been the hope of the pious Israelite, who with the patriarch, from whom he derived his name, could exclaim in death, O Lord, I have waited for thy salvation! And such we know was the sense assigned to his passionate exclamation by the Targumist, who thus paraphrases it; I wait not for the salvation of Gideon or of Samson, which are temporal, but for thy salvation; for thy deliverance, O Lord, is an eternal deliverance.

Our Redeemer is now commonly called Jesus Christ, but to many to whom he is precious, and altogether lovely, as he must appear in the eyes of all who have the faintest notion of his excellence, and their infinite obligation to him, this connection of the words, from its resemblance to the name and surname of those among whom we live, sounds too familiar, unless accompanied by the title of our Lord. Accurately speaking, his name is Jesus; by this he was addressed upon earth. Christ, equivalent to the Hebrew Messiah, is his official designation, meaning one who is anointed, and would be applied to him by none but those who acknowledged him. In the Scriptures this distinction is carefully observed; but as, out of respect to our Lord, Jesus is never given as a baptismal name, it has obtained a sacred character, and either that or Christ is used of him by most indifferently; but it is better to employ the former when we would draw attention to the salvation he has wrought for us, the latter when we would dwell upon his dignity and his claims to our obedience as our King.

8. The birth at Bethlehem of our Lord Jesus Christ. Luke ii. In obedience to the divine command, Joseph took home his wife, but knew her not until she had borne her first-born Son; and he called him, as he had been instructed, Jesus. Thus Jesus being born of the Virgin solely, was most literally the promised seed of the woman, and partaker of human nature without the pollution of sin, which is inherited by all the natural progeny of Adam. He was also born in wedlock, which preserved his virgin mother from disgrace; and the

knowledge of the mystery was confined to Mary, her husband, and a few friends, until the time that it was necessary to be divulged, after our Lord's resurrection, and the foundation of his Church. This descent from a virgin had been foretold seven centuries before by Isaiah, vii. 14. and, in the opinion of many commentators, by Jeremiah, xxxi. 22; and such an event, apparently impossible, none but a true prophet would venture to predict, and none but He who inspired the prophet could accomplish. The language of the Evangelist seems to imply that she afterwards cohabited with her husband; but her virginity is an ecclesiastical tradition, and we may reasonably infer that at least she had no other children, from our Lord's recommending her to the care of his beloved disciple, who in consequence took her to his home. At this period she was probably in early youth, and her husband in advanced life. We read of our Lord's brothers and sisters, Matt. xiii. 55. and one of these, James, became the first Bishop of Jerusalem; but the term in Hebrew includes nephews and cousin-germans, Gen. xiii. 8. 2 Kings x. 13. Some have supposed that these were Joseph's children by a former marriage; but the supposition is not necessary, and is incompatible with the hypothesis, that deduces our Lord's right to the throne of David through Joseph.

9. 10. The two genealogies of our Saviour.

As the Messiah was to be the Son of David, it is necessary to prove his descent; and accordingly, both Matthew and Luke give us his pedigree, transcribed, as it appears, from the public registers, which we know continued to be kept in the time of Josephus. In these pedigrees there are minor difficulties: in that of Matthew there are omissions of his own; in that of Luke, perhaps interpolations since his time, as the earliest Christian writers reckon the amount of his generations seventy-two, or seventy, whereas in our MSS. we have mostly seventy-seven. Luke, or his copyist, follows the Septuagint in inserting a second Cainan between Arphaxad and Salah. Matthew has omitted three kings, the descend

ants of Athaliah, and also Jehoiakim, and probably some persons between Obed and Jesse, since we can hardly suppose that four individuals in succession would each live above a century. The reason of this seems to be, that Matthew wished to arrange the genealogy in three divisions of fourteen generations, the first and third of which consisted of private persons, and the intermediate one of sovereigns. It is remarkable, that the only women named are either aliens, or of bad character; Thamar, who committed incest with her father-inlaw Judah, the adulteress Bathsheba, Rahab the Canaanite, and Ruth the Moabite.

