which He is still the living centre. Politics, Science, Philosophy, Churches, Creeds, Business, Home and Personal Questions, must all be brought to the judgment seat of the Son of God. We acknowledge Him to be the Lord, and cannot consider anything success which falls short of promoting His righteous kingdom in the earth.

Nor may any be "offended" with the "denominationalism" of this magazine, as though it were not in keeping with such a purpose. For what is the fact denoted by this somewhat repellant word? We are in danger of mistaking its true nature, and failing in our duty to God and men through our error. The rage for the repression of individuality runs so high, and the craving for unity is so intense, that we are strongly tempted to ignore the real value of separate and organized action for the defence and maintenance of the truth. Denominationalism is, historically, the name of the new and heroical virtue of testifying to the truth; or, in current English, preferring convictions to interests, imperishable principles to fleeting pleasures. The ancient world had no place for it; but it sprang into vigorous life in the very footprints of Him who "came to bear witness to the truth," and took definite shape soon after He sent His disciples to be His witnesses to the uttermost parts of the earth. They that believed came together." The magnetism of common convictions held them in an indissoluble union. Certain persons in Antioch, moved by a common impulse, separated themselves from their fellow-worshippers, and devoted their lives to the service of Christ, and they were called, i.e., denominated, named, and marked off as, Christians. The principle, though oft abused, is the same now as then. Earnest loyalty to Christ is the ground on which the practice of separation is based, and from which

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it draws its life. So that strictly speaking the word in question describes the united effort of honest men to detach themselves from the slightest complicity with falsehood, to state, defend, and propagate the truth, and to retain untarnished the priceless jewel of their sincerity. And such were the godly men who established this periodical in 1798, and appointed Mr. Dan Taylor as Editor. They were separatists for the love of God and souls: men who could not "bend with the willow and flow with the stream," but were firm as adamant in their adherence to the word of God. Truth was precious in those days, and they would not let it fail in the earth for lack of free expression and bold defence. We are their children, and to us is this grace given of continuing their work for a generation that needs us not less than they were required then. Whilst, therefore, this serial is a register of the progress of the churches, and an organ for the discussion of questions affecting our condition and duties, it must also be a "magazine," or store of arms and ammunition for the defence and dissemination of the truths most surely believed amongst us. And since this is our "Centenary Year," and one that ought to become a memorable landmark in our history, special pains should be given not only to plough and sow for new harvests, but also to collect and guard the legacies of the past hundred years. "Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee."

But I must close these words, adding only a brief selection from the minor rules to be put in service in conducting this magazine: (1.) "Eph. iv. 15 to be strictly followed. (2.) No departure on any account from the law in Eph. iv. 27. (3.) Anonymous correspondence, whilst not universally rejected, strenuously discouraged. (4.) Written wrath never to be printed.

(5.) As all the correspondents are gentlemen as well as Christians, any personalities, discourtesies, or questioning of motives, to be regarded as slips of the pen, and erased immediately. (6.) The well-being of the people is the supreme law,' and if either contributor or readers must suffer, the election to be in favour of the readers;" etc., etc.

Now, dear friends, my closing wish is, that it may come to pass with us, as with those two disciples

who went to Emmaus, "that while we commune together, and reason and talk of all those things which have happened, Jesus Himself shall draw near and go with us;" and that as our hearts burn with the holy love He has kindled by His presence, we may be emboldened to say to Him, "Abide with us, O Lord, Abide."

Ever faithfully yours,

JOHN CLIFFORD.

THE Divinity and Eternity of Him who is here called the Word is declared in the first verse of the chapter, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Creation is ascribed to Him-"All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made." Life dwells in Him as its source-life of which other beings partake as they draw water from a fountain, and by the life that is in Him the duty and destiny of men are revealed, albeit the world in its blindness may not understand the revelation" In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." With all His attractions He appeared among a people who rejected Him, "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." But on the few who did receive Him, He conferred extraordinary privileges, making them sons of God by a new birth, in which they were endowed with new spiritual qualities, and introduced into the Divine

family-"To as many as received Him, gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."

Such is the exalted personage of whom the evangelist here speaks under the designation of the Word, and to whose incarnation he thus bears testimony-" And the Word was made flesh."

