A SERMON.

JOHN XV. 24.

If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin.

THE peculiar claim which our Lord addressed to the Jews was that of being a person foretold in a long train of prophecies, commencing from the very earliest period of the world, and reaching to about four hundred years before his coming, at which time the canon of the Old Testament was completed. This person was called the Messiah, or the Christ; two words which alike signify the Anointed One. As the Jews were accustomed to see their prophets, their priests, and their kings, severally to take upon them, and assume their offices by the ceremony of anointing, they would understand by the peculiar expression, "the Anointed One," one who should be all these three-a prophet, a priest, and a king. In the fulness of time came a person professing to unite all these characters-in short, professing to be the Messiah himself. But how was Jesus to prove himself such? Nothing less than miracles could be sufficient to sustain such a claim; and indeed it was particularly foretold that the Messiah would work extraordinary miracles. If Jesus therefore had not wrought miracles, there would have been no sin in rejecting his pretensions; so far from it, that there would have been a credulity even dishonourable to God in allowing them: or if he had wrought miracles, but only such as might be otherwise explained, he might have been rejected as the promised Christ. Such a rejection would have been no sin. But our Lord in the text complains of the Jews, that their rejection of him was sinful, because he had proved himself to be their Messiah by sufficient tokens. He did among them the works which none other man did. He did among them the very works, which it was prophesied Messiah should do; and there was such a vast difference between his miracles and those of the greatest prophets who had gone before him, that there could be no reasonable doubt who he was. Great as were the miracles of the other prophets, Moses and Elijah particularly, neither in number nor in greatness could they be compared with those of Christ. Besides, Moses and Elijah acted as by the authority of God; Christ acted on his own only. The Jews had no cloke for their sin, no pretence by which they could excuse or defend it, when they treated him as a mere pretender to the title of the Messiah, and even so far from that character, that his very miracles were the work of Beelzebub the chief of the devils.

Christ therefore declares in the text, two points respecting the Jews; the one, that they committed sin in not receiving him for their promised Messiah; the other, that they might have done this without sin, provided he had not wrought among them the works which none other man did. Now the same thing exactly must apply to ourselves. God never would expect reasonable creatures to believe any thing of which he had not given them sufficient proof. If, therefore, Christ be really the Messiah, the proof must be complete to us that he was so ;

otherwise, we might follow the example of the Jews in rejecting him, and yet be without sin.

The miracles of Christ have been committed to writing, and attested by competent testimony; that, namely, of the persons who witnessed the performance of them, and who staked their lives upon the truth of what they stated. We therefore know what things our Lord performed among the Jews as well as they themselves could have known them. The proof is not exactly of the same kind as it would have been had we seen them ourselves; but still it is a complete proof. We have abundant evidence that they occurred; and we, like the Jews, are left to draw our own conclusions.

To consider all the miracles of Christ is not necessary to our subject; though, if time permitted, and they could be examined severally, the weight of proof might appear the more irresistible. We will, therefore, for the present, consider only two of these miracles, and then enforce the text.

Raising the dead appears to be the highest proof which can be afforded of miraculous powers. Elijah and Elisha had exercised this power; and it might therefore have seemed that the Messiah himself could have wrought no greater miracles than what those prophets had already performed. But in the cases of those dead persons whom they recalled to life, death had only very lately taken place. It was otherwise, however, in the instance of Lazarus, who had been dead four days, which, in the climate of Judea would be sufficient for producing very considerable putrefaction. To raise a putrid corpse by a word to life and health, is manifestly beyond the ordinary powers of nature. Grant that the fact took place, and we must grant also that no proof of Divine authority could be higher; that it was a work which no other man did; that if this were not sufficient ground for believing Jesus to be the Messiah, no ground sufficient ever could be had; and no man ever could be known to be that person whom God nevertheless, by his holy prophets, had so distinctly promised to send into the world.

Now the raising of Lazarus took place in the most public manner, in the presence of the people at large, people unfriendly to Jesus, so unfriendly that they immediately resolved upon his death. And yet what was their language? Did they deny, or attempt to deny, what they had witnessed? If it was no miracle, it was a fraud easily exposed. But, in truth, it was not a case which admitted of fraud, for Lazarus was known to have been four days dead-he was known to be alive there could be no imposition here, there was no room for imagination, that fruitful cause of changes, which, from their unaccountableness, men have sometimes considered miraculous. And to return to our question, What was the language of the chief priests and Pharisees? Did they say, This man doeth many impositions, and must therefore be destroyed? No: but "What do we? for this man doeth many miracles." They admitted, then, that Lazarus had been dead, and was raised from putridity to life by a word. They would, doubtless, have denied it if they could. It is evident, then, that here was a miracle-a miracle, too, of the very highest conceivable kind.

But there was a still greater work than this performed by Christa work which is a proof that he acted by a power greatly superior to

that which wrought in Moses or the old prophets. Christ raised himself from the dead. It is said, indeed, that God raised him, and that he was quickened by the Spirit; but he also declared, "No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again." The resurrection of Christ appears to have been the direct act of all the Persons of the Trinity. It certainly, however, was the act of Christ. Now, for a mere man to raise himself from the dead, for a man to have any share in such an act, is what cannot be conceived, what is plainly impossible; the moment he becomes possessed of such a power he ceases to be a mere man only. This was a character to which none of the ancient prophets could approach. Now in the resurrection of Christ there can be no room to doubt whether the alleged fact were a miracle or not. Who recorded the death of Christ? the writers, all of whom lived at the time-one of whom was certainly present, all of whom were probably so. The punishment of the cross was not one from which it was very possible to recover, especially where it had been inflicted for six hours; but we happen, in the case of Jesus, to have a separate proof that he really was dead before he was laid in the tomb. The Jews themselves, without intending it, supplied this proof: "Because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain on the cross on the Sabbath day (for that Sabbath day was an high day) they besought Pilate that the legs of the crucified persons might be broken, and that they might be taken away. Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs; but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side." Here, then, is abundant proof that Christ died. And who are the witnesses that he rose again? Those who were in constant intercourse with him for three years. Could they not have known his person? Those who had been separated from him for less than as many days,-could they have lost their recollection of him? And it was not for a passing moment, nor yet for an hour that he appeared to those who had known him: "He shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." Could there have been any deception? And what inducement was there to the apostles to bear a false testimony? None. They gained nothing; but, on the contrary, in this world they lost every thing. "If in this life only," says St. Paul, "we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." Christ himself had given them the warning; "In the world ye shall have tribulation:" and indeed it was easy to see that if they called the master of the house Beelzebub, no better treatment would await those of the household. No conceivable motive could have operated with the apostles to expose themselves to sufferings, to dangers, and to death, for the sake of the resurrection of Christ, unless they had firmly believed it; and if they believed it, it must have been true, for it was a fact of that kind which does not admit of a mistake.

It may be said, that when our Lord spoke the words of the text, the great miracle of his own resurrection had not taken place. This is