of life from a sense of its uncertainty, and of their own private insignificance.

The sublime disinterestedness of a state of society in which the individual holds himself as living only as his race lives, and not dying so long as they survive, and which calmly resigns the hope of individual immortality to the hope of a noble future for its people, admirable as an illustration of moral elevation, is, nevertheless, both the result and the perpetuation of imperfectly developed personal affections.

It is impossible to conceive of a tender domestic life, of a general ardor and activity of the affections, in a state of society in which the instincts of immortality are suppressed, or smoulder in an ashen vagueness. Man dare not cast his all upon affections which perish at the grave; nor can he attribute to a being insignificant as the limits of this earthly existence make him, a claim on any deep and self-sacrificing affections. We know very well that human nature has vindicated all its qualities in exceptional cases, in all ages and under all circumstances, and do not doubt that holy faith, and spiritual insight and elevation, and family affections, have existed in sporadic cases since the world was made, and under the most disadvantageous conditions. But we are now speaking of the general rule, and of the characteristics of successive eras and ideas; and we say that the absence among the Jews, and in the prophetic writings, of any distinct faith in the immortality of the soul, or of the perpetuation of the individual beyond the grave, is a sufficient proof of the undeveloped and torpid state of the affections, and of the domestic order, as compared with the other and earlier parts of human experience. If we are told, that, although this does not clearly appear in their sacred writings, it may have been a part of their interior confidence, we reply that the affections cannot conceal their faith, or fail to give a bold prominence to it when they hold it; and that caution or doubt in the expression of a faith in immortality is equivalent to indifference, and shades, by easy degrees, into unbelief.

After the prophetic books were closed, we know that

throughout the world, particularly in Greece and India, notions of immortality were beginning to awake and to become important, and to have disciples among the Jews themselves. But the immortality, whether of the Indian philosophy or of Plato himself, was rather an immortality of the spiritual principle than of its individual possessor, the immortality of the

rain-drop that falls into an ever-living ocean.

Do we ask, then, what the new revelation was to unfold? We answer, the importance, the dignity, the glory, of the individual. And how was this to be done? By revealing something beyond the goodness, the mercy, the general fatherhood of God, namely, his personal interest in, and discriminating feeling towards, the individual members of his human family; by revealing God, in short, as human, in the play of his interest and affection, his sympathy and tenderness, toward men. Until men could learn to think themselves of individual importance in God's sight, they could neither believe in their own immortality, nor love as immortals, nor treat otherwise than with stoical repression their own latent tenderness of feeling. Polygamy, desertion, the prostration and enslaving of women, the selling of children into bondage, concubinage, and every form of contempt for the affections, belonged to the era when the individual was nothing, the race and tribe every thing, when power and right, authority and justice, absolute and impersonal, ruled the world.

But the new revelation began a fresh era. We cannot describe it better than as the era of the affections; and it began that era, and accomplished that revelation, by the incarnation. That is to say, God came into the world as a man, came near to us, and confessed and disclosed his personal and human affections towards us, in Christ Jesus. Not that in any Trinitarian or popular sense Jesus Christ was God, any more than the plenipotentiary is the king, or the messenger his own sender; but he so truly represented God's love and tenderness, as feeling human weakness and want, and individual griefs and sorrows, and as taking his children one by one to his bosom, that we are henceforth justified in ascribing to God every

affection and tenderness and consideration for our private griefs and the wants of our affections, which we behold in Jesus Christ, who was Immanuel or God with us, God manifest in the flesh.

The directness, the immediateness, the condescension, the domesticity of God's love; his willingness to be the personal friend of each and every one of his children; his sympathy with private and personal griefs and sorrows and struggles, — this is the revelation made in the incarnation: "the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. It has been easy enough for the world in all ages to deify men and exalt human qualities into divine, but only Christ has humanized God, and brought divine attributes into human limitations and conditions.

