others from their adherence to the Christian religion!

2. The fearless transgressions of the bold and daring in iniquity. Who lay aside all the restrictions of conscience, and the respect of the virtuous around them. Who give themselves up to every evil way and work. Who have no fear, &c. (Luke xviii. 4).

3. Those who resist the providential dealings and interpositions of God for their salvation. Providence subserves the designs of grace. Adversity, &c., are often employed to lead to thought and consideration, &c. The resistance of these is striving against God. If these do not soften, they harden (H. F. I. 56-59, 145, 229).

4. Those who will not yield to the overtures of the Gospel. The Gospel proclaims men enemies, and seeks their return to friendship. The Gospel proclaims an amnesty; but of course it is on the principle of their throwing down their weapons and ceasing to strive and rebel. Whoso persists in unbelief strives against God — yea, against the riches of His grace.

II. THE EVILS OF THIS STRIFE.

1. It is full of infatuation. It cannot be vindicated upon the principle of reason or propriety. A sign of the mind being blinded by the wicked There cannot be greater mad

one.

ness or more complete folly than to strive against God.

2. It is fraught with evils to our own souls. It excludes the greatest blessings God has to bestow (Jer. v. 25)—the divine favour, peace, hope, all the rich communications of heaven. It degrades the mind, hardens the heart, &c.; converts conscience into a gnawing worm. Often makes life insupportable. 3. It is full of ingratitude. The child-the befriended. But all figures must fail in the illustration. 1. We

We might a

III. ITS FINAL RESULTS. cannot injure Deity. potsherd like ourselves. Neither, 2. can we benefit ourselves. Who hath hardened himself against the Lord and prospered? Nor can we, 3. Escape the triumphs of the Divine judgments over us. One must prevail. We cannot! Then God will; and His prevailing will be our "woe." The woe of His righteous sentence, &c. To each and all such (Rom. ii. 9).

CONCLUSION.-1. Let the careless think and stop in their career. 2. Let the hesitating allow good emotions to prevail (H. E. I. 1489). 3. Let the seeking now exclaim, " I yield, I yield, I can hold out no more," &c. 4. Let the children of God rejoice, and labour for the weal of others.-The Pulpit Cyclopædia, vol. iii. pp. 150-152.

man.

II. That God has a design in making man, and in ordering and arranging his circumstances in life.

III. That man is little qualified to judge of that design, and not at all qualified to pronounce it unwise, any more than the clay could charge him that worked it into a vessel with want of wisdom.

IV. That God is a Sovereign, and does as He pleases. He has formed

man as He chose, as really as the potter moulds the clay into any shape that he pleases. He has given him his rank in creation; given him such a body and intellect as He pleased; He has determined his circumstances in life just as He saw fit. And He is a Sovereign also in the dispensation of His grace-having a right to pardon whom He will-nor has any man any right to complain. Not that God, in all respects, moulds the character and destiny of men, as the potter does the clay. God is just, &c., as well as Sovereign; and man is a moral agent, and subject to the laws of moral

we

faith, and consequently none of the glory we render to God when exercise it, and none of the moral advantage which flows to us from the being required to lean constantly on an invisible staff.

3. We could not then have that conviction that in the Bible we have the Word of the living God which now arises from our perception that the obscurity, of which some complain, is the result of the sublimity of the disclosures there made to us.

4. The wonders of nature, had they been completely unveiled, would soon have ceased to interest and to call forth our admiration and praise; whereas, by being partially hidden, they are made to contribute to the glory of their Creator. ()

II. HOW GOD HIDES HIMSELF IN REGARD TO HIS DEALINGS WITH HIS CREATURES.

1. God conceals much in the dispensations of His Providence; He does not lay open the reasons of His appointments and permissions. But besides the moral discipline that is thus secured. for us, will not the ultimate solution of all those mysteries gain more glory for God, than if the whole course of Providence had been made plain from the beginning?

2. God hides from His creatures the day of their death. But this concealment is in many ways a blessing to the individual and to society.

3. God has hidden much from us respecting the nature of a future state. He has given much to exercise faith and occupy hope; but if the veil had been more fully withdrawn, what would have become of a state of probation, with all its present and permanent blessings? (4)

4. God has hidden from man the future history of this world. But by means of prophecy this hiding of the Deity has been made to minister peculiarly to our advantage. (7)

5. God has hidden from us the results of our own actions. But this is palpably to our advantage, for thus we are reminded, as we could not have been in any other way, of our depend

ence upon God, and the necessity of acknowledging Him in all our ways. Especially is this a blessing in the workings of benevolence. We are thus led to carry on our operations in the best possible spirit, in the consciousness that we are but instruments in the hand of God. Besides, it is this very hiding which enables us to honour God by our performance of duty. It were comparatively nothing to labour with the certainty of success; the trial of obedience lies in the being summoned to labour when we cannot be assured of success: and if we prosecute the enterprise, in spite of all that is disheartening in the hid ing of results, we ing of results, we glorify God by that best of all offerings-a simple and unquestioning conformity to His will: our own obedience being of a far higher cast than if we were stimulated by the known amount of success, is nothing less than a fresh proof that we should praise God under His character of "the God that hideth Himself."-H. Melville, A.M., "The British Pulpit," vol. iii. pp. 142–152.

