and just to infer that when the cause of the mischief shall be obliterated, and the Great Maker shall come forth the Redeemer and the Remaker of