APOCALYPTIC SKETCHES.

LECTURE I.

CHRIST'S MANY CROWNS.

"On his head were many crowns."-Revelation xix. 12.

THE crown and cross of Christ are inseparable in our minds: the crown has a retrospective reference to the cross; the one is the consummation and flower of the other. Christ had many conflicts, and in each he triumphed, and therefore he is presented to our view on this occasion as the wearer of many crowns. Every struggle in which he took part was necessary: the cup was given him to drink, and he drank it.

It is, therefore, with reference to his many past conflicts, that we now notice the many crowns which he wears. He endured all that the law denounced on us as sinners. It said, "The

soul that sins shall die," and He died, infinitely died. Not one element was poured into that cup (and all bitterness was concentrated there) which He did not drink and exhaust; there was not one struggle into which he did not enter, and triumph most gloriously for us in it; nor was there one conflict which did not lead to a corresponding crown.

He fulfilled all the law demanded. It said, "Do and live." He did it in our stead, and lived to give us life. He magnified the law and made it honourable. Its greatest exactions received, in his obedience, a glorious response; and a crown on his brow is the evidence of his victory, and that victory is our plea at the judgment-seat. He fulfilled all prophecies, and promises, and types relating to the Messiah; each prediction was successively personated in him; each promise found its echo, and each type

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its counterpart in him. The accomplishment of these liabilities, in his state of humiliation, was his victory; and each obstruction he surmounted, each step he made good, each position he gained, terminated in a crown. His cross was the path to his crownhis sufferings were the pioneers of his victories; and his many crowns are therefore the expressive memorials of his many trials, and many triumphs. He undertook to represent Deity to mankind, and to bring God within the horizon of mortality. He finished the portrait, he perfected the great enterprise. "We beheld his glory as the glory of the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth." "God was made manifest in the flesh." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." In other words, he accomplished this glorious apocalypse. He personated in himself all the splendours and attributes of God. He let God shine and glow through humanity, in undimmed glory, and manifested to mankind all that man or angel can reach or know of Deity; and having finished the sacred sculpture, he received the corresponding crown.

But besides these evidences of crowns, as far as these are symbols of victory, he wears many diadems, which are also the evidences of sovereignty. He is a king as well as a conqueror. The crown of creation is his. "By him all things were made, and without him was not any thing made that was made." "But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom. And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail." Heb. i. 8, 10–12. There is not a pebble on the shore, nor a planet in the sky, which he did not create; whatever defies inspection by its minuteness, or exceeds our comprehension by its magnitude whatever attracts by its beauty, or is fragrant through its perfume-whatever is prized for its value, or venerated for its antiquity-all were made by Christ. He wears the crown and wields the sceptre of all. Not an earthquake rocks the globe, nor a wave rolls on the bosom of the sea-not a flash leaps from the

clouds, nor a bud peeps from the bough, which he does not unprison and charter for their respective missions.

As all things were made by him, so all things reflect more or less his glory. So full and overflowing is the earth with the evidences of divinity, that the Pantheist says the word is God— thus praising undesignedly, by his blasphemy, as much as the Christian by his adoration. Pantheism is false, but Pan-Christianism is true. Creation is Christ developed; and yet its grandest scene is but a comma in the apocalypse of his glory. Every object speaks of Christ, and reflects his beauty, his excellence, and love; the withered leaf driven by the whirlwind sparkles with his glory; the dew-drop trembling on the rose-leaf, and the snowy summit of the Alps, reflect alike the splendour of his majesty. A chord of love runs through all the sounds of creation, but the ear of love alone can distinguish it.

His glory shines from every ray of light that reaches us from a thousand stars; it sparkles from the mountain tops that reflect the first and retain the last rays of the rising and the setting sun; it is spread over the expanse of the sea, and speaks in the murmur of its restless waves; it girdles the earth with a zone of light, and flings over it an aureole of beauty. In the varied forms of animal tribes, in the relations of our world to other worlds, in the revolution of planets, in the springing of flowers, in the fall of waters, and in the flight of birds, in the sea, the rivers, and the air, in heights and depths, in wonders and mysteries, Christ wears the crown, sways the sceptre, and exacts from all a royal tribute to his sovereignty and glory. We can behold, but we cannot augment it; we cannot add one ray of light to the faintness of a distant star, nor give wings to an apterous insect, nor change a white hair into black. We can unfold, but not create; we can adore, but not increase; we can recognise the footprints of Deity, but not add unto them. All things were created by him, and for him. Heaven was created by and for him—his glorious humanity its central object, its Lamb upon the throne, its illuminating sun. "Where he is," is heaven; angels are the executors of his sovereignty. He is the head of angels; they receive their embassy from him: they worship him; he sends them forth as ministering spirits to the heirs of salvation; all the

