both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.

"Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne;

"He seeing this before, spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

"This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are witnesses."

What has been copied from Isaiah and the Acts concerning Christ and David, is pregnant with matter of high and peculiar interest. The language of the prophet and the apostle, respecting the sure mercies of David, arises from the same source, and has relation to the advent and spiritual kingdom of Christ, and the temporal royalty of David, who is here made a type of the Redeemer, in order more effectually to exhibit and unfold the divine and human natures meeting and concentrating, agreeably to prophecy, only in the person of Immanuel as the promised Messias. Jacob, or Israel, when bestowing his prophetical and dying benediction on the heads of the tribes

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made this testamentary declaration of Judah : 'Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father's children shall bow down before thee." "Judah is a lion's

whelp, from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion; and as an old lion, who shall rouse him up?

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh* come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.

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Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood. of the grapes."

* The following interpretation of the word Shiloh, will, I hope, be acceptable.

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'Shiloh, one of the glorious names of the Messias, denoting him to be the only procurer of our happiness; and our alone peace-maker with God: for it importeth a Saviour, or happy, blessed, peaceable, or a peace-maker, &c., from the root Shalah-he was quiet and in peace, he was safe and happy. It is found Gen. xlix. 10. The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.' All christian commentators agree that this word ought to be understood of the Messiah; of Jesus Christ. Jerome translates it by qui mittendus est; he who is sent; and mani

The prophecy of dying Jacob, declaring that Christ should descend from the tribe of Judah, when the ruin of the Jewish monarchy should have been effected; and the oath which God had sworn unto David, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit upon his throne, are irresistible proofs of Christ's advent in the natural image of man. This is confirmed by the admitted historical fact, that Herod, the Edomite, was undeniably in possession of the sovereign authority in Judea, at the time of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem; and sceptics of our day are not only driven, with the Jews, to the impossible necessity of finding two Messiahs, but they must likewise produce a

festly reads Shiloah, sent instead of Shiloh. The Septuagint translate it: Until the coming of him to whom it is reserved ;' or, 'till we see arrive that which is reserved for him.'

"Some translate: The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, till he comes to whom it belongs;' others, 'till the coming of the peace-maker, or the pacific, or of prosperity' others, till the birth of him who shall be born of a woman, who shall conceive without the knowledge of a man other.

wise, The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, till its end, till its ruin, till the downfall of the kingdom of the Jews.'

"A certain author derives Shiloh, from Shalah, which sometimes means to be weary, to suffer, till his labours, his sufferings, his passion, should come to pass."

"From Cruen's Concordance"

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second David, which the apostle points to, and infers, by saying, "Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day." We see, therefore, that the man Christ, of the tribe of Judah, or he in whom God told Abraham that all the nations of the earth should be blessed, and who, in the ordinary course of his generations, should be a "branch" of the stock of the house of David, has, agreeably to that oath sworn by Jehovah to David, been manifested in the flesh to unbelieving Israel, and, agreeably to the determined foreknowledge and will of his Father, suffered death by crucifixion. Of whose incarnation, and divine and human natures, Jehovah himself, through inspired Moses, gives us this testimony, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created he them." God the Father himself giving unreserved testimony to the same fact, by declaring, "Behold! a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." Thereby signifying that this son should be God and man in one and the same natural person,

or that conjointly in the person of this son, the seed of the woman, the spiritual King of the true Israel should be found; for they are not all Israelites that are of Israel, which the Redeemer assures us of, by saying, "My kingdom is not of this world," more clearly expressing his affinity to the church alone, by saying, in St. Mark iii. "For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother." And David himself, though directly Christ's progenitor according to the flesh, gives us the example and benefit of his faith in Christ, as the promised Messiah, by conferring on him the title of his Lord, which his seniority of life on earth would certainly exclude him from, had he not spoken in the spirit of inspiration of his Lord Christ's divinity. Because David's royalty was temporal, and Christ's, in its highest signification, was spiritual; a truth which was perfectly familiar to David, who, in Psalm xciii, 2, when speaking of Christ, thus expresses himself, "Thy throne is of old, thou art from everlasting." To these observations and proofs of the divine and human natures of Christ, there will be found to subsist