latter were the prevalent notions, and these lower conceptions of his character would prevail just as the expectation of the re-establishment of a temporal sovreignty prevailed, or by a gross interpretation of the prophecies was carnalized by the growing worldliness of their minds. From about the time of the birth of our Lord, they appear to have become increasingly uneasy under the Roman power, and the desire to be avenged of it, and rescued from its control, was at length wrought up to passion and infatuation. The progress of this feeling among the Jews, all through the life of our Lord, will account for the constantly diminishing views of Messiah's character, as compared with the faith of their fathers. For earthly wars, conquests, and cares, a mere man, if endowed with power to command signs from heaven, thunders, hail-storms, lightnings, to blast the enemies of Israel, or at most an angel, would by such be naturally thought a Messiah quite adequate to accomplish all they expected, and, in fact, all they desired. THE SON OF THE LIVING GOD is therefore emphatically added, to express Peter's own view and that of the other disciples of the true nature of him whom they acknowledged to be the Christ; an acknowledgment not now made by them for the first time; for, after he had walked on the water, and had come into the vessel, all the disciples "worshipped him, saying," in the most emphatic manner, “OF A TRUTH THOU ART THE SON OF Gon." That confession, indeed, they had made in a moment of great excitement, occasioned by a most impressive display of his divine power over the elements; but now they make it calmly and deliberately. 3. That the title SON OF GOD is a designation of nature, not of office, like that of THE CHRIST. The latter, indeed, is a noble part of the confession, for it includes all those high offices to which he was ANOINTED by the Holy Ghost, and which are so largely dwelt upon in the prophetic scriptures; but the title, "Son of God," is added, and stands in manifest opposition to the phrase, "the Son of Man," in the question of our Lord, which, though

a designation of Messiah, is founded alto. gether upon his real humanity. By this he was declared both to be the Messiah, and truly a man; but was he nothing more? The disciples in the ship, and now Peter in their name, again reply in the affirmative, and call him THE SON OF GOD, the Son of the LIVING GOD, which is the high and distinguishing appellation of Jehovah, in opposition to dead idols. That this title, the Son of God, was given by the disciples with reference to their faith in our Lord's divine nature, although as yet the mystery of the Trinity was not so distinctly revealed to them as afterwards, is rendered indubitable by the sense put upon that very phrase by the Jews themselves. Of its universally received import the Gospels afford complete evidence, and that both as to the popular sense in which it was understood, and with which, therefore, the disciples could not be unacquainted, and also of the interpretation put upon it by the learned. As to the first, we have this pregnant instance, that when our Lord, amidst an indiscriminate company of hearers, claimed God as his proper Father, the Jews accused him of blasphemy, and took up stones to stone him. And of the second we have evidence in the fact, that he was tried and condemned before the Jewish Sanhedrim on a charge of blasphemy, grounded upon this fact, that he professed to be THE SON OF GOD. "Then said they all, Art thou then THE SON OF GOD? And he saith unto them, Ye say that I am;" thereby affirming it. And they said, "What need we any further witness? for we ourselves have heard out of his own mouth; " and the High Priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy. Behold now ye have heard his blasphemy, what think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of DEATH.” So fully demonstrated is it, by these two facts alone, that the title, "Son of God," was considered by the Jews to involve an assumption of the divine nature, which Jesus himself did not deny; but, by his entire silence as to his having used the term in any lower sense, most forcibly and infallibly confirmed. See note on chap. xxvi. 63.

Verse 17. Simon Barjona.-The son of Jona, or Jonah, which was the name of his father; these patronymics being in frequent use among the Jews.

Flesh and blood hath not revealed, &c.Flesh and blood is the Hebrew periphrasis for man; and the meaning of our Lord is, that Peter had not derived this knowledge of Christ from his own sagacity, or from the teaching of man, or from the notions respecting the nature of Messiah current among the Jews, but from the special teaching of THE FATHER, giving him a right understanding of these great truths, and a docile disposition to yield to those demonstrations of them which he had beheld in the works of Christ. Nor is this to be understood exclusively of Peter, but of all the other apostles, whose knowledge of this mystery could only come from the same source, the revelation of the Father; and as Peter was on this account pronounced blessed, so was the benediction pronounced through him upon them all; for, as he had answered in the name of the rest, so he receives the blessing as representing the rest.

