leading men's thoughts up to a consideration of the true God; but then, when one had approached to the central Sovereign of the universe, there was a disposition as well as a government. There was a God in his relations to the great creation; but there was a God in his relation to his own children.

A magistrate is allowed to have no feelings, and yet behind all magistracy is the father, the husband, and the friend; so behind and within the sovereign God, there was the personal and dispositional element of the divine nature; and it was this that the apostle caught. Perhaps more certainly, more anxiously, and more urgently than any other one, does he express this interior and personal disposition of God, as made manifest in the Lord Jesus Christ; and it is this that gives us some insight or hint as to the singular use of language which he employs :

"Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. For the preaching of the cross [why did he not say the preaching of Christ? He, as it were, changed the name. Why, instead of using that glorious Name that is above every name, should he have said, 'The preaching of the cross '-not, The preaching of Christnot, The preaching of that gospel system, that system of good news that had irradiated the world, and filled the world with joy? Why should he have said, The preaching of the cross-that bloody and hateful instrument of despotism and cruelty?] is to them that perish foolishness [Yes, and it is to this day]; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God."

What! The cross the power of God? In the passage which I read, Paul says:

"I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified."

In other words, he determined not to know Jesus Christ as he walked in Galilee; as he led captive the throngs of the people; as he stood in the temple, meeting and matching his adversaries, and unfolding, serenely, and with transcendent power, the secrets of the spirit-land; or as he was in his ascension at the right hand of God. He determined not to know Christ efflorescent, victorious, attractive, beautiful, winning. He determined not to know even Jesus Christ, when he came among the Corinthians, except as the wounded, the bruised, the crucified.

Now, there is in this, when you come to scrutinize it,

something strange, something mysterious. Because you must remember that this Paul was almost a vagabond Jew.

If, in 1859 or 1860, a black man had come from the South to New York, he would have stood against a popular prejudice more notorious than that against which Paul, being a Jew, stood in Corinth, a city that fairly groaned under the luxury that wrapped it round perpetually. The Greeks, like all nations, were conceited, and they thought Corinth was an enormous city, and they thought that all but Greeks were barbarians, as the Jews thought that all but Jews were Gentiles; and as we think that all but the elect are non-elect, or that all but members of the church are objects of God's uncovenanted mercies-which are a great deal better than the covenanted mercies of most folks who are in the church.

The Corinthians had this contempt, and especially for the Jews. The Jews were odious to them; and this Jew was unquestionably a diminutive personage. Paul's references to himself are not flattering. I think the idea conveyed of his physical appearance is that it was insignificant. And when he came to this ornate, luxurious city, this city of various refinement and culture, this city of intellectual, artistic, and esthetic power, it is natural that he should have said to himself: "Now, I have a difficult thing to do: how shall I do it? How shall I win this great city? How shall I gain the ear of these people? Will not the cacophony of my language grate on their ears? Will not my thoughts and notions clash with theirs, on the subject of divinity? Where are there any analogies between my views and theirs? How shall I spin my ideas so that they shall join on to theirs? How can I gain them? What is there in common between them and me?"

If there was ever one thing that a Jew believed in, it was that when God should come as Messiah, he would come magnificently; that the earth would shake under his footsteps; that he would advance his glittering banner, and that the armies that would march under it would overthrow all opposition; that all men would bow down before him, and that he would stand in Jerusalem and upon Mount Zion acknowl

edged to be the glorious Sovereign of time and the world, and subdue the earth to himself. The Jews' notion of the coming Messiah was that he was a being of glory and power, conspicuous, brilliant, unmistakable.

As to the Greeks, their notion of God was that he was a being of eternal youth, eternal beauty, and eternal joy, without alloy, with perfectness of condition, plenitude of place, and peace undisturbed.

When, therefore, Paul came preaching a divine Saviour, how natural it would have been for him to slur over these things which were offensive to his hearers in regard to that Saviour, only making conspicuous such features of him. and of his doctrine as were agreeable to them; but no, he said, "I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." He determined not to know even the Saviour, except as the crucified One. He dctermined to preach among those proud, beauty-loving, effeminate, sensitive Greeks, the most odious thing that could be preached-namely, a malefactor; a man so weak that the Roman government could easily lay the cross upon him; a man whom his own countrymen despised and crucified.

