of all the highest excellences that we can conceive, it is so delightful to a good and sound mind that it is misery to part with it; and such a mind, if it cannot discern God clearly, concludes that the fault is in itself that it cannot yet reach to God, not that God does not exist." I give this lengthened extract because it exactly interprets what I would like to convey. Who of us has not often cried, "Help mine unbelief"? Some whose eyes rest on this page may have many perplexities, occasionally almost an eclipse of faith. Let them wait. The vision may tarry, but in the end it will speak. The pure in heart shall see God. For the conception of Him, the Giver, the Father, the Saviour, is written into the heart. Itself is the evidence that God is.

Then, Who is God? The disposition of our minds towards Him will be according to our knowledge, to our consciousness of Him, the Living. And what have we to guide us as to this? My readers, recalling the history of old Greece and old Romestates made famous by great philosophers, orators, poets, men who desired truth with a noble passionand reflecting on the condition of heathendom in our own day, will need no argument to prove that a mere natural religion is not sufficient; that it may even become a false and fatal light. In autumn, during

sunrise, the traveller in Alpine regions is sometimes startled by seeing an enormous figure confronting him, bowing as he bows, kneeling as he kneels, and disappearing as the sun rises high in the sky. It is the shadow of himself, dilated to immense proportions. And thus, the god whom people worship is sometimes only their magnified self. I do not deny the likeness between God and man. I proceeded on the recognition of it when I urged that what we find in our hearts is, so far, a sign and seal of God. But we must present truths in the right way. An ancient philosopher took the wrong way when he wrote: “Men are mortal gods, and gods are immortal men.” That is the error into which many besides him fall. They forget that the word is, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness;" not God in man's image, but man in God's,—the likeness, alas! marred by faults and sins; whilst it reminds us of the glorious original, reminding us also of the estate whence we have fallen. Away from all fantasies of our own brain, let us stand in the light of the only revelation of the living God. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”

In this light, we know that God is not a Being who, having constructed worlds, leaves them to their

fate, as if they were mere self-acting machines; not a Being built about by adamantine walls, having no liberty, no power of action, "a grim idol for science to worship, but no Father to weakness or Redeemer to faith;" not a Being who summers high on hills of everlasting bliss, solitary, awful, inhabiting an eternity alone. He is Love. Coleridge has observed that whilst no man in his senses can deny God in some sense or other, it is difficult, except by faith of the Trinity, to combine the personal living God with an infinite Being infinitely and irresistibly causative." I have always felt that the thought of the Three Persons in the one God, if a mystery which baffles all solution, is also a truth necessary to faith in God as Love. And so, long centuries ago, it was put in this wise: "Thou seest the Trinity if thou seest love; for these are the three, the loving, the loved, and the mutual love." We do not worship a solitary Deity, lost in a monotonous self-contemplation until the creative energy went forth, and living only in creation, as the soul lives in the body. He whom the only begotten Son has declared is Love, perfect Love, in whom all that love implies perfectly and for ever is; the Father, whose eternal complacency is the Son; Father and Son, one in working as in being through the Holy Spirit of love proceeding from Father and Son. Let us not

further pry into this great deep. If you ask me as to His will, His thoughts, His ways, His government of the worlds, His character, His heart, I reply, “There are lengths and breadths which finite mind cannot measure. But the portion of His ways which, in the light of the only begotten Son, I can grasp is enough to assure me as to all which I cannot grasp, that there is, in all, the one Eternal Righteousness, Wisdom, Justice, Goodness, and Truth." Very strange, awfully dark, are some things, ay, many things, in and about this universe. My readers, do not pick the lock when God has not given you the key; be content to leave the insoluble to Him; lo! in the darkness, through the difficulty, there is shining on our souls the Light of a wondrous Face, a Light in which I recognize the countenance of God

"the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ." That Face! one through which there has passed a power of love still fresh and full, which has shed a new tenderness and grace of healing into this weary world, with its many wounds and sorrows!

-the face of the man Christ Jesus! When the

Holy Word says, "God is manifested in that face; he that sees Jesus sees the Father also," the heart responds, Amen, discerning the revelation that it craves. Light is its own evidence. The conscience salutes Jesus," My Lord and my God." And, through the

lowly humanities of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee, and the sad story of Calvary, the thought of God, the feeling of God becomes, as it were, domesticated with us. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has declared Him.

"Glorious and fearful name, The Lord thy God:" alas! a name which to many is a mere dictionary and pulpit word, put from them as if they had no personal interest in it; they trembling, every moment, on the verge of the shoreless, timeless sea, yet never asking, How is it as to my poor soul and God? But may I not assume that to my readers it is no mere phrase, but the Name glorious and fearful? Fearful, as the Hebrew captive felt when, tempted to sin, he cried, "How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" Fearful, searching and detecting every wicked way. Would that we brought all our ways, all our doings to its fire, that our work may be proved of what sort it is. Fearful! yes; but oh, so glorious! Wanting it, this world of ours were a hopeless riddle, bewildering, depressing, sometimes almost beyond endurance. When the thought of God becomes feeble, there will be pessimism enough, enough of the inquiry, "Is life really worth living?" For myself, I know that it takes all my faith, all my