The wonderful condescension of the almighty God - permitting us and entreating us to see him in a human creature, to know him in knowing a human creature, to interpret him by the conduct, affections, and sacrifices of a human creatureought to excite all our gratitude and all our wonder. Nothing short of this could ever have drawn human affections out of the supine indifference in which they lay dormant. In no climate less heavenly mild than that which Jesus Christ, the sun of righteousness, has made, the climate of warm, all-embosoming, and all-penetrating love from God, could the delicate sensibilities, the family affections, the personal aspirations, of humanity have dared to shoot and bud and blossom until they made that garden bower of homes and hearts which we call modern civilization. This is Christendom, the age and sway of personal affections, the era of the individual, when man dares to look at his personal stake in the universe; dares to believe himself known to God and dear to him; dares to look death in the face, and succeeds in looking its stony eyes out of countenance; dares to love the fragile and the death-struck, because they are still strong in God's care, and undying in their essence; dares to grow old and recognize his own decay, because so only can he renew his youth; dares to see his own

imperfections and sins just as they are, because God loves him in spite of them, and because he is to have an endless opportunity of struggling with them and putting them away, and has an all-sufficient ally in his Saviour or his Father.

There is no end to the beauty and significance of the faith that God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ; no bound to the meaning and glory of the incarnation. It has changed general principles into personal affections, it has made religion from a public concern a private interest; it has brought the temple into the home and into the heart.

We know very well that this is bringing God too nigh to suit the views or the tastes of some: they do not want religion to be personal, individual, and, so to speak, human. They object to shutting up the soul to the study and contemplation of God in Christ; the limits shock or disturb them; they are willing to have Jesus Christ one among other holy teachers of divine truth, but not "the way, the truth, and the life." They have perhaps never sympathized with Philip's earnest request, "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us," much less with Christ's answer, "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father, and how sayest thou then, Father.'"

Show us the

There is another side to the personality of the gospel: while it brings our Father nigh, it brings our God equally near; while it supports and cherishes and consoles our afflictions, it probes our consciences; while it bends low to whisper its encouragements into our ear, it looks, with the eye that Peter could not meet, into the sinner's own heart, and summons him to an immediate, an urgent, and a personal repentance.

Receiving religion through a person makes it a personal matter; and it thus gets a hold on the conscience and will, as on the heart, which arouses the resistance or alarms the selflove, the pride, and waywardness of many. But, as a matter of observation, all the practical power, whether to console or to convince of sin and save, which resides in the gospel, resides in it by virtue of the incarnation of God in Christ coming

into direct personal relation with individual souls, and so, by a positive, circumstantial, and unescapable influence, shutting them up to a direct intercourse with the great Physician, who is also the great Consoler and Comforter of souls.

This is what our Orthodox brethren of every name mean, when they talk of the necessity of coming to Christ. They have, it is true, a great many theories about the efficacy of Christ's blood, and the virtue of the Atonement, and the power of the cross; but these are matters of theory and speculation and rhetoric. We do not think it necessary here to oppose or to explain them. But all that they mean is realized by every soul which, in any way and on any theory, comes into personal relations with Christ, as the Father's image and the Father's love brought nigh, and so made positive and influential and tender and predominating. If we do not want our religious and personal affections to be chilled to death; if we really desire that personal relation with God which shall make his service a positive and constant reality; if we wish Christianity to come to us, not as the message of the sovereign or president comes to every citizen of the state, but as a warm and tender communication, a letter from home, addressed to our private souls, then let us study God's will in Christ's face and in Christ's life and death; meditate upon and make ourselves masters of the purpose of our Lord's mission on earth. Consider what has been always, and what now continues to be, the secret of his power. Then we shall no longer worship a vague, or a merely just and holy God; but we shall find a heavenly Father, and find him quickening and cleansing our conscience, sanctifying our heart, consoling our griefs, confirming our faith, and renewing our souls, through the tender and all-sufficient hands of a personal, a devoted, a dying, a risen, and an ever-living Saviour.