a perfected righteousness, and having presented it to His Father as a garment spotless, seamless, and of sufficient amplitude to cover the guilty race of men, naked and shivering under the cold shade of death, He says, "It is finished.” In regarding this word as the language of congratulation addressed to us upon a completed work for us, it is not meant that we may now sit still and fold our hands and look for His coming; but it is meant that meditating upon Christ in this supper or before approaching His table we should rely upon His work, enjoy it, glory in it, without any attempt or wish to add to it. It was perfect in His death. Time, nor the trust in it of millions, poor, needy, guilty, like us, cannot diminish its virtue. As a foundation it will endure for the Church through all eternity; as bread of life it will feed the Church for ever; as a garment it will never grow old! His blood cleanseth us from all sin, so that not a solitary stain is left for our tears to wash away. His sufferings have so fully satisfied justice that we need not suffer for sin; His righteousness, now ours by faith, is so perfect before God, that we are mercifully delivered from all miserable attempts to establish our own. Those of us who have felt the burden of guilt, and who may never think of meeting God in death without painful fear, may surely be satisfied with Christ's atonement for us, seeing that God is well pleased with Him in it; and with Him not simply as His beloved Son, but as our substitute and redeemer. In obeying His command, "This do in remembrance of me," we will think of the intimate connexion be tween Jesus and His Father, and our Father in His death. In this word at least-"It is finished"-He could not be said in any sense to be abandoned by His Father; indeed, it may be regarded not only as a sublime soliloquy, and a congratulation to us, but also the language of loving resignation to God. In this last sense it is an appeal addressed to the Supreme Judge to decide whether all He pitifully undertook for us is not finished. And may not we, recalling at His table His sufferings and victory, "Love and grief our heart dividing,” accept His resurrection, and the descent of the Holy Ghost according to promise, as the Father's affirmative response to the appeal? Let us trust thankfully that His atonement will be efficient in all our need, only let us be very jealous of its honour. We must discriminate between it and the presumed saving grace of sacraments administered by men assuming to be priests. And with the firm hand of faith push aside all the superstitions of misguided men as no better than rotten wood, or untempered mortar, and cling to the one sacrifice for sin, designed, adapted, and proved from experience, to give pardon and tranquillity of conscience. As it is finished for the salvation of sinners, we, happy communicants at the Table, should go and declare to others that man as a sinner, weighed down and worn out by sin, need not delay coming to Christ. Delay cannot add to the Lord's work for him, though it may utterly ruin his soul. Oh! let us, fresh with the dew of His grace, received at the Supper, go and tell him that all is finished for him, so as to remove the last vestige of a legal barrier to his salvation; that prudence, self-interest, gratitude, the value of peace, and the worth of his soul should prompt a hearty and grateful reception of the Saviour himself by faith. It is finished! Saviour, help us, Thy children, to realize our interest in it, so that it may finish all our O Saviour! calm our troubled fears, CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA AND EPHRAEM SYRUS AS HYMNISTS. ALEXANDRIA-now little more than a huge hotel and port on the overland route-once sat proudly by the blue Mediterranean sea, a queen among the cities. The stately buildings told how to Egyptian massiveness had been added the luxury and chasteness of Grecian art, while all around these palaces were gardens, groves, alcoves, flowers, and statues. Foreigners from every land thronged the streets, and spoke every language of the then known world, from that of the barbaric Goths from the black forest, to that of the glossy negro slaves who basked in the sun in the market. By day the white quays on the beach, and by night the blazing light that gleamed from the Pharos and flung its beacon light far across the sea, bade welcome to the fleets of the world, and the harbour of Eunostus was crowded with countless masts-from that of the gaudily-painted barge, to the ships which were loading their many decks with costly manufactures of linen, paper, and glass, with Oriental merchandise, and with corn from the valley of the Nile which lay beneath that rainless sky in huge unsheltered heaps. The city of Alexandria was the home not only of merchants and men of money, but also of those who ruled in the world of mind-of historians, geometricians, philosophers