In Jaffna Mrs. Griffith's health once more failed, and so seriously that an immediate return to Europe became imperative. Her husband, having transferred the business of the District to his esteemed successor, the Rev. John Walton, again proceeded to Madras. Here, while resuming his important avocations, he prepared his dear wife and his two children for their voyage home; and, entrusting them to the good providence of God, and the care of friends on board ship, he submitted to the grief and inconvenience of separation, considering it his call of duty to remain at his post.

At that time Mr. Griffith was, to human appearance, in vigorous health. He was full of life and animation, and was looking forward to a course of useful labour with all the happiness of cheerful hope. But a sudden change soon came over his bright and alluring prospects. A mortal disease, which baffled medical skill, developed itself within the first few months of his second residence in Madras. The only hope of recovery presented itself in a return to his native air. He accordingly embarked for the overland route. The transit over the desert and through Egypt was at that time a fatiguing journey for the most robust: it proved to be a source of most severe suffering to Mr. Griffith. When he had completed that journey, and embarked at Alexandria for Southampton, his health was in a most shattered state; so that, when he arrived in London, his family and friends were shocked at the change which had taken place in his oncevigorous frame.

It was clear to himself that his case was one of great peril, and that his recovery was very doubtful; yet he was reluctant to abandon hope of further labour for India. He could hardly believe that the qualifications for usefulness in that most important field, which he had acquired with so much labour, would be no longer employed, now that they were more ripe and more required than ever. He talked of his work, and its prospects, with an earnestness which his friends were more than once obliged to check, by reminding him of the insufficiency of his strength for animated conversation. Yet, when the sad truth that his career was near its close became too obvious to admit of doubt, he submissively said, "It is all right," and resigned himself into the hands of God.

He died in London, on the 29th of June, 1856, deeply lamented by his family, and by the Committee, who knew his worth as a Christian and a faithful Missionary of the Cross. His remains were interred in the Highgate Cemetery, in a grave belonging to the Wesleyan Missionary Society.

In closing this brief review of the life and labours of this muchvalued Missionary, two or three considerations present themselves, which may be expressed to some useful purpose. Our friend, like a thousand other youths of his day, might have remained at home with a family-circle in which he was admired and beloved, living in respectability and comfort, useful though in obscurity. When Divine Providence and Grace opened his path, and prepared him for an extensive field of Christian labour, it was still in his power to remain at

home; and in the opinion of his immediate acquaintances, or the majority of them, he would have acted rightly had he done so. But he chose the nobler course: he risked all worldly good, whether in possession or in promise, that he might take part in the conversion of men from idolatry to the worship of God, from sin and death to holiness and eternal life. He had his reward even in this world. He was directed to the chief battle-field of modern Missions. He confronted the Brahman and the sceptic in their own region, and foiled them with their own weapons. His attainments made him a match for the readiest disputant, and his honest zeal told on their consciences and hearts. To many thousands of benighted Pagans he announced Divine truth, and his earliest and latest labours were equally successful. Does the example excite admiration? Is it worthy of imitation? If those who can, will imitate it, shall we not cease to hear of men being wanted for India and other countries, and of stations being vacant which ought to have additional labourers and additional means for carrying on the work?

It appears to us an inscrutable proceeding in the Divine government, that a life of so much value should be shortened by an early death. Useful as Mr. Griffith was in the first year of his Missionary life, every year's experience prepared him for greater usefulness; and, when he died, he had few equals among his fellow-labourers. Had he been permitted to reach the ordinary term of human life, how great might have been his success! It may be some relief to the difficulty, if we consider that he would probably not have lived longer had he remained at home, surrounded by every domestic comfort. How many, who appeared as promising for life as he, have been called away earlier, without having been exposed to the unfavourable influences of climate and of labour which he experienced! Many of them have died before they began to live for the world. But, in the short space allotted to him, Mr. Griffith did the work of a life. If his pulpit ability had been allotted to one man, his literary attainments to another, and his diligence in business to a third, each would have been respectable in his department; but, as he was honoured with more than ordinary gifts, so he was permitted sooner to finish his work. Our regret at his early removal from a work for which his talents so well fitted him, should be accompanied by thankfulness that He who has “taken away" is the same as Ile who "gave ;" and, as it becomes us to bless Him who gave, so it is our duty to submit to Him who, in His wisdom, has seen good to take away.