Verse 18. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, &c.-Here, again, the key to our Lord's meaning is that peculiarity in his teaching, which, by the use of beautiful and easily-understood enigmas, and by taking terms in a literal and figurative sense in the same sentence, or giving a lower and a higher application of the same term, for the moment involves his meaning in obscurity, only to unveil it in greater force and clearness to attentive minds. In this passage our Lord confirms to Simon the new name of Peter, which had before been given him; instead of his old name Simon Barjona. It was not unusual for the Jewish doctors to im

pose new names upon their disciples; and our Lord, in this instance, had followed the example, having given the name of Cephas to Simon, “which is by interpretation a stone," at his first calling. John i. 42. That it was not considered improper in a Jew to use a name derived from the Greeks or Latins, is also clear from the example of Saul, who assumed the name of Paul, or Paulus. Peter, Пerpos, signifies a stone or rock, and from this signification of his name, our Lord declares that he should be a foundation stone upon which he would build his church: "Thou art Peter," a stone, and ET TAUT? Tη πETPO, upon this stone, this foundation stone, “will I build my church." The Papists take the words to have been addressed to Peter exclusively, and ground upon this famous and oft-controverted passage, their notion of the supremacy of Peter and his successors; whilst many Protestants, in order to rebut this conclusion, contend that the foundation on which the church was to be built, was either Christ, who is supposed to have pointed to himself with his finger; or the profession of faith which Peter had just made. The latter view was also that of Chrysostom, τη πετρ τουτεστι τῇ πίστει της ομολογίας, "Upon the rock, that is, the faith of his profession." In favour of this, an argument has been founded by some upon the difference of termination between ПeтpOS and Пerpa. If the apostle, say they, had himself been the rock, our Lord would not have changed the term to η πέτρα; and it would have been more direct to have said, Thou art Peter, and upon thee will I build, &c. But this change of gender is sufficiently explained by the figurative manner in which our Lord must on every scheme of interpretation be

gions, one of the blessed, or, as the Hebrews called it, Paradise; the other the abyss or Gehenna, the place where the wicked are collected, and are in a state of misery. This lower region is also the abode of evil spirits or devils, though not rigidly so, since they are permitted to have access to our world; whilst Paradise is inhabited not only by the departed faithful, but by the angels of God. Figuratively, this region of the dead, and particularly with reference to them, is said to have gates, the keys of which are in the hands of Christ, so that "he opens and no man shuts, and shuts and no man opens;" by which we are to understand his absolute power over life and death, and that his dominion extends not only over earth, but into the world of spirits, and is absolute over all the beings which it contains,-angels, devils, and men. The promise, that the gates of hades shall not prevail against the church has been differently understood by interpreters. Since hades is the place of the spirits of the dead, the gates of hades have been understood to mean death. Thus, Isaiah xxxviii. 10, “I shall go to the gates of the grave," ev muλais adov, meaning I shall die. And Wisdom xvi. 13, "Thou leadest to the gates of hades, es wuλas qdov, and bringest up again." The import of the promise is therefore taken to be, My church shall endure for ever; death shall not so prevail against it that it shall ever become extinct, but it shall continue from generation to generation to the end of time. But though this be an important and encouraging sense, it does not well comport with the imagery of the text. The idea suggested by the church being built upon massive foundationstones, intimates its power to resist assaults of war, like the strong fortresses of antiquity, built upon the strongest sites; and the word xalxvw, used in the text, indicates the application of violent force, as of an assault of enemies to vanquish and subdue: a metaphor which cannot well be applied to express the slow and silent wastes of death. We must therefore look for another interpretation, and this is intimated to us by other scriptures.

