dead. Whether, therefore, we consider the form or the meaning of the phrase, this exposition may be allowed to be both critically admissible and substantially true. The words will bear the sense alleged, and in that sense were strictly fulfilled. Jesus is indeed the rock of the faith of his Church, the only solid foundation upon which all we live by and look to is built.

And

By a second class of interpreters, this rock of foundation for the church is applied to that doctrine of the Messiahship and divinity of Jesus, which was contained in the confession of Peter. "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," said that Apostle. "And upon this rock I will build my Church," answered the Lord, and this faith is indeed the foundation of the whole building of Christianity.. "What doth hinder me to be baptized?" asked the Ethiopian eunuch? Philip said, "If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered, and said, I be lieve that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." This is the very confession, and these are almost the very words of Peter. Here then we have another interpretation in which the expressions of our Lord may be fairly taken, and were legitimately fulfilled; for upon this belief in the Messiahship and derivation of Jesus from God, as upon a rock,

d Acts viii. 36.

the living stones of the temple of his body, the members of the Church, which is the assembly of the first-born, both ever have been, and ever must be built.

There is still a third, and perhaps a more probable interpretation than either of the former, which considers St. Peter himself as the foundation-stone of the Church of Christ. "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock" or stone "I will build my church," was at once a promise and a prophecy from Jesus. Now the intimacy in which the two ideas are connected together, and the pointedness of the allusion to the name of Peter "which is by interpretation a stone, "e immediately and almost necessarily persuade us to regard the Apostle as the object intended to be designated under that peculiar emblem. Nor was the fulfilment less conspicuous than the propriety of the denomination; for by the efforts of Peter were formed the first beginnings both of the Jewish and the Gentile Church.

But why should we be compelled to confine ourselves to any one of these modes of interpretation, when it is evident, first, that Jesus in the boundlessness of his wisdom might contemplate them all, and, secondly, that the prediction was

"not only literally and separately fulfilled in each; but that the original foundations of the Christian Church were laid in the combined completion of the whole. It was Peter who first lifted up his voice on the day of Pentecost,' and let all the house of Israel know that God had made that same Jesus, whom they had crucified, both Lord and Christ." Such was the substance of those many words with which he "did testify and exhort" the men of Judea to repent and be baptized; and by the piercing power of this appeal

they were pricked to the heart, and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls." Now this we are authorised to consider as the very first foundation of the Christian Church, not only because it is the first instance of the conversion of any considerable number of persons to the faith of Jesus as the Messiah, but also because it seems to have been regarded, by the sacred writers themselves, as the first regular formation of Christians into a distinct religious body. Frequently as the word Church is to be met with in the pages of the New Testa'ment, we meet with it but twice throughout the whole of the Gospels. Once it is introduced as a prophetic designation of that Church which should afterwards be formed, and a second time as a common designation of any religious body. f Acts ii. 36.

Acts ii. 41.

It is never applied as an historical denomination to the visible assemblies of the followers of Jesus upon earth, until after this extensive conversion on the day of Pentecost. When the writer of the Acts of the Apostles speaks of the three thousand who were convinced by the first preaching of Peter on that day, he speaks of them only as being added to the Apostles. But when he proceeds, in the conclusion of the very same Chapter, to notice the succeeding triumphs of the Gospel, he speaks of these additional members as being united to the body of a Church already existing. "And the Lord added," says he, "unto the Church daily such as should be saved;"h thus intimating, by this change in the manner of his expression, the moment at which he conceived the foundations of the Christian Church to have been laid, and fixing that moment to the first preaching of the Messiah by Peter.

Take the prediction then in what sense you will-contemplate it under every different and possible view, and still it will be found that it was strictly fulfilled, and that not only was the Church originally built upon the Apostle Peter himself, but upon the very words of his confession, and upon the belief of that holy doctrine which they

b Acts ii. 47.

contained, namely, that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God.

I have entered into this dry, and perhaps tedious, enumeration of the various meanings of the words, in order to direct your attention to the singular contrast which their obscurity presents to our view, when compared with the clearness of the denunciations of calamity upon Jerusalem. Then every woe was uttered, as if it had been already endured, with all the soberness of reality, and in all the simple solemnity of sadness. Sorrow seems to have mellowed down the prophet into the historian, and "Thy house is left unto thee desolate, and thy children shall fall by the edge of the sword," are expressions whose meaning it were idle to doubt, and impossible to misunderstand. We have only to change the tense from the future into the past, in order to turn the prefigurations of prophecy into the language of narrative. But all is altered when, instead of mourning over the suffering of his enemies, the speaker comes to describe the first planting of his own religion. The natural obscurity of the prophetic style immediately returns, and it is only by searching out their fulfilment in succeeding events, that we are enabled to remove the ambiguity of the metaphors. Wherefore this difference, and why are all the gloomy horrors of the