greater Son." There are also in the Psalms very significant details. When we read these various minute touches,

"And in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink,”

"They part my garments among them,

And upon my vesture do they cast lots,"

"They pierced my hands and my feet,"

We are brought very near to the cross of Cavalry, with its familiar but sad incidents, though the descriptive lines were written hundreds of years before the events thus foreshadowed.

(3) How long is the Gulf Stream? over three thousand miles. We have gone over two of the millennial divisions of our Messianic stream "in the law of Moses" and in "the psalms," and now we sweep out into the times of "the prophets" themselves. Isaiah stands forth pre-eminent. He prophesies, "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call his name Immanuel," that is, "God with us," likewise called "Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God," and we think of the Virgin Mary and of her first-born with his divine characteristics. The same prophet speaks of a land "glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light," and we have the whole Galilean ministry by the sea of Gannesaret pictured as with a single stroke of a master artist's brush. In that marvellous fifty-third chapter, which has made infidels believers, and confounded sceptics who would not be convinced, we have a vivid portrayal of the suffering Messiah, so enigmatical till the Christ of history exactly filled the prophetic outline, even to minutiae, for when we read that the wondrous Person "opened not his mouth," we are reminded of the patient silence which was so inexplicable to Pilate; and when we read again, "His grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death," we are struck with the correspondence to subsequent facts, when the Lord was "with the

wicked" in being crucified between two thieves, and was "with the rich in his death" in that he was buried in the private garden of the wealthy Joseph, while the rich Nicodemus brought a hundred pounds of fragrant "myrrh and aloes."

From Isaiah we pass to Micah, and hear him prophesying that out of humble Bethlehem "shall One come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting," and this was sufficiently specific to make the Jewish Sanhedrim, more than seven hundred years later, officially declare that Bethlehem was to be the birth-place of the promised One. If this is not minute prediction, there is no such thing as minuteness. Subsequent prophets never for a moment lose sight of the coming Messiah. Jeremiah says, "I will raise unto David a righteous Branch," Ezekiel says, "My servant David shall be king over them; and they all shall have one Shepherd," and after a mystical seventy weeks, says Daniel, "Shall the Anointed One be cut off," "to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness." Haggai says, "I will fill this house with glory," "The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former," but as the second temple was not specially glorious of itself, was indeed so much inferior to the first that the older Jews actually "wept" with disappointment, the greater glory promised for it must have been none other than the coming to it of the Messiah, who therefore was connected by this prophecy with this second house, whose rebuilding by Herod was never counted a third structure, and whose destruction by the Roman armies, 70 A. D., fixed and defined the time within which the Christ should appear, and before the post-exilian temple was forever destroyed, there did come to it One who was glorious, "fairer than the children of men."

Zechariah's predictions, too, were minute, presenting

still other features by which the Christ might be recognized. Said this prophet, "They shall look unto me whom they have pierced," and the crucified One with his pierced side comes to view through the intervening ages. The King, whom this same sacred writer represents coming "lowly, and riding upon an ass," while yet "his dominion shall be from sea to sea," suggests the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and the still more triumphant march of the present around the earth. The passage, "They weighed for my hire thirty pieces of silver," which were cast "unto the potter, in the house of the Lord," makes dramatic that scene of Judas throwing down in the temple the same number of silver pieces wherewith the innocent blood of his Master had been betrayed.

What a wealth of Messianic delineations is being gathered while we are being hurried along the stream of prophecy, and we reach the flood tide in that last of the prophets, Malachi, who exclaims with exultant hope, “Behold, I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple," and we see at once John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth whose way he prepared by announcing his coming and by pointing him out as the long-expected Lamb of God, and our Gulf Stream of Messianic prophecy, which we have been following through the law of Moses, and the psalms, and the prophets, all the way from beauteous Eden, breaks at last upon the first century with the melody of the ocean's gleaming surf, with the musical sound of “many waters" that sparkle with a gladsome light. "We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write," and we have found him by the minutiae of prophetic utterance through thousands of years. And from this single line of Messianic evidence among many other lines that might be presented, "minute prediction" would seem to be not a "barrier" needing to be swept away, and

"modern doubt" would seem to partake somewhat of the nature of the ancient slowness to believe which the Lord himself sadly reproved.

In conclusion, to vary for a moment the figure permeating all that has here been written, as a red strand runs through all the cordage of the British navy, we have traced through whole millenniums the scarlet thread of Messianic prophecy. Or shifting our position yet again, as we glance backward through the vista of centuries, we are reminded of a not infrequent scene in the mountains. Alpine ranges stretch away for miles, peak succeeding to peak, and in the early morning, while dark shadows lie along the valleys and far up the steep slopes, summit after summit, every Mont Blanc, is gilded by the rising sun. So a long sweep of vision into the past shows a succession of mountain tops golden. with the rays of the Sun of righteousness, and while there are many low vales unlighted, the towering heights are so illumined with glowing prophecies, that there is one stream of Messianic light from Eden to the Cross, and the radiance reaches to the present, and shall go corruscating down to the remotest future.

ARTICLE III.

DUALITY.

BY THE REV. JOSEPH E. WALKER, A. M., MISSIONARY. OF THE AMERICAN BOARD TO FOO CHOW.

WHEN China was forced into contact with Western nations it was like encountering another planet; for in her were hundreds of millions of beings most diverse from us, with their own independent history and civilization. The contact must profoundly affect both them and us; and though in the gospel of Christ we have a boon to impart to them which is more than all the world besides, they too have somewhat to teach us: and under the above heading I wish to set forth a line of thought which had its beginning in contact with the Chinese. They are a formal people, fond of numerical regularity; and pages might be filled with instances of this: but duality has the fundamental place. First, they say, the Limitless produced the Extreme Limit; and this in turn produced the yin-yang, or dual principle. One writer says, "From the subtile essence of heaven and earth the dual principles of yin-yang were formed; and from their joint operations came the four seasons; and these putting forth their energies, gave birth to all the products of the earth." Every thing is classed as yin or yang. Sun, day, heat, male, etc., are yang: moon, night, cold, female, etc., are yin. Once some Chinese officials were calling on the governor of Hong Kong, just after a change of ministry in England; and he explained the situation to them. They 1 William's Middle Kingdom.