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vidual life, the perpetuation of the human species, the general, social development of the world unto the end, and the triumph of the Redeemer's kingdom over all the earth. The planning and working, alike, of so vast and ramified a system of providence gives him endless occasions for ever-new combinations of infinite skill, forethought, care, patience, and love. By the general laws and principles of his providential administration God presents to mankind at large, in lavish abundance, a vast average sum of good, to which each one who will skilfully, diligently, prayerfully, and believingly seek for it has complete and divinely welcome Wonderful, indeed, are the compensations and equalizations of his providence among men. Every employment has its advantages and its drawbacks; the former always seen beforehand, and the latter as uniformly found and felt afterwards. "God hath put the day of adversity over against the day of prosperity, to the end that man may find nothing after him." "The like afflictions are accomplished in our brethren that are in the world." God's providence provides inevitably, indeed, in whatever form or stage of society for a favored class. Most must toil among material things; the many must go on their own feet wherever they move; few can travel, to see the wonders of nature or the beauties of art; few can possess books, cheap as they are, to any considerable extent; and only an elect few can secure a high education, or range at will through upper spheres of thought and feeling. But the continual evolution, by many and complicated social forces, of this specially favored class has been contrived by the great Maker of all, not merely as a matter of distinguishing mercy to them, but also as such to all those less favored beneath them, as a divinely prepared foundation for a system of privileged co-operation on their part with him, in the effort to elevate the mass of mankind to true and high habits of moral thoughtfulness and aspiration. Fearful indeed are the responsibilities, as ordained of God, of the wise, the powerful, and the rich to all less favored than themselves.

And then, again, how often is it forgotten that the great common pleasures of the heart (common because offered to all, although realized by but few, since not possessing hearts purified by grace and filled with God) are not only open to each one's attainment, but, with infinite kindness and earnestness combined, pressed upon it; compared with which treasures all others are the merest trifles. As God, moreover, made man at the outset in his own image, that he might become by his own choice his free and happy child forever, he has fashioned the elements both of nature and of human life to the presupposition of an active use of the intelligence and virtue in each one which it is his desire to develop in the end to full perfection. While the special ends of God's providence are often manifestly quite various, at one time aiming at individual good, and at another at some larger social result, now immediate and then remote in their bearings, here aiding and developing a given style of action and there disciplining and educating the minds of men to a newer and better one, - its great obvious drift in all ages has been towards the promotion of human virtue, human happiness, and human advancement.

4th. His positive subsidizing of all things to the successful issue, in the end, of his scheme of universal providence. The system of redemption is the grandest demonstration made by God of himself to the universe; and this not for man's sake alone; but "to the intent, also, that unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God." Here, veiled in mortal flesh, lived, for more than thirty years, the Son of God as man's Pattern, and died in the end as man's Atonement. Here, the angels, those "hosts" denoted in Jehovah's title, "the Lord of hosts," are "all" of them employed as "ministering spirits, sent forth to minister unto the heirs of salvation." Small as is the island-universe in the sidereal heavens to which we belong, compared with many others slowly moving with it around the central "Pleiades," with their "sweet influences," and little especially

as is this world alone in it, still all the lines of historic and prophetic interest and progress in the whole vast circumference of created things are represented in the scriptures as unitedly and intensely converging here. On the brief periods of probation allotted to separate human lives on earth, following each other like summer clouds, in such rapid succession, they gather together their strength of light and interest.

How natural and how unanswerable the argument to one who knows how to estimate Christ at his true significance: "He who spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not with him freely give us all things"! But to his children God directly declares: "All things are yours." They own the universe in fee simple, by direct investiture and charter from above. Better than that, they own God himself, the glory of the universe, not only within it everywhere, but also everywhere without it, and above it, and greater than it, however vast, by the same term that he is greater than man himself, "the lord of this lower world," of whom it is said, that "before Him all nations are as nothing, and less than nothing." As vast, therefore, as are the combined resources of the whole creation, in all its physical, intellectual, and moral wealth, and as vast as are the unfathomable riches of God's nature, of which all that yet is presents but a petty image of what he can and will ordain to appear hereafter, in ever-new successions of created good, and on continually higher planes of his own ever expanding but never terminating self-manifestation to finite beings, for their greater happiness and glory, so absolute is the certainty that none of his plans will lack their needful succors, or fail to answer their expected ends.

