Him : He will indeed save us. Pray that when you are alone you may say these words, one after another, with the utmost deliberation, throwing into them all the clearness that your understanding can command, all the warmth of your affections, all the power and intensity of your will. In short, pray that you may mean them. If you do, they will bless you; now, at this blessed Festival of the Divine Redeemer's Birth, and hereafter.

And you who as yet have not found your way to God's Altar, do not lose heart, as if you could never have part in the secret blessings of the New Kingdom. Certainly you have yet to know, by experience, that no moments in existence can compare, for purity and intensity of happiness, with those during which a Christian soul, here on earth, unites itself to Christ in the Sacrament of His Love. But do not lose heart. Make the most of the truth which you already know, and it will lead you on; do not rest till, by God's grace, you have made the most of it. Only let no root of bitterness1 stand before you and your eternal birthright: only let no cherished evil keep you from your God. A day will come to you too, if you will, when you shall say, with a sincerity you little imagine now, "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him: He will

save us.

1 Heb xii. 15.

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SERMON VIII.

THE GLORY OF THE GOSPEL.

(SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT.)

I TIM, i. II.

The glorious Gospel of the Blessed God.

WHAT,-men often ask,-what is a phrase? Well, it may

be nothing more than an ornament of human speech, intended to embellish some subject which would be prosaic or dull without it. Now, a phrase, in this sense of the term, is not entitled to any great respect. It is like an ornament in architecture which means nothing; which adds nothing to the strength or purpose of a building. It recalls the tinsel garniture with which bad wares are sometimes recommended to careless purchasers. A phrase thus comes to mean in many minds something that is without basis in fact; something unsubstantial, flimsy, deceptive.

But a phrase need not mean this; and, considering the use and dignity of human language as the expression of thought, it ought never to mean it. In a sincere man a phrase means a great deal; it expresses a thought or feeling which would not be expressed if he did not use it. In every really great writer, that is, in every writer who, by moral weight or mental power, has come to reign during a course of years, perhaps of centuries, over the reason and heart and imagination of men, his phrases almost rank with his arguments. They condense, and they set forth by the condensation, whatever is most characteristic and imperious in the writer's mind; they mark the moments when speech is most vivid with the force and fire of the thought which bursts forth through it; they are not less significant when they are produced by impulse, whether of thought or feeling, provided only that they express it accurately.

Men feel this; and therefore, from time to time in the world's history, a phrase becomes a power and may even play a great part. Those who dislike its import will protest; but the conquering phrase is believed to embody fact or reason, and it holds on its way. It passes from mouth to mouth; from writer to writer; even from one language to another: it achieves in a summary manner the work of a dozen arguments. It may propagate a saving truth; it may be the apostle of a capital error. But in any case it is a power; and all forms of belief and opinion are anxious to command its services if they can. So it is in political life, as we all know; so it is in the more sacred province of religion. From the days when the great and fruitful phrases, "the Kingdom of Heaven," "the Blood of the Lamb," "justification by faith in the Son of God," s "the washing of regeneration," were first uttered in the distant East, down to our own day and country, Christianity has had to do with phrases; some of them short-lived and disappearing at once into history; some of them living on in documents of more or less authority, or in popular religious language, and so shaping the thoughts and feelings of men from one generation to another.

Now, in this expression of St. Paul's, "the glorious Gospel of the Blessed God," we have one of those phrases which have moved the world. It sums up the impression which the religion of Jesus Christ made upon the mind and the heart of the man, who, so far as we know, has done more for its extension than any other human being since the Incarnation. The glorious Gospel, or, as it might be rendered, "the Gospel of the glory of the Blessed God; that group of words tells us what our religion was to the great Apostle. Let us try to take it to pieces. Let us ask ourselves why he, a man who knew what words meant, a man of reason rather than of impulse, a man whose whole life expressed the sincerity with which he uttered this very expression-let us ask ourselves why he called his Master's religion "the glorious Gospel of the Blessed God."

