God's great truth is to be resisted and banished from the earth.

Let us pray that our views of the Sabbath may be those enlightened ones which Jesus taught that our feeling toward the criminal may be less indignation and more compassion, such as Jesus showed; and bless God that Christ, who left us a propitiation for the sins of all that believe, has left us also an example, that we may follow in his steps.

gathered you, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but ye would not!" All this is divine thought audible in the language of man, great eternal truths clothed with the imperfect drapery of human speech-the accommodation, as it were, of what would be infinite and inconceivable to the finite and imperfect apprehension and comprehension of man. The great idea here meant to be conveyed is, that just as Christ looked for fruit on that figtree, and found none, he comes down to earth still, and looks for practical fruits, such as those enumerated in Gal. v. 22, in the conduct of every believer, and there finds them, or finds them not.

The other difficulty that has been adduced as peculiar to this miracle is, that there seems to be expressed an unnatural and almost unnecessary revenge in blasting by a curse the fig-tree, because it had no fruit to satisfy the hunger of Jesus. But this objection originates in a feeling that there is something inconsistent with what we should expect in the character of Jesus when he displayed any thing like anger, or what might bear the likeness of resentment. But in truth it arises from a feeling that nothing like judgment should occur in the dispensations of God— from a secret persuasion that we entertain in the depths of our hearts, that there is nothing in the creature to necessitate punishment, but every thing to draw down approbation, affection, and love. But we do read of Jesus being angry; we read of the love of Christ, we read also of the wrath of the Lamb. In one word, Jesus was man. But we shall see that historically and morally there was a reason for the peculiar manifestation of divine displeasure which is embodied in this miracle. Every miracle that we have before examined has been expressive of unmingled beneficence; now it does seem that there was needed some divine manifestation of justice and of judgment also. Amid so

many and so glorious rays of infinite goodness, it does seem natural that there should be at least seen, if not in all its intensity, one ray of that God who is the consuming fire. Amid so much as we have been considering to draw out love from man's heart, something was wanted to prevent presumption appearing in any man's bosom. And yet, even here, where there is a miracle to teach us that while God overflows with love, he is yet a just God, and angry with the wicked every day-yet even here, and amid such evidence of judgment, there are seen the reflections of goodness and mercy. Mercy is mingled with judgment; for while the subject of healing, in every miracle we have considered, was a man-while the object of the goodness that Jesus displayed was the living and sensitive and rational creature, the monument of his curse is not a rational, sensitive man, but an irrational, insensible, and unconscious tree. Thus we see that when he was teaching how good he was, he made man to be the recipient of that goodness, and the page on which he wrote the lesson; but when he was teaching how holy he was, and how truly he would avenge sin, he made an unconscious tree to be the lessonbook, and the recipient of that judgment: so that in the very midst of his judgment we see mercy; and we are taught by these spectacles more and more that goodness is his every-day delight, and that judgment is his "strange work."

But it has been asked, in the next place, "Why so treat a tree? Why so treat an unconscious and unoffending tree?" I answer: Christ did not ascribe to the tree responsible or moral qualities; he merely made it the symbol of such responsibility and of such moral qualities. We read, for instance, in the prophet Hosea, a similar image: "I saw your fathers as the first ripe fruit in the fig-tree at her first time." So in Joel, "He hath laid my vine waste,

and barked my fig-tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away." And in Luke, "He spake also this parable; a certain man had a fig-tree planted in his vineyard." That is not historically true; it is merely a probable history used to represent and embody eternal and spiritual truths. All external imagery is perishing, but the inner and spiritual thought for which it was constructed lives for ever. Jesus came, it is said, and sought fruit, but found none. The tree is used as a symbol, and it was blasted to teach man a great moral and spiritual truth. The very fact that it was a thing, and not a man-in other words, the very objection that some make to the blasting of the fig-tree in order to teach a lesson to mankind, is the best and strongest reason why it should be selected for this purpose; for all nature was made to be subservient to man, nature's lord and king. All things now exist for man's good as well as for man's glory; and the selection of this tree, even by its sacrifice and destruction, to convey a new lesson to mankind, is an instalment and foreshadow of that glorious epoch when nature shall hear the last trump, and rise from her degradation and her ruin, and become the mighty lessonbook from which a vast and redeemed population shall learn new and glorious lessons of the goodness, and mercy, and beneficence of God.

I may also notice, (and I mention these things because they are historical facts worth recollecting,) that while the vine is used to represent what is beautiful and good, the fig-tree is never or rarely used in the Bible except as the symbol of what seems bad. It is the barren fig-tree we read of; it is the fig-tree cast down and destroyed. And it is remarkable that the ancient Rabbis of the Jews assert in their traditions that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a fig-tree; and it is no less remarkable that, among the Greeks, with whom the primeval traditions of Para

dise seem to have survived, or who gathered them, rather, from the Phoenicians, who brought them from the East, a fig-tree is generally used in a bad sense. A Greek would

call a bad man, auxivos avne, a fig-tree man. So the word "sycophant"-a flatterer, a man who acts dishonestly— when literally translated, means a man that shows figs: showing how widely this association may spread, and what changes it has outlived, as it still runs through the language of mankind; as if the traditions of the Jewish Rabbis were true, that the fig-tree was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There can be no absurdity in supposing its being so. It might have been an apple-tree, a pear-tree, or an orange-tree, or a bramble; the gist of the appointment was not in what the tree was, but in what it was the symbol of; its representative character was the reality. God appointed the tree simply as a test—a visible test, to show man that he was a creature owing allegiance to his Creator, and that the instant he did what his Creator forbade, that moment he assumed to be his God, and gave up the lowly position of a dependent creature, and wickedly attempted the sovereignty of the independent God.

But the greatest difficulty that has been felt in the interpretation of the miracle, and of the statements that immediately precede it, arises from the clause inserted in the account of St. Mark, that "the time of figs was not yet." An objection has been raised on this by those who search the Bible for reasons for rejecting it, as has been done by Strauss, for he is the only infidel who seems to have really read the Bible. Paine, Voltaire, Hume, and those men who made jokes at the expense of the Bible, but really at their own expense, acknowledged that they had never read it: the one party had only gathered fragments of it from the missals and breviaries of Rome, and the other party only fragments of it at second-hand, and from not the most