Now, we may see this, above all, in The adorable Name of Jesus.  That name, above all others, ought to show us what a name means; for it is the name of the Son of Man, the one perfect and sinless man, the pattern of all men; and therefore it must be a perfect name, and a pattern for all names; and it was given to the Lord not by man, but by God; not after He was born, but before He was conceived in the womb of the blessed Virgin.  And therefore, it must show and mean not merely some outward accident about Him, something which He seemed to be, or looked like, in men’s eyes:  no, the Name of Jesus must mean what the Lord was in the sight of His Father in Heaven; what He was in the eternal purpose of God the Father; what He was, really and absolutely, in Himself; it must mean and declare the very substance of His being.  And so, indeed, it does; for The adorable Name of Jesus means nothing else but God the Saviour—­God who saves.  This is His name, and was, and ever will be.  This Name He fulfilled on earth, and proved it to be His character, His exact description, His very Name, in short, which made Him different from all other beings in heaven or earth, create or uncreate; and therefore, He bears His name to all eternity, for a mark of what He has been, and is, and will be for ever—­God the Saviour; and this is the perfect name, the pattern of all other names of men.

Now though the Christian names which we give our children here in England, have no especial meaning to them, and have nothing to do with what we expect or wish the children to be when they grow up, yet the names of people in most other countries in the world have.  The Jewish names which we find in the Bible have almost all of them a meaning.  So Simeon, I believe, means ‘Obedient’; Jehoshaphat means, ‘The Lord will judge’; Daniel, ‘God is my judge’; Isaiah means, ‘The Salvation of the Lord’; Isaac means, ‘She laughs,’ as a memorial of Sarah’s laughing, when she heard that she was to have a child; Ishmael means, ‘The Lord hears,’ in remembrance of God’s hearing Hagar’s cry in the wilderness, when Ishmael was dying of thirst.

Especially those names of which we read that God commanded them to be given, have meanings, and to tell the persons who bore those names what God expected of them, or would do for them.  So Abraham means, ‘The father of many nations.’  So the children of both Isaiah and Hosea had names given them by God, each of them meaning something which God was going to do to the nation of the Jews.  And so John means, ‘Given by the Lord,’ which name was given to John the Baptist by the Angel, before his strange birth, in his mother’s old age.

But we must remember that the heathens also gave names to their children, though they did not know that their children owed any duty to God, or belonged to God, and therefore we cannot call their names Christian names.  Yes, the heathens did give their children names; some of them give their children names still.  And there is to me something most sad and painful in those heathen names, and yet most full of meaning.  A solemn lesson to us, to show us what the fall means; what man becomes, when he gives way to his fallen nature, and is parted from Christ, the Head of man.