exactly the Christian high priesthood and rule to which it was to yield.[20] A prophecy embodied in a fact which unites a people into an indissoluble organisation, and works through centuries moulding generation after generation, and gathering into one prodigious monument of priesthood, sacrifices, ceremonies, and temple, and the hopes and devotion of a race, this is the ground which our Lord selected for the basis of the spiritual kingdom which He would set up. He had provided Moses as a servant to construct the model of the house which hereafter He would build Himself; He had inspired Moses to create Aaron and draw out of him the levitical priesthood, because Himself would commission Peter, the perpetual fountain of the Christian priesthood, and would make Peter for all nations that which Aaron had been for one. But, as in all the preceding history, God left to man the exercise of his free-will. It was not open to the Jews indeed to frustrate the divine purpose, but it was open to them to receive or not receive the Christ when He came. They were ready to receive a glorious but not a suffering Christ. And the High Priest, sitting at the head of the Great Council of the nation, in the chair of Moses and in the dignity of Aaron, instead of accepting, rejected and slew Him with the Roman death of crucifixion, by the hand of the Roman governor, the bearer to the nation of the Roman imperial power. The High Priest slew Him further on the affected charge that He was plotting against the emperor's power; in reality because He acknowledged Himself to be the Christ, the Son of God.