was that which our Lord then gave! And with what beautiful and touching simplicity does He describe it, when He compares His unwearied love and ceaseless care to the hen gathering her chickens under her wings!

When Jesus teaches men the nature and character of God, He does not enter into any formal disquisition on so lofty a theme. He does not deliver His lessons of wisdom in abstract terms as the philosophers were wont to do. He draws His illustrations of the Divine character from His own Divine works, and leads men to an apprehension of the highest truths through that which had become by observation and experience familiar to them. When He teaches the impartiality of the Divine love, He tells us that our heavenly Father 66 causes His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." When He teaches His Divine grace and beneficence, in bestowing upon His desiring creatures the most precious of His gifts, He appeals to the natural affections of His hearers. "Which of you that is a father, if his son ask bread will he give him a stone, and if he ask a fish will he give him a serpent?" And then He appeals to them on His own behalf: "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?" When He declares His tender and untiring love, even to those who habitually turned a deaf ear, and too often gave a rebellious refusal, to His entreaties, He compares His conduct to that of one of the meanest of His creatures, as influenced and guided by an instinct that is common to them all: "How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings!" But in directing us to the instincts of His creatures, the Lord in truth directs us to Himself. That instinctive love of offspring which prompts all creatures, the noblest and the meanest, the gentlest and the fiercest, to cherish and protect their young, is inspired by the Creator Himself, and is His creative love in them. And that which in them is a blind instinct is directed by Infinite Wisdom to perpetuate the existence of His works. For Preservation is perpetual creation. Divine love is therefore the Fountain from which all creatures draw the desire for and the love of offspring. It It is that by which the "eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings," to which the Lord Jehovah likens His tender and unwearied love for His people; and it is that

by which the hen gathers her chickens under her wings, to which the Lord Jesus likens the unspeakable love which would have gathered the children of Jerusalem together, to place them under the shadow of His own cherishing love and protecting wisdom. The same love which inspires all the inferior creatures, and makes even their love a type of the love of God, inspires the noblest of all creatures with the highest of all natural affections, the human mother's love. Yet what is a mother's love for her offspring compared with the Lord's love for His children? "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, she may forget, yet will I not forget thee." When we see the love of God, as it flows through its finite and imperfect channels, in the creatures formed for its reception, and thus for its enjoyment, what must the Divine love be in its source and in its essence? That love knows no change, no partiality; it is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It infinitely transcends all creaturely love in purity, intensity, and constancy. That love was manifested in the person of the Lord Jesus, and was displayed in His whole life and teaching. His love for the human race, which brought Him down from heaven, and induced Him to assume their nature, and do for them what they had been unwilling and had become unable to do for themselves, showed itself in His solicitude for their salvation, in His teaching, His exhortations, His calls, His entreaties, and not less in His sufferings and death, inflicted by those very beings for whose sake He endured them.

In the Old Testament the Divine character is often described as severe and retributive. But this is in accommodation to the intellectual and moral states of men, who are permitted to be impelled by fear when they cannot be influenced by love. One of the purposes of the Incarnation was to enable men as completely as possible to see God as He is. Therefore, in the life of our Lord, these and all seeming imperfections of the Divine character disappear. There is but one instance of Jesus being spoken of as touched with a human infirmity, and even then it is shown to be but the earthly shadow of a Divine perfection. Once, when He would rebuke the malevolence of His enemies, Jesus turned round and looked upon them in anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts. His anger was thus but the expression of His grief. And grief is mercy, for mercy is love grieving. Love sometimes puts on the appearance of anger, when resisted by the iniquities of men. God's anger, so often spoken

of in Scripture, has no existence in God Himself; it is only the appearance which His love presents to sinful men, when their hardness of heart repels or perverts it. The Divine love flows like a majestic and peaceful river, spreading blessings wherever it comes; only when it meets with the rock, the gorge, and the precipice does it fret and struggle, and rush and foam. Not in itself is the Divine love changeful only in the finite channels through which it flows.

