They always laugh at calamity, and mock when fear cometh. When fear cometh as desolation, and destruction cometh as a whirlwind, men may call aloud to the gods of unbelieving science, but they will not answer. And that wisdom which deals only with such matters as law and force, and rejects the revelation of divine love, has no gospel for humanity. All it does is to spread a dark background which the more vividly sets off by contrast the glad tidings of a Father God, who "forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies."

Experience has convinced the writer that it would be. too much to expect all those who have been in the habit of putting these awful words into the mouth of our Father in Heaven or of His Son Christ Jesus, to acknowledge that they have been wrong. But surely it should not be too much to ask even those who are most wedded to traditional interpretation and inferences to honour the Scriptures so far as to quote them correctly. If they will cling to the idea that when the Bible says. "Wisdom" it means to say God or Christ, then why should they change the word? If it so obviously means God in the Book of Proverbs, it will have the same meaning when it is quoted. Let them tell the people that "Wisdom" says these things; but if they take away the Bible word and put in another, are they not taking the name of the Lord their God in vain ? For either "Wisdom" in the passage quoted means God, or it does not. If it does, it is not necessary to make the substitution; and surely it is a vain thing to suppose that their word is better than the word in the Bible. If it does not, and there is no evidence that it does, then in a far more serious sense it is taking God's name in vain to

thrust it in. It is not as if there were not passages enough to set forth the wrath of God against sin. No man who accepts the Scriptures as from God can honestly deny that there is a terrible doom for the impenitent sinner. But it is just as plain that God "delighteth in mercy," and "doth not afflict willingly," that there is infinite sorrow in His heart at the thought of the calamities of the wicked, represented throughout the Old Testament by the most pathetic appeals, and expressed with infinite pathos in the tears of Jesus over doomed Jerusalem. Let the vengeance of God be by all means proclaimed against impenitence; but let it be distinctly known that it is the vengeance, not of cruel exultation, but of Divine sorrow and love.

IX.

THE INCARNATE WORD AND THE

INDWELLING SPIRIT.

THE God Whom we worship is represented to us in Scripture, not only as God the Supreme, but as Father, as Son, and as Spirit. The word "Trinity," though it is never used in the Bible, seems justified by this threefold representation. Great difficulties are encountered when the attempt is made to imagine how the one God can exist as Father, Son, and Spirit; but no greater than reason would lead us to expect, for "who can by searching find out God?" There are unfathomable mysteries in the complexity of our own constitution, and philosophers who have devoted the closest attention to the study of man, have come to the conclusion that there is a mysterious trinity in his nature, of body, soul, and spirit. This is not suggested as in any sense parallel to the Trinity in the Divine nature, but it may surely prompt the question-If we find that which is unfathomable in our own nature, why should it perplex us to encounter that which is utterly incomprehensible by us in the nature of God? The doctrine of the Trinity, indeed, is sometimes put in such a way as to involve a contradiction; never in Scripture, however; only in the vain attempts of men to put the incomprehensible into logical or arithmetical forms of expression of their own devising. Many are sorely perplexed, and some are

decisively repelled, by the apparent irrationality involved in the very word "Trinity," especially when it is put in the arithmetical form, "Three in One, and One in Three;" but it is only necessary to bear in mind, first that the Bible is not responsible for that way of putting it, and next, that while God may be said to be Three as well as One, it is certainly never meant that He is or can be Three and One in the same sense. The doctrine cannot thus or in any way be relieved of incomprehensibility; but it is certainly relieved entirely of contradiction and absurdity.

The Father is preseted to our thoughts as God invisible, inaccessible; the Son, as God manifest; the Spirit, as God working. Some, beguiled by the apparent simplicity of the conception, have maintained that these are three successive revelations; that God revealed Himself as Father under the old covenant, as Son in the life of Christ, as Spirit on and after Pentecost. But this theory is at once set aside by the fact that the Son and the Spirit are found all through the Old Testament as well as the New. The Apostle John, looking back over the old dispensation, says: "No man hath seen God at any time, the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." The Son was God manifest from the beginning. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." From the beginning, too, the Spirit is spoken of as exercising His divine energy, for do we not read at the very opening of the Bible, how "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters"? And there are many passages in both Testaments, in which both creation and providence are attributed to the Son and to the Spirit; to the Son when they are regarded as manifestations of God, to the Spirit when they are regarded as

works done by the divine energy. And not only are the Son and the Spirit spoken of as engaged in creation and providence from the beginning, but in the work of salvation as well. The declaration of St. John above quoted is a proof of this, and it is fully confirmed by a careful study of the Covenant name Jehovah, and of those very numerous passages in which the Angel of Jehovah or the Angel of the Covenant is spoken of in such a way as to identify Him with the Word, Who in the fulness of the time became flesh and dwelt among men. For proof of it in relation to the Spirit, reference may be made to such passages as these: "My Spirit shall not always strive with men" (Gen. vi. 3); the prayer of David, " Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me;" the message to Zerubbabel, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord." It is plain then that the theologians have rightly interpreted Scripture, when they have spoken of Father, Son, and Spirit as alike eternal, without beginning and without end.

But, though the Word is eternal, the Incarnate Word had a beginning; and though the Spirit is eternal, the Indwelling Spirit dates from Pentecost. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the Eternal Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; when the 120 were all with one accord in one place on the day of Pentecost, the Eternal Spirit came as the Spirit of the Son to dwell in human hearts. The two events, the two great Advents, are most closely related; and it is of great practical importance to keep the relation between them clear and full in our minds. The Incarnation prepared the way for the Indwelling; the Indwelling crowned the Incarnation by rendering it practically universal and perpetual.

The connection between the one and the other is most