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of felicitous expressions of Divine truth, they both gratify and nurture religious feeling:

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

How fondly we dwell upon some apt and beautiful petition in prayer. How greatly we are moved by snatches of a pious psalm or hymn. It is not that it teaches us any new truth; it is not merely that it reminds us of any old truth-this might be done by the most homely prose; but it is that it puts familiar truth before us in a form that both the heart and the imagination delight in; and the heart always retains the most tenaciously that which the imagination shapes for it.

A verse of a hymn will do for us what a sermon has no power to do. It will flash light into our greatest darkness. It will float to us a life-buoy in the utterest shipwreck of our hope and joy.

"Other refuge have I none,

Hangs my helpless soul on thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone,

Still support and comfort me."

How we cling to it, and how it comforts us !—we hardly know why, it is a truth so old and familiar, save that it expresses it so beautifully, and through it we come afresh to Christ himself.

How often has the 23rd Psalm trembled upon dying lips, and comforted dying hearts. When we can no longer reason we can feel, and holy hymns and psalms furnish concise and beautiful forms for the expression of our feeling, when perhaps we are too feeble to make forms for ourselves. When our hearts are cold, they are quickened by finding words of fervour provided for them; and when cast down, they are cheered by words of confidence. When Luther can no longer reason, he can dispel his sadness by singing the 46th Psalm. How many a hardened, godless man, has been smitten into repentance by a sudden recollection of some hymn, learned perhaps in a Sunday school, or at a sainted mother's knee. Like the sound of village bells, they charm us; like the still small voice of God, they subdue us; like guardian angels, they preserve us; they themselves have a "gentleness which makes us great," aye, when rougher things would be utterly powerless to touch us.

You will find this beautiful expression, as indeed the psalm in which it occurs, in the 22nd chapter of the Second Book of Samuel, with, however, some slight and instructive variations; there the psalm is historically recorded, probably as David first composed it for his own private use. Here it is somewhat altered, probably to adapt it for more general use in the tabernacle. Various readings of the verse have been given, but none of them more plausible than this of the received version, and all preserving the same fundamental idea. Let us take two or three illustrations of the principle that it so beautifully expresses.

I. The first shall be taken from God's merciful dealings with our race, and the effects that they have produced. His purpose concerning our race was not to destroy it, or to disable it; but to

restore, exalt, and bless it. And this purpose He has sought to realize by His gentleness-by immediate promise, and kind forbearance, and loving encouragement.

We are apt to forget that God's purpose need not have been a saving purpose at all. He might have simply purposed our punishment and immediately inflicted it, as He punished the angels who sinned.

But we are born into a dispensation of mercy; we find men looking and striving after spiritual salvation. The first words that we are taught are words of God's pity and grace. The first utterances to Him that we learn are loving praise and prayer. And we are apt to forget that this is not our natural or necessary relationship to Him. How different it might have been, if" in the midst of wrath God had not remembered mercy."

It were very vain for us to speculate what the alternative would have been; whether the race would have ended with the first transgressor, and what his condition of being would have been. Assuredly God's retribution would not have made him great. It would have overwhelmed and destroyed him; the angels who sinned are not made great by their punishment. It is, however, enough for us to remember what God has done, and what has been the result. In His infinite love and pity He has "devised means whereby His banished ones be not expelled from Him." He has proclaimed an amnesty for those who have broken His laws. He has sought to restore us, and not to punish. He has no pleasure in the death of a sinner. He would save us, and not destroy us. God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

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The effect of our sin was, first, to bring us under legal condemnation to subject us to the judicial penalty of the broken law; and next to debase and degrade us morally-to pollute our nature, disquiet our conscience, and inflict damage and degradation upon every faculty. The shame of the first transgressor implies this— Adam's vain attempt to hide himself from his Maker, his guilty consciousness that he was naked, alike confess his sense of personal degradation.

