Isai. liii. 2, 3. For he shall groio up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground : he hath no form nor comeliness : and, when voe shall see him, there is no beauty
that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief : and we hid as it were our faces from him: he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
WE find in almost every branch of science, that truth can be discovered only by deep and serious in- vestigation. If we rest in superficial inquiries, we shall be led into numberless and fatal mistakes. In what relates to religion more especially, an impartial examination is necessary, because the doctrines of revelation are confessedly repugnant both to the prejudices and passions of mankind. Yet, strange as it may appear, there is no other science, wherein men form their opinions on such slender information, as in that. The generality adopt the notions that are current in their day, without ever considering whether they be right or wrong : the natural consequence of which is, that, in many instances, they embrace error in preference to truth. This was too much the habit of the Jews in reference to their Messiah. Our Lord had cautioned them not to judge according to appear- ance, but to judge righteous judgment ; nevertheless they paid more attention to received opinions than to the oracles of God. Had they searched the Scrip- tures, they might have found that their expected Messiah was to suffer as well as to triumph : but they, thinking only of a temporal deliverer, despised the low condition of Jesus, and made his humiliation a ground of rejecting him. That such would be their conduct, the prophet had foretold in the words before us ; wherein he assigns the low estate of Jesus as the very ground, on which the united testimony of Pro- phets and Apostles should be discredited.
In the words themselves he sets forth,
First, Some marks and characters of the Messiah, and, Secondly, The treatment he should meet with in the world.
I. The marks and characters given of the Messiah were not only exceeding various, but apparently in- consistent with each other ; and they were multiplied