worlds throughout the infinitude of space were made by him to be mirrors of his glory: they roll and beam in their orbits under the impulse of his touch; they glow in the reflected lustre of his cross, and silently hymn redeeming love, while they gather round our earth, and gaze and wonder at the mysterious scenes which have occurred upon it. "The earth is his, and he made it." There is not a multiplicity of gods, as the heathen dreamed, but many crowns are on the head of the one Creator and Governor of all.

Our life on earth is subject to the sovereignty of Christ. He fixed the hour and place of our birth, and he will determine the place and hour of our death. Every pulsation in the heart is the rebound of his touch; we grow old under his sovereignty, unable to arrest the rapid influences of decay, to restore the youthful colour to gray hairs, or to brush away the mists from the dim eyes of age. We feel we are carried along on an ebb-tide, the impulse and direction of which are derived from on high; and that when our places on earth are vacant, others will be summoned, in the sovereignty of the King of kings, to fill them, and to follow out their responsibilities. Our souls, too, are equally subject to Him, on whose head "are many crowns." "All souls are mine." Whatever of hope lights it up with the foresight of immortality-whatever of joy, repose, progress, and perfection it attains-whatever of sorrow it feels-whatever of regret, remorse, repentance, it experiences-are all under his sway, and within the range of his control. He only is able to redeem, regenerate, and save it it has sunk so deep in ruin, that divine sovereignty alone can raise it; yet in its very aphelion it is not beneath the notice nor beyond the reach of Christ.

Christ is the sovereign of the universe, and atheism is a lie, a delusion, a folly. None are so truly objects of pity as those morally and mentally diseased souls who are guilty of renouncing their belief in the existence of God. It is surely unutterable folly to sacrifice hope and joy to some cold metaphysical abstraction, and to reject all that sustains the heart and supports the head of weary humanity, at the bidding of a syllogism. Earth sleeps under a paternal eye, and is safe within a sovereign arm. Let mankind know it is the fool who says in his heart, "No God."

How glorious a spot is earth! Over it are spread the shadows of the cross and crown of Jesus. The sun and stars shine to let us see where Christ lay. This nook of the mighty universe is covered with a kingly lustre; but kingly eyes alone can see it. The image and the superscription of Christ are traceable on all beauty and preciousness below. It is the glory of earth that he found a cradle and a grave in it; it is the safety of earth that he reigns and rules it. How blessed will be that promised restoration of all things for which humanity groans, when the reclaimed earth shall emerge from the smoke of the last fire, fresh and fair as when first the morning stars sang together; when the usurper shall be cast out, and all rebel elements shall be calmed and subdued, and sin shall be expunged, and death dead, and life alive for ever, and the wilderness be made glad, and the desert blossom like the rose-when every atom of it shall glow as with the glory of Deity-when the undulating hills, and the rooted rocks, and the majestic mountains-when the virgin beauty of the morn, and the matron dignity of evening, and the mystic pomp of the starry night, and all stars above, and all flowers below, and all spiritual beauty, and all moral excellence, shall combine to adorn that crown which is only one of many on the head of Him who is King of kings and Lord of lords!

Christ also wears the crown of providence, as well as the crown of creation. He rules what he has created. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." In fact, the very existence of earth is the consequence of the rule of Christ. It exists because he wears the crown. When sin was introduced, all its springs were smitten with terrible paralysis, and its just and deserved doom was instant and entire disorganization and decay. Such would have been its lot if Christ had not stepped in between the polluted earth and its provoked doom, and arrested its ruin by interceding, "Spare it yet another week! I will die a victim on one of its hills, and magnify a broken law, while I reclaim by forgiving a guilty people; and I will take on my head the crown, and on my shoulder the government of earth thus respited." The existence of man is, therefore, evidence of what Christ has done. Earth, the home of generations of the living, and not the sepulchre of the dead, is proof of its rolling under restraining and forbearing