Lastly, we see in Benjamin, The son of the right hand, followers of Him to whom the Father hath said, "Sit Thou at my right hand until I make Thy foes Thy footstool," and to whom He hath Himself said, "He that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, as I also overcame and am set down with My Father in His throne." These sons of the right hand are men of power, through whom God effects His purpose of witness among men, "Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen." Concerning them Christ saith through Isaiah, "Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for the signs and wonders in Israel, from the Lord of hosts which dwelleth in Mount Zion;" and through Zechariah He calls them "men wondered at." These are the stars in the right hand of Him that walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, shining in His light and upheld by His power, He lays His right hand upon them, saying, "Fear not ;" to which they respond, "Because thou art at my right hand I shall not be moved." Therefore should we expect to find this tribe among the overcomers, and sealed as the servants of our God in their foreheads.

But we miss the tribe of Dan, and right glad we are at length to miss it, significant as it is of Judgment, or One that judges; for these "judges of evil thoughts" have been sad troublers in Israel for ages, not fearing to judge their brother and set at nought their brother, they have judged everything and everybody but themselves. All who have not pronounced their Shibboleth, or seen not eye to eye with them, have been adjudged as heretics, not to be tolerated but tabooed to the extent of their ability. In vain for them has it been written, "Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and make manifest the counsels of the hearts." Like their great ancestor of this tribe, they deal in foxes and firebrands, and too often set on fire their neighbours' standing corn, an act we have never been able to commend even in Samson. This predilection for foxes and firebrands has unhappily developed in the seed of Dan to this day. And so in the place of Dan, The judge, we get Manasseh, One who forgets, one who, though cast off by his brethren, forgets and forgives their injuries, and we account it a good exchange, and in the New Jerusalem home where failure will be no more, Dan, "a serpent in the way" or "a lion's whelp," would be as much out of work as out of place.

Thus, surely, we have in the names of the tribes enumerated as sealed ones, "the excellent of the earth," upon whom the seal of Divine complacency rests, as upon those who shall be sheltered in the coming storm and eventually caught away to meet their coming Lord. These are they "who dwell in the secret place of the Most High, and abide under the shadow of the Almighty, so that a thousand shall fall at their side and ten thousand at their right hand, but it shall not come nigh them; only with their eyes shall they behold and see the reward of the wicked.' For, like their prototype in Egypt, the children of Israel were sheltered under the blood while the Angel of death smote their enemies, so these shall be sheltered under this sealing of the angel awhile after the storm of judgment has commenced, and as men of faith they shall shine as stars in the world's midnight. For we read, when locusts, like scorpions, appear under the sounding of the fifth angel, "it was com

manded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree, but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads " (Rev. ix. 4).

And what are these various names but so many features of the one Name, expressive of the one nature, in which all so endowed shall presently be swallowed up and lost, the one Jehovah-tsidkenu, which name the Bridegroom and the Bride are mutually to share. For this is the name whereby He shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness (Jer. xxiii. 6), and, This is the name wherewith she shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness (Jer. xxxiii. 16), which is seen to be the work of the Holy Spirit during the present age, in visiting the Gentiles "to take out of them a people for His name (Acts xv. 14). Having taken out of "the natural branch," a goodly remnant in the past age, He is now taking out of "the branch wild by nature but grafted into the good olive tree," a further remnant, and thus is "making ready a people prepared for the Lord." And when she shall be seen coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, both branches shall be seen combined in the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb inscribed on her foundations, and these names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel inscribed on her gates.

Now, that it is the true Israel of God, and not the seed of Jacob after the flesh, which are here intended, should be manifest to the least spiritual discernment, as well as to the most superficial observer of prophecy. Beyond preserving their nationality for the purposes of His grace in the coming age, God has had no dealings in grace with the Jews, nor will He have during this age, wherein they have rejected His Son from becoming their King. If our reading of prophecy be correct, two tribes alone return to Palestine and rebuild their city, which eventually becomes the seat of the Antichrist, and when the nations lay siege to it, it is taken with such difficulty that "two thirds are cut off and die" before the Lord goes forth to plead with those nations and save the third part from extermination.

