day of his shewing unto Israel.'--LUKE i. 67-80.

Zacharias was dumb when he disbelieved. His lips were opened when he
believed. He is the last of the Old Testament prophets, [Footnote:
In the strictest sense, John the Baptist was a prophet of the Old
dispensation, even though he came to usher in the New. (See Matt.
xi. 9-11.) In the same sense, Zacharias was the last prophet of the
Old dispensation, before the coming of his son to link the Old with
the New.] and as standing nearest to the Messiah, his song takes up
the echoes of all the past, and melts them into a new outpouring of
exultant hope. The strain is more impassioned than Mary's, and
throbs with triumph over 'our enemies,' but rises above the mere
patriotic glow into a more spiritual region. The complete
subordination of the personal element is very remarkable, as shown
by the slight and almost parenthetical reference to John. The father
is forgotten in the devout Israelite. We may take the song as
divided into three portions: the first (vs. 68-75) celebrating the
coming of Messiah, with special reference to its effect in freeing
Israel from its foes; the second (vs. 76, 77), the highly dramatic
address to his unconscious 'child'; the third (vs. 78, 79) returns
to the absorbing thought of the Messiah, but now touches on higher
aspects of His coming as the Light to all who sit in darkness.

I. If we remember that four hundred dreary years, for the most part
of which Israel had been groaning under a foreign yoke, had passed
since the last of the prophets, and that during all that time devout
eyes had looked wearily for the promised Messiah, we shall be able
to form some faint conception of the surprise and rapture which
filled Zacharias's spirit, and leaps in his hymn at the thought that
now, at last, the hour had struck, and that the child would soon be