Son, were announced and were received, I propose to consider next Sunday. I would only allude here to the connection of these passages with what we know of the writer. The distinction between the Old and the New Covenant, the covenant with servants and the covenant with sons, the covenant with the nation and the covenant with mankind, must have been always present to the mind of a companion of St. Paul. To show how one passed into the other, how one fulfilled the other, must have been a prominent object in his preaching. When he began to examine all the records of his Lord upon earth, would it have seemed to him a strange anomaly, would it not have struck him as an orderly, reasonable commencement of such a history that there should be a birth like that of the son of Zacharias, the climax of those births on which the Old Testament puts such honour, that there should be one like that of the Son of Mary to inaugurate the new age? May not the evidence of these have come mightily home to him, not being exceptions in the divine method, but as the highest illustrations of it,as a justification of the past, and a preparation for the future? Are not these stories witnesses to us of the glory and blessing of human parentage, of our right to claim a divine parentage?

LECTURE II.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE SON OF DAVID.

And Mary said, My soul doth maguify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.—ST. LUKE i. 46–48.

ST. LUKE'S introduction, which we considered last Sunday, is strictly prosaic. He speaks of the carefulness with which he had studied the reports of those who had been eyewitnesses of Christ's acts. He claims no exemption from the ordinary toils of a historian. He seems to think that he is more bound to perform them because his subject is so awful, and because he believes himself divinely called to unfold it.

The narrative begins with a quietness befitting this preface. We hear of two old people, both of the sacred Jewish family, who are walking in all the commandments of the Lord blameless. They are childless. Zacharias punctually fulfils his duties as a priest. At a certain time he goes according to the order of his course into the House of the Lord. It is his lot to burn incense.

Then we arrive, some will say, at the supernatural part of the story.

'And the whole multitude of the people were praying

without at the time of incense. And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb. And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years. And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings. And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season. And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he tarried so long in the temple. And when he came out, he could not speak unto them: and they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple: for he beckoned unto them, and remained speechless. And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house.'

This narrative of an angelic visitation does not bring us into a supernatural region. We are in one already.

The Temple-worship meant nothing if there were not an actual established intercourse between the visible and the invisible world. The Jew believed that He who dwelt behind the veil had made a covenant with his fathers and him, that He had given them a law, that He had appointed their priests and their sacrifices. In His name they protested against all worship of visible things. And therefore the visits of angels are not in the Old Testament what they are in Pagan records. The heathen started from the human ground, was continually feeling after God. Ever and anon, he was sure that communications from heaven did reach the earth. Without such, the condition of man seemed to him utterly dreary, inexplicable, hopeless. But these communications are disorderly interruptions of the course of human life, even if they confer on it some of its chief blessings. The Hebrew starts from the divine ground. He does not want casual appearances to testify that God is speaking to men. That He should not speak is for him the perplexing anomaly. Life must cease, according to the lessons which he had received from his childhood, if God were withdrawn from His universe; above all from the creatures whom He had made in His image.

But there were times when it did seem as if He were withdrawn from His universe; when the children of the Covenant seemed to have lost sight of Him; when their worship had been either turned to other objects, or had become utterly hard and unreal, a punctual observance of rites, not a living intercourse. At such times we do hear of angel visits. They come to those who are beginning to think that the world is deserted by its Deliverer, and given over to its oppressors. They come seldom to the great of the

earth; rather to peasants like Gideon, who are threshing their wheat by the winepress when the Midianites are possessing the land of Israel, and the Israelites are bowing down to Baal. They are sent to break the yoke of some great superstition which has degraded the people. They are never imparted to any man that he may be exalted, but that he may understand God to be the God of his countrymen as much as himself; that he may be a witness to them of their true unchanging Lord; that he may stir them up to defy and mock those who pretend to be their lords. These are almost invariable characteristics of the angelic appearances in the Old Testament. The one which startled Zacharias, and sent him dumb to his house, will bear the test. It told him that he was the priest of a living God, not of one about whom he might read in a book; of a God who directed the minds of His creatures, not of one who merely demanded from them a certain quantity of sacrifice and incense.

We hear that, when the promise of the angel was fulfilled to Zacharias, when his child was actually born, when he had written on the table that its name was to be John, his tongue was loosed. He could not but sing, as his fathers had sung in every great crisis of their history. He had felt, no doubt, that there was some merit in his punctual observance of the commandments, some great distinction between him, the Levite, the descendant of Aaron, and the people who might not enter the Holy Place. Now, when the weight that had crushed his heart and his wife's heart had been removed, all such self-glorifying thoughts disappear. He speaks of the Lord God of Israel, who has visited and redeemed His people. The wonder of a common birth, an ordinary father's joy mingles in

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