2. The Word became flesh, that He might die.

The death of Christ stands in quite a peculiar relation to his life. It is the purpose of it all. Other men's deaths are no part of their work in the world. Christ's is the very centre of his. All his life was a sacrifice, himself took our impurities before He came to the cross. Throughout his whole career he identified himself with us men, and by sympathy, made deeper than we can know through his tenderness and purity, and by virtue of the altogether singular relations which he sustained to our race, bore our sins in his own body, long ere He bore them to the tree. Every experience which he made of life's sorrows, either outward or inward, was in Him the bearing of the consequence of sin not his own. But his sacrifice is eminently accomplished on the cross, where he bears the true burden of sin in that mysterious separation from God, as well as in the outward punishment in physical death. Blessed, then, and great as were the other ends for which "a body" was "prepared" for Him, and real as is the sacrifice of his life, we shall but imperfectly understand the song that proclaimed at his birth, " Peace on earth, goodwill toward men," unless we think of his death as the great sacrifice which reconciles earth and heaven, and brings the good pleasure of God to dwell among men. There have been many attempts to part the cross from the cradle, the Incarnation from the Propitiation. Sometimes the one, and sometimes the other has been put forward, as if all the gospel lay in it. But what God hath joined together let not us put asunder. Ever look at the birth in the solemn light cast on it by the death; ever look on the death, as deriving all its significance and power from the wonder of the birth. The child in swaddling bands laid in the rock-hewn manger may recall the man wrapped by tender hands in fair linen, and laid in the rock-hewn tomb. Here is the great fact which separates the true Christian Incarnation from all human dreams. No boldness could venture to think of such a purpose and end to a Divine appearance, "The Son of man came-to give his life a ransom for many." There is the burning heart of the glory, the highest apex of the wonder, the deepest reason for Christmas joy and praise.

3. The Word became flesh, that He might be our Brother.

We are taught that the Incarnate Word holds a special relation to the whole race. Paul's teaching of the second Adam, the new pure source of a holier manhood, necessarily presupposes our Lord's supernatural birth. He does not stand as one in a series, but He is a new beginning. He is not a mere link in the chain, as all the rest of us, but the first of a new order, and a fountain of life. And yet, though a new beginning, He is a true man, and just because He has no share in the tainted stream that flows through our veins, is He our brother.

We have in Him the pattern and consecration of manhood. We have not to look to some ideal or abstraction, but there in Christ we have the living, breathing type and exemplar of whatsoever things are fair, the embodiment of all "virtue" and of all praise, as if some white wonder of the sculptor's chisel should begin to glow and flash with life, and come down from its pedestal to walk among men. How different the law of duty when it lives in a

person! And for all precepts we hear from his loving lips the one invitation, "Follow me."

We have in Him the brother who sympathises in our sorrow. There had ever been pity in the Divine heart, as many an ancient psalm had told. But Christ was born that an added tenderness might be given, and an added power to strengthen our hearts. The pity of God becomes the compassion of the man Christ Jesus, and He has a fellow-feeling with our infirmities. Poverty, calumny, treachery, rejected love, disappointed hopes, physical sufferings, mental agony, the pains which only the leaders and benefactors of men can know, and the homely sorrows which are the portion of us all-these He has known. In all He has been before us. No valley is so dark but we may see the prints of his foot in it; no cell in our prison so foul but He has breathed its air; no torture instrument but is still stained with the traces of his blood. For this end He was born, that He might feel all our pain and sorrow. So a solemn gladness should fill our hearts as we turn our thankful wondering gaze to that cradle where lies One who in so deep a sense is a "brother born for adversity."

In Him our manhood is lifted even to the throne of the Universe. The world has thought of transient assumptions of human form by divine persons, but never of their permanency. Christ Jesus, the man Christ, has entered into the glory which the eternal Word had with the Father before the world was. There for ever and ever our Brother reigns. So, when we think of our own weakness and folly and sin, or of the world's miseries, of the wasted lives, and the debased natures around us, of the dark places of the earth, and of all the evil that is now under the sun, the one remedy for despair is to think of Him who was born at Bethlehem. True, yet we see not all things put under man. True the rapturous words of the old psalm about man's dignity and dominion sometimes seem as far from fulfilment as the angels' song at the birth of Christ. But "we see Jesus," and in Him we see the true purpose of God for man, the power which shall fulfil that purpose, and the pledge that it shall not fail for ever. Not these poor sin-blasted lives of ours, but his fair and royal humanity, is the will of God concerning us. Not these graves, but that throne is our destiny and home. Christ is born; men shall not die. Christ is born; men shall share his life and be changed to the likeness of his glory! Cradle, cross, and throne, we look to them all. Then we begin to understand how they were tidings of great joy," that "unto us a child is born," and fasten our hope in life and death for ourselves and all mankind on that sure truth, "The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us."

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Desolate.

ONLY the voice of the north wind is sighing

Through the long rents in the grey castle-wall; Only a few gleams of daylight are dying

In the dim west while the silent flakes fall; Here in old days there was laughter and singing,

Gaily they welcomed their Christmas of old! Now to the hearth-stone the ivy is clingingWarm hearts are cold.

