The "fine twined linen," as expressive of Christ's spotless manhood, opens a most precious and copious spring of thought to the spiritual mind; it furnishes a theme on which we cannot meditate too profoundly. The truth respecting Christ's humanity must be received with scriptural accuracy, held with spiritual energy, guarded with holy jealousy, and confessed with heavenly power. If we are wrong as to this, we cannot be right as to any thing. It is a grand, vital, fundamental truth; and if it be not received, held, guarded, and confessed as God has revealed it in His holy Word, the entire superstructure must be unsound. Nothing can be more deplorable than the looseness of thought and expression which seems to prevail in reference to this all-important doctrine. Were there more reverence for the Word of God, there would be more accurate acquaintance with it; and, in this way, we should happily avoid all those erroneous and unguarded statements which surely must grieve the Holy Spirit of God, whose province it is to testify of Jesus. When the angel had announced to Mary the glad tidings of the Saviour's birth, she said to him, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" Her feeble mind was utterly incompetent to enter into, much less to fathom, the stupendous mystery of "God manifest in the flesh." But mark carefully the angelic reply--a reply, not to a sceptic mind, but to a pious, though ignorant, heart.--"The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; wherefore, also, that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." (Luke i. 34, 35.) Mary, doubtless, imagined that this birth was to be according to the principles of ordinary generation; but the angel corrects her mistake, and, in correcting it, enunciates one of the grandest truths of revelation. He declares to her that divine power was about to form A REAL MAN--"the second Man--the Lord from heaven"--One whose nature was divinely pure, utterly incapable of receiving or communicating any taint. This holy One was made "_in the likeness_ of sinful flesh," without sin in the flesh. He partook of real _bona fide_ flesh and blood without a particle or shadow of the evil thereto attaching.