From this twofold condition of guilt and corruption, our Maker would mercifully recover us; the marvellous lovingkindness of God our Saviour appeared. In wonderful grace He purposes to restore us to the condition from which we had fallen, and in order to this He first provides for the forgiveness of our guilt, changes our condition from that of the condemned to that of the reprieved-from hopeless despair to possible restoration: we can be restored only by His pity and help, only by gentle and loving processes.

It is true that He utters the sentence which our sin had incurred. He pronounces the penalty which righteousness demands-" Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return." But it is only sentence of death recorded, it is not necessarily to be inflicted; and in the very utterance of the sentence a way of escape is intimated, the promise of a mighty Redeemer is given, a hope is set before us for us to lay hold upon. When the very curse is being pronounced by the lips

that cannot lie, by the justice that cannot falter; when Adam is banished from the Paradise that he has defiled, and made subject to the law of death that he has defied; when joy is quenched in his guilty heart, and he stands consciously lost before his Maker;-even then gentle words are heard blending with the awful words of justice : pitying words of fatherly love; relentings of Divine compassion; assurances of gracious help; the promise of a Redeemer, the seed of the woman who should bruise the serpent's head. The bow of the covenant is painted upon the black tempest-cloud of wrath.

And the merciful God does not first utter the curse and pronounce the sentence, and then follow it by words of promise and hope after an interval-after it shall have wrought its dismal spell upon the stunned and stricken heart of the culprit; for surely his heart would have melted, and his hands have been feeble, his spirit would have fainted, and his knees have been weak as water.

He does not, therefore, defer His words of compassion and promise, but blends them with the very sentence of His justice; so that the meaning of the terrible curse is hardly apprehended before the mercy that is to counteract it is felt. What gentleness and grace are here! Who does not feel that this need not have been? Who is there whose conscience within him would not perfectly have justified a swift, and stern, and irreparable retribution? Who does not feel that the connexion between sin and penalty is just and necessary? If law could be broken with impunity, who is there whose conscience would not feel offended-whose life would not feel insecure? We must do violence to our profoundest instincts, we must blunt or pervert them, before we can be satisfied for sin to go unpunished.

We feel, too, that man's sin had peculiar aggravations—that his probation was an easy one, that his failure was wanton and inexcusable; what other consequence could be expected, than that such a sin should be followed by the instant infliction of the threatened penalty? This had been deliberately and solemnly threatened, placed over the law as its guardian, and no imputation against the Holy One could have been brought, had it been permitted to take instant effect. Man had no right or reason to expect the intervention of any expedient to avert it. But " God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved ;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." And this act of pardon is also an influence of restoration; it appeals powerfully to man's gratitude and service. The infliction of justice would have crushed and destroyed him; the provisions of mercy soften and inspire him. God's gentleness awakens all that is good and noble within him-his remorse and his gratitude, his resolution and his hope. "The love of Christ constrains him." He "looks upon Him whom he has pierced, and he mourns." By the cross of Christ "he is crucified unto the world." Christ "lifted up draws all men unto Him;" and from the very bar of his Judge, full of repentance and holy purpose, he goes to strive after and to win the redemption that has been proposed to him.

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The infinite wisdom of the merciful God well knew that the way truly to redeem man, to bring out all that is best in him-his penitence, his faith, his love-the way to make him "great"was not to terrify and disable, but to encourage and help him; not to extinguish his hope, but to enkindle and make it strong that the way to subdue and recover him was not to denounce and threaten him, but to pity and encourage him; to win him by a grateful heart, to lead him by a confident love. In this, as in every other process of spiritual life," the joy of the Lord is our strength;" we love Him because He first loved us."