(a) Suppose God to make a full and adequate revelation of Himself: there is a point in the examination of that revelation at which man's understanding must fail; for man's understanding, at the best, is finite. God is infinite. The finite cannot grasp the infinite; and therefore there must be a point at which the power of the finite understanding that would take in the infinite communication must cease, and at that particular point there would be a horizon to man's perceptions of truth. That is, to us there would be a point at which the revelations would cease to be explanations, and a man's view would be bounded, and a mystery would commence. For what is a mystery? A mystery is a revelation unexplained; a truth told distinctly, but not reasoned upon and explained; a truth so told that we can boldly say what it is, but not how it is. The personal existence of God, as declared in Holy Scripture, is a mystery; it is a revelation unexplained, a statement unreasoned; and it presents a horizon to the human understanding.

In philosophy, facts hold the place which revelation holds in religion. Experience gives the philosopher his facts, and facts bring him to a point where he must confess mystery. Where is the metaphysician that hath ever explained the action of mind upon matter, and the ready movements of flesh and bone at the secret bidding of the mysterious visitant

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within? And where is the anatomist who hath discovered its origin with his searching knife? No; there is a mystery in it. For a mystery in philosophy is a fact unexplained, as a mystery in religion is a revelation unex. plained.

Take another instance. Much has been discovered, and much has been demonstrated, in the science of astronomy. The motions of the heavenly bodies have been made matter of calculation amongst men; the results proving themselves true by periodical returns of infallible observation. But there is a point at which we reach a mystery here. Upon what do all these calculations depend? Upon what do all these motions rest? Upon a quality which Sir Isaac Newton baptized; he gave the mystery a name; he called it "gravitation." Grant gravitation, and we can reason about the solar system. But what is gravitation? Who can explain that?-M'Neile.

(8) That God should disclose thoughts of mercy so vast and far-reaching affects the prophet's mind powerfully. He pauses to say, "How little had I known of God before! Thou art a God that hidest Thyself!" How long the world had lain in darkness, ignorant of these glorious plans of God for its ultimate conversion! Surely the God of such promises should be known by this one great name, "The God of Israel (His own spiritual Zion) the Saviour!" He wears this name most worthily! -Cowles.

Compare Romans xi. 33.

(7) H. E. I. 2229-2224, P.D. 1501-1502, 1525.

There is nothing that should surprise us in this, if we would but observe how little way our reason can make when labouring amongst things with which we are every day conversant; but we should expect that it would be altogether incompetent to the unravelling the Incomprehensible. It will also be evident that we are a mystery to ourselves; that every object around us baffles our penetration; that there is not an insect, a leaf, an atom, which does not master us as we attempt to apprehend its nature and its growth. . . . If, then, making trial of our powers on the commonest objects by which we are surrounded, we feel ourselves defeated in our philosophy by the worm or the water-drop; can it be rational, when we turn ourselves to the study of God, to expect to find the Almighty a being which we may thoroughly comprehend? It is enough that we observe the most gifted of our fellows applying themselves assiduously to the commonest facts, the most familiar occurrences, and yet able to do nothing more than trace a connection between cause and effect. We ought to be convinced that we possess not the capacity which can allow us to embrace the wonders of the Deity. So that not only the stars in their rushings, and the waters as they flow in their tides, but every sand-grain and every bubble, and every beat of the pulse, and every blade of grass, and every floating insect, all join in preparing us for the fact that the

God of Israel must be a God that hideth Him. self.-Melvill.

(8) We stand in the midst of a mighty temple, the whole visible frame of nature rising around us, like the walls of a gorgeous sanctuary; and we gaze on the beautiful arch of heaven, on the sun walking in his brightness, on the moon, and the stars, and the dark cloud of thunder; but what know we of this magnificent array! What account can man give of the hidden springs of such vast machinery? Who will tell us what is that light which makes all things visible? Who will explain that secret wondrous energy which retains, century after century, so many worlds, each in its separate orbit? Whose penetration is not utterly baffled by the growth of a blade of grass, by the falling of a stone, by the floating of a feather? When asked, we state reasons, and assign causes, but this is only a shifting of the difficulty. It were easy to talk of the gravity of matter, and the laws of nature philosophy is at fault: the learned man knows little more than the savage of the amazing processes which go on daily in the laboratory of nature: while he may be sitting on the lofty pinnacle of science, a child shall propose questions which shall perplex, and confound him, and bring him down from his lofty eminence, and force him to the humiliating confession that what can be discovered by man bears no proportion to what is hidden by God. . . . There is nothing teaches us our own ignorance as knowledge when pushed to its utmost limits. In enlarging the sphere of light, you equally enlarge the surrounding sphere of darkness.-Melvill.

