"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

"All we, like sheep, have gone astray: we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.

"He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

"He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generations? For he was cut off from out of the land of the living; for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

"And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

"Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

"He shall see of the travail of his soul, and

shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.

"Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death; and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors."

In the beginning of this chapter, the prophet complains of the incredulity of the Jews for not receiving him who was the true Messiah; on account of that humility, and the herepredicted absence of all that grandeur and worldly pomp, which should attend the advent of Him who, when on earth, said, "My kingdom is not of this world."

The prophet then enumerates a successional detail of the most circumstantial particulars attending the death of the Redeemer, strongly insisting on the perfect and sinless purity of Christ, as the righteous servant of the Father, in whom the faithful find justification from the penalties of the broken law, and whose iniquities we know he bare in his own body on the

cross; and, finally, the office of Christ as a Mediator, where in heaven he ever liveth to make intercession for us, is most plainly asserted.

Now, had this sacred revelation, which could alone proceed from Jehovah, been written after the crucifixion of Christ; the narrative must have been regarded in all the matter that is spoken of, as exactly conformable to the strictest truth. On comparing this prophecy with the events which took place more than seven centuries afterwards, surely even sceptical objectors of the most obstinate description must see the necessity of reflecting and reconsidering the grounds whereon they falsely build their hopes of acceptance with God; and the Christian by contemplating the fulfilment of this prophecy, in the agonized and suffering humanity of the Son of God, will be taught to consider, that sacrifice in every sense under the law, especially where blood was shed, was typical of Christ, and received its full completion in the sacrifice of the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world. In like manner when Christ said "It is finished," bowed his head in death, and gave up the ghost; the great antitype of all sacrifice had

then magnified and made honorable the law, by the sacrifice of himself once offered for all. Hence in the wounded side of our Immanuel, we behold that fountain opened by faith in his blood, for the purgation of all sin, and all uncleanness, from the moment when sin and death entered into the world, by the fall of our first parents in the garden of Eden. And in the blood and the water issuing from the side of our Lord Jesus Christ, we have the reality of all mere creature-blood, shed by the church universal, until the divine and human reality in the prepared body of the seed of the woman, terminated as he had begun all future sacrifices to the church, by the eternally-required sacrifice of himself. It must be plain, that whereas the blood of Christ cleanseth from all iniquity, that that blood could alone proceed from the natural image or body of the man Christ, and of which Moses spake, when declaring the eternally designed incarnation of the Word made flesh, by saying, So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him male and female created he them." Our Saviour himself, when speaking of his own human nature, after his resurrection, sets this

:

matter at rest, by saying to his then incredulous or doubting disciple, Thomas, "Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing." By faith, says the apostle, ye are saved, and faith alike in the divine and human natures of Christ is now as needful for salvation, as when Christ was openly manifested to the Jews in the days of his flesh; and when Moses spake of the image of Adam, and of the Creator, he spake of the material or corporal image of both their persons; though each was in himself unique, or differing in his origin from the other, for the first man was of the earth, earthy, but the second Adam was the seed of the woman, and the Son of the most high God.