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And who may say how great this loving redemption by Christ will make us ? Is there not reason to believe that by these gentle processes, God will elevate us to a condition of sanctity and blessedness surpassing even that of our primitive creation? Man redeemed will be greater than man unfallen; his holiness will rest on grander principles, will be impelled by nobler motives, will attain to a more rapturous and intenser fervour. God puts upon us the crown, not of virtue merely, but of victory; the robe, not of innocence merely, but of Christian sanctity-the robe that has been "washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb." He will distinguish us from all His creatures by a redemption so marvellous, that even the "angels shall desire to look into it," that they may "learn from the church the manifold wisdom of God." The mightier cause will produce a mightier effect; and just as the holiness of the man is grander than the innocence of the child, so the holiness of the redeemed man shall be grander than the innocence of the unfallen: the very head and crown of the creation, he will be "nearest the throne, and first in song," For it will be a song and a thanksgiving, beside which the rapturous gratitude of the unredeemed is poor. The song of heaven which the seer of the Apocalypse heard, found its climax, not in the song of the angels, but in the song of the redeemed-the great hallelujah which celebrated the Lamb that had been slain-so greatly has God" magnified man, and set His heart upon him."

II. Take as a second illustration of the principle of the text, the means whereby God leads individual men to the knowledge of Himself.

The first effect of God's forbearance and gentleness is, as we have seen, to place us in a condition of reprieve; to suspend the execution of our sentence, to make us probationers, and to set before us a possible salvation. How, then, is this salvation to become actual? How are we to be led to a personal experience of it -to repentance, and faith, and holiness? To lead us to this is the great end of God's dealings with us as probationers. What are the methods that He adopts? Can we hesitate to say that they are methods of gentleness-that all personal penitence and obedience are produced by loving methods ?

And yet it cannot be denied that there is much in our experience that is privative and painful; many things, lacking that would greatly promote our happiness; many things to be endured that greatly hinder it. In a thousand ways the curse and woe of sin are felt the pain and disease of the physical body, its dislocation and dissolution by

death; the ignorance and limitation of the mind, the degradation and pollution of the spiritual soul. Even if we become partakers of Christ's salvation, we must pass through all the agonizing processes of a new birth, all the painful experience of a reformatory discipline. Who does not feel that, throughout, our life is characterized by the conditions, not of a perfect and happy, but of an imperfect and suffering state? as compared with angelic life, or with the life of the first man in Paradise, it is "full of trouble and sorrow." How are these consistent with God's gentleness ?-they may be God's mercies, but they are His rough mercies rather than His tender mercies.

First, we reply that, as compared with the condition of the lost, or with the deservings of sin, our sorrows are light and transient indeed.

And next we reply, that the wisdom and goodness of God's dealings with us are to be estimated by the character of those whom He has to deal with, and by the ends that He seeks to accomplish.

God has to deal with us as sinful men; and He deals with us so as to recover us from our sin. We make the conditions, not He. The physician who seeks to recover his patient from a condition of virulent disease, can hardly treat him with the gentle and pleasant regimen of health. The parent that has to discipline corrupt and disobedient children, can hardly maintain towards them the loving amenities that he does towards the dutiful and affectionate. Will he not rather, if wise in his love, permit us to feel so much of the bitterness of sin as will make us conscious of its evil? And will he not select whatever means of discipline will the best bring us back to loving obedience? All this must be remembered when we would judge of God's dealings with us. The Father is not the less loving, even towards the prodigal himself, because His dealings with him are different from His dealings with the son who never at any time transgressed His commands. To the latter His love is always complacent and gentle; to the former His love is necessarily severe. But, let the prodigal repent of his wanderings-let him confess his unworthiness, and return to the service and affection of a son-and how instantly His love changes its form; and the sternness that wisely left him in a far country to feel the pinchings of hunger and the desolation of an outcast, will give place to the unrestrained tenderness that rushes forth to meet him, falls on his neck and kisses him, and kills for him the fatted calf.

It is easy even for us to see how God's wonderful adjustment in our probation of misery and mercy-our exposure to suffering, and the merciful alleviations of it-our sense of righteous penalty, and our good hope through grace-our sorrowful shame and our penitent boldness-are the very best means that could have been devised for bringing us to repentance and salvation.

How wonderfully does it harmonize with the holiness that must punish sin, and with the pity that punishes only to restore! How wonderfully is the balance preserved! nay, how wonderfully is suffering itself made the means of working out our salvation!

When, therefore, we would, because of our suffering, question God's gentleness, we must remember that He has to deal, not with

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