no difference to him whether he is scolded because he grieves, or whether he sees by the gentle tone and action that his father or mother is sorry to give him this pain? Few young people like going to school; does it make no difference to them whether their parents share the sorrow of separation and leaving home, or whether they seem quite indifferent, even perhaps pleased that the holidays are over? If anyone shares our feelings and our experience, we know that person loves us. Therefore, if God enters so fully into all our perplexities and troubles as human beings that He actually takes upon Himself those very conditions, limits Himself so that they may press upon Him as they do upon us, we may be very sure He loves us, that whatever may be His reason for allowing the world of human life to be what it is, it is not want of love. That which the Life of Christ reveals to us, and which we could not have been sure of without it, is that God is Love.

(2) We come now to the second of our enquiries: Does the life of Christ give us higher, nobler, worthier thoughts of God than we could have without it? In one sense this question is already answered by the revelation that God is Love; for love which

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is love indeed, self-forgetting, self-sacrificing, self-losing, is the noblest of all qualities. It is stronger than pain, it is stronger than sin, it is stronger than death. Even in men it can be all that. In God there is no limit to its strength. "I am persuaded," says the great Apostle of the Gentiles, who himself was "constrained" by that love, "that neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." That is the general answer to the question whether the life of Christ gives us higher, worthier thoughts of God than we could have without it. But it will be helpful to follow the subject out in more detail.

First, the very manner in which the love of God is manifested, though men can, to some extent, appreciate it, is not what they would have expected, or had they been asked would perhaps even have wished. It already shows us that the Divine thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor the Divine ways as our ways. Human love, even when unselfish, is prone to be one-sided. Our very devotion to those 1 Rom. viii. 38, 39, R.V.

whom we love, often blinds us to what is for their good; we strive to spare them temporary pain at the cost of worse suffering later. Love may even degenerate into an easy good nature which is satisfied so long as we and our friends are able to get on without having much effort to make, or pain to bear. And consequently what many people would wish God to be is just good-natured, slurring over faults, remitting punishments, letting them do what they like and be what they choose without exacting any penalty or placing them under any discipline which might stir them up to better things. And there have been much worse thoughts about the love of God than this. It has been represented even among Christians, as partial, as making favourites of some men or some nations in the way a foolish and selfindulgent earthly parent does-while in earlier ages and in heathen countries, if men believed in the love of their gods at all, it was often in a way too horrible and degrading to be described.

Even before Christ came, God was educating the Jews, and partly through, and partly in a different way from them, the rest of mankind, to a worthier conception of His love than any of these. But now I want you to fix your

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thoughts on what Christ's own life and teaching reveal to us on this supremely great

matter.

(3) And thus we are brought to the consideration of our third sign. Whether the life of Christ throws any light on the meaning of the universe and of man's being? The answer is yes, for it tells us in the plainest and most striking way that we and the whole Order to which we belong are of infinitely more value than we could have dared to suppose. It shows us that God is so present in His creation, that He has so really made man akin to Himself, that He can use the actual circumstances of a human life to bring Himself within the reach of our understanding. Limited as that is, limited as all human powers are, they are not too limited to be made God's means of revealing Himself to us. form of man, even of the Divine Man, is only capable of showing us in part what God is. In part, however, it does do that, and consequently so long as we humbly and reverently bear in mind that beyond what He thus enables us to know, there is infinitely more which we do not and cannot know, we may put perfect confidence in what Christ makes clear to us, viz., that we come from God and go to Him.

The

"In Him we live and move and have our being." We live because He lives, and that being so, the root and essence of our life is beyond earth, beyond space and time; it cannot be confined and limited by them, and death has no hold over it. On the further side of that great change lies not "another life," as we are in the habit of saying, but a continuation under different conditions of the only life we have ever lived or can live, that which is God's, and yet which He has so wonderfully and indissolubly made our own. Of this continued life beyond death I shall have much to say in later chapters, but I must leave it until we have considered the relation which the religious and especially the Christian aspect of the universe bears to that which science shows us.