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recalling the ancient oracles, celebrated the return of the Virgin, the birth of prevailing order, and the descent of the Son of God from heaven. To his eye a grand epoch speedily advanced; all the vestiges of crime were effaced, and earth was forever delivered from fear. The divine infant, who should reign over the peaceful world, will receive for first presents the simple fruits of earth, and the serpent will expire near his cradle. The universal tradition, moreover, was, that this celestial envoy would be man and God combined, and that he would come to achieve the salvation of the world. "He will save us," said Plato, "by teaching us the true doctrine,”. herd, prince, universal teacher, and sovereign truth," said Confucius, "he will possess all power in heaven and upon the earth." This lively anticipation of a mighty liberator and restorer, vanquisher of demons and imbodiment of supreme good, was doubtless permitted to prevent the nations from falling into complete ignorance and despair. It never ceased to prevail, in a manner more or less distinct, through all the pagan world, from a period long anterior to Moses to the auspicious night when the Magi, guided by a supernatural meteor, came from the East seeking the Star destined to elevate Israel and overthrow idolatry. Who is this Savior- the desire of all nations—the true Messiah, sent of God? We have but one response, and shall never need another - Jesus Christ, who was all that the nations expected him to be, all that the prophets declared he would be, the true Son of God, begotten from eternity, his Wisdom and his Word, incarnate and divine.

Humanity has never ceased to pour forth its desires and tears at the foot of such altars as could be found; it has never ceased to adore under some form; and hence, since worship is a universal instinct, in the most sacred of books God has entitled himself "the desire of all nations." But at the time Jesus of Nazareth was born, more than ever before, poor, degraded, persecuted, bleeding humanity laid its hands upon its mouth, and its mouth in the dust, crying for a deliverer to

appear. Its prayer was heard. The fulness of time had come, and "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us." The eternal Son of God deigned to take our nature and clothed himself with our mortal flesh. He united in himself the divine and the human; and these two natures formed but one person, Jesus Christ, the God-man who was the expectation of all the nations. He appeared at the time foretold, “and we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth." His incarnation was a great mystery indeed, but a mystery so analogous to our wants and so conformable to the universal reason of mankind, that it has been perpetually believed ever since the fall.

But what end did the divine Word propose to himself in his incarnation? What secret designs impelled him to descend so "He came," says

low, and unite himself to our nature? Paul, "to regenerate all things in the heavens and upon the earth." His mission was as grand as it was benevolent. It was worthy of Him by whom all things were made; and who alone was able to renovate- regenerate all. Our nature had become depraved, and it was the prerogative of Christ, by his sacrifice, precepts, and example, to create us anew in the image of the Highest. It seemed to the apostle that this sublime work, achieved through such wonderful means, would blaze with ineffable splendor, not only in the world which we inhabit, but beyond us to all worlds, even to the most exalted height of the heavens. It was necessary that the Source of all light, by making himself man, should enter the night in which humanity was involved in order to disperse it. The regeneration of our nature is the image of its primitive creation: the first and the second are equally the work of the divine Word. "For by him were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him and for him." He renews our spirit in the same way as he formed it, by the communication of himself: to hear, believe, obey, this was man's first act; he was born by the throes

of faith, and the word which originally gave to him life, is the same which reproduces it.

The king of day is glorious and sublime in all his course, but he is the most beautiful as he comes into view and disappears. The resemblance which this bears to the great Sun of Righteousness is manifest. We are ever to remember that in Jesus Christ our nature was intimately united with Divinity the most exalted, and that in the triumphant Redeemer humanity is already enthroned in heaven. He came to unfold to mankind their capacities of greatness, to impart generous conceptions and reveal the splendid destiny that awaited them, to awaken aspirations after a nobler character and a higher being, to kindle in their bosoms a love for all the virtues imbodied in himself, and throw wide open before them the gates which invite to life without a pang, and glory without a cloud.

