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THE MESSIAH AS PHYSICIAN PRIEST.

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tion in these Psalms, which illustrates in a remarkable manner the well known saying of Butler in his " Analogy," that the whole scope of scripture is not yet understood, and that there is nothing astonishing in the assertion that the Bible may contain many truths not yet discovered.

The offices of the Messiah, include that of the physician as well as of king and legislator. Now it might seem a singular way to teach a physician his profession by making him practically acquainted with the sorrows and troubles of humanity, in the shape of obliging him to bear those diseases in his own person, but the Bible asserts, that such is actually the way in which the divine physician or priest is taught his sorrowful lesson. Isaiah in the fifty-third chapter states plainly, that the Messiah bears the griefs, and carries the sorrows of suffering humanity. He is a man stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted, he is tormented for man's transgressions, bruised for his iniquities, chastised for his reconciliation, and by these lacerations man his healed, upon this physician is made to culminate the iniquity of all men. By this painful experience shall the suffering, sorrowing priest or physician justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities. But how?

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Before we turn once more to the Psalms, we remark that the book of Job in its significance is predictive as well as historical. Now Job says, "God has stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head." says, "The glory of a young man is his strength." means is too obvious for comment. Job says, "fear, and it came upon me, and that which I was afraid of "is come unto me."

Solomon What he "I feared a

The context does not say that Job's loathsome disease was the effect of his fear, or that the mind itself affected the body through the nervous system, but it leaves the question open for debate. Job does not say that he is a victim to the lies and rascality of quack doctors, who invent imaginary diseases, and spread suffering and suicide far and wide in their iniquitous trade of picking frightened peoples pockets. But the allusion to Satan attacking Job in his own person,

is evidently the antagonism of self-consciousness, which by fear, and the consequences of that perverted self-consciousness, does practically bedevil the poor monomaniac with the very disease that it conjures up, therefore, when Job exclaims, "I feared a fear, and it came upon me," he shews that the Satan that possessed him in the first instance was perverted consciousness. He feared, and it came because he feared.

Now it is well known to every physician and surgeon of practice, that during the last quarter of a century, a fearful amount of suffering and nervous derangement, culminating here and there in suicide, has sprung into existence from the undue prominence given by certain physicians, such as Lallemaud and his camp followers, to what is called Spermatorrhoean patients.

The mischief done by a few mistaken, though doubtless well meaning men, has now, in the hands of unscrupulous, ignorant, and greedy quacks, reached to an extent that calls for active interference and considerable self-sacrifice to combat, and finally put down once and for ever.

A bad conscience makes every one a coward, and, therefore, when the recollection of past profligacy has weakened the mind, the ground is prepared for that knowledge of the malade imaginaire, that brings with it the very disease itself, that would otherwise be non est inventus, if the Satan of selfconsciousness did conjure up the evil thing wherewith to haunt the poor monomaniac.

It is not an easy thing for a man to brand himself as having been a prodigal before the whole public, but Dean Swift encourages a man to do his duty, telling him that :

"It is not so much being exempt from faults as the having "overcome them that is an advantage to us, for a man should 66 never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, "which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day "than he was yesterday."

And further on he says:—

"To relieve the oppressed is the most glorious act a man " is capable of, it is in some measure doing the business of "God and providence."

THE PRODIGAL SON.

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Besides, Jesus of Nazareth himself, attached the brand of profligacy to his younger brother in the parable of the prodigal son, where he describes him as being a man who had misspent his earliest days among harlots and riotous living.

The vision of Zechariah, as related in the third chapter, is of the final Messiah, of whom Joshua, the son of Josedech, was the prototype, and of this man it is said by the angel of the Lord, "I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, "and I will clothe thee with a change of raiment." This prediction cannot refer to Jesus of Nazareth in the specialized way in which the Messiah is here spoken of, for there is nothing recorded of his iniquity to require purging away.

