with Himself. Yea, "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son:" gave Him, His supreme and uttermost gift, Life of His Life, Light of His Light: Him He gave when He had no more to give; gave Him when we had despised and outraged all other gifts, and would disgrace, and defame, and spurn, and spit upon this His holiest and dearest Gift also. Him, nevertheless, His only Son, His Beloved, Heart of His Heart, Spirit of His Spirit, Son of His Love: Him, still, at all risk, at any cost, He gave! So mightily, so unflinchingly, has God, the good Giver, loved this naughty world! Surely here is meekness, meekness even in the Most High! Surely here is humility, and lovingkindness, and pity, and long-suffering, and tenderness, and gentleness, and sympathy, and goodness, and mercy, and love, and inexhaustible compassion. Surely here is One Whose delight is not to be ministered unto, but to minister: here, in God the Father, Who gave His Son for us, we recognise all that melts us to tears of thankfulness in the sweet and pleading graciousness of Jesus, Jesus, the human-hearted, the Man of Sorrows, Who gave His Life a ransom for many!

SERMON XVI

THE POWERS THAT BE

“There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God."-ROM. xiii. I.

THE historic life of man moves under the impulse and control of God. So the first Church believed, as it read in its familiar Scripture how the long order of the Jewish revelation had interwoven itself into the actual history and process by which the race of Israel had moved forward, through its political changes, from the free domination of the Lawgiver, through the loose and sudden chieftaincies of the judges, to the full sovereignty of the kings.

Each movement in social organization was a movement in spiritual apprehension: it was God that showed Himself in each political expedient: it was the law of His manifestation, that it should shape and mould itself by the needs, and forms, and varieties of Jewish society. His revelations moved in intimate sympathy with the shift and change of history.

And this intimacy was not narrowed, so the Jews had learned, to the mere limits of the privileged people. As the shock of disaster shattered their homes, and scattered their sad exiles into all far lands, the eyes of their large-hearted seers were opened to the wider

ranges, to the vaster horizons. As they stood under the solemn shadows of the immense Babylonian palaces, and gazed from out of their lonely sorrows upon those silent masses of Assyrian statuary, big inspirations stirred in them of far-reaching hopes, and grander destinies. Not that the holy nation was lost or forgotten it still centred upon itself the eye and heart of the Most High; but round it and about it these enormous nations moved and shifted under the breath of that same God. At His Will they gathered; under His wrath they sundered and passed: it was He Who, by His mighty arm, uplifted them into supremacy: it was He Who drew them by strong pressure from the east and from the south: it was He Who drove them out of the hills of the north: it was He Who poured them out of the river-watered plains.

For each He had an office; for each He had appointed a beginning and an end. One by one they rose in orderly succession, those stupendous kingdoms of the East. Babylonian and Persian, Egyptian and Greek, God had required their armies: He had lain His hand upon their captains: Assyria was His hammer, Cyrus was His shepherd, Egypt was His garden, Tyre was His jewel: everywhere He was felt: everywhere the Divine destiny directed and controlled: and far from the especial revelation of Himself, which he concentrated upon the Jews, being severed sharply and decisively from these large social growths, it interlaced itself most closely and intricately with their motions: it mixed its story with theirs: it is round it they turn. The shuttle of God passes in and out, weaving into its web a thousand

threads of natural human life. All history is put to the uses of God's holier manifestation: He works under the pressure laid upon Him by the wants and necessities of social and political progress.

Nor was this association of the spiritual and natural confined to the Jews. The faith of the Incarnation enlarged and crowned this anticipation of the prophets. Christ, indeed, came down from heaven: He was not of the world; He came from above, not from beneath: but He came to find what the Father had already given, what the Father had already drawn to Him. Nothing could come near to Him but that which had already in it the force and impulsion of God. The revelation, then, of Christ entered a world already informed by a premonitory impulse, already responsive to the touch of Divinity. The sheep were His, and He entered only to find and gather them: His voice would be to them no strange, unfamiliar thing, but the sound of a friend, known, beloved, expected, sympathetic: the world to which He came was a world already His, already made by Him: it was true of the whole as it was true of the part, that He came unto His own; and, if so, His entire manifestation would proceed in intimate union with the process and movements of the natural order of life; it would answer to them; it would be congenial to them; it would meet them; it would find them to its hand; it would mingle itself with their aspirations and welcome their aims. Everywhere that Spirit of Revelation would recognise itself: it would greet its own handiwork; it would encounter its own countenance; it would come unto its own; it would raise this faint and

stifled humanity to life, as Elisha raised the dead boy at Sarepta, by laying face to face, and hand on hand, and feet to feet, by close and binding correspondence.

And it was so. We have been hearing lately in London,1 from lips that speak our accents without our inspiration, how largely Christ admitted, within the shaping of its Divine system, the influence of that imperial dominion which had laid its vast arms about the world from the Thames to the Euphrates. We, indeed, may insist, with unshaken force, that the power so to put Rome to use could hardly proceed from Rome herself, as our puzzled critic is inclined to suggest; while, yet, we admit with ready glee that the Church found in Roman organization, in Roman skill, in Roman order, in Roman obedience, that which had for her an overflowing suggestiveness, and won from her a free and delighted adaptation.

"The powers that be are ordained of God." So cries St. Paul: this great empire is His voice, His call to us, His symbol: in it He invites us, He welcomes us, He holds out hands of greeting. It is the response from without to our mission from above; the mercy and peace that look down from heaven encounter a righteousness that springeth up from earth: they meet together and embrace. So it was, as we know well, that the vision of the vast Christian kingdom, whose citizens should break down all partitions between Greek or barbarian, bond or free, male or female, draws its imagery and wins its intelligibility from that wide fabric of Roman law which spread its marvellous

1 M. Renan's Hibbert Lectures.