knowledge; to knowledge temperance; to temperance patience; to patience godliness; to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity;" ever keeping in view his glorious appearing, when we hope to be made completely like him, and to stand in his presence with exceeding joy. If the blessedness of which our Psalm is speaking be the ambition of the Church of God, no less than in another aspect is it the hope of the world, although they know it not. For what is the converse of this truth that the righteous man is blessed, and shall endure for ever? "The ungodly are not so, but like the chaff which the wind driveth away." For a time they may "flourish like a green bay-tree;" but in the end "their way shall perish." They may now "stand in judgment" over others, and wrong and oppress their fellow-men, but they shall not stand in the judgment, nor find a place when the righteous judge shall come. For "God hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained," and when that brighter day shall dawn upon this sin-struck earth, the character we have been speaking of shall visibly predominate in earth's affairs, and no more shall it be said that might prevails over right. "A king shall reign, and prosper, and execute justice and judgment over the earth." (Jer. xxiii. 5.) Under his rule "No longer hosts encountering hosts They hang the trumpet in the hall, "He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy. He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence, and precious shall their blood be in his sight," and "men shall be blessed in him; all nations shall call him blessed." (Ps. lxxii.) The human race shall breathe anew under such righteous rule, andTM hasten on with joy to that more glorious culmination beyond, when every trace of evil shall be "wiped away," and all things made new, when "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, nor pain." (Rev. xxi. 4.) Till that glad time come, let us who look and long for it endeavour to go on in the strength of that truth with which our Psalm concludes." The Lord knoweth [or, as some would read, ‘approveth'] the way of the righteous.' Then there need be no fear for such as are in the paths of his righteousness. He knoweth their way, and all the difficulties and dangers that surround it; and, doubtless, he will guard and guide his children; for "the Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and he knoweth them that trust in him." (Nahum i. 7.) He approveth it, and "what shall we then say? If God be for us, who can be against M. W. STRANG. us ?" Hillhead, Glasgow. 101 LIVING IN THE WILL OF GOD." And when the tempter came to him, he said: If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said: It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.-MATT. iii. 3, 4. "EVERY word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." We have here to do, then, with God's mouth and that which issues from it. We do not depart from the spirit of Christ's great sayingnot the less his because a quotation from Israel's ancient law-when we say, God has many mouths out of which his life-giving words proceed. He has a mouth in nature, from which, as from the darkness of the eternal throne itself, "thunderings and lightnings," as well as sweet voices of peace and tenderness, are continually heard; he has a mouth in our own conscience, where, as in the inner sanctuary of our threefold nature, the reflection of his inextinguishable glory serves at least to make the darkness visible; he has a mouth in revelation, which has through the ages been the undeceiving, though imperfectly comprehended, oracle of his Church and people; and above all, he has a mouth from whose lips of guileless purity all the riches of his wisdom and the fulness of his grace are poured forth-in HIM who is comprehensively, preeminently, and essentially THE WORD; the brightness of the Father's glory, and the perfect embodiment of his will. 66 But "every word." What is a word? Taken in a passive sense, is not a word the embodiment of a thought? taken in an active sense, is it not the expression of a volition? If I am calling upon a friend and he asks me, "What sort of a day is it ?" and I reply, "Cold;" by that word, "cold," I convey to him my thought regarding the day. But if he should further inquire of me," Will you not come nearer the fire ?" and I answer, No; I am warm enough;" then I express my will in relation to the movement which his kindness suggested. Such at least is the legitimate use of language,-which is but the collocation of words,-the purpose for which it was originally bestowed upon man by his beneficent Creator; though, alas! men do not always use it thus, but make of that which was intended to be a transparent medium a disguising veil; practically adopting the cynical saying of a certain great statesman, that language is most useful in enabling us to conceal our thoughts. Such was, we apprehend, the Devil's opinion when, in the temptation to which we have drawn attention, he said to the blessed Jesus: "If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." But such, it need not be said, is never the case with God's words. God-to use our familiar expressionalways means what he says: "He is not a man that he should lie." “The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times." Moreover, we shall find, if we consider the subject closely, that God's words seem always to combine the active and passive senses to which reference has been made. They are at once the embodiment of the Divine thought and the expression of the Divine will. They are, as some one has graphically said, "living words, with hands and feet." Thus, for example, when at the Creation God said, "Let there be light;" or, as the original expresses it with still sublimer brevity,—“ Light be "-and the light was: how magnificent was the thought of the Infinite Mind, and how supreme the will which, as in a moment, flooded the universe with its splendour. When, therefore, Jesus says to the tempter, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," he teaches us the profound lesson, that it is not by any essential virtue or potency in the creature-such as breadthat our life is sustained, but, fundamentally at least, because such creature is the embodiment of God's thought and will. Did you ever ask yourself the question, "Why does bread, or any other kind of food, nourish my body?" The Christian answer, which underlies all scientific ones, is surely this,-Because such is the will of God. How simple and yet how sublime a philosophy! A child may apprehend it; an angel cannot comprehend it. God could just as easily have nourished our bodies with the dust of the earth, of which they were made, or the gaseous elements of the air and the water, of which they are so largely composed. He might have fed us as he feeds the lilies and the fowls of the air. But just because we are so much better than they," he willed otherwise; and that not arbitrarily, but-as we can at least dimly see-out of his wise care and fatherly love towards us in this our fallen estate. The lilies and the fowls have never sinned, and therefore God can afford to feed them as he does his angels, and as he will his saints in heaven; but man has "fallen as a star," and by his fall made toil and pain at once the necessity of his condition and the perpetual sacrament of his redemption. 