(e) If God had bared the secrets of creation, so that we could exhaust the store-house whose very threshold we are now scarce able to pass, is it not evident that the familiarity would have generated indifference to the skill of the mighty Architect; and that the mere fact that there was nothing to find out would have made us unobservant of the broad impress of Divinity? Under the existing ar rangement, as we may term it, of God's hiding Himself, creation ministers perpetually to our awe and admiration of the Creator; every new leaf, as it is turned over by the intelligence of industry and the guidance of inquiry, presenting a new witness to the wisdom and power of Deity, whilst at the same time it tells out the inexhaustibleness of the volume; so that continually learning, and yet continually finding there is more to learn, we pass on from stage to stage, climbing (so to speak) the magnificence of God, only to know that what appeared the summit is but the basis of a lottier mountain; and thus compelled, as marvel on marvel crowds the vision, to exclaim-oh, not with the tongue of regret and murmuring, but with the tongue of worship and rapture-"Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour!" -Melvill.

(Š) H. E. I. 2178, 2179.

(7) Prophecy is the standing miracle of cen

turies; a miracle so wonderfully constructed, that time, which might be thought to weaken every other, adds only fresh strength to this. The far-off day of its delivery is as surprising as the fact of its fulfilment; but it is clear that the wonder of prophecy is dependent on the combination of our ignorance and of God's knowledge of the future. It is by His displaying His own acquaintance with that which He has hidden from His creatures, that God makes the hiding to put forth the greatest strength against infidelity; indicating from the very beginning the knowledge of all things proves His own omniscience and His sovereignty. So that if the future were open to man's expatiation, there would remain no place for prophecy as the distinct prerogative of Deity, and it would remove altogether that attestation to the truth of Christianity which, growing and strengthening as time rolls on, resists, like a rock, the advance of scepticism. -Melvill.

That God is a Saviour is a declaration written in lines of light on every page of the Book of Revelation. What, too, is history, with all its dark passages of horror, its stormy revolutions, its ceaseless conflict, its tears, its groans, its blood, but the chronicle of an ever-widening realm of light, of order, of intelligence, wisdom, truth, and charity? It is a tale of slow, patient, but persistent and victorious progress. Yet there is a destroying power at work in the universe on a scale of enormous magnitude, and to most men the dominant feature in this vast universe seems to be confusion. Shocks and shatterings cause more noise and make more show than the germinations, the uprisings, the upbuildings. The earthquake is long remembered, the soft springing of the corn passes unnoted by. Hence to most men God is hidden. If they believe there is a God, they think of Him merely as the Judge, the Avenger, the Destroyer, not as the Saviour.

But why should God hide Himself? If He has purposes of mercy always before Him, why does He not make them abundantly plain to all mankind? Why leave the world to groan and madden under the terror lest a malignant tormentor should be master and ruler of, at any rate, this lower sphere ?

I. The reason lies partly in the essential mystery of the Divine nature -a nature whose judgments must remain unsearchable by man's limited intelligence, and whose ways must be past finding out; His nature and methods we can grasp just as an infant can grasp the thought and purpose of a man (Job xi. 7 ; Rom. xi. 33).

II. God hides Himself through His patient, deep, and far-reaching method in the government of mankind. He is governing us as free beings on a profound and obscure but benignant method; the aim being to train us to govern ourselves in the light of His truth and love. The only way to govern in freedom is to allow full play to freedom. We are free to try our paths and see where they issue. But when men go astray by the very misery that succeeds their sin (Luke xv. 14), God leads them back to Himself and proves that He is the Saviour.

III. The day of the Lord is a long day. His methods work through generations. Consider the years of the right hand of the Most High, and understand how His way must be hidden in each brief generation; while in the generations in which His hand is on the world in judgment, the darkness in which it is buried must be profound indeed.

IV. God hides Himself behind the fatherly chastisement with which He exercises and educates the individual human soul. It is in the nature of chastisement to hide for a moment the wisdom and the love of the hand which administers it (Heb. xii. 11).

V. There are seasons of darkness in which God seems hidden, which are among the most sacred and salutary experiences of the soul. By them God is drawing out and drawing up its deeper longings and aspirations, exercising its patience, and kindling its hope (H. E. I. 16451648, 1656).

VI. God hides, must hide, much of His method, but while the Cross stands as earth's most sacred symbol there