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because of the Father's hate, but because of His great love.

It is just this view of God's dealings with His children that we are apt to lose sight of, through our habit of looking for judgments and causes within our own small range of sight, and of dictating to the sufferer the truths which we think he ought to see. But, in truth, he cannot see what we, standing by and uttering our mealy-mouthed proprieties, think we see; and, moreover, he sees what we cannot see. For there are things of heaven and earth which only those eyes can see which are purged by tears. And on either side of the burdened spirit stands the tempter, trying to shut out the view that the eyes behold. On one side it says, "Curse God and die. Why will you still believe in a Father and a friend? What you so imagine is but an iron law which rides roughshod over the upturned faces of men. There is no pity, no love in Fate. Better to die, and so at last defy its power." On the other side comes the voice of the slanderer, saying, "Leave the comfort and the grace of the consoling Saviour; look into your own self, and recognize the hideous hypocrisy of your heart. Lament your sinfulness; confess that you have never acted as a

child of God at all, and that hence is your punishment. Be wiser than your Maker, and, instead of learning to thank Him for what He gives and for what He takes away, linger in the region of your own sinful nature; and, instead of the love of a Father, recognize only the triumph of an offended enemy."

These are the rival forms of temptation presented to Job, by his wife on the one hand, by his three friends on the other. But he was wiser than both, for he saw what they could not see. Ever since that day has the tempter's voice been ready to make affliction an instrument for darkening the face of heaven. And the instinct of sonship, which was so strong in Job, we, blessed with the great heritage of Christianity, are often so slow to attain to. We have the treasured experience of centuries, the records of the struggles and temptations and triumphs of so many suffering men, and the power of seeing in the world's history how in God's ways, which are not ours, that which seemed evil has proved to be good, and that out of death, and loss, and disappointment, blessings have arisen to strengthen and console; and still the old truth of Job's confession is hard to master. For, however much the reason is convinced that

suffering and sacrifice are necessary ministers of the kingdom of heaven, and that in things evil there dwells a soul of good, "would men observingly distil it out," we each, for himself, have to make it our own by another path. He who has searched out the stories of other men has acquired the knowledge of a fact; but only in the sphere of his own communion with God can he make the knowledge a power and a blessing, a stepping-stone to heaven, a realization of things not seen.

I do not know why this first chapter of Job is appointed to be read in church on the festival of St. Luke, the Christian evangelist, the "beloved physician." But when read in this connection, it is impossible for us not to be reminded that the office of the physician brings him continually into contact with the severest troubles that beset mankind-disease, death, bereavement. We know little or nothing of St. Luke— a slave in all probability, certainly exercising an art imperfectly understood, using the few simple remedies of the time; fighting, ignorantly often, uncertainly always, the great battle of health against disease. And all else that we know of him is, that he was a follower of the Saviour, and that he had won to himself the

love of his fellows. Warring against disease and disorder-sure that health is good and disease evil-he still is the firm believer that when God gives, and when He takes away, blessed is the name of the Lord. In this double faith surely it is the highest office of the Christian physician still to work. When the first conviction of the man of Uz, and the latest assurance of the regularity and sacredness of scientific truth meet together, there is the true physician for men's bodies and their souls. It is of small profit to depreciate the study of God's creation; it is of less profit, nay, it is of deadly result, to forget God's fatherhood. Though we have sounded and may yet sound new and unsuspected depths in the mysterious world of law, it is still a will which gives and takes away, and a will which is one of good to all its creatures; yearning for their health of body, soul, and spirit, and making all its judgments subservient to the one end-calling all to arise and claim. their true inheritance-a spirit in union with God.

SERMON VI.

THE ATONEMENT.

(TRINITY SUNDAY, 1868.)

"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto This He said, signifying what death He should die." -JOHN xii. 32, 33.

me.

THERE are many reasons why statements of the doctrine of the Atonement, as exhibited in popular works on theology, are repellent rather than attractive to persons of earnest and reverent natures. There is often, in the first place, an easy and confident manner of treating this great mystery, which at the outset dissatisfies those whose deepest appreciation of the mystery has been drawn from the words of St. John or St. Paul. The New Testament is full of the Atonement-full of it as the spring of new life for humanity. But the writers of the New Testament do not aim at defining, for the satisfaction of the impatient reader, the exact character of the transaction, as it is called, by which the sins.

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