For Love is highest excellence,

The source of all the joys above; 'Tis stronger than Omnipotence,

And Jesus' richest crown is Love. How vain the honors men possess, The honors of the loftiest state! And heaven and earth alike confess That Charity alone is great.

From the French of Vinet.

O LOVE of God, how strong and true! Eternal and yet ever new, Uncomprehended and unbought, Beyond all knowledge and all thought.

O wide-embracing, wondrous love!
We read thee in the sky above,
We read thee in the earth below,

In seas that swell and streams that flow.

We read thee best in Him who came
To bear for us the cross of shame;
Sent by the Father from on high,
Our life to live, our death to die.

We read thee in the manger-bed
On which his infancy was laid;
And Nazareth that love reveals,
Nestling amid its lonely hills.

We read thee in the tears once shed
Over doomed Salem's guilty head,
In the cold tomb of Bethany,
And blood-drops of Gethsemane.

We read thy power to bless and save,
Even in the darkness of the grave;
Still more in resurrection light
We read the fulness of thy might.

O love of God, our shield and stay,
Through all the perils of our way;
Eternal Love, in thee we rest,
Forever safe, forever blest!

BONAR. Hymns of Faith and Hope.

CHAPTER IV.

ITS SIMPLICITY - CONTRAST WITH ROMANISM-POETRY.

"I am meek and lowly in heart."—Matt. 11: 29.

OW admirable the simplicity of this ordinance! how in keeping with the whole character and gospel of Christ!

The religion of Jesus is not a religion of the imagination or the senses. It indeed acknowledges them and ap

peals to them in their proper sphere; for it is a system for man with an intellectual and physical nature. It sanctifies and calls into exercise every part of our complex being, aiming to bring the whole man, — body, soul, and spirit, under its blessed control, and making all conducive to his highest spiritual welfare.

The religion of Christ, therefore, gives no countenance to that exaggerated spiritualism which affects to transcend the external senses, and dis

cards all historical beliefs, dwelling in a realm of sublimated idealism.

Although the most intensely spiritual of all religious systems, it is yet most intensely concrete and human, as addressing itself not to pure spirits, but to spirits incarnated, and which shall forever be embodied, though in a sense to which our existing material forms furnish but a very faint analogy. And thus it may be that, as our Saviour intimates, though without explanation, the Lord's Supper will in some sense be perpetuated in heaven. There is to be a "drinking anew in the kingdom of God." What a spectacle such a scene would be in heaven! Would not the angels look on and wonder?

But it is a striking proof of the divine origin of Christianity, that it ever holds the senses to their proper place of subordination, making them honorable yet humble servitors to the higher spirit that dwells within. And so also the imagination, that soaring intellectual faculty, is taught to chasten its aspirings and to regard itself as only the lowly handmaid of faith, helping faith to gaze with keener eye, and grasp with firmer hand, and comprehend with wider sweep, spiritual and eternal realities; yet itself to veil its face and bow with

reverent mien before the invisible things of God, which faith discerns.

A system of religion which gives great prominence to the imagination and the senses cannot, therefore, be from God.

In striking contrast with all earth-born systems is Christianity, in all its parts, aspects, and influences. The evangelistic record of the life of Christ, and especially of its last days and of his passion,― how remarkably simple and reserved! There is no high-wrought description of the different incidents of that last wondrous scene, no artistic grouping of events, no studied projection into the foreground of the various stages of the machinery of the crucifixion, no startling dramatic touches for effect. A few artless strokes, and the scene is before us; but not so drawn as to make its chief appeal to the natural sensibilities, or to foster a mere sensuous or sentimental devotion.1

1"The mysteries of those hours of darkness, when with the sufferings of the agonized body mingled the sufferings of the sacred soul, the struggles with sinking nature, the accumulating pressure of the burden of a world's sin, the momently more and more embittered foretastings of that which was its wages and its penalty, the clinging desperation of the last assaults of Satan and his mustered hosts, the withdrawal and darkening of the Paternal presence,-mysteries such as these, so deep and so dread, it was not meet that even the tongues of apostles should be moved to speak of, or the pens of evangelists to record.