Ought we, then, to yield to discouragement in the work of the Indian Mission? "The harvest is great," and "the labourers are few;" while, few as the labourers are, their number is again and again diminished by sickness and death. In these circumstances we may find the occasion for earnest and constant prayers to the Lord of the harvest. But we may also derive encouragement from the consideration, that labourers such as Mr. Griffith was are sent forth by the Lord of the harvest Himself. They are His gift. He is not impoverished by giving. Boundless resources are at His com

mand. When He "gives the word," and when that word is obeyed, "great" will be "the company of the Preachers." They shall fill the world with their doctrine; and "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”

CHRIST THE BREAD OF LIFE.

(Concluded from page 314.)

THIS leads us to observe, secondly, that the great general provision for human want is the incarnation of the Redeemer.

The name given to our Saviour by prophecy, and by the angel who spake of His birth, was IMMANUEL; which, being interpreted, is, GOD WITH US. The whole mystery of the incarnation is involved in this title; a mystery, the difficulties of which human nature may never be able to elucidate and remove, the doctrine implied being simply propounded to our faith on the authority of the great Revealer. That doctrine is, that the Divine and human natures are so united as to form one Person, who shall be the Object of human homage, trust, and love; and yet, that in this hypostatic union there is no loss of any quality or attribute pertaining to either of these distinct natures, and no confusion of the substance of either. So long, indeed, as we are ignorant of the manner in which soul and body, things of different and perhaps contrary essences, are united as one individual in man, (though the fact is matter of personal consciousness,) no objection can be raised on the ground of reason or experience against this view of our Lord's Person. Rationalism, which, with all its agonizing efforts of thought, has failed to give a full account of human nature, may presume to dogmatize on the subject before us, and to pronounce the incarnation an impossibility and a contradiction; but the pride and arrogance of such dogmatism are as repugnant to a true philosophy as to a childlike repose on revelation. At the same time, all the difficulties of the case are simply those of a logical kind; those which make us feel how limited is our knowledge of the essential qualities of body and soul, and of the respective attributes of a finite and of an infinite nature.

The moral view of the subject is one of endless interest and wonder, and gathers round it a fulness of glory which no words can express. This single provision seems to contemplate all the particulars of that loss and pain in which our entire race was involved, with a view to their removal. It was not sufficient, in order to human redemption, that some new man should arise in the ordinary way, and be endowed with superhuman qualities, such as seraphic strength and love; nor sufficient that there should be a new man formed in an extraordinary way by the power of the Holy Ghost,-so long as He was nothing but man for the distance between human and Divine would still be infinite. Divine wisdom decided that our Lord should take flesh of the Virgin Mary, who, being by nature a sinful creature, (notwith

