reasons which will constrain him to forsake this ground, need not be here detailed. We shall single out two, which are of themselves sufficiently stringent.

One is the exceeding abruptness and the isolated character which would thus be attributed to these acknowledged Messianie paragraphs. The dying patriarch, Jacob, is describing to his sons the portion their descendants shall respectively possess in the land of Canaan, when suddenly, with nothing to indicate a transition, he speaks of the coming of Shiloh, and then as suddenly returns to his original theme, and goes on with the partition of Canaan. Isaiah is giving to Ahaz a sign, that the two kings warring against him should not accomplish their hostile purpose, and he tells him of the virgin's Son. In the prediction which occupies the last twenty-seven chapters of his book, all is so intermingled, and so apparently spoken of the same subject, that while of some parts Jerome has well said that it seems more as though we were reading a gospel than a prophecy, it is yet impossible to make a separation, and say with accuracy which verses refer to Christ and which to the time of the Babylonish exile. An announcement is made to David of a son, who shall sit upon his throne and build a temple for the Lord, which runs imperceptibly into a prediction of Him who is the greatest of his descendants and the most glorious of his successors. The Psalms appear to be describing the kingdom of David or of Solomon, and almost before we are aware, certainly without advising us of any change of subject, we find attributes ascribed to it of universality, perpetuity, &c., which are the standing characteristics of Messiah's reign, and which never pertained, and never can pertain, to any other. Again, David or some other suffering saint seems to be describing in his own person the sorrows he has endured, and his abandonment of God, when suddenly, with no intimation that the same description is not continued, we light upon passages which are among the most evident predictions of Christ any where to be found. Now, it is impossible to refer these explicit predictions to Christ, and at the same time assume that the context, with which they are so intimately united, has no reference, bears no relation to him, without a violence of procedure which would be tolerated in the exposition of no other book. Verses must be rent out of their connection, and applied to an entirely different subject, without any thing on the face of the passage to justify it. If no principle be laid down, no rule established, but only whenever any thing is said by a sacred writer that can be applied to Christ (no matter what the immediate subject of which he is speaking), this is assumed to be a prediction of him, and the rest of the discourse to relate to something wholly different-what is this but to

make the Scripture the mere plaything of a capricious fancy, and to obtrude upon it as its meaning, not that which the scope of the writer would indicate, but whatever any interpreter may choose?

The same is true of the types of Scripture. There are here and there in the history and institutions of the Old Testament, types so clear and manifest that their reference to Christ will not be denied by any believer in revelation. But if it be affirmed that these stand alone in their reference to him, they present themselves in a strange isolation; and the question instantly arises, to which no satisfactory answer can be given, By what right are these considered predictive of Christ, when no allusion to him is found in all by which they are surrounded? Are we at liberty to go through the history of Israel, and pick out all that bears a real or seeming analogy to the history of Christ, and, discarding all the rest as irrelevant, erect out of these random and violently-sundered fragments a figure of Him that was to come. To whose mind can such a course of procedure carry conviction? or, in the interpretation of what book, except the Bible, would such trifling be accepted as its just sense? If the Bible be an intelligible book, with a fixed meaning of its own, other than that which any interpreter may, at will, fix upon it—if it be the product of a rational mind and addressed to rational minds, all such capricious dealing with it must be discarded. It is by such an arbitrary mode of not only departing from all just principles, but of acting irrespective of any settled principles whatever, that such incongruous and extravagant senses have been forced upon Scripture as have in some quarters brought the very name of types into disrepute, and made the whole idea of their existence an object of ridicule and contempt.

The other argument which we shall here mention as constraining to the belief that Christ is to be found elsewhere than in the express Messianic predictions and the manifest types, is drawn from the authority of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit is surely the best expositor of his own mind. The Spirit who guided the apostles and evangelists is the same that spake through Moses and the prophets. He can tell us with infallible authority what was his meaning in any thing that he inspired the holy men of old to say. Now, we find the writers of the New Testament quoting the language of the Old, or alluding to it as applicable to Christ, declaring that it was fulfilled in him, drawing from it inferences as to his character and work, and that not only from its explicit predictions and types, but equally from such parts as, on the theory of those who find Christ nowhere but in these, have no reference to him whatever. And after all the deductions that

can be made on the ground of the Old Testament being used in the New by way of accommodation rather than of explication, it is yet impossible for him who examines the inspired interpretations given of the Old Testament with any candour, to avoid the conclusion that Christ is represented as spoken of in many passages where no distinct mention of him lies upon the surface; and if their authority be admitted as infallible, of course he must be there.

