for redemption in Jerusalem." And the blessed Virgin said: "My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. He hath holpen his servant Israel as he spake to our fathers, to Abraham and his seed forever." On the same day that our Lord rose from the dead, on the road to Emmaus, he said to two of his disciples who "were sad because they had trusted that Jesus, a prophet mighty in word and deed, had been he who should have redeemed Israel, and the chief priests and rulers had crucified him, O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! And beginning at Moses he expounded in all the Scriptures the things pertaining to himself."

In the earliest chapters of the earliest gospel the correspondence of the Life foretold with the life of Christ Jesus is felt, and this vein pulsates through it all. The cry that was to go before the Christ is heard. Moses the lawgiver, Elijah the reformer, leave Jesus alone with his disciples, and then from the excellent glory comes the voice, "Hear him." The marvelous pre-intimation in the oldest book of prophecy is fulfilled by "the Son of man in the three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."

X. As the divine purpose to call the Gentiles into the place of the Jews more and more comes into sight in the earliest gospel, there is a semblance of a change in the Saviour's purpose and mission, but its real unity is always evident. The broader and the narrower mission are blended. The one widens into the other. The problem of the harmonizing of the mission to the Jews and to the Gentiles is solved,

and solved through facts only. In the word to the twelve in chapter x Saint Matthew finds a wellmarked point of transition from the narrower to the broader view of the great redemption, but all before that is diligently adjusted to the seeming change to come. In part, at least, this may have been a reason why some facts were passed over by Saint Matthew; not, indeed, that any facts in any way contradicted any thing he said of the Redeemer's purpose and course, but that some things may have been passed over for the sake of clearness in the drawing of the interwoven lines of thought.

Saint Matthew's gospel ever keeps in mind that Jesus, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, son of David, son of Abraham, is the Son of God. He comes "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel"-words given in Saint Matthew's gospel only-yet his star is seen by Magi of the Far-East; and as all of a martyr's life is the preparation for the larger world into which his liberated soul enters through a violent death, so all before the crucifixion prepares for the wider mission fully opened by the command, "Go, teach all nations."

In this gospel more than in the others our Lord is revealed as the lawgiver, not of spiritual life only, but also of social life. His revelations as to the latter are a great part of the teachings between the Transfiguration and the Passion of our Lord, and to them especial consideration will be given. But the leading ideas before named, and all else that enters into Saint Matthew's argument, is subordinate and subservient to what was higher and greater. All thoughts, all feelings, all desires in the apostle's soul were lost in the

one desire that as his Lord and Saviour lived in his own heart and mind and memory he might live in his gospel; so that as he himself believed others might believe on him, and believing have life through his name. For that the evangelist prayed, and the gospel according to Saint Matthew is the answer of the Holy Ghost.

THE INTRODUCTION TO SAINT MATTHEW'S GOSPEL.

CHAPTER I.

THE Common form of an Introduction is not essential. If a writer begins with so telling about himself as to show why he wrote, such autobiographic leaves may do the work of an introduction-that is, they may help the understanding of what is to come. Facts from the history of the time may do the like. And in that way Saint Matthew's first two chapters are what in modern parlance may be styled his introduction.

Though not in form they are such in fact; for they bind together the past and the present. Seen is the foreseen star. "Out of Israel have I called my Son" marks the correspondence between the life of Israel and the life of Christ. The "trouble" of Jerusalem foreshadows the treatment of Christ Jesus by the Jews. The Magi, representatives of the nation, by their coming and their worship pre-intimate the breadth of his kingdom, the wonder and sign of the star, his power in the heavens. The first and the last verses clearly show that the new Scripture is to complete the older Scripture, and thus those two chapters do the work of an introduction, and they do much more.*

*The two chapters that open the new Testament are much spoken against. There Schleiermacher wrecked his faith and said that Jesus was the son of Joseph. Following in his evil path, Meyer, another heretic, says that the revelations of the Incarnation in Saint Luke and Saint Matthew are unhistorical, thus sweeping away its record, though

II. The names of the family and of the national ancestor of Jesus are engraved on the first stone of this portal arch-the name of Abraham, of whose line was to come the Saviour, promised in Eden, and the name of David the king, in whose family his birth was forewritten. On this, proof instantly follows of the superhuman generation of the Christ, with the prophetic announcement that he is Emmanuel-God with us.

The new Scripture opens well. But this is no predetermining of what Holy Scripture ought to be. The human mind can no more predetermine that than what nature ought to be. Yet, if it knows what the Scripture is, it may see something of its reasonableness. Thus, when a Christian lays the opening chapters of the earliest and the second gospel side by side he sees that the second gospel could not have begun the new Scripture; sees that Saint Mark's opening is proof that the Church rightly remembers the time-order of the two gospels; and he also finds some evidence of the fact, proved in other ways, that when Saint Peter's gospel was

he holds to the fact. Norton, rejecting the first two chapters of Saint Matthew, began his translation of the gospel with the third. And truly Bishop Ellicott said, "It is painful to witness the hardihood with which their genuineness has been called in question." Now, in the ill-treatment of those chapters by such scholars their lack of command of the art of literary criticism is plain, and that of its right application to inspired writings they knew nothing. Meyer shows this, not only in his senseless notion that the angelic announcements exclude each other because the one in Saint Luke is made before the Incarnation and the one in Saint Matthew is made after it, but generally in all he has said (so, too, Strauss and others) in trying to prove that the two gospels of the infancy are not reconcilable. As to all of this an answer is given later on.