us, whom he hath called." So reprobate,-so fatally doomed, is the world; and so unequivocally is it marked out as the great antagonist principle or power, by which the truth and they who believe it are to be tried, persecuted, and purified.

Yet, into this very rock the Lord would have a wedge inserted; on the very dross and dregs he would have a wholesome and salutary influence exerted.

For this end, he constitutes his CHURCH on earth a missionary society, and lays upon it the burden of prosecuting and carrying out his own ministry, when he is gone to the Father. He establishes, in fact, the true apostolic succession-the real chain of authority and official title-the only warrantable tradition, reaching from his own advent to the end of time.

In the first place, he speaks of his own apostleshiphis own personal commission-when he says to the Father (ver. 18), "Thou hast sent me into the world" -thou hast made me thine apostle-given to me, personally and individually, an apostolical, or in other words a missionary, commission. Hence Paul, writing to the Hebrews (chap. iii. 1), calls Jesus "the apostle of our profession."

And this office or apostleship requires a peculiar consecration, a special dedication or sanctification, internal as well as external. The commission of him who sends is not enough: there must further be the sanctification of him who is sent. And this sanctification or consecration must be real, not formal. It must be no mere outward act, but the inward dedication of the heart and of the will, implying consent and full devotion on the part of him who receives the commis

sion, concurring with the seal and sanction of him who gives it. Accordingly Christ says, in reference to his own apostleship "I sanctify myself" (ver. 19). Thou hast sent me, or made me thine apostle and missionary, into the world, and in that character I sanctify myself— I devote, I consecrate myself to this office, and to all that its execution includes. For when thou preparedst for me a body—when mine ears were bored by thee— when I became a voluntary servant, did I not say, “Lo, I come, I delight to do thy will, O my God; yea, thy law is within my heart?" (Ps. xl.; Heb. x.)

Such is the apostle of our profession, sent by the Father into the world-for "him hath God the Father sealed "—and sanctifying himself through his willing obedience to the Father;-through the law, or the truth, or the will of God, abiding within his heart ;and, above all, through his offering of himself as a consecrated victim to the Father—a holy, spotless, and allsufficient sacrifice, in the room and stead of the guilty.

And now, secondly, he appoints his successors in this office, and he makes his own apostleship, in all respects, the model of theirs. Here, as it were, we have the official appointment, and the ordination prayer ;"Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth" (ver. 17-19). I have given to them a commission similar to that which thou gavest me; or rather, identical and the same. I have made them apostles and missionaries into the world, as thou didst make I have sent them, as thou hast sent me. And now, as I sanctify myself, so let them be sanctified.

me.

My sanctification of myself is for their sakes. It is the model of their sanctification-of that consecration which they need to qualify them for the ministry which I now delegate and hand over to them; it is more—it is the means of it. My sanctification of myself is true and real; it is through thy law within my heartthrough thy word and will, which I willingly embrace, and which I delight to do. And it is the prelude and preliminary to theirs. It makes their sanctification possible; and provides, moreover, the agency and instrumentality, the might subjectively, and the motives objectively, by which it is to be effected. For it is "through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth that they are chosen, from the beginning, to salvation" (2 Thess. ii. 3), and to this apostleship as an important part of salvation. And of whom does the sanctifying Spirit testify but of me? And what is the truth to be believed but the truth as it is in me?" I am the truth." Are they not then-these whom thou hast given me, O Father-most intimately associated and identified with thy Son, alike in his very act of sanctifying himself as thy servant and their surety, and in its blessed and holy fruits-the cleansing from all sin which it secures, and the all-renouncing self-devotion to thee which it at once demands and inspires?

Thus, O Father (if we may venture, without irreverence, to prolong this paraphrase of words so sacred),— thus, my holy and spontaneous dedication of myself to thee, in all that thou requirest of me for accomplishing the ends of the mission on which thou hast sent me, will become to them the pattern, the principle, the creative cause, of a similar dedication of themselves on their part, through the truth. Thy word will be to

them what it has been to me. Thy law will be within their hearts, as it has been within mine. And thou wilt make them as ready and obedient servants as thou hast found that I have made myself. Sanctify them, O Father, as I sanctify myself. Let the same mind be in them which has ever been in me, in reference to the work, and service, and sufferings of the apostleship, which they now receive from me as I received it from thee. Let my people be willing in the day of my power;—as willing as I myself have been. To this effect, in substance, is the apostle Paul's argument upon the fortieth Psalm, as he reasons from it in that passage of his Epistle to the Hebrews to which reference has already been made, and in which a very intimate connection is established between Christ's sanctifying of himself, in the terms quoted from the Psalm, and our being sanctified-that is, cleansed and consecrated by the will of God, which Christ came to do. The apostle is speaking of our Lord's willing surrender of himself to the Father, in his undertaking to do what the Levitical sacrifices could never accomplish. "The blood of bulls and of goats could not take away sin." "The ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean might sanctify," or cleanse, "to the purifying of the flesh," or the removal of ceremonial defilement, but could not " purge the conscience from dead works to serve the living God." To effect this, a higher and holier victim is demanded, and one capable of voluntary service and of a voluntary substitution. Accordingly, the Eternal Son becomes a servant; his ears are said to be "bored," in allusion to the form appointed in the law to be observed in the case of one entitled to his freedom, con

senting of his own accord to be a servant (Exodus xxi. 2-6). Or, which is the same thing, "a body is prepared for him;" for it is in his incarnation that his voluntary subjection to the Father takes place; he is "made of a woman, made under the law."* And being thus willingly obedient to the Father, he sanctifies himself for his mission and work; devoting himself as the substitute of the guilty to the whole service and suffering required of him in their stead. Thus, he came to do the will of God; "By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once. for all" (Heb. x. 10). Our sanctification-or, in other words, our cleansing from guilt, as well as our separation and consecration to God-follows from that will of God which our great High Priest came to do. By that will we are sanctified, or, according to the meaning of the word sanctify in this epistle, purged from sin, so that we come into the identical position which Christ himself occupied when he dedicated himself to the mission of glorifying the Father, and finishing the work which the Father gave him to do.

This, however, is rather anticipating our third observation. What we have gathered out of the passage more immediately before us is, that whatever apostleship Jesus had from the Father, and whatever consecration to that apostleship,-he shared both of them with the brethren actually present for whom he offered this solemn prayer. Another step in advance remains to be taken.

For as the Lord named successors to himself in his apostleship, so also, in the third place, he named suc

*The original Hebrew and the Septuagint Greek are thus virtually at

one.