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time that God may reveal all other things to | ed by mistake on our Lord's answer to St. him; towards which, we ourselves, by treat- Peter's question-" Lord, what shall this man ing him with tenderness and kindness, may be made instrumental.

But these offences, upon Christ's admonitions, having been repented of and forsaken, they deprive not our apostle of the place he had obtained in his Lord's favor. For at the last supper we find him sitting next to Jesus, and, as the manner then was, reclining on his breast as it is the privilege of the beloved disciple, when admitted to the supper of the Lamb, to pour out all his prayers and his complaints into the bosom of his Redeemer, who is always ready to hear, always mighty

to save.

do? If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" But, alas! St. John loved Christ too well, to think an exemption from death, for the sake of living in such a world as this, a thing to be desired. And whoever loves his Master as he did, will be of the same opinion.

After the effusion of the Spirit at the day of Pentecost, we read of John, in the character of an apostle, using his gifts for the good of mankind, healing the sick, preaching the Gospel, thrown into prison, and brought forth before the Jewish council, but still undaunted in bearing his testimony; herein leaving an example to his successors, the ministers of Christ, through all generations.

From the ecclesiastical histories we learn, that after preaching the Gospel, and founding many churches in Asia, he was sent bound from thence to Rome, at the command of the tyrant Domitian, who had him cast into a caldron of boiling oil. But the God, who preserved the three children in the midst of the fiery furnace, brought the apostle out of the caldron unhurt, to convince us, that nothing can harm "the disciple whom Jesus loveth." The emperor, however, not at all moved by this miraculous deliverance, banish

At the apprehension of Jesus, John fled with the rest, but quickly returning again, entered into the high priest's palace, and attended his blessed Master through every stage of his passion, till we behold him taking his station at the foot of the cross, where he is usually drawn in pictures of the crucifixion, with a countenance full of grief and love unutterable. From the cross Jesus commended his holy mother to the care of St. John, who from thenceforth, happy in an opportunity of showing his love to his Lord, as well as of entertaining such a guest, "took her to his own home," where she continued till her death, treated by him with the duty and af-ed the holy man to a wretched and comfortfection of a son. Let the disciple, then, who would show himself worthy the love of Christ, often contemplate and sympathize with his suffering Lord, placing himself, in imagination, at the foot of the cross, and looking with the eye of faith on him who was crucified thereon let him abide by the persecuted truth and the afflicted servants of Jesus, in the hour of darkness and sorrow; and let him, for Christ's sake, and in obedience to his repeated injunctions, honor and show kindness to the church so long as he lives, and be a dutiful son to her.

less island, called Patmos, where he saw heaven opened, and beheld those glorious visions recorded in the book of Revelation: as God often vouchsafes a larger portion of spiritual joys and comforts to his servants, when they are secluded from those of the world.

Upon the death of the emperor Domitian many of his cruel edicts were revoked by his successor; when St. John, taking advantage of the indulgence, returned to Ephesus: and finding Timothy the bishop of that church martyred, he took upon himself the government of it, till, in a good old age of about an hundred years, he most willingly resigned his meek and gentle spirit into the hands of his Lord and Saviour, to experience the fulness of his love, and possess the glories he had so often contemplated.

Upon the first tidings of the resurrection, St. John, running with St. Peter, outran him, and came first to the sepulchre; as the soul, that has the love of Christ abiding in her, will always be foremost in quest of him. It was St. John who discovered Jesus to St. These are the great outlines of St. John's Peter, when he appeared in the habit of a life and character. But, after all, whoever stranger, at the sea of Tiberias. "That dis- would be thoroughly acquainted with him, in ciple whom Jesus loved saith to Peter, It is order to become like him, must survey and the Lord." He who loves Christ, will al- copy that fair picture which he hath drawn ways know him when he comes in the dis- of himself in his divine writings, where we guise of a stranger, or a poor man: he will sometimes behold the lofty flights of the eagle, know, that it is the Lord who asks relief of and at others hear the plaintive voice of the him in their persons; and he will inform turtle; we behold him viewing and describothers of the same great truth. It was con- ing the glories of Christ in his Godhead and cerning St. John that a report went among kingdom; we hear him relating the sweetly the disciples as if he was never to die, ground-sorrowful and loving discourses of his dear

Master, in his state of humiliation. Let these | therein, we shall have learned to live the life holy books, therefore, be in our hands, until of faith and charity. So shall we be CHRISthey have wrought their proper work in our TIANS, in word, and in deed; so shall we be hearts; that is to say, until, by believing the "the DISCIPLES whom Jesus will LOVE.” doctrines and practising the duties taught

not.

DISCOURSE X.

RACHEL COMFORTED.

JEREMIAH XXXI. 15, 16 17.

Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel, weeping for her children, refused to be comforted for her children, because they were Thus saith the LORD; Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears; for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the LORD; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy children shall come again to their own border.

Or the events which befel the church of Israel in old time, many were by Providence ordained and disposed to be figurative of other events in the latter days, relative to the church Christian or universal. Let it be supposed for example, in the present instance, that the Babylonish captivity, and subsequent restoration, to which these words of Jeremiah relate, did, like the Egyptian bondage and the redemption therefrom, represent that more wretched, durable, and general captivity, in which mankind were detained by their grand enemy, with the restoration from it, which the Son of God, as at this season, was born to effect. And let us try, upon this plan, to show the beauty and propriety of the application which St. Matthew has made of the passage to the slaughter of Bethlehemitish infants, and the lamentations of those who were thus bereaved of their children by the sword of Herod.

It is not easy, perhaps, to find a more judicious illustration of the case in hand, than the following one, given by the excellently learned Dr. JACKSON, to whose most useful labors, on a curious and difficult subject, I must here, once for all, acknowledge myself indebted for the substance of what I am now about to lay before you.

"We know," says this able divine, "that a map, though in itself a thousand times less than the least parcel of enclosed ground, may represent the exact form or proportion of the country whose name it bears, though that be ten thousand times bigger than the largest VOL. II.

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field that our eyes can look upon. And thus hath the wisdom of God, under the same words and phrases, included two deliverances, of which the one is a map to the other. He, therefore, who should deny passages to be literally meant of the deliverance of Judah and Benjamin from Babylon, because they are only fulfilled in our deliverance by Christ, will give the Jew no small advantage; he will commit as great an oversight, as if an heir, possessed of a goodly estate, should burn the map or terrar of it, which his ancestors had truly taken for the benefit of their successors, if they should know how to use it, when any controversy should arise concerning the bounds or extent of their inheritance. The Jew, on the contrary, in denying these places to be meant of Christ and us, because they have been literally verified of the deliverance of his fathers by Zorobabel, and Joshua the priest, is like a man distracted, who boasts he hath a goodly heritage, because he can show the map or engrossed terrar of those lands of which the law has deprived him, since he knew not how to use them aright."

In the prosecution of this design, permit me in the

First place, to collect and present to you the historical circumstances concerning the person introduced by Jeremiah, as making lamentation over her children, and the occasion of her so doing, with the prophet's consolatory address to her, upon that occasion after which we shall be prepared, in the

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Second place, to take a view of those parallel | uttered the words now under our consideracircumstances, which offer themselves in tion, Judah was closely besieged in Jerusathe lamentation made by the Bethlehemi- lem by the Chaldean army, in whose way tish mothers, and the cause thereof, with thither the land of Benjamin lay. It expethe consideration which was to administer rienced, therefore, of course, all the horrors comfort to them, in the day of their great of invasion. It was miserably wasted, and and bitter affliction. its inhabitants were carried away into captivity. This is the reason why old Rachel still renews her former complaint, and will not be persuaded, but that Benjamin must still be Benoni. She and her daughters (for under the name of Rachel we must comprehend all the woful mothers of that tribe) fill the heavens with their outcries, whilst their children are forced from their embraces into miserable bondage in Babylon. And though mention be only made of Ramah, a city of Benjamin, yet must we imagine the wailings to have been as loud and bitter about Bethlehem, which, though in the tribe of Judah, was upon the borders of Benjamin, and near unto the place where Rachel died; as we read in Genesis: "Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem; and Jacob set a pillar upon her grave, unto this day."* Such was "the voice heard" in the days of Jeremiah, the "lamentation, and the bitter weeping: " when "Rachel," as the general mother, and representative of all the mothers in the tribe, "weeping for her children, refused to be comforted, because they were not." As a people, they had no civil existence. They were in that sense lost; they were dead; they were gone into captivity.

The mournful scene is laid by Jeremiah in Ramah, a city belonging to the tribe of Benjamin, of which tribe, it may be observed, the prophet himself was a member, as we learn from the first verse in his book; "The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth, in the land of Benjamin." The person introduced by him, as making lamentations, is Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob, and the mother of that tribe. She had before born Joseph, at which time, by divine instinct, with allusion to the name just imposed, she said "The LORD shall add to me another son." In childbirth, however, through the prevalence of her pains, she was induced to give up her former hopes of a second son for lost. Her attendant endeavored to comfort her with her own prediction; "Fear not, for thou shalt have this son also." Yet, "when her soul was in departing (for she died!")-never surely was there a more affecting parenthesis-" when her soul was in departing (for she died!) she called his name Benoni," that is, the son of my sorrow. "His father," seeking to avert the omen with speed," called him Benjamin," or, the son of the right hand, that is, of power and glory.