This, then, is the truth we are to observe at the outset of our discussion; on the one hand, that the appearance of Christ had been, from eternity, predetermined by the divine will, and, on the other, that this determination was carried into effect precisely at the period when all was made ready for the purposes of his mission. But Christ, according to all records, sacred and profane, does not stand isolated in universal history, but was heralded among the Jews by the law and the prophets, -among heathen nations by symbols, significant myths, and vivid traditionsby philosophy, poetry, and art by the very depravity which kept alive a painful consciousness of a doom deserved, and which awakened the deepest longings for the appearance of one mighty to save. This fore-appointment of the Messiah from all eternity is especially stated by the apostle Paul; as when, for instance, he asserts that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world; while the historical necessity of the Redeemer's appearance at a particular period is announced in those assertions of Scripture, that the Son of God and of man was born in the fulness of time; in other words, that he appeared at the precise moment when the preparations for his advent were completed, and the world in such

a state, that the influence of his mission, however much opposed, could never be entirely lost. He appeared in the period prepared-at exactly the right time.

Secondly, the birthplace of the Redeemer was appointed, and comported well with the character of his mission. It resembled the spiritual character and the temporal condition of the great masses of mankind. Man had fallen from his high estate into the most abject condition; and, in order to redeem him, it was necessary for the great Captain of Salvation to pass through the deserts of penury and the tomb. The first Adam had desolated Eden with sin; the second Adam, in the humblest home of misery, will open the fountains of life for all. "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” The first man had changed every zephyr of the world's garden into destructive tempests, every flower into thistles and venomous stings, every sweet stream into bitterness and woe. He who, from the eternal throne, wings the thunders with power, stoops to the manger, and lies bound in swaddling clothes. Celestial purity blends with and springs from the least corrupt source on earth, exemplifying at once the greatest marvel in physical creation, and the most astonishing movement of heavenly love. In the first instance, the divine was destroyed by the human; in the second, from humanity divinity is produced, pledged to heal every wound sin has inflicted, and spread over a groaning and degraded world joy and glory again.

But

It is worthy of especial remark that the circumstances of poverty and desolation which characterized the advent of Christ were the same that attend the birth of the great masses of mankind. Doubtless the coming of the Redeemer was arranged with reference to this fact. "He who was rich for

our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might be made rich." He rendered himself in the greatest possible degree accessible to all; he bore the deprivations of the most obscure, and, from his very birth, accumulated a wealth of experience and sympathy with the outcast and suffering of

every degree, so as to be able to enrich every child of poverty, and mitigate every pang of woe. In every age and clime there has been many a Simeon waiting for the consolation of Israel, all of whom felt that the needed Redeemer, to be efficacious, must be weak as well as strong, poor as well as infinitely rich. Plato not only shows that in his day a divine instructor was desired, but he strikingly described the attributes he would need to bring and the doom he would meet. "He must be poor, and void of all qualifications but those of virtue alone; that a wicked world would not bear his instructions and reproofs; and therefore, within three or four years after he began to preach, he would be persecuted, imprisoned, scourged, and at last be put to death." The feebleness and penury of Christ would give him ready access to the great majority of mankind, while his omnipotence and infinite stores of heavenly merit would qualify him to atone for all their sins. Blessed was the lowly condition of the infant Redeemer, and auspicious were the mild beamings of the star that heralded his birth. Then a softness began to spread over the obdurate heart of man; the curtains of mystery began to fall, and immortal glory rose on the enraptured view.

Lamartine, in visiting the spot appointed to be the scene where the advent of Messiah should transpire, gave utterance to his feelings in the following words: —

"It appeared to me, on ascending the last hills which separated me from Nazareth, as if, from the summit of the mountains of Galilee, I were about to contemplate at its source that all-comprehensive and fruitful religion which for nearly two thousand years has established and is establishing itself in the universe, and which has refreshed so many generations by its clear and vivifying waters. Here was the source in the hollow of the rock, which I here tread under my feet, and the hill of which I have ascended the last heights, has borne on its sides the salvation, the life of the light, the hope of the world. It was here, a few paces from me, that He, the model of man, was born amongst men, to withdraw them by his word and his

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