Him, as His natural garment. The human race as a whole, with its deep-rooted idea of an incarnation, needs only that God should shine in its heart, in order to see that idea realised, and receive "the light of the knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus His Christ" (2 Cor. iv. 6).

And second, believing this truth of His deity, the lost world is prepared to receive His Gospel promise of "repentance and remission." Thus, when we preach "remission of sins" in His name, men can really believe us: they can believe that the Son of man has power to forgive sins when they know that He is the Son of God: they can believe that He has procured remission by His death when they know that His atoning death is that of God manifest in the flesh: once John has borne record "that this is the Son of God," they can believe him when he cries, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Again, when we preach "repentance "-a new heart, and consequent new life-men can really accept our gospel call: they can believe the Gospel promise of repentance, and receive power to obey the Gospel precept, "repent:" they will give themselves to Jesus that He may give them this new life, when they know that He is the Divine Son, from whom proceedeth the Divine Spirit, the Lordly baptism of repentance, "He shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire." Yea, and we can believe in the efficacy of ordinances as administered by us, we can seriously expect the miracle of the world's regeneration by the word, when we remember, and see, and feel, that the real teacher, of whom we are but ministers, is that eternal Word by whom the worlds were brought into being (Ez. xxvii. 1-10).

II. THE ORDER in which this work is to be undertaken :— “beginning at Jerusalem.”

Not, passing by Jerusalem, nor, coming to her in the last place, but "beginning at Jerusalem:" so runs the Will. So a few days after, the Saviour prescribed this plan for the grand campaign :-"Ye shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem (beginning there), and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth" (Acts i. 8). So it was in the actual administration of the will through the Holy Ghost: the apostles and evangelists began at Jerusalem; and even in heathen cities they preached the Gospel "to the Jews first," they went first to the synagogue of the Jews.

In observing this order the apostles, being Jews themselves,

may have gratified their private feelings of patriotism. But no such feeling appears to have actuated their Master in prescribing it. And apart from any sentimental regard to the Jews as a nation, there are obvious reasons why we should first go to them with the Gospel of God's love. The Holy Ghost has put on record that this order of proceeding is vitally important for the success of the Gospel in the world as a whole: "If the fall of the Jews be the riches of the world, and their decay the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness! If the casting

away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?" (Rom. xi. 12, 15) The conversion of the Jews ought, in reason, to be regarded as an event, not only blessed and glorious in itself, but also most auspicious, ominous of good, with reference to the conversion of the world. And that on such accounts as the following:

1st. They are the nearest, most easily reached. 1. In place. To the apostles elect, Jerusalen was literally the nearest point of Judea, and Judea of Palestine, and Palestine of the world. And even beyond Judea and Palestine, in every important city of the Gentile world, there was a Judea and Jerusalem, a Jewish quarter and synagogue, more acccessible and convenient for public religious teaching and discussion than any other quarter and temple. In the ruins of Pompeii, a city buried by lava in the life-time of some of the apostles, among the inscriptions scribbled on the walls there has recently been found, in Hebrew letters, the Hebrew name of Sirach, silently shewing to this hour that, if an apostle or evangelist visited Pompeii in A.D. 79, a Jew was there before him. All over the civilised world, in the great cities, the emporiums of commerce, the radiant centres of civilisation, wherever an apostle or evangelist went, the Jew with his synagogue was there before him. And so it has remained down to our day. Long before we had set foot in India or China, the Jew with his synagogue, from immemorial ages, had been there before us. This is one of his points of resemblance to the Scot: his nation, far more than ours, is the ubiquitous nation. All the world over, the Jew is nearest in place.

2. They are nearest in mind. I have said that even the heathen have some rudimentary ideas corresponding to the leading doctrines of the Gospel, and that this is something to begin with. But the ideas are so deeply buried in corruption that there is deplorably little to begin with. A lady from India

once remonstrated with me for using the expression, "home heathen." We have, she said, properly speaking, no heathen at home in our bright light of Christian civilisation, the veriest outcast has ideas of the Gospel, of God, of holiness, of truth and law, which give us, in dealing with him, an incalculable advantage, by way of fulcrum or basis of operations, over the missionaries who deal with the true heathen abroad. For in these the ideas I have spoken of are either so utterly lost in falsehood as apprehended by the mass of men, or so ghostly thin when the falsehood is purged away by philosophical refining, as to be of exceedingly little practical avail. The wood has first to be hewn in the savage forest, and the stones to be quarried from the bowels of the earth, before the heathen mind can furnish as much as an altar for our faith to be laid on. But in the mind of the Jew the altar is built to our hands: the wood is there upon it, ready to be kindled to a blaze. In order to his "repentance and remission," all that is needed is "the lamb for the burnt-sacrifice," with the lordly fire-baptism of the Spirit. For wherever the Jew is there is the synagogue, and in the synagogue the Old Testament Scriptures, and in connection with both such religious habits as that of Sabbath-observance and worship. By positive revelation of God, the leading doctrines of our religion have been impressed on the Jewish mind from the infancy of the nation down to this, its doting old age. The Jewish mind is therefore full of the God-given truth regarding the Messiah, only without the Messiah himself; Christianity, only without Jehovah's Christ. In order that the Jew may become a Christian, he needs only to recognise in Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah whom he looks for, "of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets did write." And when we go to him with the Gospel, all that he has learned from Scripture regarding the messianic Son of God is not only a basis of operation upon him, but a schoolmaster to bring him to the faith of the crucified son of Mary.