Heu nunquam vana parentum auguriathe observation of an heathen poet, is found more particularly verified in the history of the patriarchs, because among them there was often a foresight more than human, and the prospect into futurity was opened to them by a light from above. The different fates of the tribe of Benjamin seemed to have answered the different names imposed at the birth of its founder, by father and mother. No tribe more various than that; none more afflicted with disasters and calamities. At one time slaughtered by its fellow tribe, almost to excision, a true Benoni to Rachel, who, had she been alive, must have "wept for her children, with an exceeding bitter weeping;" at another, restored to populousness and prosperity, placed, as it were, at the head of the rest, furnishing the first king, who ruled God's people Israel, and realizing the name and character of Benjamin, the son of the right hand.

Upon the revolt of the ten tribes, Benjamin adhered to Judah, then the royal tribe, the tribe that gave birth to David, the tribe from which, in the fulness of time, a greater than David was to descend. When Jeremiah

It was under these circumstances, that the prophet addressed the disconsolate motherconsidering him as a Benjamite, we may say, his disconsolate mother-" Thus saith the LORD, Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears; for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the LORD, and they shall come again from the land of the enemy; and there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy children shall come again to their own border." As if he had said, in other words

Yet

-Remember, O Rachel, my mother, the days that are past, and call to mind God's wonders of old time. Remember how thou sorrowedst, when thou broughtest forth my father Benjamin, as fearing lest he should have died with thee, or before thee. after thy pains hadst thou this joy, that a man was born into the world. And though thou didst impose upon him a name betokening sorrow, yet his father wisely changed it into one predictive of better things. Remember, when Benjamin, for the good of his brethren,

• Gen. xxxv. 19.

was called to go down into Egypt, how Ja- | cob supposed him lost, and complained that he was bereaved of his children. But, notwithstanding these ill bodings, Benjamin, at length, returned in safety, with his brother Judah the father was again blessed with the sight of his youngest and best beloved son, the light of his eyes, and the staff of his old age. Such, at this time, my mother, is thy fear and sorrow; but greater, hereafter, shall be thy comfort and thy joy. Benjamin is indeed led captive into Babylon; but Judah is once more gone with him, as his pledge; and if he bring him not back again, let the blame be his, yea mine, yea God's for ever. "For thus saith the LORD, if my covenant be not with day and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth, then will I cast away the seed of Jacob and David my servant, so that I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob-for I will cause their captivity to return, and have mercy on them— yea I have sworn by my holiness that I will not fail David." Now, my mother, while this promise lasts, in general, to Israel, as Abraham's seed, Benjamin must have his portion in the blessing. And while it remains good in particular to the seed of David, Benjamin, for his faithful adherence to Judah, in prosperity and adversity, must participate with him in the prerogative. And when the kingdom shall be restored, as restored it will be, whoever shall sit on the left hand, faithful Benjamin must sit on the right hand of the throne of David

cause thereof, with the consideration which was to administer comfort to them in the day of their great and most bitter affliction.

The death of the tribe of Benjamin, in conjunction with the tribe of Judah, in the time of Jeremiah was a civil death, a departure into captivity. Their restoration from it was, consequently, a civil restoration, a restoration to their ancient city and polity in their own land. The death of the Bethlehemitish infants was a bodily death, by the sword of Herod : their restoration must therefore be a restoration to the bodily life, thus violently taken from them, that is, it must be a resurrection. Rachel's present lamentation for the bodily death of her children must have a comfort answerable to it, as her former lamentation for their civil death had a comfort answerable to that. Let us see what analogy and proportion the sorrow and joy in one case bear to the sorrow and joy in the other.

There is no need to shock your feelings, by endeavoring to draw a picture at large of this day's most abominable massacre. Suffice it to say, that the bloody murder of children in the tenderest and most helpless estate, torn from the arms, and butchered in such multitudes before the eyes of their mothers, must again cause "a voice to be heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning; great, beyond the conception of any, but those who then experienced, or were witnesses to it. We cannot read the words which describe it, without imagining that we hear Rachel, called from her tomb near BethThis, taking all circumstances into the ac-lehem, "weeping for her children," that we count, seems to have been the import of Jeremiah's consolatory address to Rachel, in the day of her calamity. And his words, or rather those of the Almighty, were in the fullest import made good to her. Within seventy years, it came to pass that the posterity of Benjamin returned, with Judah, into the land of promise, and inhabited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other bordering cities, promiscuously with the royal tribe. "Her work was rewarded;" her patient expectation, in faith and hope of the promises made her, failed not of its fruit, in the appointed season; her "children came again from the land of the enemy to their own border," as the LORD had foretold by his prophet; they "returned, and came to Sion with songs; joy was upon their heads," and in their hearts; "and sorrow and sighing flew away!

