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whole, loved as a person, but handled as one whose being was deemed necessary to complete the universe and judged through the ends of Him who means the universe to be complete. And the man who believes in God, believes in One who loved him from eternity, whose love called him into being, designed and prepared a place for him in the system His wisdom ordained and His will maintains. He knows that amid all the shadows and sorrows and shame of life, underneath him and around, are "the Everlasting Arms."

II.

Now that we have reached an approximate notion of what it is to believe in God, we must attempt to determine the spiritual value of this belief. Taken in its whole circumference this were a very large matter to determine, and so we must define the limits within which we are to move. Here then, we restrict our view to man as he lives amid the uncertainties and sorrows of time, a being who looks before and after, sends his thoughts ranging into the eternity behind, his hopes into the eternity before, yet does not know what any day or any moment may bring forth. To man, so regarded, faith in God is of a quite infinite. religious significance.

I. His need of the Eternal God seems but too manifest. Weak and mortal, man feels himself a most helpless being. Birth and death are stronger than he; of the one he is the product, of the other the victim. He comes out of a past eternity, in which he had no conscious being; he must go into an eternal future where he is to be-he knows not what. This little

conscious present is all he has, all that sense can discover or intellect disclose. Mind can see, can feel, the lonely sadness of this little life,-can look out into the infinities of space and time, realize their boundlessness and its own minute personality, till it feels like a small self-conscious star twinkling solitary in an immense expanse. In moments when the thought of these infinities, conceived only as such, has been strong in me, I have felt like one standing, and reeling while he stood, on a narrow pillar reared high in space, looking up to a starless sky, out on a boundless immensity, down into a bottomless abyss, till in the despair of utter loneliness the soul has cried, "Oh for the face of the Eternal God above, and the Everlasting Arms below."

Out of this conscious weakness, out of this utter loneliness, realized even in a living world in moments of supreme trial, rises our need of God. We did not make life, we cannot unmake death; and if in all the universe there is no one mightier than we, what remains to us but the misery of hopes that only dazzle to betray? What are our lives but gleams, that had better never have been, across the face of an awful, eternal darkness? Those infinities of space and time are like boundless deserts, silent, void, till filled with a personal God and Father; but once He lives in and through them, they become warm, vital, throbbing, like hearts pulsing with tides of infinite emotion rushing towards me and breaking into the music of multitudinous laughter and tears. The sky above is no longer space gleaming with stars; but filling it, round the stars, round and through the world, in and about each individual man, is God, daily touching us, daily loving

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us, giving us life and being in Himself. Those Eternities behind and before us are no longer dark, empty, or, at best, a grim procession of births and deaths; they are a living, loving God, from whom man came, into whom he returns. And that Eternal God makes all things secure, restful, blessed. No moment, either here or hereafter, can ever be without God; therefore in none can the good man be otherwise than happy. What is beyond death is not beyond God. He is there as here; and so, whether we live or die, "the Eternal God is our refuge, and underneath us are the Everlasting Arms."

2. Man's relation to this Eternal God determines his spiritual condition. This encircling, pervasive God, our Refuge, in whose bosom we lie, even when we little dream it, is to our soul what nature is to animal and vegetable life. The animal and the vegetable live only as the vital forces in nature enter into their organisms and become assimilated to their respective substances; so man lives only as the spiritual truths in God pass into his soul and are absorbed into the matter of his being. A dead plant or animal is one out of living connection with nature, unable to receive from the forces that play around it the nutrition they were designed to give, to use its native functions, to drink of the vital streams which bountiful nature pours on and about every living thing. So a dead soul is one out of sympathetic relation to God-one the eternal truths in God surround, but cannot enter, because the living connection has been allowed to cease, the receptive and assimilative functions to die. No soul remains in a dead or paralyzed condition because of poverty in the Divine

influences that vitalize, but only and always because of its own determination not to receive and incorporate these into its substance.

The afflictions that happen to man, while interfering with his domestic happiness or social enjoyment, may yet, as promotive of more intimate and vital relations with God, be blessings, real though hidden. The plant that has withered in a rich and favoured spot of the garden, has often lived and flourished in a quiet and shady nook. Had you met the gardener bearing the plant with its torn and bleeding roots to its new bed, you might have blamed him for thus ruining a thing you loved; or had you seen it soon after it had been transplanted, with drooping and faded leaves, you might have charged him with causing its death. But wait till its roots have struck deep into the new and suitable soil, and the plant that had been heavy and half dead in the garish sunshine blooms into sweet loveliness in the mellow and modest shade. Thus God lifts many a spirit from the soil and society it has loved and plants it away from the passion of life and the fond associations of the past, that it may stand in closer sympathy with Himself and break into a lovelier flower.

What man needs to this intimate and sympathetic relation is a permanent consciousness of the Eternal God as a daily presence, the very atmosphere in which the soul lives, moves, and has its being. To this, two movements are necessary, one from God to man, one from man to God. God's movement is one in fact and essence, though manifold in form and manifestationLove. There is truth Divine and universal in that saying of the Psalmist--" Thy gentleness hath made me

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great." All man's greatness comes from God's gentleness. Were He wroth, our spirits would fail before Him; but He remains merciful, and we endure. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." His heart, boundless as space, infinite as eternity, beats with mercy; and the Eternal God around us means simply, Man is enveloped in eternal love. As light must be where the sun is, so where God is present love must be; and as the sun though unseen is not unfelt, so man, though unconscious of God, cannot exclude from his soul the influences that flow from the Divine presence. Earth, when her face is turned to night and the stars, is yet upheld by the flaming hands of the sun; and man is in his spiritual night borne in the arms of Eternal Love. And were not the night within rather than without, did he not suffer from blindness rather than darkness, he might see, even in his night of sorrow, the stars above looking down like the myriad eyes of God in gentleness and pity. The bad as well as the good man stands in the love of God; but, then, it is all without the one, while within as much as without the other, and that makes an altogether infinite difference. He who has become conscious of the Divine love within as well as without, lives in the Eternal God, and has the life of the Eternal realized in him. "This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou didst send."

But, on the other hand, let us not forget that the movement from man to God is as needful as the movement from God to man. The one, like the other, is a movement of love; yet with a difference. Divine pity moves down to all men; but only from filial hearts