human race, must (agreeably to the mental infinitude of an omniscient God, to whom nothing can be new,) be a proof beyond all rational contradiction, that Christianity is eternal with the Deity himself.

This remark suggests many things for our improvement: first, it shows us that the Divine Word, or Son of God, was eternally co-eternal and co-existing with the Father himself; and, in the second place, that he is of the like co-equal divinity with the Father, and that in the Trinity of the Godhead, "none is afore or after other, none is greater or less than another; but the whole three persons are co-eternal together, and co-equal. So that in all things, the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity."

These remarks, if compared with a part of the prophecy inserted as Zechariah xiii., and connected with Genesis i. 27, may be found useful in enabling us to recognize more clearly the accordance and meaning of both portions of Scripture, with regard to the "image" and "likeness" of God and man, whose name the

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Father declared, before his natural life began on earth, should be Immanuel, therefore this chapter shall be finished by both portions of Scripture being placed side by side, for the reader's consideration:

Genesis i, 27.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him: male and female created he them."

Zechariah xiii. 7.

"Awake, O sword, against my Shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of Hosts: smite the Shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones."

Here Moses calls the Creator God, a title appertaining to, and alone bestowed on Jehovah the only true God, by way of distinction from, and in opposition to the word Adonai or Lord, which the heathen nations applied, not only to their false gods, but also to their kings, and petty princes and governors; and in this sense Adonai is applied to the king of Bezec, when opposed to Israel.

Moses then declares the natural image of Christ and man as alike constituting both their persons. In the transposed prophecy erroneously placed with the prophecies of Zechariah, Jehovah calls Christ his own Shepherd, the

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Man that is his equal, which asserts a sameness with self in their co-equal and divine spiritual likeness; so that the intimate and vital existence of God and man in the person of one Christ, is unreservedly here asserted in both The human nature of the Redeemer was a substance superhumanly ordained in his virgin mother, and of that mortal nature with the original substance of man at large, appointed once to die; thus Christ was man according to the substance of his mother, born into the world, and hence called the Son of Man.

CHAP. XII.

The Judicial Character of Christ first displayed in his denunciation of punishment against the Serpent, Adam, and Eve -Confirmed by accepting the offering of Abel, and rejecting that of Cain-Genealogies instituted, their primary object -The Flood, and preservation of Noah and his family.— The appearance of the Rainbow decided.

THE lamentable transgression, and fall of man from that state of holiness, and, to us, inconceivable purity, in which he was originally created, presents us with a merciful mitigation of the sentence on the creature, mystically contained in the declaration of death, on the day that man was put into the garden of Eden, to dress it, and to keep it, and which sentence amounts to a temporal reprieve, by that condition of imperceptible, yet dying life, to which Adam and his posterity were immediately subjected; for as in Adam all live, being the fallen and mortal inheritors of their general father's original sin, so in Christ shall all be made alive, and made partakers with him in his resurrection at the day of Judgment.

The Creator on the fall of man is instantly

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on the

introduced denouncing judgment transgressors, and his character as the Judge of all men is shortly afterwards again fully brought forward, and confirmed to us, by the rejection of Cain and his offering, and the acceptation of that of righteous and faithful Abel, which, by faith in Christ, the antitype of all sacrifice, was immediately accepted; because the human nature of the seed of the woman was the thing typified, and it was the intention of Jehovah that atonement for sin should be made in that same human nature which had sinned. The prescience of Jehovah shows this, his eternal purpose, by declaring the incarnation of the seed of the woman for the redemption of man in time and in eternity, therein holding out our deliverance from eternal death, through the righteousness of Christ, found upon us by imputation, through faith. Which is not like sin, hereditary, as the Jews imagined, but is the gift of God the Father through Christ, and thus becomes both available and all-sufficient for man's salvation. Now the Son's repeatedly insisted on coequality with the Father, in holy writ, proves him to be equally possessed of all the divine