5th. His own inexorable withdrawment from human view in the management of his providence.

The discipline of this life is inevitably, to each one of the race, from first to last, a discipline of faith. We can, if we will, neglect or refuse to see the many convincing proofs of his busy presence with us, or we may distress ourselves

with a sense of the many mysteries of our brief being here, and of the but partially uncurtained future beyond; and still he maintains a voiceless silence, as he stands, unseen, at our very side. The heart that loves him most, and eagerly longs for the vision of his Father and his God, face to face, in the upper glory, must content itself without any manifest divine approach, in this world, to its senses. So imperturbably calm is he, amid earth's fiercest tumults of thought and feeling, that he seems, perchance, to multitudes almost or quite unimpressible alike to human want and wo, as well as to all their fearful causes and occasions. By nothing else so baffling to human thought and feeling is the fact of his perpetual, purposed invisibility to human eyes paralleled, unless it be the utter impenetrability of that vast and solemn future towards which all things human are so irresistibly tending. Does not "the hiding" of his presence, at all points, from the human race seem in itself as awfully divine as, on any other scale of observation, appear the greatest wonders of his power and skill?

6th. His immeasurable patience in the execution of his purposes. The Infinite Mind is never in a hurry. "A thousand years are in his sight but as yesterday" is to us, "when it is past." But God not only waits for "the appointed hour" in his plans, however far off from human vision; he meets also with infinite ease the all but infinite difficulty of quiet and serene forbearance with human waywardness and wantonness over all the earth, in every moment of its history. But while, in the revelation of his justice towards the guilty, he is thus for a time persistently self-restrained, even to the utmost possible self-denial, he is patient, "with a will"; terrible is the method of his silence; and his wrath is only gathering all the more heat by its temporary inaction. "Fill ye up, then, the measure of your fathers," is the plain, practical sense of his jealous posture of waiting upon any man, or any generation of men, to complete the elements of their doom. Thus mockers at his falsely supposed indifference to their conduct are ever busy, with strange,

delirious zeal, in "heaping up wrath for themselves against the day of wrath." That forbearance with the wicked for a season, which they, with presumptuous haste, count his "slackness concerning his promise," is altogether moral in its source, and has, in its highest aspects, great redemptive ends in view, even the furtherance of his church on earth. Therefore says Paul (Rom. ix. 22): "What if God, though willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, yet endured, with much long-suffering, the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction, even in order that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory." The summer heats and favoring showers, under which the tares grew to troublesome luxuriousness, were meant, not for them, but for "the plants of righteousness" that grew by their side.

There are two leading anthropomorphic conceptions of God's providence, and widely diverse one from the other, in themselves and in their influence the one, and that most widely prevalent, frigid enough to suit a heart estranged from all divine ideas, the conception of God as an infinite mechanician, who, after making the world with wonderful care and skill, thousands of years ago, passed it to a great degree out of his heart, if not out of his hands - as men relinquish to others' direction the working of machines, which they have made at the outset to work aright-contenting himself, after pronouncing his handiwork, in the first "days of creation," to have been "good," with looking on as an indifferent or idle, if critical, spectator of its subsequent history. The other conception, which is true in itself, and which exerts a deeply quickening influence upon any heart that holds it, and which is everywhere in the Bible imaged in full beauty to our thoughts, is that of an infinitely loving, all-watchful, and all-bestowing Householder, occupying every part of the universe with his active presence, power, skill, and affection; tenderly yearning at all times after the immediate and lasting good of each one of his great family of intelligent creatures, and with inexhaustible generosity, edu