LECTURE VIII.

ON THE PERSONAL FIGURES, OR TYPES, OF THE SCRIPTURES; PARTICULARLY THOSE OF MOSES AND JOSEPH, PROPOSED BY ST. STEPHEN, IN HIS APOLOGY TO THE JEWS.

THE Scripture would have supplied us with

much more matter, of the same kind with that in the two preceding lectures. I might have set before you the history of Gideon's victory, and the fall of Sisera; which were signs of the spiritual victories of the church over the enemies of her salvation *. I might have considered the rejection of the Jews, as it was prefigured in the histories of Cain and Abel, of Jacob and Esau, of Isaac and Ishmael, of Ephraim and Manasses: to which I have ad

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* See Isaiah ix. 4. Psalm lxxxiii. 9.

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ded a view of their present state, as signified by the fall of the proud Nebuchadnezzar, and his temporary banishment amongst the beasts in a state of insanity, till the times of judgment. passed over him. The grace of God to the heathen world, in admitting them to the salvation of the gospel, might have been exemplified by the healing of Naaman the Syrian, and the visitation of the widow of Sarepta: which two cases our Saviour pointed out to the Jews at Nazareth; but they would not bear the most distant hint of the reception of the Gentiles ; and were so filled with wrath, that they would have thrown him down headlong from the brow of an hill, (after the Roman fashion) as an enemy to his country; for so were traitors punished at Rome, by being thrown from the top of the Tarpeian Rock.

Many figures are to be found in the occurrences and circumstantials of the history of the gospel by those who read it with such an intention. In short, the history of the Old and New Testaments hath a secondary or prophetical sense in many instances: its great events were signs and figures of things not seen as yet; and many of them are in force as such to this hour. Great things are still to be expected, of which we can form no conception, but as they are set before

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us in the figures of the sacred history. God shall descend, and the earth be on fire, and the trumpet shall sound, and the tribes of mankind shall be assembled, as formerly at Horeb. Distress shall come upon a wicked world, when its iniquity shall be full, as once upon Babylon, and afterwards upon the apostate Jerusalem. The armies of the Lord shall encompass it; and it shall be overthrown, with them that dwell therein. For this reason, the visitation of Jerusalem was foretold in such terms by our Blessed Lord, that in many of his expressions it is hard to distinguish, whether that, or the end of the world, is to be understood.

These things, however, I must at present leave to your meditation, and go forward to the figurative histories of individual persons; such as were the prophets, kings, heroes, and saints of the old testament; who by their actions, as well as their words, foreshewed the coming of that Saviour, in whom the saint made perfect through sufferings, the conqueror, the prince, the priest, and the prophet, were to be united. As the things which befell the church at large, happened to them for ensamples to the whole congregation of Christian people; so the things which befell the prophets of old happened for ensamples of the Saviour himself; that his cha

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racter and history, as the true Son of God who should come into the world, might be infallibly ascertained and demonstrated, by a comparison with the various characters of those who had been most eminent in the church of old. Some of these characters were extremely different from others, and the events of their history very unlike; but the character and history of the Messiah was to comprehend them all. For this end their lives were puposely conformed by the divine Providence to the image of him that was to come after.

This consideration, when we see the force of it, will reconcile us to some strange things, which might appear very unreasonable, if they were to be considered only in themselves, not under the relation which they bear, and were intended to bear to higher and greater things. How monstrous would it seem in any other history, that a man should be buried in the body of a fish, and cast up alive again after three days upon the dry land! But if this strange thing happened, that it might afterwards be compared with the return of Jesus Christ from the dead, for the salvation of all mankind; then the preservation of Jonah becomes fit and reasonable; it being of infinite consequence to the world, that the fact of Christ's resurrection, when it should

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happen, should be admitted and believed; and so the case was worthy of the divine interposition. Jonah was not preserved by a miracle for his own sake, but for a sign, to instruct the people of God in the truth of their salvation and the peculiar means or mode of it. Two strange events of the same kind are more credible than one; because the objection is removed which might arise from the singularity of the case. The resurrection of Christ is a true fact, and a credible fact: for why? it was foreshewn by the preservation of Jonah; another fact of the same kind. And again, to take the matter the other way; the preservation of Jonah was a miracle, worthy of God, from its relation to the resurrection of Christ; the most important fact in itself, and the most necessary to be believed, of all that should ever happen from the beginning of the world to the end of it. Jonah's deliverance was intended to do what the apostles were sent over the world to do, viz. to witness, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our Saviour himself hath directed us to make this use of Jonah's history. The Jews required of him some miraculous fact as a testimony that he was the true Messiah: and he gave them this as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the son of

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