done before; and by a like perversion of consequences, the result of the mission of Jesus Christ to the Jews, attested and confirmed as it was, was a catastrophe which exceeded in indignity the worse treatment of the prophets before him, and did more to prove the Jews to be rooted in impenitence, and stubbornly confirmed in their opposition to the counsels of God for their good, than the rejection and failure of any one of his overtures of pardon and peace before.

The son, in coming to the husbandmen, came as the heir to the tenants of his father's vineyard; and our Lord, in coming into the world, came to that which was his, by right of creation, and in coming to the Jews, came to his own, by virtue of their original covenant: but the husbandmen respected not the heir of the vineyard, in the son, nor the world its Creator, nor the Jews their Lord and Master, in Jesus Christ. The husbandmen knew the son to be the heir, and conspired to put him to death because he was so: and if it is not hereby implied, that the Jews must have known Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, and the federal Lord and Head of their own church, yet it must be implied, that they should know him to profess himself at least, to be the Son of God; and on account of that profession, and that profession more than any thing else, should ultimately put, or seek to put, him to death. The proceedings at his examination before the sanhedrim, and afterwards at his trial before Pilate, shew that this was actually the case f.

f Matt. xxvi. 63-66: Mark xiv. 61-64. Harm. iv. 95: Luke xxii. 66-71. Harm. iv. 96: John xviii. 7, 8. Harm. iv. 98: Matt. xxvii. 54: Mark xv. 39. Harm. iv. 102.

Or this part of the parabolic history may be verified in the personal history of our Saviour, by the fact that the Messiah, when he appeared, was expected to appear as the Son of God 5; and Jesus of Nazareth, who appeared overtly as the Messiah, by that very circumstance must be supposed to have appeared implicitly as the Son of God: and if he was put to death openly, for this assumption of the character of the expected Messiah, so would he be implicitly for that of the character of the Son of God. Nor does the recognition of the son in the character of the heir, by the husbandmen, imply more than the mere superficial acknowledgment of his relation in that respect or go further than what the simple matter of fact compelled them to go, in the allowance of that character; while as to any practical effect of the acknowledgment, in inducing them to act towards him accordingly-it might just as well have been disclaimed, as made. The preliminary recognition of the heir in the son, is but an ironical declaration, not a serious admission; and as contrasted with the conduct immediately adopted towards this supposed heir, in consequence of his recognition-is only the more taunting and insulting, for being made.

The mission of the son was final; and no prophet, like those of the olden time, appeared after Christ and the Baptist. The ancient dispensation closed with them; the new began with the apostles. The obstinacy of the husbandmen was more clearly evinced by the failure of the mission of the son, than by the ill success of any messenger from his father before him; and the stubborn ing John i. 50.

fidelity of the Jews, was more strikingly displayed by their reception and treatment of such a prophet as our Saviour, than of any divinely commissioned teacher, who had preceded him. The condescension both of the father and of the son, as equally concurrent in the effect of his mission-the magnanimity, zeal, and devotion to the service of his father, above every messenger of his who had preceded him, which characterised the conduct of the son, in coming upon such an errand, have been pointed out already; and are so true of the mission of Jesus Christ, so clearly illustrated by the facts of his history, and so often insisted upon in the Christian scriptures, as peculiarly characteristic of the part which he acted, that we need not stop to dwell upon them. The ultimate treatment of the son, at the hands of the husbandmen, is the counterpart of the sufferings of our Lord, at the hands of the Jews, down even to the circumstance of his being put to death without the gate. The motive of the husbandmen to this treatment, was that so the vineyard which was his, by right of future inheritance, might become theirs, by virtue of present possession. The rejection of Christianity finally by the Jews, was produced in part by a determination not to coalesce with the Gentiles, nor to see privileges exclusively their own, communicated, much less transferred to any besides them. And though the motive which must have influenced the Jews to the personal rejection of our Saviour, cannot be traced to a cause like this; yet it is still true, that their refusal to acknowledge him for the Messiah-(for such a Messiah at least, as he professed himself to be,) was necessary in their own estimation, to retain their place

and nation; they could not receive him in that capacity without, as they thought, endangering both h. The punishment to be inflicted on the husbandmen, under the circumstances of the case, must be for all the offences collectively, committed by the possessors of the vineyard against its owner during all the time that they had been in possession of it; and upon the heads of that one generation who rejected and crucified Jesus Christ, the accumulated sin of bloodguiltiness, contracted through every previous period of the probation of the church, on earth, from the beginning of the world, was to be visited. The punishment in question, to be adequate to the degree of guilt contracted by its subjects, could not possibly be confined to the mere alienation of the vineyard from them, and its transfer to others; and the infidel Jews, who rejected and crucified Christ, not only had their own place and favour, and prerogatives in a spiritual sense, taken away, and transferred to the Gentiles in their stead, but by a series of judicial visitations upon them and their country, were almost totally destroyed. This deprivation, however, of the vineyard, and this destruction of the husbandmen, were both spoken of in the parable, as still to come; and the rejection of the Jews, with all its consequences to themselves, and the substitution of the Gentiles, as the people of God, in their stead, were yet future events when the parable was spoken. The personal destruction of the husbandmen, as was natural, was predicted first; and the alienation of the vineyard to others, afterwards; nor was it until the destruction of Jerusalem, and the dissolution of the ecclesiastical and civil polity of the Jews, that

h John xi. 47-50: Harm. iv. 24.

the Jewish church, as such, ceased to have a being, and the only visible church of God that could be said to be in existence, on earth, was the Christian or Gentile, which had succeeded to its place i.

i A parable, like the preceding, which embraces so complete a retrospect of God's dealings with the Jews, from first to last— which draws so lively a picture of his kindness, patience, and longsuffering, and of their ingratitude, obstinacy, and impenitence-which touches so closely upon the fact of that future personal treatment, which our Saviour himself was about to experience from them; was calculated to raise a variety of emotions in the mind of the speaker; from religious fervour, from pious indignation, from benevolent regret, from the sense of personal interest-all unusually excited in the subject-matter of his own representations. We cannot therefore but be surprised at the calmness of the tone and manner which pervades the narrative, down to the catastrophe; a calmness which can be paralleled by nothing so properly as the similar dispassionateness, which appears afterwards in the Gospel narrative of the passion

itself.

It is a necessary effect too of such an history, as that which is contained in the parable, to justify the ways of God as much in the rejection, as in the selection of the Jews, to be his people. That selection might be the act of the free grace of God; but the free grace of God, and the immutability of the Divine counsels, cannot be pleaded in excuse for the voluntary ill-desert, which may require the subsequent alienation of the Divine favour from its former objects. The possession of his vineyard was bestowed upon the husbandmen, by the gift of the owner originally; no doubt, with the intention that it should continue theirs ever after: and yet it is no impeachment of his consistency, that after the flagrant abuse of the confidence reposed in them, after the many aggravated offences, and particularly the last and worst of all-of which they were guilty-he should be found in the end recalling and revoking his own gift. Under such circumstances, the husbandmen only could be to blame for the change produced in their relation towards him. The owner could have no alternative, but to pursue at the close of his connection with the tenants, even of his own choice, a