be registered. Some indistinct intimations, however, of this slaughter have been transmitted to us. Cedrenus Cedrenus says, that Herod was distinguished by the title of child-slayer; and Macrobius furnishes this heathen testimony," when Augustus heard, that among the children, whom Herod king of the Jews ordered to be slain in Syria, his own son was also put to death, he said, It is better to be Herod's hog than his son." Probably he spoke in Greek, and thus played upon the words úv and vióv. His eldest son Antipater he did kill for a conspiracy, only five days before his own death; and in the repetition of the story some ages after, it is not unnatural that such an event should be confounded with the Bethlehem massacre.

It is objected, that the author of the introductory chapters assigned to Matthew, has brought forward as testimony to Jesus passages from the Prophets, which the context shows to have been fulfilled in other persons; and the candid reader must allow, that the application is far from obvious, and is open to critical difficulties. Yet an objector of equal candour will be ready to grant, that the application is made after the manner of Jewish commentators; and if other arguments are of sufficient weight to establish the authenticity of this introductory narrative, we are bound to acquiesce in the authority of an inspired author, though it may not be to our judgment convincing. "The Lord seems purposely (Scott on Isaiah vii.) to cast an obscurity over some of the most remarkable predictions in Scripture, as a trial of our humility, and to prove whether we will receive and profit by what is obvious, though we cannot satisfactorily solve every difficulty, or whether we will proudly reject the whole on that account." Nor can this be said to be reasoning in a circle, for it would be easy to show, that the remark is as applicable to other parts of the New Testament, as to these disputed chapters. There are divines, whose orthodoxy is above suspicion, who consider several of these passages as accommodated to subjects which they were never intended to predict; as modern preachers, by detaching verses from the context, sometimes in their sermons give a new and

not strictly appropriate meaning to Scripture. "To deny this," says Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. Pye Smith, "would be to refuse the Apostles and Evangelists that liberty of observing striking coincidences, and of making useful applications, which writers of all ages have exercised, and the Scriptures were almost the only literature of the Jews." But he proceeds with a caution against the abuse of this practice. "We should be slow to admit this solution, and well consider the probability that in such cases there may be a ground of appropriation, the inobservance of which is solely owing to our ignorance of some circumstance in the original intent of the passage. But when it is introduced explicitly as an assertion of fact or doctrine, or as a prophecy, we must admit the propriety of the application, to the full extent to which it is carried by the sacred writers. The two citations, the application of which to Jesus we find most difficulty in allowing, are thus formally introduced, "That it might be fulfilled, Out of Egypt have I called my Son;" and, "Then was fulfilled, In Rama there was a voice heard," &c. These terms are said not to be so unfavourable, as they appear to be at first sight, to the hypothesis of accommodation, for they occur in the same manner in the Talmud, and Rabbinical works, and are not even unknown to the Greek. But this system, not so much of interpreting as explaining away a prophecy, is not, I conceive, required; the two passages may be understood as having a double fulfilment, of which the secondary is the most important, and was the more exact one. The calling up out of Egypt, by the hands of Moses and Aaron, of Israel, the adopted son of God, prefigured the future bringing up out of the same country of his real Son by generation, the one to enter upon the possession of the earthly Canaan, the other by his sufferings in the same land to obtain for himself and his people a right to the enjoyment of its antitype, heaven. The literal sense, says Lowth, "does more properly belong to Jesus than to Israel, which is observable in many other prophecies, which can be but improperly applied to those, of whom they were first spoken, and taking them in their true and genuine sense, are only fulfilled in Christ."

Rachel, who lay buried between Rama and Bethlehem, is particularly represented by the prophet, as weeping and inconsolable for the death of her children. The primary interpretation appears to be the captivity, but the slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem, a town near the confines of the tribe of Benjamin, Rachel's son, and some of whom we may reasonably suppose to be her descendants, is the full accomplishment of the prediction; and this is rendered the more probable, to any one who will read through the chapter, which comforts both Ephraim and Judah with the promise of a better spiritual covenant, and includes that obscure intimation of the Messiah's miraculous conception, which the ancient Jews expounded of him, "The Lord hath created a new thing in the earth; A woman shall compass a

man."