The value of this peculiar nearness and accessibility in place and mind has been abundantly illustrated by the results of missionary preaching. In the first age of the Church the vast majority of her members were born Jews. And in our own day the estimated number of born Jews who have entered the visible kingdom of Christ is more than 30,000, i.e., about half the estimated number of Christians in the world when the last of the apostles went home to the Father. Here, then, is reason

in Christian strategics for "beginning at Jerusalem." Regarding the 5,000,000 Jews merely as so many units of the human family, in seeking the conversion of that family as as a whole, we ought to preach the Gospel "to the Jews first." For the skilful fisherman will go first to the nearest and best of pools; the reaper will go first to the nearest and ripest of fields. But the Jews are not to be regarded merely as a two-hundredth part of the sum-total of humanity. Though numerically small they historically constitute one of the two great divisions of the race, which, from a religious point of view, has been divided into Jews and Gentiles.

2d. They are, when found and saved, fitted to be the most precious, as instruments of diffusing the Gospel to others. I have already referred to their lot of ubiquity, showing that they are by position an army in actual occupation of the world. I might add that they have a natural gift of tongues, being familiar with the languages of all the nations among which they are dispersed. And we have seen that they have a theological knowledge, derived from Old Testament revelation, such that they need only to know Jesus as the incarnate word in order to be ready-made preachers of Him in the Gospel. Thus Paul the apostle preaches nothing that was not, in terms at least, familiar to Saul the persecutor: only, he has found in the New Testament the Messiah revealed in the Old, the living realisation of those doctrinal ideas which every well-educated Jew drank in, so to speak, "with his mother's milk:" if it was in Christ that he served God, it was thus "from his forefathers" (2 Tim. i. 3). Thus all the first preachers of the Gospel were born Jews. Thus her Hebrew membership, with their clear doctrinal conceptions, and definite religious character and habits, formed the strong mould in which the loose Gentile materials of the primitive church were cast. And in our own day, of the more than 30,000 Jewish converts, about one in every hundred is actively engaged in the public teaching of the Gospel.

Not only they thus have shown a disposition to teach. Their peculiar history has created in them a singularly great ability to teach. Let it be remembered that Jews are now, and on to the end of the world, the actual teachers of Christendom; that the human authors of the Bible, the prophets, evangelists, and apostles, with probably not one exception, all were Jews by education and birth. And for this office God has qualified the nation by a wondrous course of discipline, dating from its

call in Abraham, and educating it to be the educator of mankind. The Pagan fable speaks of a harp of Orpheus, by which he wrought such miracles in the physical world as Jehovah has purposed to work in the moral and spiritual: "The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." This miracle is to be wrought through Jehovah's word. But for the utterance of the word He chooses and forms an appropriate instrument. And the instrument He has chosen and formed, the Harp of God, which He has been perfecting for 4,000 years, is the nation of the Jews.

For this end, first of all, He has revealed Himself to the Jews as to no other people. Though the heathen had some idea of a Zeus or air-god, and an Apollo or sun-god, yet their knowledge of the Divine omnipresence and omniscience, their knowledge of God as a living person, in personal intercourse with man, was dim, confused, inadequate, and practically inoperative. But the Jewish nation, from its first beginning down to this hour, has been ceaselessly pursued by the felt presence of Jehovah, as the living, all-seeing, personal God. Even when they have most bitterly provoked Him He has always been to them a reality: the pillar of cloud and of fire has never been absent from their view: the presence of God has always constituted the atmosphere they breathe: "in Him" they ever have consciously “lived, and moved, and had their being." And one result of this discipline by His presence, perpetually brooding over the nation, has been a peculiar power and grandeur of soul, corresponding to the greatness of the thought, of the living eternal Jehovah, which has thus constantly occupied mind and moulded the nation's life. Thus, apart from Divine inspiration, Moses the runaway slave has a presence more commanding and majestic by far than Pharaoh the King: his great soul is a vessel manifestly fitted to receive the treasure of God's revelation of law. David the shepherd boy needs only the occasion and the call in order to show himself as David the magnificent monarch, the poet whose words have sufficed to fill, and move, and express the whole heart of the Church in all ages and nations. The Roman civilisation of law and disciplined force is vulgar and insignificant as compared with the spiritual greatness of the Galilean fishermen. And the vaunted Athenian civilisation of intellect and taste is really narrow and mean in comparison with the true culture of Paul the tentmaker, the "babbling" blear-eyed barbarian from the