ILLUSTRATING what we have said before, it remains to be noticed, that almost all the great societies sprang into existence almost simultaneously. The foremost among these,* in 1792, was founded the Baptist Missionary Society. It appears to have arisen from a suggestion of William Carey, the celebrated Northamptonshire shoemaker, who proposed, as an inquiry to an association of Northamptonshire ministers, "whether it were not practicable and obligatory to attempt the conversion of the heathen." It is certainly still a moot question whether Le Verrier or Adams first laid the hand of science on the planet Neptune; but it seems quite certain that, when one of God's great thoughts is throbbing in the heart of one of his apostles, the same impulse and passion is stirring another, perhaps others, in remote and far-away scenes. Altogether unknown to William Carey, that same year the great Claudius Buchanan was dreaming his divine dreams about the conquest of India for Christ, in St. Mary's College, Cambridge. Undoubtedly the honour of the first consolidation of the thoughts into a missionary enterprise must be given to William Carey and his little band of obscure believers. At the close of Carey's address, to which we have referred, a collection was made for the purpose of attempting a missionary crusade upon Hindoostan, amounting to 137. 2s. 6d. The wits made fine work of this; the reader may still turn to Sydney Smith's paper in the "Edinburgh Review," in which the idea and the effort are satirised as that of "an army of maniacs setting forth to the conquest of India," and Carey ridiculed as "Brother Ringletaube." But this humble effort resulted in magnificent achievements; Carey and his illustrious coadjutors, Ward and Marshman, set forth, and became stupendous Oriental scholars, translating the word of life into many Indian dialects. Then came tempests of abuse and scurrility at home from eminent pens. We experience a sense of shame in reading them; but it shows the catholicity of spirit pervading the minds of Christ's real followers, that Lord Teignmouth, and William Wilberforce, and Dr. Buchanan, were amongst the ablest and most earnest defenders of the noble Baptist missionaries. We are able to see now that this mission may be said to have saved India to the British Empire. It not only created the scholars to whom we have referred, and the bands of holy labourers; but also the sagacity of Lord Lawrence, and the sword of Sir Henry Havelock. In an argument we would maintain that we are indebted more to William Carey and his 137, 28. 6d. than to the cunning of Clive and the rapacity of Warren Hastings.

Another child of the Revival was born in 1795the London Missionary Society. But it would be idle to attempt to enumerate the names either of its

* It is not implied that these were the first modern missionary agencies. The Moravians had already sent the gospel into many regions. There were Swedish and Danish Missionary Societies also at work. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had as long before as the time of the Hon. Robert Boyle, been at work in America.

founders, its missionaries, or their fields of labour; let the reader turn to the names of the founders, and he will find they were nearly all enthusiasts who had been baptised into the spirit of the Revival— Rowland Hill, Matthew Wilks, Alexander Waugh, William Kingsbury, and, notably, Thomas Haweis, the rector of Aldwinckle and chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon. Nor must we omit the name of David Bogue, that strong and eloquent intelligence, whose admirable and suggestive work on the Divine authority of the New Testament, sent to Napoleon in his exile at St. Helena by the Viscountess Duncan, was, after the Emperor's death, returned to the author full of annotations, thus seeming to give some clue to those religious conversations, in which the illustrious exile certainly astonishes us, not long before his departure.

It is the London Missionary Society which has covered the largest surface of the earth with its missions, and it is not invidious to say that its records register. a larger range of conquests over heathenism and idolatry than could be recited in any age since the first apostles went upon their way. We have only to remember the Sandwich Islands, and the crowds of islands in the Southern seas, with their chief civiliser, the martyr of Erromanga; Africa, from the Cape, along through the deep interior, with Moffat and Livingstone, whose celebrated motto was, "The end of the geographical feat is the beginning of the missionary enterprise;" China and Robert Morrison; Madagascar and William Ellis, and crowds of other regions and names to justify our verdict.

In 1800 the Church Missionary Society came into existence. "What!" said the passionate and earnest Rev. Melville Horne, in attempting to arouse the clergy to missionary enthusiasm; "have Carey and the Baptists had more forgiven than we, that they should love more? Have the fervent Methodists and patient Moravians been extortionate publicans, that they should expend their all in a cause which we decline? Have our Independent brethren persecuted the Church more, that they should now be more zealous in propagating the faith which it once destroyed?" And so the Church Missionary Society arose; and in 1804, the Bible Society; in 1805, the British and Foreign School Society; the Religious Tract Society in 1799, which, since its foundation, has probably circulated not less than five hundred millions of publications. The Wesleyan Missionary Society, which claims in date to take precedence of all in its foundation in the year 1784, was not formally constituted till 1817. Every one of these, and many other such foundations, alike show the vivid and vigorous spirit which was abroad seeking to secure the empire of the world to the cause of Divine truth and love.

