envied him, but Jacob, his father, it is said, marked these visions, and observed the saying, although at the moment he rebuked the apparent arrogance of Joseph's speech.

Subsequently, when Jacob is called to bless Joseph's children, he chooses Ephraim the second son before Manasseh the first-born, and finally, when on his death-bed; Jacob predicts the coming of Shiloh from the line of Judah; but when he comes to Joseph, he blesses him above all his other children, and says, that from Joseph shall come the great shepherd to gather into one fold the scattered flocks or twelve tribes of Israel, and who will sling the stone that is to destroy the mystical Babylon of idolatry.

So that from Joseph, and especially from EPHRAIM, for Joseph, and not from Judah, the final or seventh messenger or Messiah is to come.

The Messiah, or sent one, is applicable to a series of messengers or prophets, and is not confined to one solitary individual. There is more than one Messiah alluded to in the old Hebrew Scriptures, but the "last" stands for, and includes by its position, the return of the end to the beginning of the great cycle of life, Alpha to Omega, and Omega to Alpha; and thus the last is first, and the first is last, for circles end where they commenced. The first angels or

witnesses of God upon earth were man and wife, Adam and Eve. The last are equally two in one, or man and wife. The two first witnesses were martyrs to sacerdotalism, and two last witnesses are equally to be martyrs, but in another sense, to the same system of priestcraft: (vide Rev. chap. xi, 3rd to 12th verse.)

With respect to the title of "Saviour of the world," the first who is recorded to have possessed this, is Joseph himself, who received it from the Egyptian monarch as a testimony that God worked in and by Joseph's instrumentality for Egypt, and the world at large. It is true that the Egyptian monarch's title had a double signification, and he did not probably see the full scope of this name of "Zaphnath"paaneah," but the fact remains.

Each of the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and

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Daniel, say in effect, of their commissioned authority, just what Jesus of Nazareth said, namely, that they are Joshuas, or Saviours, and revelations of the great first and last of the eternal word of life, but they all speak of some one to come after them, to fulfil or take up that portion of the great work which they leave unfinished. Jesus of Nazareth is no exception to this rule, he is found asserting more than once that there is another to follow him, and of whom he says, "Greater works than these shall he do because I go to the "Father;" and afterwards Jesus says to John in the Apocalypse of this same messenger or Messiah. "He shall rule "the nations with a rod of iron, even as I have received of "my Father." And again, in another place, "I will be to "him a God, and he shall be my Son." This is spoken of the future, and cannot have any reference to Jesus himself, who was already the Son of God, and speaking to his angel at the time.

When Isaiah speaks of the Messiah or the Christ of God, he includes Jeremiah and others equally with Jesus of Nazareth, but his prediction extends beyond Jesus, for he says in the celebrated fifty-third chapter, "He shall see his "seed (children) and prolong his days;" whereas Jesus of Nazareth left no seed, and his life was cut short before reaching its meridian, and he did not prolong his life subsequent to his resurrection among the children of men, which is the prolongation that the Isaiaic writer alludes to.

And the same is the case in the Psalms of David and others. Their poetic prognostications include all that happened to Jesus of Nazareth, but they extend beyond his individual witness or martyrdom. For instance, in the 72nd Psalm, it is positively stated that every nation to the uttermost part of the earth shall be given as the Messiah's dominion. From the forty-fifth Psalm, it is plain that this anointed king is to be a married man, because his queen is mentioned in the ninth to the fourteenth verse, and in the concluding verse his children are mentioned; moreover the throne of his dynasty is to be established for ever. In other places, the eighty-ninth Psalm for instance, the promises

that are made to the Messiah are to be inherited by his children through succeeding generations. The words are thus recorded: "His children shall endure for ever, and his "throne as the sun before me."

Now it is plain that all this has no reference to Jesus of Nazareth. The poetic prognostications contained in these Psalms do undoubtedly apply to Jesus as the anointed one or Messiah, in so far as they are applicable to his special mission, but they do not end with him, because they embrace the two final witnesses or martyrs, who are sent for judgment on the two first messengers or angels who lost their first estate, and upon their crafty serpent seducer.

The title fixed by Pontius Pilate upon the cross, over the head of Jesus, was simply "King of the Jews," or the King of Judah, but the title of the final Messiah and martyr is King of Judah and Joseph, or King of the Jews and Israelites.