I. THE WORD.

We stand here in presence of a mysterious subject, on which it behoves us to speak with great diffidence, as unable to understand it: on which it behoves us also to speak with great care, lest our words should mislead. And indeed they will not fail to mislead if it be not borne in mind that any words we can use do not express all the truth-that in consequence of the nature of the theme they can only make a more or less distant approach to it.

This much, however, we may say— that the Word, or Logos, is, as the term itself indicates, the expression of God, or God in manifestation.

We cannot understand the mode of the Divine existence, or the essence of the Divine nature. The Absolute and Infinite One, we can form no adequate conception of. But in the person of the Word, the Absolute is conditioned the Divine comes forth, and is revealed to us in form, in speech, and in action. The Word existed in the beginning, and has existed throughout all ages, as the Divine power in exercise-the Divine mind in utterance- the Divine character in manifestation.

The Divine power in exercise. For the Word is the Author of all events. "All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made." The Divine mind in utterance. For all Divine communications are made by the Word. He spake to Adam in Paradise. He visited Abraham in Mamre, when he sat in his tent door in the cool of the day, and, receiving human guests, as he thought, found that he had been entertaining not only angels unawares, but the God whom angels adore-who condescended to enter into covenant with His servant, and to reveal to him His purpose, and hear his pleading concerning the doomed city. He was the angel of the covenant who redeemed Jacob from all evil. He appeared to Moses in Horeb and Sinai, and spake to him from the burning bush, and the mountain which shook and trembled beneath his tread. He went before Joshua as the captain of the Lord's hosts, and appeared with the three youths in the fiery furnace. He gave inspiration to the prophets, and sanctity to the priests, and all divine favours to the chosen race. And far beyond their limits, to all races of men, He is the source of whatever illumination men possess. All intellectual light comes from Him who is the effluence of the Divine mind. "He is the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." The Divine character in manifestation. For we know nothing

of what God is except through Him. All that we have learned of God's attributes, His mercy, and goodness, and faithfulness, and holiness, and justice-all His moral perfections have been communicated by the Eternal Word. To the fathers He made known the one living and true God the I Am-the Almighty. And in the days of His humiliation, He in our nature which He had assumed, gave the fullest revelation of the Divine, in form and manner best adapted to our comprehension; so that He could say, "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." As proceeding from God, He is God's Son; ushered into the world as such; declared to be such with power by His resurrection from the dead. And though we are at a loss, even when He is so described, to understand the relation which He sustains to the Father, this much we know, that, being the term employed to denote that relation, the word Son gives us the best conception of it which we are able to form. He was the Son of God in a sense which involved equality with the Father— the one Being who, without presumption, and without exaggeration, could say, "I and my Father are one."

II. THE WORD BECOMING INCARNATE is unquestionably the greatest event in the history of the human race, probably in the history of the universe; as there does not seem any reason to believe that the Divine Being has ever been enshrined in any other creature's form, or has ever before shewn such condescension in His dealings with a rebel race. When Solomon asked, "But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth?" his language shews that the very possibility filled him with amazement, and that such condescension on the part of the Divine Being seemed to him scarcely credible. But the condescension displayed in

the Word being made flesh, was greater even than anything which Solomon's wonder contemplated. Had he lived in the days of our Lord, he would have seen that not only did God in very deed dwell with men, but in men on the earth! The Word-the Eternal Word-the Word who was in the beginning with God, and was God-was made flesh; not only drew near to man, and allied himself with man, but in very deed became man-bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh-our brother, albeit the Creator of all things-truly human as well as truly Divine. The Infinite One, by a mysterious union, subjected Himself to human conditions-became a sharer in our human frailities-occupied the meanest position in which our humanity is found-appeared in the form of a servant-the very voice of God proceeding in that form from human lips, and the works of God being, in that form, wrought by human hands!

Such is the marvellous nature of this event that men hear of it with far more than the incredulity with which Solomon anticipated the lesser fact. They flatly and positively deny where he only wonderingly inquired if so it could be. Unable to comprehend, they are unwilling to credit what is so strangely illustrative of the Divine condescension. And yet, notwithstanding this incredulity, it was so much in harmony with, as to be a fulfilment of, the desires and expectations of humanity in all ages and nations. Men everywhere have longed and yearned for such an event, as if God, where He withheld His fuller revelation, still gave His creatures some dim prophecy of that which was to be. The turning point of history-the climax of Divine dispensations-the wonder of the universe, did not come without casting a prophetic shadow over the minds of men, even as it has not taken place without affecting their ndition and their destiny.