standing the recent and audacious invention of the Church of Rome to the contrary,) brought our sin and guilt so near to Him, as to furnish in herself that point of actual contact at which they were repelled from His own humanity by His absolute holiness through the Eternal Spirit. He inherited the judicial pain, but not the carnal mind, its legal cause: and all this, in order to meet the requirements of the scheme of mediation between God and man; and so to afford illustration and proof that our salvation was wrought, not by lifting men up according to some educational scheme devised below, as by bringing God down. In our Lord's perfect humanity, for example, we find brought before us the moral standard to which we are to be conformed: it is our very ideal, and our sole one, of human holiness. It places that holiness before us as a definite object of attainment. Without this image of Him after whom we are to be created anew, we should be exploring we knew not what; our conceptions of righteousness would have neither consistency nor authority; we should not know where our chief good lay. Here is our light shining in a dark place; or rather, to keep closer to the imagery of our subject, here is our bread from heaven. Again, in the constitution of our Lord's whole Person, we have an exhibition of the infinite benignity of God toward our race. The condescension involved on Christ's part in taking "the form of a servant," while He is essentially "in the form of God," was sustained by His every act and temper during His sojourn on earth; and, as we learn from the promises He has left on record, still continues in His glorified state. We are assured of His perfect sympathy with us in all our exercises and distresses; which sympathy could not have subsisted, had He taken the angelic nature into union with the Divine. (Yet, in such case, He would have known our sorrows as facts, by His omniscience.) And, when our thoughts rise to the conception of the peculiar omnipresence of the Second Person in the Trinity, we, who are passing through the wilderness of the world, and exposed to destitution and danger, must needs think of Him in this new conjunction, as of the aliment everywhere prepared for us (so the Psalmist seems to have perceived by the Spirit) in the presence of our unseen enemies. The union of the Divine nature with the human, viewed not only in its formal aspect, but in the working out of its consequences, leads every reflecting mind to anticipate results of untold magnificence, compared with which, the very noblest heaven of pantheistical aspiration, where human nature is the highest form of Deity, is basely and insufferably poor. Beyond all which, let us not forget, (for this, indeed, is the great and paramount consideration which the discourse before us is intended to unfold,) that it was the Divinity in Christ which gave to His vicarious sufferings and death that value which made them atoning and propitiatory: His blood thus became "the Blood of God," on account of which God the Father could forgive the sins of the guilty. Had there been no human nature, there could have been no sympathy, and no atoning sorrows, at all; had the Divinity been wanting, there would have been, no value or dignity in the mediation, beyond what a

prophet or an angel might have presented: but, in the union of both, Christ takes away, in His own Person, and by the provisions of His Gospel, every principle of repulsion, legal or actual, between Jehovah and His guilty, ruined creatures; and so places redeemed men in a position to receive in this life, and much more in the life to come, communications of spiritual blessedness which, the Scripture itself has decided, cannot be written, spoken, or conceived through human language. The doctrine of the incarnation abundantly confirms those statements of the Divine word which have respect to the guilt, corruption, and helplessness of man in his fallen state, and to the nature and evil of sin. If we were otherwise than as Scripture represents us to be,—“ born of the flesh," "carnally minded," "dead in trespasses and sins," and "lost," then no such affecting condescension were required: but, if our state is one of utter revolt and ruin, without a pulse remaining of self-raising life and power,—and if sin is a unique evil, which no earthly analogy can help us to estimate,-then there needed One who should travail in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save. The same doctrine yields the deepest and sweetest consolation to those who, by a personal, penitent faith, have been made partakers of saving grace, and who are, to use the Apostle's phrase, "in Christ Jesus;" in respect that their very bodies are, through covenant-relation to Him, "washed with pure water," ere they partake of the full Gospel feast; that is, sanctified, or separated to God: a peculiar sacredness appertaining to their persons,-yea, even to their mouldering members, when they repose in the grave awaiting the resurrection of the dead; for they are still "in Christ." Such, O God! is Thy complete provision for a dying world; and so preciously verified are the words of Thy dear Son, "I am the bread of life, which came down from heaven."

We have now to show more explicitly, in the third place, that the benefits of the incarnation are communicated to us through our participation in the atonement.

In our Lord's discourse, the frequent interchange of the practical and spiritual idea of "believing" with the metaphorical one of "eating," is quite sufficient to prove that the two denote one and the same action; and the action itself is thereby all the more fully set forth. "Believe," saith Augustine, "and thou hast eaten." To show the infinite importance of this doctrine, our Lord asserts again and again, with increasing solemnity, that He is "the bread "—namely, the support as well as the source-"of life:" which life, flowing in essence and operation from His Person, may be estimated, as to its nature, from the fact that the life-giving grace takes effect upon believing men, who, as to the body, do like the Israelites die; that is, it takes effect upon the soul, and then, consequentially, upon the whole man at the day of resurrection. But now our Lord introduces a new term, and declares, "The bread that I will give is My flesh." The Socinian comment, which would make the term "bread" signify Christ's doctrine merely, fails to account for this change of expression for, however the wisdom of a teacher may, in Jewish phraseo