Asaph declares in Psalm lxxviii, 67, 68, that in his day God had passed by the tribe of Ephraim, of Joseph, and had chosen Judah for the Messiah's throne. And at Solomon's death the children of Ephraim along with the other ten tribes are separated from Judah and Benjamin, and this great schism between Jews and Israelites represented by Judah and Joseph is widened until it ends in total and absolute separation, so that at Jesus of Nazareth's coming, there remained only the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, specialized as the "Jews," for the Messiah to be king over. Pontius Pilate was doubtless an unconscious agent in what he did when he limited Jesus' title to King of the Jews, and his snappish answer to the Jewish clergy, when they demanded an alteration, shows that the man obeyed an impulse that overruled his own will, and which he knew better than to resist.

The key to this severance of the twelve tribes of Israel, and their final gathering under one sovereign is to be found in Ezekiel's vision, as detailed in the thirty-seventh chapter, of the resurrection in the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel (or the Ezekielitic prophet whoever he was) is directed to take

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two sticks, and to write upon one stick, "For Judah, and "the children of Israel his companions ;" and upon the other stick, "For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and all the "house of Israel his companions." And then to join these two sticks so labelled, the one to the other, so as to constitute one stick only.

The explanation of this sort of pantomimic acting is to the effect, that in the last days God will gather the children of Israel out of the nations where they have been dispersed, and will collect them and bring them all together as one nation, under one king, into the land of promise, never again to be separated any more for ever.

The Jews and Israelites represented by Judah, and Ephraim of Joseph, so long separated from the time of Rehoboam's rash government, are henceforth to be one homogeneous family. The promised king is called by the generic name of David, or the beloved, and we have seen that the patriarch Jacob, as his last will and testament, proclaimed and predicted that this sovereign or final shepherd of the regenerated family of Israel would come from Joseph, and not from Judah.

The promises to the Messiah are to the king of restored Israel, or Jews and Israelites amalgamated into one theocratic system of family government, and the throne of this Messiah in his capacity of a public servant or minister, are to him and to his children, and children's children, so long as the sun and moon endureth, that is to say, for everlasting. This cannot apply to Jesus of Nazareth who is confessed to be, by Paul in his first letter to the Thessalonian converts, (fourth chapter, and sixteenth verse,) an archangel in heaven. To argue that an archangel, such as Jesus of Nazareth is said to be, is to return to the inferior status of marrying and begetting children, is too sublimely absurd to be entertained in argument for a moment.

That the final martyrs or witnesses of God, and the angels of judgment, do not specially apply to the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, is evident from careful study of the following facts recorded in the Psalms, where, in addition to such

plainly expressed statements as are found in the eighteenth and eighty-ninth Psalms and elsewhere, that the promises are to the Messiah and to his children for evermore, it is stated that the call of the final messenger is made in the NIGHT. The mission of this angel of judgment embraces a wider field of work in its particular way, than that assigned to any preceding prophet, not excepting even that to Jesus of Nazareth. The significance of this in the second Psalm and in the ninth verse, is referred to by Jesus himself in the Apocalypse, as events still in the womb of time.

The nature of the final judgment is spoken of in Psalm lxxvi, cx, where it said that the valleys of the field of Armageddon shall be filled with the corpses of the opposing forces, and again in Psalm cxviii, it said that "all nations" compassed the Messiah round about, but that final discomfiture and destruction awaits their schemes. This great battle field of Armageddon is called the valley of Hamon Gog, by the prophet in the book of Ezekiel, in the thirty-ninth chapter. The events predicted in this place are so plain that none but the self-deceived, (and all men are more or less self-deceived,) can mistake the startling significance of the predictions here recorded.

In Psalm lxxi, the prayer of the Messiah is "Forsake me "not when I am old and grey headed." This cannot apply to Jesus of Nazareth, neither could it apply to David himself when he used the expression, for he says a little further on, that he expects to be quickened into life, and brought up again from the depths of the earth or the grave of hell. This alludes to martyrdom, and King David was not a witness of God in this sense. The next Psalm, which is actually the continuation of the preceding ones, is apparently limited by King David for his son Solomon, but his words are here, as they are elsewhere, overruled by the spirit giving them a wider significance. The expression of "ALL kings shall fall down before him, ALL nations shall serve "him," was neither fulfilled in the case of Solomon, nor even in that of Jesus Christ.

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But beyond all this, there is something recorded as predic