KING, a. title applied in the Sc.riptures to men (Luke xxii. 25 ; I Tim. ii. r, 2 ; I Pet. ii. 13-17), to God (I Tim. i. 17 ; vi. 15, 16). and to Christ (Matt. xxvii. ; Luke xix. 3S ; John i. 49 ; vi. r5 ; xviii. 32-37)—to men, as invested with regal authority by their fellows ; to God, as the sole proper sovereign and ruler of the universe ; and to Christ, as the Messiah, the Son of God, the King of the Jews, the sole Head and Governor of his church. The kingdom of Christ, in Luke i. 32, 33, is declared to be without end ; whereas, in Cor. xv. 28, we are taught that it will have a period when God shall be all in all. The con tradiction is only in form and appearance. The kingdom of the Messiah, considered as a media tonal instrumentality for effecting the salvation of the world, will of course terminate when the pur poses for which it was established shall have been accomplished ; while the reign of the Son of God, associated with his Father in the empire of the world, will last as long as that empire itself, and never cease, so long as the effects endure which the redemption of the world shall produce alike in its remotest as in its nearer consequences.
Regal authority was altogether alien to the insti tutions of Moses in their onginal and unadulterated form. Their fundamental idea was that Jehovah was the sole king of the nation (I Sam. viii. 7) : to use the emphatic words in Is. xxxiii. 22, The Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king.' This important fact, however, does not rest on the evidence of single texts, but is implied in the entire Pentateuch, not to say the whole of the O. T. The Scriptural state ments or implications are as follows :—God is the creator of the world ; he saved a remnant from the flood ; towards the descendants of Noah he manifested his special favour ; to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, lie promised a land flowing with milk and honey. In the fulness of time he accomplished, by apparently the most unlikely and untoward means, the oath which he more than once sware to the fathers of Israel ; so that eventually, having furnished his people with a complete code of laws, , he put them in possession of the promised territory, assuming the government, and setting forth sane tions alike of ample good and terrible ill, in order to keep the people loyal to himself as to the only Creator and God of the universe, and specially as
. their supreme sovereign.
We consider it as a sign of that self-confidence and moral enterprise which are produced in great men by a consciousness of being what they profess, that Moses ventured, with his half-civilized hordes, on the bold experiment of founding a society with out a king, and that in the solicitude which he must have felt for the success of his great under taking, Ile forewent the advantages which a regal government would have afforded. Nor is such an attempt a little singular and novel at a period and in a part of the world in which royalty was not only general, but held in the greatest respect, and some times rose to the very height of pure despotism. Its novelty is an evidence of the divine original to which Moses referred all bis polity. Equally honourable is the conduct of Moses in denying to his lower nature the gratifications which a crown would have imparted—we say denying himself, be cause it is beyond a question that the man who rescued the Jews from bondage and conducted them to the land of Canaan, might, had Ile chosen, have kept the dominion in his own hands, and trans mitted a crown to his posterity. If Washington, at this late period of human history, after the accu mulating experience of above three thousand years has added its sanctions to the great law of dis interested benevolence, is held deserving- of high honour for having preferred to found a republic rather than attempt to build up a throne, surely very unequal justice is done to Moses, if, as is too generally the case, we pass in neglect the extra ordinary fact that, with supreme power in his hands, and, to all appearance, scarcely any hin drance to the assumption of regal splendour, the great Hebrew patriot and legtislator was content to die within sight of the land of promise, a simple, unrewarded, unhonoured individual, content to do God's work regardless of self. It is equally obvious that this self-denial on the part of Moses, this omission to create any human kingship, is in entire accordance with the import, aim, and spirit of the Mosaic institutions, as being divine in their origin, and designed to accomplish a special work of Pro vidence for man ; and therefore affords, by its con sistency with the very essence of the system of which it forms a part, a very forcible argument in favour of the divine legation of Moses.