Both pedigrees appear to be those of Joseph; and we are perplexed to know why they should be given by authors, who take care to inform us that Jesus was not really, but only supposed to be, his son, since their object was to show that the Messiah was not only the legal heir of David, but also, Acts ii. 30. the fruit of his loins. It also does not appear how both can belong to the same individual, since they proceed from two different sons of David, and agree only in two descents, in Salathiel and Zorobabel. The best solution of the difficulty appears to be, that both Joseph and Mary came, by true and real descent, from David, and that the genealogy of the former is set down by Matthew, that of the latter by Luke. Matthew writing for Jews, therefore, reckons only from Abraham, to whom the first promise of the kingdom was made, Gen. xvii. 6. but Luke runs up his line to Adam, the first head of human nature. Mary is called by the Jews the daughter of Eli, and her father having no son, her husband is reckoned to him, as it was not the Jewish custom to trace a pedigree through a female; or with Raphelius, we may translate, being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph, but in reality the son (i. e. the grandson) of Heli. The language of Matthew shows that he did not mean to assert, in contradiction to his narrative, that Jesus was really the son of Joseph; for in his instance alone he carefully avoids the term constantly used before, "begat;" writing, Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was or

had been born Jesus; and Luke also, as just observed, takes care to use a similar expression. The scheme I prefer is thus summed up by South, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 426. The royal line of David by Solomon being extinct in Jeconiah, whom, Jer. xxii. 30, God wrote childless, the right to his crown passed into the next line of Nathan in Salathiel. His son Zorobabel had two sons, Abiud and Rheza, the ancestors respectively of Joseph and Mary, and the former line failing in him, his right passes to his wife as now next of kin, and through her to Jesus, who is thus shown to be both the son and the heir of David. Solomon, according to this scheme, has no connexion with the Messiah; but though the Jews maintain he must descend from him, there is no scriptural warrant for that opinion. It is said, indeed, of Solomon, (1 Chron. xxii. 10.) that God would establish the throne of his kingdom for ever, yet it is not said in his seed; and besides, the kingdom there spoken of was the spiritual kingdom which his temporal one typified. Some, however, as Calvin, think it foretold that the Messiah should descend through Solomon; and Dr. Barrett, in his elaborate discussion of this question, for the substance of which I refer to Clarke's Commentary, or Townsend's Arrangement, endeavours to prove that Jesus came through this line, by assuming that Neri died without male issue, and that his daughter, heiress of the family of Nathan, united the two branches by marrying Salathiel, chief of Solomon's descendants. Upon this supposition, Jeconiah was the real father of Salathiel, and the latter is reckoned to Neri in the same way as Joseph is to Heli.

11. The infant Saviour receives the homage of shepherds.

Bethlehem, the predicted birthplace of the Messiah, a village six miles south of Jerusalem, is more than fifty from Nazareth. The Virgin, far advanced in her pregnancy, had no motive to take the journey, till the Emperor Augustus, whose paramount authority superseded when he pleased such nominally independent sovereigns as Herod, ordered a census

of the population, the time of which coincided with that of her delivery; and this enrolment by command of a foreign potentate was a badge of subjection, which proved, contrary to appearances, that the sceptre had now actually passed from Judah. We have in this decree a striking illustration of the mode in which the omniscient and almighty God accomplishes his purposes, without interfering with the free agency of his moral creatures. Persons were to be registered, not at their homes, but at the towns to which they legally belonged. Joseph accordingly was under the necessity of travelling to Bethlehem; Mary accompanied him, according to some commentators, because she was an heiress, and had property there; others think that the census might require the appearance of women as well as of men; or that she might judge it proper to avail herself of this providential opportunity of claiming her descent from David, as she knew herself to be miraculously with child of the Messiah.

The taxing is mentioned by Luke not so much to mark the time of Christ's birth, as to prove that it took place at Bethlehem, and that Mary and his reputed father were at that time allowed to be descendants of the royal family of David; for, John vii. 42, hath not the Scripture said, that Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem? This registering was clearly made before the death of Herod; yet Luke connects it with Quirinus, or, as he calls him in Greek, Cyrenius, who ten years after, being governor of Syria, made a taxation on the deposition of Archelaus. As it cannot be supposed that the Evangelist has mistaken the time of the taxing, some method of making his language consistent with the fact must be devised. Lardner's elaborate Dissertation, says Dr. Hales, considerably longer than Luke's whole Gospel, offers only a choice of difficulties. Our version seems to convey the meaning of the same taxation being twice made. Scaliger and other eminent critics translate, This taxation was made before Cyrenius was governor of Syria; and Mr. Greswell, who advocates this interpretation, takes it as a parenthetic admonition, not to confound this with the later and more

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