And now that He has come, the general rejoicing with which, throughout Christendom, the event is celebrated at this season of the year is but a prophecy of the purer and more intelligent joy with which it will yet be regarded by men in all parts of the world. By those who feel sensible of their need, by sincere and earnest souls in every land, the message which tells of His advent will be welcome when understoodwelcome as cold water to the thirsty ground, and the gratitude with which it is received will show how eagerly it was desired, and how generally looked for, and how well it answers to the cravings of mankind.

III. THE INCARNATE WORD DWELLING AMONG US, while it is the natural corollary of His incarnation, is a noticeable fact as attesting the genuineness of His humanity. He was no myth, as has been alleged-a character involved in obscurity-a mere name around which certain tales have gathered. Whatever else may be, that is certainly not, the explanation which meets the requirements of the Scripture narrative. Neither was He a man who kept Himself, in the main, aloof from His fellows, working mostly in secret, startling them now by the suddenness of His appearances, and now by the abruptness of His departures, causing His followers to circulate extraordinary reports concerning Him, the accuracy of which, owing to His seclusion, men had no opportunity of testing, and thus surrounding Himself with an air of romance which in course of time has consolidated into accepted though unveracious history. Neither does that theory accord with the narratives of His life. He was a real historical personage a man who associated with His neighbours on familiar terms; openly performed His acts, delivered His discourses so that all who heard of Him might for themselves verify or disprove reports, and

thus judge of what He was. He lived among His fellow-townsmen of Nazareth, and was in regard to all the circumstances of His outer life like one of themselves. He was subject to His parents like any other human child. He associated with His brethren so much in the ordinary manner, eating with them and working with them and conversing with them, and being in all outward respects so much one of them, that His kinsmen and townspeople were among the last to acknowledge that a humanity so real and true was the temple of a superhuman guest, and to recognise His divine claims. And though His divinity becomes more manifest when He enters on His public ministry, He still associates with His disciples in the same human fashion, and continues, though He exercises His divine power for the fulfilment of His ministry, subject in the same manner, as regards the mode and circumstances of His life, to the same human conditions. He is no dweller in the wilderness, like His forerunner, but eats and sleeps in the ordinary abodes of men. Labour wastes, and food recruits, His strength. The springs of energy, which are exhausted by long continued activity, are replenished by refreshing sleep. He weeps from sympathy, and delights in friendship, and groans under suffering, and instinctively seeks relief. He has His bosom friends among the twelve disciples whom He more especially commissions to be the founders of His kingdom, and His favourite place among the wider circles of His friends. Bethany was dear to Him because it contained the home of Lazarus and his sisters; and often when wearied with His day's labours in Jerusalem, He spent the evening there in their congenial society. He lodged with Zaccheus the publican, dined with Simon the Pharisee, visited the house of Jairus, asked drink from the woman of Samaria, attended the marriage at Cana of

Galilee, joining in and contributing to the festivities of the occasion. So social was He in His habits that while the Jews charged His abstemious forerunner with having a devil, they said of the Son of Man, because He came eating and drinking, "Behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." He dwelt among us. So truly and intensely human was He-human in His affections and sinless passions-human in His bodily infirmities and wants, that He felt as we feel, and required to fare even as we fare. Having allied Himself to us, He accepted of all the liabilities which the relation involved-sought to exempt Himself from no obligation, claimed no peculiar privilege. He placed Himself on our level, and in everything but sin was one of us. And, O! when I see the Eternal thus subjecting Himself to all the conditions of our humanity, and sojourning in the abodes, and faring after the manner, of men, and freely mingling with them, while I regard the fact as an attestation of His true humanity, and learn from it how literally the narrative of His life is to be interpreted, and how trustworthy is the evangelists' record of what He did and said-I behold in it a display of Divine condescension of which the soul stands in awe. Its degree is such as the mind cannot grasp. It can only wonder and adore in presence of the awful mystery. With Solomon we exclaim, in deep amazement-Will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? Has He, in very deed, been a sojourner in human homes-sleeping under the roof, and sitting at the tables of His sinful creatures? Behold heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee, how much less any house of man's rearing! "Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh." "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."