HAS it not come? Must the Most High await the prayers of His creatures ere He can become a KING? Is His dominion yet but remote and lingering, and can the world and Satan thwart and retard it? Certainly not, as to the kingdom of his Providence ;—his sovereign and uncontrollable sway as the Former and Upholder of all things. The Saviour Himself teaches, in this very discourse, that universal oversight and supremacy of His Father, and presents it as being already come; when He tells of his clothing each lily, and feeding all the birds of the air, and making the showers to fall and the sun to rise, on every field of every tiller, around the globe. He who numbers the very hairs of our head, and marks the falling sparrow, and wheels along its orbit each vast and rolling world, needs not, and waits not for us to supply His sceptre, or to weave His imperial robes, or to confer, by our vote and election, His crown. The very necessity of His nature,—as the all-pervading, and the Most High, the Wisest, Best, and Mightiest of Existences, makes rule inseparable from his being. Sovereignty and Existence, are with Him indivisible. He that WAS AND IS, AND IS TO BE, and whose years are from everlasting to everlasting, is and must be,— through all that Eternity,-King of kings, and Lord of lords; and all other beings, in commencing their existence, begin it, as subordinate to Him, and dependant upon Him. Earth lies in His grasp. Hell quails beneath His glance. Heaven lives in His smile. And when, from His Throne, He proclaims, "I AM THAT I AM,”— the Universe, through all its depths and all its heights, responds in submissive awe: "THOU ARt, and ALL THINGS ARE OF THEE AND BY THEE, AND FOR THEE." But the Kingdom here intended, is something very different. It is the dominion of His grace,—that provision of his Infinite Mercy, by which He is to subdue our sinful race into cheerful allegiance, and exulting homage, and general service. This, as yet, has come but in part. Its full and final establishment has been. long the theme of prophecy, and the burden of prayer. The movements of God in His kingdom of Providence had respect from the beginning to the development of this kingdom of Grace. It had been announced in the garden of Eden, in the first promise, to the first offenders and parents of our race. Jacob, the dying patriarch, hailed its future glories in the coming of the Shiloh. The Jews, to whom the Psalms were a familiar book, read in the second of those Psalms Jehovah's decree proclaiming that kingdom, and inaugurating His Son as its potentate. Daniel, in his visions, had seen the four great monarchies of the world, but coming as the rival precursors of this Greater and Better, and Heavenly Kingdom, imaged by the stone cut out of the mountains without hands, and filling the whole earth. John the Baptist, our Saviour's forerunner, had announced this kingdom as near at hand. The heathen,-familiar with the existence of predictions that pointed to the age in which Christ was born as the age, and to Palestine as the scene of His coming,-looked, then and there, to see one making his appearance who was to rule the world. Herod dreaded it, and the babes of Bethlehem were massacred, in the hope, by that indiscriminate slaughter, to destroy the Predestined King of Israel and of all other nations. Pilate put over the cross of Jesus an inscription, not that Christ claimed to be, but that he was this King of the Jews; and the dying thief prayed to be remembered of his crucified Lord, when that Lord should come into the full possession of this his kingdom. Under various names, this kingdom was the subject of reference by our Saviour, and by his apostles after his ascension. Some of the expressions employed seem to represent it as future; and others, as, in part at least, already come; whilst, by the countrymen and contemporaries of our Saviour, the very nature of the kingdom was misunderstood. ancient Jew desired but political liberty and carnal aggrandizement; and nailed, in scornful ingratitude, to the accursed tree the hand that offered him but the pardon of sins, and eternal life, and a home and a throne in light, instead of the earthly and mortal joys, The |