know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep."-John, x., 15. The last verse will be considered first. The speaker, in this passage, was Christ. When he said, "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father," he must, beyond doubt, have spoken of himself in his united natures, and with special reference to his Godhead. It was only the omniscient Son who could know the Father, even as the Father knew him. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know ?"-Job, xi., 7, 8. These sublime interrogatories were propounded to demonstrate to feeble man his utter incapacity to explore and comprehend the mysterious and awful elements of the unsearchable God. The manhood of Christ had no greater capacity, physical or intellectual, than an ordinary man; it had no infinitude of comprehension; it admitted its want of prescience. The mighty speaker, then, who thus claimed community of omniscience with the Father, must have been the fellow of the Father's everlasting reign.

"And I lay down my life for the sheep." The speaker had two lives, the human and the divine; the drop and the ocean of vitality; distinct, yet united. If his meaning was that he would lay

down the human drop, leaving the divine ocean untouched, then must he have made a sudden, abrupt, and strange transition, in one brief sentence, from the altitude of his united natures, where the sentence began, down to his mere exclusive humanity. There is nothing on the face of the passage to intimate that such sudden descent was intended. Such abrupt transition is not required or indicated by anything in the context. In a verse shortly succeeding, in the same chapter, are found the memorable words, "I and my Father are one."-John, x., 30. The terms used by Christ, in the passage under review, were unlimited and illimitable. They import the laying down of both his lives. They are not satisfied with anything short of the totality. To compress them within a small fractional part of that stupendous whole, is to straiten, and distort, and maim the terms. Why will reasoning man gratuitously crucify the living, palpable, speaking words of the crucified God? Because, as the needle is true to the pole, so does unbending man implicitly follow the guidance of that hypothesis which he has adopted for his polar star, "God is impassible.” Yet has it been shown that this assumed polar star, though it has hung for centuries on the skirts of the horizon, is but an exhalation of the earth.

He who laid down his "life for the sheep" des

good shep

To whom Not to the

ignated himself by the name of the herd. "I am the good shepherd." was this endearing name applied? human son of Mary, but to the "Lord of glory." The human son of the Virgin was but the mansion of the good shepherd-the temple consecrated by the indwelling God. As, then, a man dieth not because his mansion is consumed; as the God is not destroyed by the destruction of the temple, so the life of the good shepherd would not have been laid down by the dissolution of his tabernacle of clay, according to the mighty meaning of the august speaker. His declarations, which so astonished the heavens, could only have been satisfied by the laying down of the divine life of the second person of the Trinity, in the scriptural import of the stupendous terms.

Christ did not leave the meaning of the term "life," as applicable to himself, to be inferred by reasoning process. Five chapters before that upon which we are commenting, he explicitly fixed its signification by his own paramount authority. "For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself."John, v., 26. The Father's own vitality was imparted to the Son. His was the life which came down from heaven. It was the life that had breathed vitality into created intelligences. When Christ,

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therefore, announced the laying down his life, he meant not merely the human drop. He included the divine ocean of being.

According to Christ's own explication of the term life, when applied to himself, the life of the incarnate Son was as the life of the Father. This authoritative explication of the term, when so applied, became a governing precedent for all future cases. Christ, then, in using the same term, with the same application to himself, five chapters afterward, intended, doubtless, to abide by his own explication and precedent. Hence we justly infer, that when he declared, " and I lay down my life for the sheep," he meant that the life which he was about to lay down was as the life of the infinite Father. It was the life, the whole united life of the incarnate God. The advocates of the prevalent theory cannot escape this conclusion, unless they are prepared to allege that the Son of God applied the term life to himself in one sense in the fifth chapter of John, and in a totally different sense in the tenth chapter of the same evangelist. But such discrepancy of meaning, in the use of a term solemnly defined by himself, and declarative of his own vitality, could scarcely have proceeded from the lips of the incarnate Word; at least, such discrepancy is not to be inferred without some scriptural intimation of its existence.

No such intimation is to be found in the volume of inspiration.

The incarnate God laid down his ethereal life, not, indeed, by its cessation even for a moment, but by sustaining, in his divine essence, the expiatory agonies substituted for the spiritual or second death that awaited the redeemed. The expiatory agonies assumed, therefore, the awful name of the penalty for which they were substituted. Inspiration aptly termed those sufferings death. The appellation commends itself to the children of men by its manifest appropriateness.

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In the passage concerning the coming immolation of the Shepherd God, the pronouns "I" and "my" hold conspicuous places. The personal pronoun "I" is thrice repeated to denote the second person of the Trinity, clothed in flesh. "I am the good shepherd." "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep." Mark well the mighty terms, "my life." Thus applied, the little pronoun "my" acquired a meaning high as heaven and vast as the universe. It gave such exaltation to its adjunct noun as to grasp the life which "inhabiteth eternity." No person employs the name of a whole to denote one of its minute parts. Should a historian or geographer apply the pe