66 "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God:" that is, our life has its living root only in the will of God-it at once grows out of it, and is sustained by it; and therefore, to act in contradiction to that will, or independently of that will,-as Satan tempted our Lord to do,would be in effect, to rebel against the fundamental principle or power upon which the law whereby bread satisfies our hunger itself depends, in order, as we might think, to secure one of its secondary results. "Is not the life more than meat ?" Such, we apprehend, is our Lord's argument against the tempter. It is not, however, our present intention to enter further into the wide and fruitful subject of our Lord's temptation, many and important as are both its doctrinal and practical lessons. What we design in the following pages is to speak somewhat of the will of God, and our own relation thereto. God's will and man's will are distinct, separate, often opposite. In a certain most important sense, man's will may be said to be independent of God's will. That it should be so is indeed most strange and wonderful. That out of the infinite will there should be born a finite, which it is unable-by a self-limitation of its power -to control; this is at once the mystery of providence and the glory and peril of man. Man's free will is the most God-like attribute of his nature, and it was in this, perhaps, rather than in his assumed immortality, his reason, or his dominion over creation, that we are to understand the saying, that "God made man in his own image." And it is out of "this dread endowment of free will," that there springs at once the possibility of his elevation to a glory greater far than that of angels, or his degradation to a misery and ruin as hopeless and more abject than that of fiends. Is it asked, How high can man rise? We have the answer in Rev. iii. 21, "To him that overcometh will I give to sit with me in my throne." Is it asked, How low can man sink? We have the answer from the pen of the Apostle Peter (2 Epistle ii. 12): "But these, as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption." But neither the one nor the other without or against his will. Let us not be misunderstood. We do not say that man can save himself without Divine grace; on the contrary, we contend that he cannot even move or breathe without Divine grace. natural life is as dependent on Divine grace as our spiritual life. What we are bold to say is this,-God will not and cannot save us against our will. We must be willing to be saved, or we cannot be saved; we may will to be lost, and if so, must be lost. Does not Christ say as much as this? "Ye will not come to me that ye might have life" (John v. 40). And how does the widest invitation of the Gospel run? "Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely" (Rev. xxii. 17). The will, then, is the very core and mainspring of our moral being, and on the question of the existing relation between it and the Divine will, depends our happiness and holiness now, and our salvation and glory hereafter. Our God's will is the basis and origin of all the laws on which the creature's life depends, and every deviation from it-every refusal on our part to conform thereto-necessarily brings us according to the magnitude of the transgression, under the penalty and power of death. Some of the Christian brethren who seem to have been specially called at the present time to reaffirm in the ears of the churches this great and blessed truth, frequently make use of the expression," Living in the will of God," and it is no doubt both convenient and expressive; but like all religious technicalities it is somewhat inadequate. We cannot really live-as it seems to imply that we can-out of the will of God; out of the will of God we can only die. The Divine will is the grand and perfect sphere filled with all the energies of the infinite life, all the splendour of the eternal light,-beyond lies only the outer darkness in which the forces of evil alone are working to their one dread issue-death. We all see and acknowledge this in the natural region. The laws of matter and motion, the laws of chemistry and magnetism, the laws of life and health, are only so many manifestations of the will of God in the physical world. For it must never be forgotten that the will of God is revealed to us only in his laws,-laws of matter, of mind, and of spirit. And just so far as we are living in accordance with these laws we are living in the will of God; while, on the other hand, whenever we-whether consciously or unconsciouslyviolate these laws, we cease to live in the will of God, and incur the inevitable penalty; the only difference is this, if we violate God's laws wilfully, the penalty assumes a punitive character; if unknowingly, the penalty still follows, but is simply penalty. This follows from the grand truth of the reign or sovereignty of law,a truth which, while weakly shrunk from, and vainly opposed, by many ignorant Christians, is, when rightly understood, a ground of solid and constant assurance and peace. For the uniformity of law is but the necessary consequence of the immutability of the Divine will, and its universality only a corollary from the infinity of the Divine presence. Just so far, therefore, as those Divine attributes are to the Christian a cause of rejoicing, should the consequent uniformity and universality of law be also. Now, if I should throw myself into a river, or the sea, and am unable to swim, and no help be at hand, I shall without doubt be drowned. Why? Because I have placed myself in a false relation to the law of gravitation. Mix certain chemical substances together and an explosion will ensue which may maim or kill you. Why ? Because you have placed yourself in a false relation to the laws of chemistry. If we go into a house in which there is some infectious disease, without taking any proper precautions, and we happen to be predisposed, we shall ourselves become the victims of the disease. Why? Because we have violated the laws of health. Or, as we may just as truly say in any one of these cases, because we have disobeyed the will of God in these natural things. And just so is it in the spiritual region: there, as well as here, God rules by law,-law as uniform, as universal, as inflexible, as that of the physical world: there, as well as here, the great motive power of this law is the will of God: there, as well as here, disobedience involves inevitable penalty, and ultimately death. It is not too much to say, that all that is good, and real, and saving in religion is contained in this one saying: "Doing the will of God from the heart." (Eph. vii. 6.) This is indeed the whole duty of man; this is the only possible way of salvation: this is at once the secret of peace, of purity, and of power. It was so in the case of Christ himself, and is indeed the key at once to the majesty of his life, and the mystery of his work. Do you ask, What was the meaning of Christ's life; what was the meaning of Christ's |