The answer to that question may be of service to us in two respects. First, it will give shape and strength to our thoughts in the Advent season; when we are considering the coming of the Son of God into this our world; its meaning for the world's history; its meaning for our own souls; its meaning as a preparation for and warrant of another coming of His, 1 St. Matt. iii. 2. 2 Rev. vii. 14. 3 Rom. v. I. • Tit. iii. 5.

which is still future, and which will be of the utmost significance to every child of Adam. And, secondly, it may help us to turn the lessons of the Day of Intercession for Missions1 to some practical account. Those persons whose occupations on that day did not allow them to take part in the public service of the Church must have felt, if they were good Christians, that it was a great day of prayer; a day, not merely fertile, as we must trust, with blessings to the heathen, but full of meaning for the spiritual life of the Church of God in this country; a day likely to prove the turning-point in its destiny of many an immortal soul. Before the grace and fervour of such a day as that has faded away, it is well to try to gather up some of the fragments that remain of it; to make sure, if God wills, that, so far as we are concerned, it shall not have been utterly wasted.

When St. Paul thus speaks of the Gospel, he meant at the least that it is a truth, offered to man in the Name and on the authority of God. It is the Gospel of the Blessed God. Man did not invent it; it was not the growth of human minds, although they have taught it. It came from God. Coming thus from the Source of truth, it is simply true. St. Paul did not spend his best years, his strength, his health-he did not encounter fatigue, persecution, imprisonment, and lastly, death -for anything less than a Divine certainty. For him the Gospel was not a guess about the Unseen which might conceivably turn out to be untrue; nor yet an opinion about it which might be balanced or overset by a counter-opinion, resting upon equal probabilities. He believed with all his heart that God, Who had made Himself partially known through a long line of centuries to his own Hebrew ancestors, had spoken to men, fully and finally, in the Person of His Son. For St. Paul Jesus Christ stood apart from all others; He was unlike any other in all the course of human history; He was unique alike in His Person and in His Work. The religion of Jesus was for him the only true, or, as men now speak, the absolute religion; and his one ambition was to make all men see what a blessed thing it is to be associated in its faith and practice. To St. Paul the central proof of this was the outward, independent, purely historical fact of Christ's Resurrection from the dead; a fact which was attested by some hundreds of people who had seen the Risen Saviour. But, besides this, 1 The previous Wednesday had been so observed. 3 I Cor. xv. 6.

2 Heb. i. I, 2.

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there were many inward proofs that this religion met the deepest needs of his being, and so showed, by the strong yet tender hand which it could lay on the human soul, that it proceeded from the Heart of the God Who made us.

On no other understanding than this are Christian Missions to the heathen a reasonable or even a defensible enterprise. If Christianity were only a guess at truth, more successful in our opinion than other guesses about it, but still a guess; then, I say, to try to convert heathen nations to it would be not merely a waste of time, it would be a gross impertinence. What right have those who confess that they only guess to address themselves to men who believe, however mistakenly, that they know? What would an educated Mahomedan or Buddhist say, to a missionary who asked him to give up his old faith on such a ground as this? He would say, "Really, sir, you mistake both my wants and your own capacities. I want something certain to lean upon, if I am to practise any religion at all; and if my old creed is partly or altogether false, it at least does or can do more for me than your hesitating supposition. If you would have me change my mind, you must be certain about your own; you must give me something that will not be less positive than the faith which you would take away."

The Gospel of God is a certainty for those who believe it, on His Word; but what are the features in it which constitute what St. Paul calls its "glory"?

I.

The Gospel is glorious, first, because it reveals and proclaims the true glory of God's Being. By His true glory, I mean the glory of His character, of His attributes, as a Moral God. St. Paul calls it a revelation; and what is a revelation but the removal of a veil which had hidden God from the soul of man?

We may make pretty sure of the existence of a God without a revelation; His Eternal Power and Godhead are understood from the things that are made,1 and that meet the eyes of men. There is an idea of a Supreme Being discoverable in all human minds, but in varying degrees of distinctness; as is the idea of right and wrong; as is the idea of the square or the circle. And as man sets out with an idea of this kind, which he can 1 Rom. i. 20.