“He shall be called a Nazarene," presents a difficulty of another description, for the words are not found in the Old Testament. We know that in our Lord's time the bad character of the inhabitants of Nazareth had become proverbial: thus when Philip, John i. 45. said to Nathaniel, "We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and the Prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth," the reply even of that Israelite without guile was, "Can there any thing good come out of Nazareth?" It appears, then, that the residence and presumed birth of Jesus in that town contributed to his rejection. The interpretation, therefore, which takes it as equivalent to a despised person, appears to be the best, and we shall then allow that he is virtually, though not actually, predicted as a Nazarene; and this view is strengthened by the language of the Evangelist, who does not refer to a specific chapter, but says generally, in the Prophets.

St. Matthew expressly declares, that the naming of the Messiah Jesus, is the fulfilment of Isaiah's declaration to king Ahaz, that "the Virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and that they shall call his name Immanuel, God with us:" and this celebrated prophecy has ever been regarded by the Church as evidence of the miraculous conception, and of the divine nature of the promised Deliverer. Efforts were early

made to deprive us of this valuable testimony, and the attempt has been zealously revived by the modern Anti-Trinitarians. Thus Aquila, a proselyte from Christianity to Judaism in the second century, in his new translation of the Scriptures into Greek, rendered Almah, translated TagDévos, virgin, by the Septuagint, veãvis, young woman; and Jewish critics have endeavoured to show, but without success, that though generally meaning the former, it does not of necessity; and the prophecy seems to require the sense which the Church has put upon it, of one who is and continues to be a virgin, for so ordinary an event as a young woman giving birth to a child could hardly have been called a sign, or would have been announced with such solemnity. It is also objected, that our Lord was never called Emmanuel; but it is well known, that, by a common figure, not peculiar to Hebrew, it is taken for, he shall be entitled to that appellation, and that he is what it denotes, God manifested in the flesh. He would be called by this name, as much as Solomon was by that of Jedidiah; and though it was not applied to him while on earth, he has been actually invoked under it in the hymns of many subsequent generations. Bishop Pearson considers it as comprehended in that of Jesus, for what else is God with us, than God our Saviour, which is the real meaning of Jesus. The prophet calls Judah Emmanuel's land, it cannot therefore be referred to any future child of his own; and Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, to whom alone it could be applied with any plausibility, had been born some years before. These objections appear to us to be frivolous, and the prophecy, as quoted by the Evangelist, requires no further vindication; but the context involves us in considerable difficulties, for it seems to declare that the Son promised should be born within the year, and that the political deliverance announced to Ahaz, should take place before this child should have reached the age in which he would be able to discriminate the kinds of food. When it is contended that this is a direct prophecy of the Messiah, the question arises, how an event that would not happen till more than seven hundred years had elapsed,

could be a sign or assurance of another event, which was to take place within two or at most three. The solution proposed is, that since the promise of the Messiah to be born in the fulness of time, included an assurance of the preservation both of the nation and of the royal house of David; that promise was, by inference, a sign of deliverance from the present Syrian invasion; and to strengthen this argument, it is maintained, that the sign was not intended for Ahab, but for his family, or rather his remote descendants. Dr. Kennicott's scheme is to me the most satisfactory, according to which, the text contains two distinct prophecies, each literal, and to be understood in one sense only, the first relating to Christ, the second to Isaiah's son. He thus paraphrases it. Fear not, O house of David; God is mindful of his promise, and will fulfil the same in a very wonderful manner. Behold, a virgin (rather the virgin, the only one thus circumstanced) shall conceive, and bear a son, and this son shall be called (that is, shall be) Emmanuel, God with us: but this infant shall be truly man; milk and honey, that is, the ordinary food of infants, shall he eat, till he shall grow up, to know how to refuse the evil and choose the good. But before this child (pointing to his own son, whom he might hold in his arms) shall know how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings. The child's name is evidently prophetical, Shear-jashub, the remainder shall return. This prophecy was soon after fulfilled, and therefore this son, whose name had been so consolatory the year before, was with the utmost propriety brought forth now, to declare that the lands of Syria and Israel here spoken of as one kingdom, on account of their present confederacy, should be forsaken of both their kings, which, though at that time highly improbable, came to pass about two years after, when these two kings, who had in vain attempted to conquer Jerusalem, were themselves destroyed, each in his own country. The prophet was commanded to take this child with him, but no use was made of him, unless in this application; yet he afterwards declares, that both his