time: Christ Himself knew the joy of self-sacrifice when supported by faith. And how should God but give us more than this earthly life has room for? Unfinished creatures, in an unfinished world, we look to Him for final rest and satisfaction. The ideal has changed-widened-shifted; it has gone through numerous transformations since the Hebrew prophets first gave it literary shape; and, in spite of their impatient faith, the ideal is still only an ideal. But, however it change, however it tarry, those who believe in the Father of Christ will never relax their hold of His promise till the ideal is a fact. Could there be a surer prophecy of its approach than the passionate faith of God's elect in their mysterious Lord? In Thee have

I trusted; let me never be confounded!'

The results of the dealing of Christ with human sorrow are seen in the Church and in consecrated individual lives. As the ideal Church-the invisible Church-' knows the Father,' so does it rejoice in the Lord alway.' I claim the Christian Church as the scene of the world's true gladness-the gladness of forgiveness, and of faith, and of obedient service. Joy is a necessary fruit of true religion. The faith which has no gladness in it contradicts the heart's deepest instincts. Those strange modern fanatics who require human nature to submit to a self-denying ordinance, renouncing all expectation of happiness, will lose the little power they have when health returns to the soul of their victims. It is not our greed that clings to a fuller life; what is it? There is some spiritual light within us which will not permit us to starve our souls. Merely to'grip and worrit you,' if that be all religion does, is too likely to 'leave you much the same.' When such a futile faith is represented as the true Christianity it stands condemned by its very meagreness. But, on the other hand, there is nothing Christian in hugging one's-self with the thought of one's extraordinary and unexampled privileges. It is in the stress of trial and of self-denying effort that Christ's comforts avail; it is out of the soil of suffering that the peaceable fruits of righteousness are fed. Experience proves that the very most

sorely tried of Christian lives may be the most triumphant of all. Or, if we cannot reach up so far as triumph, God will accept us if we are faithful and patient. So much for ourselves. But, for the world's sorrow as a whole, God bids us find comfort by doing the work of Christ in daily duty, and in those opportunities for service which grow out of the faithful performance of daily duty. In so living, we know that we are entering into the very purpose, and thoughts, and life of God Himself, in so far as He is knowable by us. In doing His will we become acquainted with His nature. On these lines He promises to meet and encourage us; not otherwise. And He encourages us by showing us that His own deepest will is to redeem the world. The more Christian we become, the more fully are we convinced of this. Indolent pessimism finds no consoler in Christ; but they who 'do His will' learn 'His doctrine.' The kingdom of God is among us, yet there is much time and toil still in prospect before the kingdom of God can come as one day it shall. Thus our Theodicy-so far as I see -is a progressive and provisional Theodicy, to be crowned hereafter, at what many scriptures call the last Judgment.' But how then crowned? In Thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded!'

VI.

We have already dwelt upon two of the fruits in man of the knowledge of God which Christ imparts. We have studied it as the vehicle of forgiveness and as the source of happiness. If intellect and emotion made up the whole of man's nature, our work would now be at an end. There is an intense moral and spiritual rightness in each moment of faith, in which we know ourselves at one with God, in each moment of rapture, in which we receive drafts of joy from the fountain of living waters. Life can add nothing intrinsically to these experiences; it may by God's mercy reduplicate them; but they are in themselves already the very life of life. Yet man, as a finite being, lives under time and space. Though his intellect may look

down on the real world from lonely heights of abstraction— though his soul may rise to still loftier and remoter pinnacles of distance, not lonely or cold, but flushed with God's presencestill he must come back to the real world, and plod on, moment by moment, through God's gift of time. But morality redeems the time-life from emptiness; duty translates the ideal into time formulæ, and deals it out to the obedient soul as daily bread. The religion of Christ deals with duty, as well as with forgiveness or with joy. It enables us, in the sphere of duty, successively, progressively, really to attain that which is ours ideally in the moment of faith. We are free even in the bondage of the trivial round, the common task,' because we are serving God our Father, living by the grace of Christ.