and poets, until her intellectual influence upon the age was almost supreme. And though the Jew in his own land was not of very literary taste, there were some in Alexandria who caught the spirit of the city, and the children of Abraham might be seen busy with the works of Plato and Aristotle, and discussing subtle Greek theories, Roman dogmas, and Oriental dreams of ethics and philosophy. But before the close of the first century a mightier power than they had ever known was working among the people of this city; a power richer than all their wealth, and wiser than all their wisdom-the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The philosophies of Paganism, and the prejudice and obstinacy of Judaism, came into fierce conflict with the faith; and persecution assailed the preachers of the cross. But within a hundred years from the resurrection of our Lord, the Christians of Alexandria formed an important proportion of the inhabitants, and, it is said, were as numerous as those who remained attached to the indigenous superstitions." Towards the close of the second century, and while Alexandria was a centre of thought and life the slightest pulsation of which vibrated in a thousand directions, there might be found in the city one who " seems to have been a merchantman, seeking goodly pearls, until he found, at length, the pearl of great price. He wandered restlessly from school to school, seeking, it seems, not to become learned, but to find truth; not content, as an intellectual curiosityhunter, to hoard up treasures of information, he wanted some living truth to live upon." Clement of Alexandria was his name. Pantonus was his teacher in the truth of Christ, and when the master resigned his office as head of the catechetical school at Alexandria in order to go as a missionary to India, the pupil succeeded to his post; and here, amidst labours and trials, and many while daily, martyrs were burned, beheaded, and crucified before his eyes," Clement taught and wrote. And he was the earliest Christian hymn writer whose name has come down to us. 66 We know but little of the particulars of the outer history of Clement, but still he speaks to us by his writings, and speaks through us in our Sabbath worship. We seem at a glance to know much of the heart that could thus utter itself on prayer: "Prayer," he says, "if I may speak so boldly, is intercourse with God; even if we do but lisp, even though we silently address God without opening our lips, yet we cry to Him in the inmost recesses of the heart, for God always listens to the sincere direction of the heart to Him." He bids the Christian husband and wife consecrate each day by commencing it with reading the Scriptures and prayer; but he adds, "that the Christian may pray in every place," and "although he is ever thinking on God in the little chamber of his soul, and calling on his Father with silent aspiration, God is near him, and with him, for he is still speaking to God." And is there not a new joy, and something of profit, too, when in these days we celebrate the anniversaries of our Sabbath-schools, when we tell how "He shall gather the lambs with His arms," as we remember that we are repeating the devout thoughts that filled the heart of Clement of Alexandria, seventeen hundred years ago, as we join in the song?* Shepherd of tender youth, Through devious ways; Be ever at our side, So now, and till we die, And joyful sing: To Christ our King. But we must now turn to another scene and another name. The earliest triumphs won by the Christian Church *New Congregational Hymn Book, No. 975. beyond the boundaries of Palestine, among those who were "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel," centred around Antioch, the capital of Syria, where the disciples were "first called Christians." The position which that city occupied made it a place of concourse for all classes and races of people, and it was accounted, what Constantinople afterwards became"The Gate of the East." Here poets spent their young days; here generals died; here emperors were filled with admiration; here Oriental superstition mingled with the vices of heathenism, and all that was beautiful in art and nature was made the minister of sin. Such was the arena on which the Gospel of Christ fought its first battles, and won its first spiritual victories among "strangers." And from that Syrian metropolis the work of God spread over the land, and the saints were multiplied. Tradition assures us that the Apostle Thomas founded the Christian church at Edessa. It is probable, that here the Syriac translation of the New Testament was prepared, and it is certain it was used here towards the close of the second century—the period at which Clement was commencing his public career at Alexandria. In thisr egion the ecclesiastical Syriac tongue, which is a peculiar form of the Aramaic dialect, early prevailed. It is in