And, meantime, what works were going on at home? Education and intelligence were widely spreading; simple academies were forming, like that founded by the Countess of Huntingdon at Trevecca, where the minds of young men were being moulded and informed to become the intelligent vehicles of the Gospel message-eminently that of the great

and good Cornelius Winter, in Gloucestershire; and that of David Bogue at Gosport; while, in the north of England, arose the little but very effective colleges of Bradford and Rotherham; and the now handsome Lancashire Independent College had its origin in the vestry of Mosley Street chapel, where the sainted William Roby, as tutor, gathered around him a number of young men, and armed them with intellectual appliances for the work of the ministry. Some of the earliest efforts of Methodism, and some of the most successful, had been in the gaols, and among the malefactors of the country-notably in the wonderful labours of Silas Told, whose extraordinary story has been recited some time since in these pages. Silas passed away, but an angel of light moved through the cells of Newgate in the person of Elizabeth Fry, as beautiful and commanding in her presence as she was holy in her sweet and fervid zeal. Now began thoughts too about the waifs and strays of the population-the helpless and forgotten; and the great and good John Townshend, an Independent minister, laid the foundation of the first Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the noble institution of London.

In the world of politics, also, the men of the Revival were exercising their influence, and procuring charters of freedom for the mind of the nation. Has it not been ever true that civil and religious liberty have flourished side by side? A blight cannot pass over one without withering the other. The honour of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts is due to the Great Revival: the Toleration Act of those days was really more oppressive on pious members of the Church of England than on Dissenters; they could not obtain, as Dissenters could, a licence for holding religious services in their houses, because they were members of the Church of England. William Wilberforce owed his first religious impressions to the preaching of Whitefield; with all his fine liberality of heart, he became an ardent member of the communion of the Church of England. It seems incredible to us now that he lived constantly in the expectation-we will not say fear-of indietments against him, for holding prayer-meetings and religious services at his house in Kensington Gore. Lord Barham, the father of the amiable and excellent Baptist Noel, was fined forty pounds, on two informations of his neighbour, the Earl of Romney, for a breach of the statute in like services. That such a state of things as this was changed to the free and happy ordinances we behold around us in our day, was owing to the spirit which was abroad, giving not only freedom to the soul of the man, but dignity and independence to the social life of the citizen. Everywhere, and in every department of life, the spirit of the Revival moved over the face of the waters, dividing the light from the darkness, and thus God said, "Let there be light, and there was light."

CHAPTER XI.-AFTERMATH.

The effects of that great awakening which we have thus attempted concisely, but fairly, to delineate, are with us still; the strength diffused, the tone and colour modified. One chief purpose has guided the pen of the writer through all these brief papers: it has been to show that the immense regeneration effected in English manners and society

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during the later years of the last century and the first of the present, was the result of a secret, silent, most subtle spiritual force, awakening the minds and hearts of men in most opposite parts of the nation, and in widely different social circumstances. We would give all honour where honour is due, remembering that "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above." There are writers whose special admiration is given to some darling sect, some effective movement, or some especially beloved name; but a dispassionate view, an entrance-if we may be permitted so to speak of it-into the camera, the chamber of the times, presents to the eye a long succession of actors, and brings out into the clear light a wonderful variety of influences all simultaneously at work to redeem society from its darkness, and to give it a higher degree of spiritual purity and mental and moral dignity.

The first great workers were passing away, most of them, as is usually the case, dying on Pisgah, seeing most distinctly the future results of their work, but scarcely permitted to enter upon the full realisation of it. In 1791, in the eighty-fourth year of her age, died the revered Countess of Huntingdon; her last words, "My work is done; I have nothing to do but to go to my Father!" No chronicle of convent or canonisation, nor any story of biography can record a more simple, saintly, and utterly unselfish life. To the last, her unwearied fingers were daily occupied in writing long letters, arranging for her many ministers, disposing of her chapel trusts, and sometimes feeling that her rank and certain suppositions as to the extent of her wealth, made her an object on which men were not indisposed to exercise their rapacity; still, as compared with the state of society when she commenced her work, in this her closing year, she must have looked over a hopeful and promising future, as sweet and enchanting as the ineffably lovely scenery upon which her eyes first opened at Castle Doddington, and its neighbouring beauties of her first wedded home. In 1791, John Wesley, in his eightyeighth year, entered into his rest, faithfully murmuring, as well as weakness and stammering lips could articulate, "The best of all is, God is with us!" Abel Stevens says, "His life stands out, in the history of the world, unquestionably pre-eminent in religious labours above that of any other man since the apostolic age." It is not necessary, in order to do their patriarch sufficient honour, to indulge in such invidious comparisons, it is significant however, that the last straggling syllables which ever fell from the pen in his beloved hand, were in a letter to William Wilberforce, cheering him on in his efforts for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Charles Wesley had preceded his brother to his rest in 1788, in the eightieth year of his age. Thus the earlier labourers were passing away, and the work of the Revival was passing into other forms, quite illustrating how not only "one generation passeth away, and another cometh," but also how, as the workers pass, the work abides. would be very pleasant to spend some time in noticing the interior of many old halls, which were now opening, at once for the entertainment of evangelists, and for Divine service; prejudices were dying out, and so far from the new religious life proving inimical to the repose of the country, it was found to be probably its surest security and

It