In more theological language, we have now to exhibit works as a fruit of faith. For long ago we laid it down that Christ's revelations of God-which are made to faith-are the channel both of forgiveness, and of spiritual joy, and of moral strength. Christ's revelations are eo ipso a work of redemption. So likewise says the Bible. Faith,' according to the apostle of free grace, 'worketh by love.' And so, too, the champions of orthodoxy repeat with a thousand eager voices. 'We are justified by faith without works,' they cry, 'but only by a faith which produces works.' It is perfectly true, of course; but it warns us to look closely at our definition of saving faith. I do not see that assent to an arrangement' is likely to work by love. If Christians are to do more than assert that faith so works-if we are to exhibit its working as natural—we must give a view of faith as embracing the character of God and assenting to His purposes. Grace must not be an ingeniously contrived exception to the normal development of God's providence. We must emerge from theoretical as well as from practical legalism.

Perhaps it is necessary to defend at the outset our use of the word 'redemption' for this particular benefit of the Christian salvation, inasmuch as the orthodox tradition regards the saved as being redeemed from liability to punishment. But our own

usage has Scripture on its side. 'Ye were redeemed from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers." 'Who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. Indeed, when we once exchange the rigidly legal conception of God for an ethical conception of God as our Father, then it becomes obvious that, whatever else it includes, God's redemptive action will include deliverance from the reign of sin over human lives. A God whose will is for good to men sets them free from sin-from sin first of all. We are said to be redeemed, although we are put under an infinite obligation to Christ; for experience shows that nothing is so regenerating, or so redemptive, or so emancipating as obligation to such a master. The price which Christ paid may be said to have been due to the objective moral order of God's world. The redeemed are saved by Christ because His work is naturally fitted to give them new repentance, new motives, new courage, new success. This is a different doctrine from that which explains redemption as due to God's abstract justice. Abstract justice is extra-moral; it is legal; the moral order of God's world is a moral necessity, presupposed in all God's displays of righteousness and grace. moral order of Providence, like the natural order of Providence, is so far to be distinguished from God Himself, the Creator, the Provider, the Father, because in these economies God is working, for wise and loving ends, under certain fixed conditions, with which we can only reach an imperfect acquaintance, but as to which we have ample assurance that God has elected to work under them, just because He is perfect in wisdom and perfect in love. It is in such conditioned worlds that we, utterly conditioned as we are, find ourselves able to commune and co-operate with God. To such fixed moral conditions then did Christ pay the dread price which breaks the power of sin over His redeemed. The moral order is essentially retributive; it is not in itself gracious; but it is not inconsistent with grace, and is a necessary presupposition

And the

in

may make

of such further manifestations of His will as God grace. In other words, if God is to show mercy, He can only show it to moral beings, who are subject to moral discipline; and the price paid by Christ implies that our redemption is itself a moral thing—morally (not legally) conditioned. The world which Christ came to redeem must be regarded partly as social, partly as a world of individual souls. And its social condition must be considered separately as found in the Jewish and as found in the Gentile world. But in no respect can the subject of Christ's redemption be described as a mere mass of perdition. Everywhere Christ is seen rescuing elements of good which were struggling, ineffectually enough, against surrounding corruption.

Human society, within which man's moral life is realised, is constituted in the first instance by material necessities. We live in a world controlled by the stern law, that, if any will not work, neither shall he eat. Man's dependence on the soilespecially his need, as an animal, of food, whether vegetable food or vegetable food worked up into animal tissues-binds our race into the processes of nature, and makes us organically a part of the material creation. From this lowest need-the need of food-the desire for material wealth spreads out in a thousand channels, revealing the ideal nature of man, and showing that, while man is indeed a part of this world, he is at the same time its lord. But the desire for wealth is crossed by another, primarily animal, tendency which leads to reproduction, and to a multiplication of the race, which, in accordance with nature's wise general rule, tends to outrun subsistence fast and far. Hence the economic condition of mankind may be roughly described-many qualifying statements being left out -as an equilibrium between wealth getting and reproduction, between man's interests and his passions. But history-i.e. Providence-develops moral meanings in the given material and animal data of man's life. Out of the animal propensity to reproduction is developed the moral institution of the family; and out of the material craving for wealth is developed