this garb It is in this garb that Syriac Church literature appeared, a large part of which, though apparently written as prose, has been found by the learned to be metrical in form. In the structure of the hymnody of the Syrian church, two forces came into play to which we have already adverted. It is evident that, from an early period, the psalter of the Old Testament was in use, and it appears that about the middle of the third century the bishop of Antioch forbad the use of any other sacred songs than the Psalms of David. This prelate was Paul of Samosata, who sympathized with the heresy which afterwards took the name of Arius; and thus, under the pretence of a love of antiquity, he sought to silence those freer compositions which directly discountenanced his own views. Gradually, however, the stately hymnology of the Hebrew Church had to enter into alliance with the more free, varied, and popular rhythms familiar to the ear of Greek and Latin converts; and the best appliances of heathen minstrelsy were not only made servants to the house of the Lord, but were employed as powerful engines of controversy for good or for ill. In Syria, as elsewhere, says Dr. Burgess, Christians "introduced into their practice, whatever of national customs, in relation to music, they found ready to their hands." The first name connected with the metrical literature of Syria, is that of Bardesanes, a Gnostic Christian, and a native of Edessa. He flourished in the second century, and wrote nearly two hundred hymns. He seems to have cultivated the art of accommodating his opinions to those that were prevalent; though, as Neander says, "he could write from honest conviction against many of the Gnostic sects then spreading in Syria. His own heresies, however, he circulated far and wide by the use of metrical composition, in which he had great skill.' "He thus concealed," said Ephraem, one of his successors in song, "for the simple, the bitter with the sweet. For the sickly do not prefer food which is wholesome." Harmonius, the son of Bardesanes, greatly improved the metrical compositions of Syria, introducing into them some of the results of his study of the language and arts of Greece, and enriching it with new Grecian measures and melodies. But the father of Syriac poetry was Ephraem Syrus, deacon and monk of Mesopotamia, who flourished about the middle of the fourth century. Twelve thousand songs are said to have come from his pen; songs in which he turned the weapons of heresy against itself by fitting the hymns of orthodoxy to the tunes of Bardesanes and Harmonius. And while the productions of his predecessors have been nearly all consigned to oblivion, his own survive, everlasting monument of fine abilities consecrated to the service of God." This "champion of Christ," says an anonymous Syriac writer, an "the blessed Ephraem, seeing that all men were led by music, rose up and opposed the profane games and noisy dances of the young people, and he stood like a father in the midst of them, a spiritual harper," and "taught them odes and scales and responses, and conveyed in the odes intelligent sentiments, in a sententious form, until the whole city was gathered to him, and the party of the adversary was put to shame and defeated.” Nor is this estimate overdrawn. The materials which this good man wove into song were no mere creations of the fancy. "He knew," says Dr. Burgess, "of no store-house of facts and principles but the Bible, and the very slight addition made to it by ecclesiastical tradition. His God is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, revealed in the person of Christ, in connexion with the personal existence of the Holy Ghost; his world of invisible and spiritual beings is peopled with the cherubim and seraphim, the archangels and angels, both bad and good, made known by the inspired writers; his heroes are saints and martyrs, who triumphed over sin and death through the indwelling power of the Redeemer."* But while the fountain of which he ever drank was that of "Siloa's brook that flow'd Fast by the oracle of God," still he showed everywhere the creative energy of a master-mind, though the translators have complained of the exceeding difficulty of conveying the Doric sonorousness and grace of the Syriac language into another tongue. The monastic life of Ephraem appears to have choked up no fountain of human kindliness in his heart. His hymns "breathe much of the fragrance of a home." And we can fancy we see children clustering round his knees as he bids the lips of babes and sucklings sing the praise of God, and tells how "the happy flocks" of "spotless lambs" feed in "the heavenly meadows' amid leafy trees," and are led on by Gabriel, prince of angels." He seems almost to have known a parent's joy and grief as he utters the "Lament of a Father on the Death of his Little Son"-a stanza of which has thus been translated: : 66 66 |