Yet infinitely tender and unwearied as the Lord's love is, this does not, cannot, of itself, by its own desire and action, make men loving, or save them from the consequences of their sins. The will of man must unite with the will of God, that the Divine love may effectually work for His salvation. The Lord's labours of love had proved unavailing with the Jewish people. After all He had done to draw them to Himself, and place them within the sphere of His protection and blessing, they would not come unto Him, that they might have life. This briefly expressed charge reveals the whole mystery of iniquity. God wills, is ever willing, that His children should come to Him that they may live. The one only reason of their remaining dead in trespass and sin is, that they will not have the life which He is ever offering to them. God, it is true, is infinite in power as He is in love. But infinite power is infinite order. And God's infinite order presided over man's creation as well as over his redemption, and gave him the freedom which it cannot infringe or take away without taking away his humanity, and with it his immortality. It is because infinite power is infinite order that, to save mankind, God became incarnate. He did not save them by an immediate act of His power or fiat of His will, because He could not. He came to man in man's own nature, and through that nature acted on the nature and the mind of man. The Lord's sympathy with and influence on human nature was far deeper and greater than His outward life could disclose, beautiful and sympathetic as that life was. His own Divine human influence entered at once into the inmost of the human soul, and acted on the outmost of the human mind, and took hold of whatever there was susceptible of His love and wisdom, as brought down into unison with it by being humanized in the Lord as the Saviour. The Lord acted upon men both inwardly and outwardly, as the Highest and the Lowest, the First and the Last, giving inward power and supplying outward means. All was done for man that infinite love, and wisdom, and power could do. One thing only was left undone. Man's freedom was not forced. In the human

soul there is a sanctuary, which God Himself, the Creator of the soul, did not forcibly invade, because He Himself had created and sanctified it. He came as the Messenger of the covenant which He had originally made with man, but whose conditions man had broken, with offers of mercy, and proposals of a new or restored alliance. The only cause of failure, where the proposed new covenant failed, was, that man would not. This is the only cause of failure still. The Lord still beholds with tender pity and compassion every impenitent sinner. His mercy is offered to the greatest of sinners, and is ever ready to blot out, not their guilt only, but their sin, by leading them to repentance. The Divine man is still present, pleading with us and drawing us; and all that is required to bring us His saving influence is that we hear His voice and yield to His love.

It is of the utmost importance to the cause of religion that a just estimate should be formed of the nature and character of God. And no true or adequate conception can be formed of them except by regarding Jesus Christ as the very personation of the Divinity. Not as a compassionate Son come to appease an angry Father, but as the Father Himself, the loving Father of the human race, come to reconcile them to Himself. We rejoice to think that those views are passing away that have so long represented God as a Being who needed reconciliation to man, and would not, and will not, receive sinners but as purchased by the sufferings of an innocent Substitute -the " precious blood" of an innocent victim. Soon may they be blotted from the creeds as well as from the minds of Christians, that the pure light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ may shine forth in all its beauty and become operative in all its power. EDITOR.

STUDIES OF THE SPIRITUAL SENSE.

NO. II.

NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL.

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Matthew v. 38-42.

LISTENING to much of the Sermon on the Mount, we seem not merely to be taken up into a high mountain of this world, but rather to be caught up, as it were, to meet the Lord in the air of a world other

than this, and better. In our own world we have labours, troubles, and sorrows; we have dreads of mischances, previsions of evil; we have questionings, uncertainties, doubts; we have responsibilities, vigilances, and consequent anxieties; and all these at times stand as giants over us, darkening our air for us with their frowns. And when, in the better moods, we get them lessened and dwarfed down, yet often, even then, although they live only in their least forms, they play around us with reckless disregard of our ease, or, wilfully running between our knees, almost trip us up and cause us to stumble in our Christian wayfaring. But when we listen to the Sermon on the Mount, they too seem caught up at last as into some heavenly atmosphere, seized and held fast by hands as of those who love us, stroked on the hair as with magnetic fingers, soothed and wooed to peace with holy kisses, sung to in resistless lullabies, and hushed to sleep as on the laps of angels.

Does it not seem, however, to unsay all this when I ask what part of the Holy Word is more provocative of thought than this Divine sermon, more electrically bristling with light that pricks and stings, more suggestive of doubt, and even of blank misgiving? Take the words of the text, for instance, words of the Lord's own mouth on the sacred mount, words, therefore, which every true-hearted Christian is longing literally to obey. But how can they be obeyed? Turn the left cheek to the smiter of the right-can we? Ought we? Add free gift of cloak to swindling rape of coat-can we do it? Ought we to try? Dragged a mile against our will, must we duplicate it with an extra mile done gratis to make it twain? Should we give to every asker? Lend to all who fain would borrow? If we do this, shall we not soon have nothing left to lend or to bestow? Literally taken, this precept of the Lord, abolishing private property, overturns the footstool on which civilization stands. The fortifications of the social state against the greedy desperate barbarism that would spring upon it from without or assail it from within, to tear its flesh and lick its blood, this precept literally effaces. It breaks down at a stroke the two lines of defence, military and constabulary, the red line and the blue, and lays the world open to violence and fraud. Hand and foot it ties Good and delivers it up helpless to the paws and maw of Evil. The very conflict with evil as sin which brings regeneration, it apparently withstands and forbids. Caught up into another and a better world, we might begin to comprehend the precept; advanced to a regenerate state, we might thenceforward act upon it. But with this lower world, and with this our present state, it seems entirely out of focus. In the spiritual interpretation of the text, to which now we turn