and another for moral qualifications. One is highly sensitive, and another firm and unimpressionable. One has exquisite taste, and another capacity for business. One nation is inventive, and another, like the English, persevering and able to improve inventions. It is well for us to dwell on this, because in our unchristian way of viewing things we are apt to forget that they are gifts, because they seem so simple. But all God's gifts are not sublime. You would all acknowledge prophecy to be a gift, but St. Paul says the humblest faculties are also gifts. The eye is precious, but the foot, in its way, is no less so.

Next, observe that all these are gifts, sometimes we fancy they are not, because sad and melancholy moralists remind us that these things are vain, Beauty is fleeting, such men cry; strength is soon but labour and sorrow. Sound sense doth not save: "Life is thorny, and youth is vain. The path of glory leads but to the grave." A noble name, an honoured position, an existence of fame, what are these but dreams? True, all these are transient; and because so, we are forbidden to set our hearts upon them: "the world passeth away, and the lust thereof." But still, in spite of moralizing, men covet them. And the Apostle says it is right: God gave them: do you honour Him by despising them? They are good, but not the higher good. Good so long as they are desired in subservience to the greater good, but evil if they are put in the place of this.

Thirdly, remark that they are to be earnestly cultivated.

There is a mistake into which religious people are apt to fall, but which the Apostle avoids: and this is one of the negative marks of his inspiration. The Apostles were never fanatical; but ordinary men, when strongly influenced, exaggerate. Now, the world makes very little of charity; and religious men, perceiving the transcendent excellence of this grace, make very little of talents: nay, some depreciate them

as almost worthless. They talk contemptuously of the “mere moral man." They speak of cleverness and gifts of intellect, as in themselves bad and dangerous. They weed the finest works of human genius from their libraries. And hence the religious character has a tendency to become feeble, to lose all breadth of view, and all manly grasp of realities. Now, on the contrary, St. Paul prays that the whole soul (vxn), the natural man as well as the spirit, may "be preserved blameless till the coming of Christ."

And again he allows a distinction—" the best gifts."

The same Apostle who so earnestly urged contentment with the gifts we have, and forbade contemptuous scorn of others with feeble gifts, bids us yet to aspire. And just as St. Peter said, "Add to your faith, virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, temperance;" so would St. Paul have said, "Add to your nobility of rank, nobleness of mind; to your naturally strong constitution, health by exercise; to your memory, judgment; to your power of imitating, invention." He permits no dream of fantastic equality, no pretence that all gifts are equal, or all alike precious. He never would have said that the builder who executed was equal to the architect who planned.

Be contented, yet aspire: that should be the faith of all, and the two are quite compatible. And there arises from such a belief the possibility of generous admiration: all the miserable shutting-up of ourselves in superciliousness is done away. Desirous of reaching something higher, we recognise love and what is above ourselves; and this is the condition of excellence, for we become that which we admire.

II. The estimate of gifts in comparison with graces.

They are less excellent than charity. They are not the perfection of our nature. He who treads the brilliant road of the highest accomplishments is, as a man, inferior to him who treads the path of Love. For in the spiritual world a man is

measured not by his genius, but by his likeness to God. Intellect is not divine; Love is the most essential of all the attributes of God. God does not reason, nor remember, but He loves. Thus to the Apostle's mind, there was emptiness in eloquence, nothingness in knowledge and even in faith, uselessness in liberality and sacrifice, where Love was not. And none could be better qualified than he to speak. In all these gifts he was pre-eminent; none taught like him the philosophy of Christianity. None had so strong a faith, nor so deep a spirit of self-sacrifice. In no other writings are we so refined and exalted by "the thoughts which breathe and words that burn." And yet, in solitary pre-eminence above all these gifts, he puts the grace of Love.

IT

LECTURE XXV.

I CORINTHIANS, xiii. 4-13.-April 25, 1852.

T is a notable circumstance that the most elaborate description given in Scripture of the grace of Charity is from the pen, not of St. John, who was pre-eminently the man of Love, but of the Apostle Paul, whose great characteristic was his soaring Faith.

To each of the Apostles was given a peculiar work; each had one feature in his character predominant over the rest. If we had been asked what this was in St. Paul, we should have said Faith; for he has assigned to faith that high position which makes it the efficacious instrument in justifying the soul. St. John, on the contrary, was the Apostle of Love. To him we owe the pregnant expressions, "God is Love," "Little children, love one another," "He that loveth dwelleth in God, and God in him." And yet it was not to him that the office was assigned of illustrating and expounding his own especial grace, but to one of a very different character-one in whom the man-like predominated over the woman-like; a man daring, impetuous, intellectual; one in whom all the qualities of the man strongly flourished, and who yet emphatically declares all those-faith, great strength, intellect, gifts, manliness-to be inferior to Love.

There are some very intelligible reasons for this arrangement in God's providential dealings. If the Apostle Paul had exalted the grace of Faith only, and St. John that of Love only, we might have conceived that each magnified especially his own gift, and that his judgment was guided by his pecu

liarities of temperament. But when the gifted Apostle, at the same time that he acknowledges the worth of talents, counts them as nothing in comparison of Love, no doubt remains. It is as if he would show that the graces of the Christian character may be mixed in different proportions, but must all be found in every one who lives the life of Christ. For no man can conquer the world, except by Faith: no man can resemble God, except by Love. It was by Faith that St. Paul removed mountains of impossibility; it was by Love that he became like God.

Our subject then is Charity: we will consider two points.

I. Its description.

II. The reason of its superiority to Gifts.

I. The description of this grace is contained in the fourth to the seventh verses. This description is needed, because no single word in any language will express the fulness of the Christian grace here spoken of. Charity is by conventional usage appropriated to one particular form-almsgiving, and we cannot use the term without thinking of this. Love is appropriated to another human feeling, given by God as one of the means whereby we are freed from self, but which in its highest forms, is too personal and too exclusive to be the Christian grace; in its lowest forms, too earthly. To the Greeks the world was saturated with this earthly idea of love, and it needed this elaborate description to purge from their minds the thoughts connected with it.

Benevolence or Philanthropy is somewhat nearer, but still insufficient to be what St. Paul meant. Benevolence is too often merely passive, too often merely instinctive: a sentiment and nothing more. Besides, many a man is actively benevolent, charitable among the poor, full of schemes and plans for the benefit of others, and yet utterly deficient in that religious sense which accompanies the Christian grace of Love. There