We ask objectors then, Where? When? How? as to time, space, or place, could such a work of evangelisation take place among literal Jews as to convert 144,000, and especially twelve thousand of each tribe, when two tribes alone are restored? And when, during this age, a Jew is converted, does he remain a Jew nationally? Do we not baptize him in the name of Christ as a Christian? How then shall distinction of Jewish tribe be consistent, under this age, with conversion to Christ their true Messiah? Rather let us, in reading, understand the words of Amos the prophet of Tekoa, echoed by James the Apostle in Jerusalem, " After this (age) I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David which is fallen down, and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up; that the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles upon whom My name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things" (Acts xv. 16, 17).

Before closing, we venture to suggest to our readers that the 144,000 of Romans vii. 4, and the same number of Rev. xiv. 1, are not identical, although the latter may include the former, as the greater includes the lesser. In each case the number is symbolical of a class that can be numbered and are numbered, and therefore an elect number, distinct from

"the multitude which no man can number " (Rev. vii. 9), but the former, on earth, the bride militant, and therefore incomplete, the latter in heaven, the bride triumphant, and therefore complete. These, including as they will the subjects of the first resurrection as well as the living saints changed, may be taken to mean an hundred and forty and four thousand thousand, and not simply an hundred and forty and four thousand units. However that may be, the body in its completeness it will be, Head and members; neither a maimed body, nor a monster; not one member missing, nor one in excess.

Now for its application. Will all believers be sealed? Will all teachers of others, professors or preachers of Second Advent truth, prove overcomers? May not some who have been longest and loudest in testimony to this truth be most in temptation to say, "My Lord delayeth His coming?" Can any be accounted overcomers unless they endure in testimony unto the end? And, lastly, we ask, Will all the regenerated be pavilioned during the coming judgments and eventually be caught away to meet the Lord? We reply: Not unless grace in them has conquered sin, proving them to be servants of our God; Not unless seeing the Son they become, in comparison with Him, bearers of His likeness; Not unless hearing and obeying Him they become forgotten ones in the world and forgetful of the wrongs done to them, forgive the wrongdoers. Not unless upheld by God and in association with Him, they are seen as the price, reward, and recompence of His soul-travail. Not unless indwelt by God, an habitation for God through the Spirit, they add grace to grace, strength to strength, ever increasing with the increase of God. Not unless as sons of His right hand they are manifestly the praise of their Heavenly Bridegroom. Where spiritual life is developed after this manner, we have no difficulty in tracing the features of the Bride, the Lamb's wife, nor will "the angel ascending from the East, having the seal of the living God" for their foreheads (Rev. vii. 2). Hackney, London, E.

NATHANIEL STARKEY.

STUDIES IN THE LIFE OF CHRIST.

No. II.

The Incarnation.-Reasons for it Considered.

WE frequently hear and read that no reason can be given why the

except that it pleased God so to appoint it. The coming of the Son of God, His victory over evil, His radiant life, His obedience unto death, His resurrection and ascension, are to such persons only mysterious antecedents necessary to the establishment of certain conditions to which, by the arbitrary appointment of Jehovah, the creature man must conform if he would be saved. Christ thus preached is simply a ticket to heaven, and the inference is fairly deducible that had the Father made jumping over a stone exactly two feet high the only way of salvation, it would have equally answered the purpose. It is difficult to comprehend the mental and spiritual limitation in a man whose language could seem to imply such an opinion.

Christianity is the highest reason, and it would seem impossible for any one to contemplate the Gospel steadily for ten minutes, or to know it experimentally for one, without finding a clue to labyrinths of wisdom and feeling a demonstration that there alone is life. Surely nothing is more self-evident than that adaptability of means to ends was never more gloriously displayed by the Almighty Father than when the work He set Himself to accomplish was the salvation of man. All the evidences of adaptation in the material world, produced by evolution, as God's method of design, pale in significance and splendour before the incomparable manifestation of it in the work of our redemption. There is salvation in none other than Christ, because, by the nature of the case, salvation apart from faith in Him is impossible to man; that is, understanding by salvation the begetting in man of the image of God. We may rest assured that man being what he is, and man's proper end being what God has declared He wills it, even to the Almighty, there existed no alternative but to send His only begotten Son into the world.