And now to return to the records of the Psalms. The confessions, prayers, and sorrows of the Job predicted therein, are thus detailed:

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"Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions." "For thy name's sake, O Lord, pardon my iniquity, for it is great." "Look upon my affliction and pain, and forgive all my sins." "For my life is spent with grief, and my years "with sighing, my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, "and bones are consumed." my Day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. I acknowledge my sin unto thee, "and mine iniquity have I not hid." "Thine arrows stick fast "in me, and thy hand presseth me sore, there is no sound66 ness in my flesh because of thine anger, neither rest in my "bones because of my sin. For my iniquities have gone

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over my head; as an heavy burden, they are too weighty "for me. My wounds stink, and are corrupt because of my "foolishness. I am wearied and bowed down greatly. I go "mourning all the day long. For my loins are filled with a "loathsome impotence, and there is no soundness in my flesh. "I am feeble and sore broken, I have roared by reason of "the disquietness of my mind. Lord, all my petition is "before thee, and my groaning is not hid from thee." "Deliver me from all my transgressions, make me not the laughing stock of fools. I was dumb, I opened not my

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"because thou didst it. Remove thy stroke away from me. "I am consumed by the battering blows of thy hand.” “Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me so that I am not able "to look up, they are more than the hairs of my head, "therefore my courage forsaketh me." "Wash me thoroughly "from mine iniquities, and cleanse me from my sins."

It is not necessary to multiply instances ad infinitum to indicate the sorrows of this Job, whose prayer is a wild and almost incoherent wail of terror, remorse, fright, confusion and despair, nearly to the edge of suicide itself, It is the cry of one who says he is worn away to skin and bone, who has groaned himself almost into a rapid consumption, whose days are consumed like smoke, and his bones burnt up like ashes upon a hearth, and his mind, the seat of his calamity, is blighted and withered up like grass cut down for hay.

"I have gone astray like a lost sheep," cries this miserable monomoniac, "O seek thy servant." "Unless thy law had "attracted my worship, I should have perished in my "affliction."

The above are all confirmatory of the doctrine that the Satan of the Lord and giver of life is the self-concentrating attention, the self-consciousness or self-will, and self-deceiving mind of man himself, that the mind of man is its own accuser, its own devil, its own destroyer, its own origin and source of evil. Thus perverted consciousness becomes the cage of the foul and unclean demon that it conjures up from its own abortive conceptions.

According to Isaiah, in the forty-first chapter, the final Messiah is called westwards from the east, and from the antipodes or ends of the earth.

Jeremiah, in the thirty-third chapter, speaks of the Messiah as the branch, who shall never want a male child to sit upon his throne for ever. In the twentieth chapter, this man curses the day of his birth, like the rest of the labouring, sorrowing prophets, and he regrets that ever he was born.

It will be found, upon carefully comparing the New Testa

INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT RIDDLES.

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ment scriptures with the older Hebrew writings, that Jesus of Nazareth did not profess to make any addition to, or any alteration of, the already revealed will of the eternal prepurposer, as explicitly declared by former prophets. And in reference to those parts which notoriously have never been fulfilled, such as among others, Isa. xxiii, xxxiv, lx—lxvi; Jer. xxv, xxxi, xxxiii, li; Ezek. xxvi—xxix, xxxvii—xxxix ; and two-thirds of all the minor prophets, it has been left on record by the writers in the four books of the gospel, that Jesus himself distinctly gave his disciples to understand that he did not exhaust these prognosticated events in his own mission, for speaking of some one to come after himself, he says, "greater works than these (now transacting) shall he "(not I) do, because I go to the father." So all that remains now to be done is simply to pass judgment upon what is coming from the word of revelation already spoken.

If the conventional interpretation of the Bible were a uniformly consistent one, there would not be such a lamentably disjointed and jarring sectarian state of the Christian world as at present exists.

The old Catholicism had in it much to attract and chain a philosophic mind, for provided certain metaphysical hypotheses relative to mind and matter, and existence of evil be conceded, then the vast superstructure of ecclesiastical government ought in the very necessity of things to be truth, and to reject it would be folly. This sacerdotal system had in it a sublimity of conception, an awful grandeur, a majesty of movement, and a plaintive melodiousness in every vibration of its mysterious but erroneous spiritualism which the vulgar and discordant babblement of its Protestant assailants has neither mind to perceive, candour to admit, nor decency to respect even when it does see it. Granted that it gradually lost its abnegation of self, and then went headlong into the bathos of ludicrous grossness and illogical absurdities, bringing the queen down to the level of the poor street-walker drunk in the gutter; but what has Protestantism established which for grandeur, pathos, power, or philosophic thought, can for a moment be compared to the old dynasty,

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