same, so that.when a young man comes up from the country to this great city, who perhaps has his principles little formed, he may be surrounded by five or six young men more experienced than himself, who make it a subject of fervent desire and prayer to convert his soul, to save him from temptation, and to bring him to form right habits, he may come to the metropolis to be blessed for ever. Besides this, your example as an associated body is, I think, likely to do the most extensive good. I trust you will maintain friendly relations with all similar associations in this town. I recur to what I began with, the mischiefs to be remedied are so enormous, that all those who love the Saviour ought strenuously to co-operate with each other in resisting them. If there are, therefore, other associations of young men, whether in the Church of England or in other evangelical denominations, who are associated as you are for their own improvement and the good of others, maintain friendly relations with them. Besides the very large number of young men who come annually to London for the purpose of obtaining a professional education, there may perhaps be as many as 50,000 young men in the different offices of this metropolis, its shops, and among its skilled artizans. What a spectacle would be afforded to this country and to Europe, if 2000 or 3000 such young men, being closely associated, feeling for one another, sustaining one another, praying for one another, should systematically exert a powerful influence on the remaining 48,000. One such young man, with the habits I have described, has more influence than ten who are thoughtless; and therefore 2000 so associated, sustained by such concert, would probably exercise the most powerful influence, both on employers and on the young men employed by them. But that influence would spread wider still; imagine a large portion of the 50,000 young men whom I may suppose to be thus engaged, instead of wasting their Sabbaths in idleness, and giving themselves to reckless and fatal indulgence, were, like you, thus prayerfully and resolvedly to pursue their highest happiness, for time and eternity, would the lower laboring classes fail to be influenced by that bright and beautiful example? Do you think that all that are laboring in this town would not feel the force of such an example-10,000 or 20,000 young men openly professing to follow Christ, and living according to their profession-it would be such a standard of

the cross as has not been raised for centuries. Raise it then; and let the rest of this metropolis see that if there is much of folly and much of vice among us, there is also, thanks be to God, much of principle and much of prudence too; and the result may be further, that when those devoted men who labor in this town as London City Missionaries or as Scripture Readers go into the houses of the poor, and find some who are infidel, some superstitious, some profane, and some recklessly immoral, if they can but point to you as holding in your earliest youth a bright example to those around you, it will go to many a heart, and we may hope that myriads in this town may glorify their Saviour through your instrumentality. Far more, I am persuaded, than by any contributions in your power to offer, far more than any direct association for the promotion of Missions at home or abroad, will the lustre of such a lovely life, the force of such a good confession, tell on the uninstructed or immoral population around us. God grant you may have the energy, wisdom, and piety to do so, and thus may this great metropolis, the greatest of all the cities that ever existed in this world, hold forth to the capitals of Europe such an example as they, blessed by grace, may some day likewise be induced to copy.

A LECTURE,

BY THE REV. ALEXANDER MCCAUL, D.D.

Of all terrestrial localities, Jerusalem is that which has engaged the most general, the most permanent, and the most sacred regards and affections of men. Twelve hundred years before the birth of the mystic city of Emperors and Popes, it was the habitation of a royal priesthood, and now, after the lapse of three thousand seven hundred years, it still continues the holy city of Jews, Mahometans, and Christians, that is, of one half of the human race. The arms of man and the power of time have utterly extinguished the glories of Tyre, and Babylon, and Thebes, and other wondrous cities of antiquity. The light of the gospel has dispelled the halo with which ignorance and superstition had encircled the residence of Christ's pretended Vicar. But neither the ploughing up of her foundations, nor the scattering of her people, nor the varied changes of her masters, nor the corruptions of Christianity, nor the triumph of Mahometan imposture, has made any change in the reverence with which Jerusalem is still regarded by the children of the prophets, the believer in the Koran, the advocate of the Papacy, and the champion of the Reformation. The reason is, that God himself has invested the hill of Zion with circumstances of eternal interest, which no changes or chances of human history can weaken, and no lapse of ages destroy. In the days immediately succeeding the deluge there lived the priest of the Most High God. During the dispensation of the law, there on the threshing-floor of the Gentile Araunah the plague was stayed, there the house of David reigned, there stood the sanctuary of God, and there,

