If we took God's estimate of the church, as seen in His Son and one with Him, would not that make the heart rejoice? If we could only see His delight in us, then we should be able to go forth in the spirit of this song. E.F. Church of God! as faithful watchmen, O may we, as faithful brethren, While we still maintain our ground. O may we, a faithful priesthood, O may we, the bride of Jesus, In His power and love "abide”— 1 Written in reference to the foregoing songs. No XVI. PROPHECY-NO SALVATION FOR THOSE I USE the term prophecy here in its widest and most popular sense, as being equivalent to prediction given by God-or the communication by God to man of the knowledge of events long before they take place." My statement is plain and distinct; and if it seem hardy, yet it is correct: no prediction-no salvation; no interest in divine prediction—no salvation for an individual. My statement is two-fold:-1st. That the salvation provided by God is inseparable from prediction; take away the prediction and itself is gone; 2ndly. That individual participation by this or that person in the salvation is inseparable from the interest of the same individual in the prediction; to have no interest in the prediction is to have no interest in the salvation. A most important a The light of divine prediction in the Old Testament, as it is called, throws into light things of and to be upon this earth ; the thread of whose history winds ever around the family of Abraham-the Jews-as its centre, and Jesus their king; the light of divine prediction in the New Testament throws into light what will be in heaven-the Lord Jesus, and the church as His body, is its thesis. Perhaps another remark may be made, suggestively, well here, viz., as to the earth, the things to come have no existence there as yet, IN FACT; as to those of heaven, they all exist there in germ in Christ, who is there already. This gives a stringency to the use of the word prophecy when applied to the things of the earth, which it has not when applied to things in the heavens. Jerusalem and its circuit of blessing and glory is not; no trace, no root of blessing can be found in the land. Its King must come from a far land to bring its blessing. On the other hand-though in the heaven of heavens, and not in those heavenly places where the church's glory is to be--He is in heaven; and because He lives we live also; we are in Him that is there-accepted (or graced) in the Beloved-hidden in Christ in God. difference, however, as we shall sec, exists between salvation as proclaimed for earth, and salvation as preached for a heavenly people. If this position is tenable, it gives a wholesale value to prophecy which is immeasurably more weighty, more important, and more calculated to arrest the soul's attention than the proofs in detail from Scripture,-justly interesting and all-important in their place as these arewhich shew us that all the details of practical conformity in life and walk of both the former people of God, and of the disciple to His master, are, in one place or the other, connected with hope and with promises. These may not, cannot be neglected-they speak most clearly the faithful love of our Lord on high, who in His word has applied to our hearts, minds, and consciences, things yet to come in detail; but that which gives even to this truth its fullest weight and importance, is its connection with the other: that is, that Christ, by His Spirit, applies in detail from the Word, items of what has been a grand principle of God in His own plan of redemption. 66 When sin had entered, and man was under its power, and estranged from God in heart and mind, God declared to Satan, The seed of the woman shall bruise thy head." This was not a promise given to man; it was a prediction as to Immanuel, the light of which, as so given, fell on things as they were around the scene then present, and so was prophecy in the stringent sense of the word: yet, as we know from the light of 1 Cor. xv., Col. i., Rev. xix. and xx., it had to do with One who had other scenes and other places to cleanse than those of earth alone. "The seed of the woman shall bruise thy head"-we have here a prediction most explicit a sure word of God, who cannot lie, and who is able to make good His word—and this word was the sole basis for faith to fallen man. Has God said, that the seed of her who was beguiled and was first in error shall destroy the head of her betrayer?-then to God sinful man may yet look up. Self-betrayed and ruined, man need not be the prey of Satan; a Deliverer is predicted; in Him that has predicted, man may rest; and if he rests, there he must hope. - This first ray of redeeming love, this first dawning of the compassion and mercy of God in Christ was so given as to guard every point that needed guarding. It was an open declaration of war by God against Satan; it declared how, through Divine power and wisdom, the wicked one should eat of the fruit of his own doings, and have his power annulled by the seed of his captive; it made good the claim, in word at least, that the world thus betrayed to Satan belonged to another; it condemned man's sin, while it showed out his position, and silently put forth the truth, just despised, that a creature's blessing is inseparable from obedience to the Word of the Creator. Man's tenure of Eden was in obedience in not touching a tree; to fallen man what ray of light, repose, or hope, save in this declaration; he that received it as the true and sure word of God would find it more mighty than the woe and ruin of sin and the power of him whose head was to be crushed by the seed of the woman. This avowed intention of God for the future, was his mode of giving both repose and hope to the sinner. If Adam rejected this intention of God for the future, he had no rest, no hope; if he received it, he virtually took the place of a fallen creature, but of a fallen creature who, having despised his Creator's word, when subjection, easy enough, was the security for continuance of enjoyment, had now, amid ruin, to receive that which every testimony around and within seemed to declare to be impossible, and which, moreover, involved in it the declaration that there were higher and deeper glories in God than those displayed in creation, or which he could find out. Implicit, blind reception of, and submission to, the divine word, with a "Let God be true and all else liars," was fallen man's sole ground of blessing; and it put man into his proper place; it made him not the end, centre, or object of the blessing; but another, even Christ, and man, got rest, repose, and hope by-the-bye. God's display of Himself in the annulling of the power of Satan by the seed of the woman involved, indirectly, what a humbled heart, and it alone, could rest upon. I call attention to the fact, that God kept fully His place of God; and that the counsel and plan were His and His alone; why he chose to let the rays of the light of redemption in, in one way more than another, is madness and folly to ask, if the question proceed from sense and reason in an unreconciled sinner: if from humble enquiry, as of one that has tasted that the Lord is gracious, it is a question well put by a worshipful spirit and heart, and has its answer most abundantly in many parts of the Word. But the fact that such was the way chosen-which is admitted and established by the question being put (in any spirit, good or bad)—and not the answer to the question is my theme. The declaration, "the seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent" was a testimony of some one to come, not as yet revealed there; the essence of whose virtue was not present in root even in the woman, as we well know. Analyse the declaration, and you will find it contains the description of that, of which there was not one element present in Eve; the germ, nor the power to germinate, was not in her, but in another; the range of whose power, as there looked at, was, for the scene there present-earth: and it was prophecy. The Word of God may try man as well as bless him: if it does so, it shows that there is nothing in him but sin; it finds nothing in him that it can approve save the need in the midst of which, however great, it can display its creative powerthe fulness which is in God and of God. This trying of man was one great object of the law in the Old Testament; it proposed to man fallen a blessing, upon condition of an obedience which supposed him to be unfallen; and it thus discovered and made manifest the selfignorance and pride of man's heart; for man, instead of crying"Woe is me!" when he thinks of the law, finds in it (not his own condemnation before God but) a means for him to condemn others-a distinctive privilege of light when used out of God's presence. The sinner can condemn another sinner for the sin he himself commits, and even, as did the Jews, condemn him who had not sinned, but kept the law, because, in his zeal for Him that gave the law, he showed mercy on the Sabbath, and so disturbed the self-gratulatory conceit of |