Here, then, we come to be pressed by the difficulty of finding that certain rule, those settled principles, which shall approve themselves as sound before an enlightened judgment, by which to decide where references to Christ are to be assumed, and how far they are to be pressed; so that we may not on the one hand deny to the Scriptures what they actually contain, nor on the other bring in upon them what has no existence but in our own imagination. There must be some rule besides mere conjecture or caprice. The point of perplexity in the whole subject is the determination of what that rule is. And it is in the endeavour to fix upon it, that such various and conflicting theories of interpretation have been broached. Aside from all examination, it would seem to be the most obvious and simplest rule to refer to Christ only such predictions as are explicitly made of him, and such types as manifestly point to their fulfilment in him. But from reasons which have just been adduced, the finding of a Messianic content in these, and limiting it to them, must be given up as untenable. The authority of the New Testament is against it. The structure of the Old Testament itself, and the context in which these predictions and types stand, is against it. They cannot be torn from their connection, and referred to a totally different subject from that to which all around them refers, but by the most violent and arbitrary procedure. Either, then, these types and predictions themselves have no direct relation to Christ, or else the entire passages in which they stand cannot be separated from all relation to him. Some, who were unbelievers in a supernatural revelation, have not scrupled to take the first horn of this dilemma, and have maintained that no direct prediction of Christ, or, which is tantamount to the same thing, no prediction of him at all, properly so called, is to be found in the Old Testament; that its language invariably referred to some other subject, as indicated by the connection; and if it is applied to Christ, it can only be in the way of accommodation, and altogether apart from the real scope of the writer. When they are confronted with the manifest incongruity of the language with any other subject than Christ, they make a shift to explain it away as a figure of speech, hyperbole, oriental imagery, or something of the sort. Some

have even pushed their consistency to the still more absurd length of denying that the Jewish people entertained any expectation of a Messiah's coming. Our readers, however, would not thank us for proving either that the Jews entertained expectations of a Messiah's coming, or that such expectations were founded on their sacred books. If, then, we are compelled to admit this, there is only one other horn to the dilemma stated above, and it must be acknowledged, not only that Christ is to be found in the Old Testament in its plain predictions and its evident types, but that he is to be found in it elsewhere also.

It is not our design here to enumerate all the methods which have been proposed of solving the question before us, nor to enter upon the merits and demerits of each in detail. Several of the early fathers and others assumed an allegorical sense of Scripture, different from its plain and obvious meaning, and always underlying it; often, indeed, in their expositions superseding it. Others have employed every variety of method in dealing with Scripture types. One class, in order to make out a type everywhere, has assumed the most fanciful and grotesque analogies; another has affirmed with positiveness that nothing should be admitted to be a type, for which there cannot be adduced the express warrant of the New Testament writers in so many words; while another still has been willing to admit a type wherever it would be natural to conclude that one was contained, by proceeding on the same principles which the inspired writers of the New Testament appear to have followed. The fault of both the allegorical and the typical methods just referred to lies in assuming that there is either everywhere, or at least in certain parts of the Old Testament, what has been called a double sense, one obvious, one concealed-one designed by the writer, and lying within his immediate scope, the other designed by the Holy Spirit to refer to an entirely different subject from that which was intended by the writer, or which would be understood by his immediate readers. Thus, it is supposed that an Old Testament writer might be speaking of David, or Solomon, or Judah, and mean nothing more, and those of his own day see nothing more in it; whereas we, in New Testament times, might see that the Spirit designed in this language to describe Christ and the Christian church.

The objection to this theory is not to be found, perhaps, in the fact that it interprets the Bible differently from all other books; for the uniqueness in the mode of its composition, in that it has a divine and a human author, certainly renders it conceivable that it might contain such distinct senses. more serious objection is found in the want of any certain or

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satisfactory criterion to tell us in what passages the Spirit designed a different sense from that which the human penman had, and what the sense of the Spirit was. Who is qualified to decide this point? And is it not apparent that the assumption of such a sense, with no rule to determine where it is or what it is, leaves every thing to vague conjecture, deprives us of all certainty in the interpretation of Scripture, and makes it, in fact, whatever any interpreter may choose to make it? A more serious objection still is, that it mistakes entirely the position and design of this portion of God's revelation, and its relation to the people and the age to which it was given as their instructor and guide. It disregards the significancy of the Old Testament for Old Testament times, as though it could not be explained by itself, and had no meaning for those for whom it was primarily and especially designed. It assumes that in the sense of the Spirit it was unintelligible to them; and, in fact, that this was never unveiled, until it was rendered comparatively unnecessary by the superior clearness of the New Testament. The revelation made to any age, though significant for all coming time, was specially adapted to the wants and capacities of that age. A hidden sense of the kind spoken of above would be of no use to the Old Testament saints, for it was undiscoverable by them; nor is it of use to us, for we have the same things which it is supposed to teach taught more plainly in passages where that sense is obvious.

The double sense of which we have spoken must not be confounded with that interpretation which assigns to the same prophecy a twofold or even manifold accomplishment. Nor must it be supposed, that in saying what we have of the former, we have meant in any wise to discredit the latter. It is very frequently the case that the same prophecy, after having been fulfilled in a lower, is fulfilled again in a higher subject; sometimes there is a series of fulfilments of ever increasing magnitude and extent, until in the last the acme is reached of perfect correspondence with the prophetic picture. But this is a very different thing from the assertion, that there is in the words of inspiration a concealed sense, which the Spirit of God intended, but which no rule of explication could ever evolve

out of them.

The views of our author upon this subject are these. God's eternal purpose of redeeming fallen man is laid at the foundation of all human history, at least as that is viewed in the Bible. The sacred history of the world is from first to last nothing more nor less than the history of redemption; a history which is not yet fully unfolded, and will not be, until the curse shall be entirely done away, and the last ransomed of earth raised to the complete inheritance of the children of