Such was his text, such was his theme; and he went tɔ this proud city of Corinth, and determined to preach this truth in its most unpalatable form, and to know nothing but that.

Surely, he might well say that the wisdom of this world was not with him; that he was not wise according to the pattern of this world; that he did not depend upon the power of words, or the skillful arrangement of appeals; that these would not help him under the circumstances. What was there that helped him?

He had advanced a new conception of the divine nature, which was foolishness to them who only heard it by the outward ear, while to those who really got it into their mind, and understood what it was, and felt the transcendent beauty of it, and entered into the interior conception of that which represented the constituent elements of the divine nature, it was the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation.

And what was this cross, what was this suffering, what was this broken Saviour, but the revelation of God through

him who thought it was not robbery to be equal with God, and made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and, being found in fashion as a man, humbled himself, and became obedient unto death-the death of the cross?

All this long interval of self-humiliation-what was it? It was that by which the Lord Jesus Christ revealed that the nature of God was not the nature of one who sat serene in eternal blessedness, and had kind thoughts, and sent out kind messages, and that it was not a dynasty in the heavens, lifted up above all trouble and all sorrow. Jesus Christ came to reveal that the nature of God was the source and fountain of sympathy. We see it represented in diminished forms, and under imperfect conditions, in the mother that gives herself for the child, in the hero that will die for a friend, in a thousand ministrations of love in heroic forms, in this life, where it is accounted to be noble and manly for one to suffer for another. The ministration of care, by which, through uncounted hours, the mother bears for the helpless, for the weak, for the child that is brought up not less in her soul than on her bosom, drawing bodily food from the one and soul food from the other-by which she gives herself for the child, and is continually spending and being spent that the child may thrive and grow, she growing as the child grows; the ministration of self-sacrifice, as seen in the mother, the dignity and grandeur of which is inherent in such actionthis is a ministration which represents, in some measure, care and love and self-sacrifice in God. In thus giving self for another, they who go down go up; they who serve rule; they who are lowest are the highest; they who are the weakest are the mightiest. In the direction of such a giving of one's self goes moral grandeur-not carnal, dynastic grandeur, not grandeur according to the method and pattern of men on earth, but the reverse. In the great interior sphere, in the spirit land, in the dignities and ranks and gradations to which God belongs, and toward which men aspire--there greatness measures itself by what it does, and not by what it receives; by the power which there is in purity to make the impure pure; by the power which there is in wisdom to make the

ignorant wise; by the power which there is in the divine nature to make the suffering well and whole again; by that power by which God pours himself out, and becomes bread which men eat that they may live, or water which men drink that they may quench their thirst, and that quenching their thirst they may be immortal.

God is the Burden-bearer of the universe. He was the Lamb of Sacrifice from the beginning of the world. The essential nature of God is to suffer not as men suffer who are weak; to suffer not as men suffer under the lash, for disobebedience; to suffer not as stumbling ignorance, or blundering prejudice, or overleaping eagerness, or blind avarice suffers; to suffer not in any of the lower forms of suffering; to suffer with that suffering which is full of joy and strength · and grandeur, and which comes from the consciousness of giving one's self to make another soul larger and stronger and wiser and better.

Here comes in the fullness of time, the descent of the Messenger of God, the appearance of the Ambassador of Heaven, to make known to men the inward nature of God. He who had stained the heavens; he who had made the earth shake with the thunder of his power; he who had been materially equipped as a sovereign in the eyes of men-he, according to the representation made by Jesus Christ, carried within his exterior grandeur a heart of love and self-sacrifice compared with which the heart of the sweetest mother that ever lived is as a taper compared with the blazing sun at noonday. As is a handful of mist that rises from the sea compared with the whole ocean, so is the purest and deepest and noblest soul among men compared with God.

Now, that great ocean-nature, the infinite God, is not one who sits, as the Greeks thought, on a throne, making the universe subservient to him, nor one, as modern theology has taught substantially, who sits on a throne saying, "For my own glory I live, and everything I make I am going to make as a decoration to myself." Christ came to reveal a God who so loved that sacrifice was to him the emblem of love; and who ruled over a creation that came in at the lowest point, and groaned and travailed in pain. He revealed a God that