We are now prepared to take a view, as was proposed in the

Second place, of those parallel circumstances which offer themselves, in the lamentation of the Bethlehemitish mothers, and the

see her turning away, and "refusing to be
comforted for her children, because they
were not; " because they were departed
hence, and were no more to be found in the
land of the living: they were led away into
that other captivity, more wretched and du-
rable than the captivity of Benjamin with
Judah in Babylon; they were deprived of
light and life; they were hurried from the
warm and cheerful precincts of day, to be
imprisoned in the cold and dark dominions
of the king of terrors. And who can bring
them from thence? Not the high priest
Joshua, the son of Josedek; not Zorobabel,
who conducted their fathers from captivity;
not Samson, though, in the prime of his
strength, he carried away the gates of Gaza;
not David, nor their father Benjamin, though
both had been alive to command, or lead, the
whole posterity of Israel.
All these might
have said of the sons of Rachel this day com-
mememorated by us, as David did of his
child-" We shall go to them, but they shall
not return to us."-But the holiest of the an-

cient priests and prophets, the mightiest | ish in the earth, "shall doubtless come among the ancient kings and rulers, were again with joy, bringing his sheaves with still subject to death, and had taken their last him." The heavens, echoing with your repose with the beggar in the dust. Where, cries, and the earth moistened with your then, is the wonted promise of Rachel's tears, are witnesses to men and angels, that reward? Who shall comfort her in this you have more plentifully sowed in grief calamity. than your ancestors. As the sorrows of your seed-time have abounded, so the joys of your harvest shall super-abound. The LORD's promise of old is not yet expired, but extends in full force to you and yours. With what more precious seed could the land of Judah and Benjamin be sown, than the blood of tender infants, harmless and undefiled even in thought? Scattered upon the ground by cruel hands, it shall be gathered by the power of Him who dispenseth the breath of life to all things living. None of this seed shall be lost, or prove unfruitful. Every grain shall produce its ear, and every ear its proportion of incorruptible and pleasant fruit. Great, therefore, as your affliction is allowed to be, yet mourn not as they that have no hope, but even in the midst of your bitter

Nothing, certainly, can wear a more gloomy and comfortless aspect, than things here seem to du. Yet in this, as in the former instance, "Thus saith the LORD " to the mourner-and who else can say it? "Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the LORD, and, they shall come again from the land of the enemy; and there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy children shall come again to their own border."

Recollecting what hath been said above, and bearing in mind the circumstances of time and place, pointed out in the application made of the former part of the passage by St. Matthew, we may suppose this latter part to speak of the Bethlehemitish mothers, in some such manner as the follow-complaints, still remember, that Rachel's ing

pains must have a joyful recompense, and her exceeding sorrows portend extraordinary comforts in the issue. Only let patience have its perfect work through faith, and that "work shall be rewarded" with the possession of the promises. For, through the Saviour who is born," there is hope in the end," that, like as your fathers, in God's good time, "came again from the land of the enemy to their own border," so your children, whose untimely excision you lament, shall come again from the strongholds of the grave, whither they had been led away captive, to the lot of their inheritance in the heavenly Canaan and the new

At Bethlehem, the birth-place of Benjamin, where the pillar was erected over Rachel's grave, a child is born, who has caused the children of Benjamin and Judah once more to become Benoni's true sons of sorrow to their mothers; a character he himself is to sustain on earth, insomuch, that "a sword shall pierce through the soul" of her that bare him. As the seed of the woman, and with regard to the nature derived from her, he is to be "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." But, like Benjamin, from his Father he shall receive a name expressive of far different things; "a name above every name;" he shall be ex-Jerusalem, there to live and reign with alted from misery and mortality to "the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens;" there to take possession of an inheritance in the true land of promise. Of this his inheritance in a state of power and glory, he will not fail to make those partakers, whose blood has been shed by the executioners of Herod on his account. Look upon this their final deliverance and restoration, as it is delineated in that map, or chart of it, the deliverance of your ancestors from the Babylonish captivity, and the restoration to their own land. Call to mind what was said by them, at that time, on the ground of their own happy experience "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; he that goeth forth and weepeth," as if, ignorant of the art of husbandry, he feared the corn he was sowing would per

him, for whom they have now suffered and died. These children of Judah and Benjamin, like their progenitors, "shall return, and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they," and you with them, "shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall again flee away?"

The words, thus explained, will suggest to us some useful reflections, suitable to the festival, on the case of the slaughtered infants, and that of the lamenting mothers.

With regard to the infants, we may observe the choice, made by the church, of proper persons to attend the blessed Jesus, upon the commemoration of his birth. These are St. Stephen, St. John, and the Innocents. He was born to suffer; and,

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