In the book of Revelation, hades is represented as a region under the government of death as its sovereign: this is one instance of striking personification applied to this subject. In the epistle to the Hebrews, the devil is represented as a sovereign who has "the power of death," whose dominion our Lord was to abolish." This is an instance in which we see Satan brought into immediate collocation with the ravages of death, and the state of separate spirits. By hades we may therefore understand that region which is not only the receptacle of the wicked dead, but the abode of the devil and his angels, who are represented as having dominion there, and who issue from this ABYSS to carry on their ravages among men, to oppose the life-giving and saving doctrine of Christ, and to disturb and destroy the church, which is the shelter of souls from their malice and wiles. Now, as the strongly fortified GATES of cities were anciently the places, not only where the sovereign and his chief men, the elders, sat to give judgment, but also to hold their councils and arrange their plans of peace or war; by a metaphor easily understood, our Lord promises that all the counsels of Satan against the church, and the wars he may wage by his agents to overthrow it, shall never so prevail against it as to vanquish and subdue it. Such has been the glorious fact; the church still survives the conflicts of centuries; it still lives and flourishes, in spite of persecutions and corruptions: from its lowest depressions it has risen with renovated vigour; and it is again seen carrying on offensive and successful warfare against the kingdom of darkness throughout the world. To this day the fulfilment of this prophetic promise gives clear and powerful evidence to the truth of the gospel. These words of our Lord also secure to us the continuance of the church, not of any particular church, but of the church universal; the world shall never be without true believers, openly confessing Christ and maintaining the institutions of his religion; for avlns is more naturally taken to refer to the EKKλŋσιav, and not to the foundation stone, because the

former is the nearest antecedent; but in either way the sense is the same, for the foundation would only be declared perpetual with reference to the edifice which it is in all ages to sustain.

Verse 19. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, &c.—Some who apply these words to Peter exclusively, understand by the gift of the keys the honour assigned to Peter to open the gates of the kingdom of heaven, that is, the perfected evangelical dispensation, to the Jews at the day of pentecost, and then afterwards to the Gentiles, when he went down to Cornelius at Cæsarea. Others, as the Papists, understand by the phrase the committal of a special authority to Peter over the church of Christ, of which it is certain that we have no evidence or illustration in the New Testament. The emblem of the keys was a familiar one to the apostles, if the later Jewish writers have correctly described the ancient ceremony of constituting a rabbi or doctor of the law; for according to them the person admitted to this office had a key given to him as an emblem both of his ability and duty TO OPEN THE MEANING of the law, which key he wore as a badge of his office. Still, without any reference to this custom, supposing it as old as our Lord's day, the figure very naturally expresses the opening of "the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven" BY PUBLIC TEACHING, and so setting open the doors of evangelical knowledge, and, by consequence, of the Christian church. This is a much more natural exposition of the emblem in this connexion, than that which regards it as significant of the committal of power and authority to govern the church; and is indeed pointed out with great clearness to be its meaning, by what follows as to the power of binding and loosing, which must be taken as

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exegetical of the power of the keys. These expressions are manifestly Jewish, and may therefore be satisfactorily explained by reference to this mode of speaking. With the Jews to bind and loose was a usual phrase for declaring what was lawful or unlawful; what was BINDING upon men's consciences; and that from the obligation of which they were LOOSED or free. Lightfoot, Schoetgenius, and others, have produced a great number of examples froin the Rabbinical writings; one or two instances will suffice. 'He asked one wise man, and he bound; do not ask another, lest perhaps he loose." The school of Schammai binds it; the school of Hillel looseth it." 'Get thyself a heart to hear the words of them that pronounce unclean, and the words of them that pronounce clean; the words of them that bind, and the words of them that loose; the words of them that reject, and the words of them that declare it right." Under these terms, therefore, our Lord gave his disciples authority to declare the laws of the gospel dispensation under the guidance of his own teaching and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; which authoritative declaration of the terms of man's forgiveness, and how Christians ought to walk so as to secure the approbation of God, and that infliction of the divine displeasure which should follow disobedience, he promises should be confirmed in heaven; as constituting his own law and rule of moral government to be laid down by them, first in their preaching and then in their writings. It is this which distinguishes those writings from all others. They not only contain a revelation of truth from God, but they have an authority as LAW derived from this,that God himself acts upon them. Whatever the apostles have in those writings BOUND is a matter of conscience, it must