fruitfulness of the barren Church. The sighs of the fifty-third chapter are as her travail pangs, and the result is the birth anew of the family of the election-the building upon the costliest foundation, sapphire, agate, and all precious stones, the new Jerusalem whose children shall be all instructed, all in peace, till the great time. of paradisaical bliss shall return in the uprising of the fir-tree where the thorn had flourished, and the blooming of the myrtle instead of the brier.

e

We pass over the warnings against the idolatry of the people and their hypocrisy, and of their awful participation in every vice, and yet, amidst it all, the astonishing faithfulness of their covenant God". These dreadful indictments seem almost intended to heighten by contrast the glories of the Church of the future. Great is the external beauty of the united Church, wonderful the attraction by which the distant islands. shall be drawn into its bosom, but the crowning feature of all is that the Lord shall be its

c Isa. liv. 11—13. d Ibid. lv. 12, 13. e Ibid. lvi. ' Ibid. lviii. b Ibid. lix. 20, 21.

Ibid. lix.

sun and its inhabitants shall all be righteous1. If we strain our eyes and look more deeply into the future of the prophecy, we shall see its first fulfilment in the picture of a rural synagogue in a village of Galilee. A mysterious figure enters the building, opens the sacred volume, and reads the blessed words, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me," &c., and declares that He Himself is the fulfilment of the prophecy. It was Jesus of Nazareth Himself. The truth of His character and mission is the unassailable foundation of the inspiration and divinity of the language of the Prophet.

What the mystery of the last chapters may be is yet unsealed. In the awful return from Bozrah', in bloody garments and in triumph, we gain some view of both the triumphs of Messiah, the one past and the other to come. In the passionate pleadings of the sixty-fourth we have a specimen of the prayers which it is our duty to offer for the coming of "the kingdom." In the last two we behold the sublime assertion of the

i Isa. lx. 20, 21.

* Ibid. lxi. 1; St. Luke iv. 18. 1 Isa. lxiii.

universality of the kingdom of Christ. We discern in reading it the gradual passing away of all Jewish peculiarities, and the setting up of the Church of the Gentiles. The distant dwellers of the world seem flocking around the Divine standard. A new system of things is to exist, new heavens, in fact, and a new earth, in which every image of the most inviolable peace and tranquillity is to be fully satisfied. Above it all towers the throne of God, built upon the earth, and reaching above to the lofty battlements of heaven ". Peace is to flow forth like a river, for ever broadening as it runs and while every hostile effort on the part of the principle and power of evil shall be completely rebuked, there shall be not a shadow of unfaithfulness on the part of the people of God. Every ordinance of earthly worship shall be done away, but only by passing into its destined spiritual antitype in heaven. The new moon shall no more wax old and wane: the Sabbath shall be the rest of God in His people, and of the people in their God.

m

Isa. lxvi. 1.

n

Ibid. 12.

Such is the consummation to which the rapt Prophet looked forward in his latterday retirement. And whether it were by the cruel saw under the reign of Manasseh, or simply by the failure of strength through age, having sung so sweetly, so nobly, so divinely, he passed away to enjoy in heaven the kingdom he had proclaimed on earth o.

It is a tradition widely credited by the Fathers, and especially the Oriental writers, that Isaiah was sawn asunder in the reign of Manasseh. The expression, Moreover Manasseh shed innocent blood very much," (2 Kings xxi. 16,) is considered to give some support to the tradition.

66

Tracts for the Christian Seasons.

THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

I.-MANASSEH.

AMONG other striking moral phenomena

presented to us in the historical books of the Old Testament, not the least remarkable is the alternation of pious and wicked kings in the royal house of David, for two centuries or more preceding the Babylonish captivity. Prior to that period the succession of monarchs in the kingdom of Judah had presented a marked contrast to that of the kings of Israel: for while the latter had been uniformly and without exception impious and idolatrous, the former had been on the whole, and for the most part, religious and exemplary. When, indeed, we take into account the innate depravity of our fallen nature, and consider that the root of bitterness, implanted in it by the malice. of Satan in Eden, is not eradicated even

No. 64. THIRD SERIES.

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