We mean but to touch the fringe of the inexhaustible glories within it when we reverently broach the inquiry, "Why was God manifest in the flesh?" We say there was a necessity for it, and that necessity was related to the creature, and not to God. It was not that He might know man's case more intimately than as the Creator He must have known it from the first. It was not that He might "know what sore temptations mean," for He had "felt the same" from the day when Eve succumbed. It was not to gratify a paternal yearning to mix in the company of His erring and unhappy offspring, that if He could not save, He might suffer with them, and be afflicted in the afflictions of His chosen, for "in Him" they had always "lived and moved, and had their being," and He encompassed them about on every side. It was not that His judgment of mankind might be done in justice and in truth, for the Incarnation could add nothing to the perfections of Deity, or render more absolute the original responsibility of man.

We say none of these things necessitated the Incarnation, for if every created thing is an expression of a thought of God, that thought is clear not cloudy. We cannot conceive of adaptation and design, nor could we recognise in creation a moral act, were the Creator incapable of knowing the conditions of life to which He had given rise-of course a solecism in thought. We stand on the borderland of the vegetable kingdom, and question if it has a sentient existence. God alone keeps the secret of this, and if in truth the flower feels when it turns to the sun, God feels with it. When the seawave that combs the green sea hair tumbles into a rocky pool, and slipping round the slumbering anemones starts their Briarean arms and countless cilias as they rush to seize a passing opportunity, the magic of that watery touch upon the living fibre is known to God as well as to those humble beings. If not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Heavenly Father, it is because God falls with it. Creation is God's pulse. Whatever of truth lay in the dim guesses of the Pagan world, Christianity proclaims with clearness, and Pantheism among the rest, God is all and in all. It was the thought

*We say "begetting" instead of "restoring," because it can only be proper to speak of Adam before the fall as possessing the mould of the Divine Image. Christ alone enables man to fill that mould,

that ravished Chalmers as he left the crowded Trongate behind and made for the silent country, where, stretched under trees and face to sky, he listened for eight hours to the Christian's Pan singing His own praises on the world's great harp. Here we shall be confronted by the mystery of evil and the appearances of a dualism in nature. Receive or deny it who may, we hold that a world with evil in it is the only school in which man's education can be prosecuted to a certain essential stage-the only temple in which the glories of the Fatherhood can be initially displayed. Evil and misery are soils congenial to the fructification of certain seeds of highest good and blessing. Hence we read with acquiescence, "I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil," in the world, from which "righteousness" is afterwards to "spring." We can suggest nothing as to the reign of evil over the irresponsible sentient creation, but we know that it suffers for man's sake and will share in man's redemption. We return to say that if God's knowledge of His inferior creation is thus intimate, His knowledge of man is certainly not less so. Omniscience, one of the recognised attributes of Deity, is His throughout eternity. God knew man's hunger and thirst, his toil and weariness, his sharp assaults from evil powers, the care and trouble of his life and the bitterness of his death, before that ever the devil met the Lord Christ fasting, or that Jesus sank weary by the well of Sychar, or felt the kiss of Judas, or hung upon the cross. All that was new to man in the revelation of God that Jesus made was old as the bosom of the Father on which the Son had learned His will; nothing of surprising tenderness and mercy displayed in Galilee and Judea, but what the choir of heaven discerned as but an echo of the past. "Son, be of good cheer." "Be of good cheer." "It is I, be not afraid." "Let not your hearts be troubled." "Go and sin no more "-these were old words muffled in the thunders of Sinai and chanted by the returning waves of the Red Sea. History is God's veil more than His revelation; Christ came and rent the veil, and during a ministry of three years the world gazed into the holy of holies and beheld Jehovah as man's Father, Mother and Brother. It was no altered disposition in God that Christ revealed. The new dispensation and the new covenant had their origin in the Eternal Heart which was and is and ever shall be one with Christ's. Invisibly the Eternal Father had gone with all godly mourners to the grave of a dear deceased to comfort and to cheer, before ever, wending to the grave of Lazarus, Jesus wept. Hagar as well as Mary, the widow of Sarepta as well as she of Cana, Cain as well as Peter, had been comforted of God.

All, we repeat, that seemed new in the Godhead which Christ revealed was only new because without manifestation in the flesh God could not make Himself adequately known to man.

Herein then lay the necessity of the Incarnation; creaturely limitation demanded it. Prechristian faith strove to penetrate the darkness that enveloped the Divine character, and went some way towards it, but fell lamentably short.

It was by visions and angels-adumbrations of the Incarnation-that the faith of the Patriarchs was sustained. The Pagan world in all its idolatries cried out for an Emmanuel. The weakness and unprofitableness of the dispensations that preceded Christ consisted in their want of

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