fore their faces, appeared to them only as the common 'carpenter's son of Nazareth' (Matt. xiii. 55).

As a matter of course, eyes which could not discern the Kingdom of Heaven in its coming, nor the King, greater than Solomon, who brought it nigh, were as little capacitated to perceive the Kingdom of Darkness which surrounded them, and that fully armed Strong One upon its throne, who was now about to be overcome, stript, and spoiled by One still stronger (Luke xi. 21, 22). The Jews did not understand Jesus, when He offered them true freedom from the worst of slaveries, and bluntly answered Him, 'We be Abraham's seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any one: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?' (John viii. 32, 33.)

To the God-man's penetrating eye, however, the intimate connection between the Seen and the Unseen, the Natural and the Supernatural, lay fully open. He saw that the Jews, in their fanatical resistance to His Kingdom of Truth, and in their deadly hatred to His holy Person, were plainly influenced by the loveless, hateful power of Darkness. They were in reality only the willing visible instruments of a crafty invisible Instigator. In spite of their vaunted Monotheism, their ancient privileges as the 'chosen people,' their daily services and sacrifices, their sanctimonious scrupulousness in legal observances,— they had to hear the judicial denunciation: 'Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him' (John viii. 44). We read that it was 'the devil' who put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray Him (John xiii. 2); and when the chief priests and captains of the temple and elders went out to seize Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, He told them, 'This is your hour, and the power of darkness' (Luke xxii. 53). Surely we need search for no stronger proof of the reality of Satanic influences amongst men than the fact that Jesus Christ, the Sinless, the Holy, was hated, condemned, and crucified by the Jews, and that the claim of the Christian religion to universal acceptation is still so persistently and so extensively resisted in the world. St. Paul lays bare the naked truth when he says, concerning the unbelievers, that the

Gospel is 'veiled' to them, and that 'the god of this world has blinded the eyes of their minds, so that the light of the glory of Christ cannot dawn upon them' (2 Cor. iv. 3, 4).

Thus, an authority which cannot be questioned by any believing Christian, and which must be decisive for us, in judging historical phenomena, leads us to acknowledge in the hostile acts of tangible men against Christ and His Cause the intangible agency of mysterious powers of Darkness. It was the Jews who crucified Jesus, and afterwards persecuted and killed His disciples, and His death is even declared to have been foreordained by Divine counsel (Acts iv. 28), yet notwithstanding all this, the Jews, in what they did to Jesus and His disciples, were not acting as the seed of Abraham, or as God's people, but as 'children of the devil,' and as tools of the Murderer from the beginning, and the father of lies (John viii. 44).¹

Therefore also their triumph could only be apparent and their success temporary. God's purpose yet prospered. The Crucified became the centre of a Church, the rejected Prophet the crowned Monarch of a universal and everlasting kingdom. St. Peter could say to the Jewish Council, 'The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew, hanging him on a tree. Him did God exalt with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour' (Acts v. 30, 31); and St. Paul could write to the Philippians, 'God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things