Him, in the words which Christ himself has taught us, as Our Father which is in Heaven.' Let the sense of our high-calling more and more thoroughly penetrate our minds and possess us; and while it fills our hearts with thankfulness and adoration, let us seek to offer daily the 'sacrifice of praise,' the fruit of our lives, as well as of our lips, giving thanks to His Name.' In the words of the Apostle, Having these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.' IX. THE MAN OF SORROW. PREACHED IN THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF ST PETER'S, MARITZBURG, ON GOOD FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1866. 'Who hath believed our report ? And to whom is the Arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, And as a root out of a dry ground; He hath no form nor comeliness, And, when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should He is despised and rejected of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And we hid, as it were, our faces from him; He was despised, and we esteemed him not.'-Isa.liii.1-3. THIS chapter, which has been selected by our Church as one of the Lessons for Good Friday, may be justly called a psalm of the Messiah-the Messiah of the Jews first, but to us the Messiah of the whole earth. Their thoughts for many generations were fixed on the hope of a deliverer; they needed a national deliverer: but all men need a personal deliverer. They, as a nation, were enslaved and oppressed but all men are held in thraldom more or less; each man is conscious of being more or less enslaved and oppressed. The lower powers in man are always striving to bring the higher nature, the child of God, into subjection: the flesh ever lusteth against the spirit. As St Paul once exclaimed— 'I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that an! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' Yes we all feel our need, as he did, of such a deliverer. A national deliverer, such as the Jews looked for, by the might of this world, by prudent counsels, by force of arms, may free his people from force and cruelty. But how can a personal deliverer bring help to those oppressed with the burden of sin, loaded with the chains of evil habits? How can such a Saviour as this make common cause with the enslaved the failing-will, and help it up from under the feet of sinful passions, which are treading it down? Only by sympathy, only by long-suffering love, can he do this. And this chapter, in a gush of inspired poetry, with deep, prophetic insight, gives a description of the true Messiah, the true servant of God, the true deliverer of men,-a description which has been fulfilled in a measure in every one who has been such in any age under any circumstances, and eminently therefore in the Son of Man himself, in him whom we acknowledge as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Before, however, we proceed to draw from this passage the special lessons which it contains for us at this time, let me first point out the circumstances under which it was written, and to which, no doubt, it must be more immediately referred. We have been so long accustomed to hear the language of this chapter applied directly and exclusively to the sufferings of Christ, that we have almost lost sight altogether of its real original meaning, as we gather it from the context in which it stands. Such words as those in the text 'He is despised and rejected of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ' or those others which follow shortly after 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. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, Yet he opened not his mouth; He is brought as a Lamb to the slaughter, are so very applicable to the circumstances of the death of Jesus, that it is no wonder that by pious souls in all ages. they have been regarded as distinct predictions of that event, more especially as some of these expressions are actually applied to it by some of the New Testament writers. And, doubtless, they are predictions of that 1 6 event, though not in the way commonly supposed. As Christ is the great exemplar of all the Saviours of mankind, that have ever suffered in any age on behalf of their brethren, filling up that which was left behind of his afflictions,' -as he too, the captain of our salvation,' was made perfect by sufferings,' and, though a son, had to learn obedience by the things which he suffered,' before he could become the author of eternal salvation to them that obey him,'-the language of this chapter, generally, and of the context before and after, of which it only forms a part, may be applied pre-eminently to him, as it may be applied also in our measure to any one of us his brethren, who must be willing to suffer as he suffered, that we may rejoice as he rejoiced-to share his cross, that we may share his crown. But yet this chapter, and the whole section to which it belongs, was not written originally with any direct reference to Christ, or to any individual person at all, as you will very soon perceive, when I make a few quotations from it. You will see that the expressions of the prophet are, as I have said, generally, and for the most part, applicable to the case of him, whom we call preeminently the Man of Sorrows.' But they are not all suitable to him, nor can they all be referred to any single individual. I have mentioned already that the last twenty-seven chapters of the book of Isaiah are not the work of the older prophet, who lived in the time of Hezekiah, to whom the greater part-though by no means the whole of the rest of the book is due. They are the composition of a very much later writer, of one who lived in the time of the Babylonish Captivity; and, either from the fact of this later prophet's name being also Isaiah, or perhaps from some supposed resemblance in the style to the older prophecies, they have been incorrectly annexed to the writings of the older Isaiah, by the unknown Jewish editors, who collected the present Old Testament Scriptures, and authorized them as 'canonical.' I quoted on a former occasion some expressions from these chapters, which showed plainly that they were written during the time of the Captivity: and, as it is of importance to the understanding of the true meaning of the text before us, that you should have this point thoroughly settled in your minds, I will re peat one or two of these passages again with some additions. Thus we read 'Awake, awake! stand up, O Jerusalem, Which hast drunk at Jehovah's hand the cup of his fury; Thou hast wrung them out These two things are come unto thee, Who shall be sorry for thee? Desolation and destruction, the famine and the sword. By whom shall I comfort thee? Thy sons have fainted, They lie at the head of all the streets, as a wild bull in a net; The rebuke of thy God.' li.17-20. And then the prophet cries: O Lord, why hast Thou made us to err from Thy ways, Return for Thy servant's sake, The tribes of Thine inheritance, The people of Thy holiness have possessed it but a little while; Our adversaries have trodden down Thy Sanctuary.' lxviii. 17,18. "Thy holy cities are a wilderness; Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful House, Where our fathers praised Thee, Is burned up with fire, And all our pleasant things are laid waste.' lxiv. 10,11. These passages sufficiently indicate the state of things when the prophet was writing: Zion was a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation, their beautiful Temple lay a heap of blackened ruins. It is plain, therefore, that he was writing during the Babylonish Captivity; and it would seem that he wrote towards the end of it, for he speaks in several passages of Babylon itself as about to be immediately visited with severe retribution, for its unmerciful treatment of the captives of Judah. 'Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin-daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground; Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans; For thou shalt no more be called, The Lady of Kingdoms. I was wroth with my people, I polluted mine inheritance, |