of the spirituality of religion. There came a great change over him, and from that day he was a power in Scotland, and he tasted the fullness of life. On the last night of his life as he walked in his garden he was overheard saying, "Oh my dear Heavenly Father." He lay down to sleep, and in the morning they found he was with the Father.

A third form of conversion is intellectual. Nathaniel was not able to believe that Jesus was the Messiah on account of scripture difficulties, and St. Thomas could not believe that Jesus was the Son of God on account of rational difficulties. The solution of both problems, and of every other religious problem, is found in Jesus Christ Himself. When a man perplexed on every side places himself in Christ's hand to see whether Christ will lead him, and what Christ will do with him, that is conversion. Mr. Romanes in A Candid Examination of Theism wrote-" There can no longer be any doubt that the existence of a God is wholly unnecessary to explain any of the phenomena of the universe." Afterwards he wrote A Candid Examination of Religion, and he quotes as expressing his own feelings:

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one,

Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

And he adds-" How great then is Christianity as being the religion of love, and causing men to believe both in the cause of love's supremacy and the infinity of God's love to man." Two candid examinations, and between them a conversion.

There is one other form of conversion which is practical. One may be neither a sinner, nor a Pharisee, nor a doubter, and yet come short because he is doing nothing with his life. He is easygoing, luxurious, pleasant, useless. Conversion for him will be the call to service, perhaps in a Sunday school, or in a workman's club, perhaps to work among the sick, or to enter a town council. A young Italian was feasting with his friends, centuries ago. He wearied of the wine and of the jests; he went out and stood beneath the clear blue Umbrian sky. When his friends joined him they said—“ You are in love;" and he had the distant look of a man whose thoughts were in another world. "I am," said St. Francis, "in love, and my bride is called

poverty." No one has been anxious to woo her since Jesus lived, and he was going to serve her all his days. We know how loyal he was to his love, and it was a distinguished Frenchman, and not a believer, who said that there never had been a Christian like St. Francis since the days of Christ Himself. And that is the last and most beautiful kind of conversion-conversion to the service of our fellow men under the constraint of Jesus' love.

VII

THE PASSION OF GOD

"In all their affliction he was afflicted."-Isaiah lxiii. 9.

HE idea of God when not guided by the

THE

spirit of Christ is apt to oscillate between a ferocious deity who is simply an incarnation of the remorseless laws of nature-a sublimated chief magistrate, and an imbecile deity who is too goodnatured to punish sin at all-an exceedingly foolish father. The former God cannot be loved, although He may be obeyed, as one obeys the law of gravitation, and the latter cannot be respected although He may be liked, as one likes an inoffensive person. Were we compelled to

choose between the two we had better take the magistrate, for this world would not be worth living in to-day, and the world to come would have no attraction, if the reins of government were in the hands of a deity who made no distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness, the being whom the French with friendly

and contemptuous pity call "the good God." With Christian thought we rise to a higher level, and the spiritual genius of the Bible is shown, not in the reconciliation of mercy and of justice, which is a clumsy device of second-rate theology, but their inclusion in love. Love taking vengeance on sin which has wronged the human soul is justice; love redeeming the soul is mercy. The conflict of emotion in the nature of God which the prophets do not hesitate to describe, as for instance-"How shall I give thee up, Ephraim, how shall I deliver thee Israel? My heart is turned within me. My repentings are kindled together," is not a contradiction. It is rather the play of parts in music which leads us to final unity; the mixture of contending colours in tapestry which blend into one pattern.

Hebrew piety has taught us two truths regarding God which are not always united in human thought, but which are necessary to the perfect idea, and the first is not His sympathy but His spirituality. With travail of soul the saints of the Old Testament extricated the Being of God from the phenomena of nature and safeguarded His personality from the abstractions