prophecy. The fulfillments of the prophetic Scriptures, like waves of the sea, are ever multiplying and enlarging concentric circles. And Jesus Christ is evermore the final and crowning fulfillment. In him all the fullness was pleased to Col. i, 19. dwell. The Divine Man is the universal pleroma -alike the radiant point and the circumference of all things. Did Jehovah, when Israel was his child, call him out of Egypt? Even so did Jehovah, when Jesus Christ-his own dearly beloved Son-was a child, call him out of Egypt. And as God called out of Egypt his Son, who is the Head, so out of Egypt does he call his Church, which is his Son's body. It was literally true of some of the most eminent of the fathers. Out of Egypt God called Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Cyprian. It is spiritually true of all Christ's people. To them his summons is: Come up out of the Egypt of a fallen world; come up out of the kingdom of sin, the land of idolatry, the house of bondage; come up into the promised country, the land flowing with milk and honey, the Canaan of the Christ of God. Ay, out of Egypt God is evermore calling his sons. May we be as prompt to obey as Moses was! O Lord, raise up, we pray thee, thy power, and come Collect. among us, and with great might succor us; that, whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us, through the satisfaction of thy Son, our Lord; to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honor and glory, world without end. Amen. THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. MATTHEW ii, 16-18. Thus saith Jehovah : A voice is heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children; She refuseth to be comforted for her children, Because they are not. Jeremiah xxxi, 15. XVI. THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. MATTHEW ii, 16-18. Christian THE immense advance of modern civilization Gentleness of is in few things more strikingly manifest than in the difference between the manner in which a deed of blood affects us and the manner in which the same deed of blood would have affected our fathers. Let a massacre of children like Herod's be perpetrated in our day: the sickening details would be bulletined in every daily throughout the land, and all Christendom for a moment would quiver with horror. But such tragedies were so common in the centuries past that the perpetration of them excited little attention beyond the circle immediately involved. Go back to the age when Rome was mistress of the world and the Cæsar was master of Rome. What an age of arbitrary, irresponsible, absolute government; of imperial maim and dungeon; of secret strangulation and open massacre; of poison and cross. Look at Herod, at once tiger over Palestine and spaniel under Rome, wading through blood to his throne, inaugurating his reign with the massacre of the sanhedrin, murdering his own sons Antipater, |