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I. THE GENERAL PROPRIETY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IMAGE OF A MARRIAGE AS IT IS HERE EMPLOYED. Familiar emblems are needful for the better understanding of the Gospel by the mass of the people. Now, the relation between Christ and His Church, it is evident, must be of a nature not to be adequately typified by anything in the material world; and nothing could be found in human life which might so aptly represent it as the relation of husband and wife in the holy state of wedlock; and in this the analogy is so perfect that the notion" of the ancient Jews has received the express sanction of St. Paul, that the relation of the Saviour and the Church was typified in the union of our first parents, and in the particular manner of Eve's formation out of the substance of Adam.

II. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THIS MARRIAGE. The magnificence of the court of the king as it appeared on the wedding-day, the splendour of the royal robes, the profusion of rich perfumes, are dwelt on. Of these last such quantities were used that the whole person was not merely sprinkled, but "ran down" with them to the very skirts of the garment. The psalmist describes the fragrance of Messiah's garments to be such as if the robes had been made of the very substance of aromatic woods. "Thy garments are all myrrh, aloes and cassia." No palace adorned with ivory — a favourite ornament of palaces — could furnish such fragrance, no, nor even the incense that was burnt upon the golden altar as a grateful odour to the Lord. Now, all these perfumed garments were typical; first, of the graces and virtues of the Redeemer Himself in His human character; secondly, of whatever is refreshing, encouraging, consoling, and cheering in the external ministration of the word; and, thirdly, of the internal comforts of the Holy Spirit. We proceed to other particulars in the magnificent appearance of His court on the wedding-day, figurative of the glory of the Church in its final condition of purity and peace, and of the rank and order of particular churches. "Kings' daughters are among Thy honourable women." But the primary meaning of the word rendered "honourable" is "bright, sparkling," and the imagery of the original would be better preserved if rendered thus, "Kings' daughters are among the bright beauties of Thy court." The beauty certainly is mystic — the beauty of evangelical sanctity and innocence. But who are these kings' daughters? They are the kingdoms and peoples, perhaps the various national churches, fostered for many ages by the piety of Christian princes, and now brought to the perfection of beauty by their being cleansed from all wrong — they may welt be called "kings' daughters," of whom kings and queens are called in prophetic language the fathers and mothers. Then, the consort, "the queen," who is she? Some expositors have imagined that the consort is an emblem of the Church catholic in her totality; the kings' daughters, typical of the several particular churches of which that one universal is composed. But the queen consort here is unquestionably the Hebrew Church; the Church of the natural Israel, reunited, by her conversion, to her husband, and advanced to the high prerogative of the mother Church of Christendom; and the kings' daughters are the churches which had been gathered out of the Gentiles in the interval between the expulsion of his wife and the taking of her home again, that is, between the dispersion of the Jews by the Romans and their restoration. The restoration of the Hebrew Church to the rights of a wife, to the situation of the queen consort in Messiah's kingdom upon earth, is the constant strain of prophecy. The prophet, I said, describes the Gentile converts as becoming, upon the reunion, children of the pardoned wife. And so St. Paul (Romans 11.). The standard gold upon the queen's robe denotes the treasures of which the Church is the depositary — the Word and Sacraments, and the dispensation of grace and forgiveness by their due administration. Then follows —

III. THE COUNSEL TO THE BRIDE (Vers 10, 11). If a princess from a distant land, taken in marriage by a great king, were admonished to forget her own people and her father's house, the purport of the advice would easily be understood to be, that she should divest herself of all attachment to the customs of her native country, and to the style of her father's court, and learn to speak the language and assume the dress, the manners and the taste of her husband's people. The "father's house," and "own people," which the psalmist advises the queen consort to forget, is the ancient Jewish religion in its external form, the ceremonies of the temple service, the sacrifices and the typical purgations of the Levitical priesthood. Not that she is to forget God's gracious promises to Abraham, nor the covenant with her forefathers, nor any of the wonderful things God did for them. But only, so as to desire no more, the ancient Levitical rites and worship. They have served their purpose, and are now to be laid aside. Christ, her husband, is her paramount authority now, and is entitled to her unreserved obedience. There is given —

IV. THE DESCRIPTION OF THE QUEEN (ver. 13). "The king's daughter." Who is this? Not some new personage, the Christian Church in general composed of both Jews and Gentiles, as Luther thought, but, as Bishop Hume observes, "that the connection between Christ and His spouse unites in itself every relation and every affection." She is, therefore, daughter, wife and sister all in one. The same seems to have been the notion of a learned Dominican of the seventeenth century, who remarks that the Empress Julia, in the legends of some ancient coins, is called the daughter of Augustus, whose wife she was. But, with much general reverence for the opinions of these learned commentators, I am persuaded that the stops have been misplaced in the Hebrew manuscripts by the Jewish critics upon the last revision of the text — that translators have been misled by their false division of the text, and expositors misled by translators. The stops being rightly placed, the Hebrew words give this sense: "She is all glorious" — she, the consort of whom we have been speaking, is glorious in every respect — "Daughter of a king!" That is, she is a princess born; she is glorious, therefore, for her high birth. She is, indeed, of high and heavenly extraction! Accordingly, in the Apocalypse, the bride, the Lamb's wife, is "the holy Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God." The psalmist adds: "She is conducted in procession to the king" — in all the pomp of a public procession. This may point to some remarkable assistance which the Jews will receive from the Christian Gentiles in their re-settlement in the Holy Land (Isaiah 18, at end, and Zephaniah 3:10). And then follow the prediction as to the Church's children and the distinguished character they shall hold, and he closes with setting forth the design and predicting the effect of this Divine song.

(Bishop Horsley.)

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KJV: Kings' daughters were among thy honourable women: upon thy right hand did stand the queen in gold of Ophir.

WEB: Kings' daughters are among your honorable women. At your right hand the queen stands in gold of Ophir.