to be the mediator of a better covenant, the Son of God poured out his soul unto death, and the redemption of mankind was accomplished. But its wonders are not yet

finished, nor its destinies yet fulfilled. There is scriptural warrant for believing that it is still to be the place where the most gracious purposes of the Almighty are to be developed, where Israel is to be gathered, the glories of the throne of David established, the fountain head whence streams of blessedness are to flow to all nations. To point out the scriptural warrants for these expectations, and, by doing so, prove the final restoration and conversion of the Jews, is the object of the present Lecture.

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The first passage to which I shall direct your attention is Isaiah lxii., which begins with an expression of Messiah's determination never to cease his intercessions until the object of his affections shall enjoy the glories and the blessedness of a complete salvation. For Zion's sake," he says, "" will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth;" and a little farther on He commands others to perform the duty which He had himself

voluntarily undertaken. "I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night ye that make mention of the Lord keep not silence, and give Him no rest, till He establish and till He make Jerusalem a praise in the earth." If these words are to be interpreted in their ordinary sense, no doubt can exist as to the future glorious restoration of Jerusalem and the Jewish people. It becomes necessary, therefore, to examine into the meaning of the terms, as upon this depends, not only in the chapter immediately referred to, but in others which shall be adduced, the conclusion at which we are bound to arrive. What did the Lord intend by the words Zion and Jerusalem? Did He mean that city which all the people whom Isaiah addressed must have understood; or did He employ these words in a mystical sense which none of the men of that generation could comprehend, and which, in fact, has never since been comprehended by the nation to whom the prophecy was sent, and in whose language it was written? The first, most reasonable, and unexceptionable rule of interpretation is that which directs us to expound the words of an ancient writer in the sense in which

they were accepted by the men of his own time and nation, and in accordance with the opinions, expectations, the historical and geographic circumstances of the writer and his contemporaries. Apply this principle here, and the allegorical meaning of Jerusalem, whereby it refers not to a definite locality-a city familiarly known to Isaiah and his hearers-but to something of which they were altogether ignorant, to an idea then unborn in the minds of men, and intelligible only to those who lived centuries after the delivery of the prediction-Apply this principle, and this allegoric meaning must be rejected. Nothing but the express declaration of the Lord himself or his messengers can warrant us in rejecting the plain and ordinary meaning of the words of Scripture. It may please God, and it has pleased Him, to speak in the language of parable, and to withhold from the wise and prudent what He has revealed unto babes and sucklings. But to assert that all prophecy is allegory, that its words are not to be received in the ordinary sense, that it was delivered in language utterly unintelligible to the speaker and the hearers, is, in fact, to maintain that Scripture is obscure and dangerous, and an unsafe guide in matters of faith. And such is practically the doctrine of those who affirm that in the text and similar passages Jerusalem does not mean the metropolis of Judea, but the christian church. In the long interval that occurred between the times of Isaiah and the rise of Christendom, there was, on this principle, no possibility of avoiding error. Saint and sinner must alike have died in the belief that in days then future the Lord would comfort Zion and build up her waste places, and make her the joy of the whole earth. In all those centuries Jerusalem could mean nothing but Jerusalem. One generation handed down the hope and the interpretation to another, and it was interwoven in all the national ideas of religion, and it was rooted deep in the heart of individuals; and it appears as the current doctrine and belief in the days of Christ, and the Son of God stamped the meaning of the word Jerusalem with his authority, and the evangelists wrote it in the Gospel in its old and usual acceptation, and the Apostle of the Gentiles retains it in his epistles in the only sense in which it was intelligible: and how then was it possible that the Jews, with all their national prejudices, and hopes, and pertinacity, and faith in the faithfulness of God, and the unchangeable