draws nigh to a persecutor like Saul? The answer is at once simple and plain, His own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, had died upon the cross, and in death had so completely glorified God respecting all that was contrary to Him, that what God was not free to do in consistency with His own character in the day of Moses, He is perfectly free to do in the day of Saul of Tarsus. In the day of Exodus iii., and up to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, man, as a child of Adam, was recognized by God, and although fallen and ruined, had demands made upon him by God in righteousness; in other words, God was requiring from man what man was both unable and unwilling to give. Man was still on his trial, and because so, to him as such God says, You cannot come near me; "draw not nigh hither." The blessed God may, and does, bear with man, test him and prove him in every way; but nearness to God is that which cannot be known, while as yet the first man is allowed a standing before God. But it may be said, Why could not God have granted nearness to Himself, or Himself drawn nigh to a sinner, as in the case of Saul of Tarsus, on the ground of the sacrifice of Christ TO BE offered? The answer is as simple as it is plain: so long as the history of the first man (or man as connected with Adam) is not closed or ended, as long as man is allowed a place, though on trial, God must, while demanding from him, keep him at a distance, else we should have a wilful, rebellious creature allowed on that ground, and brought into that relationship which is true only of the one who is in Christ a new creation; and beside all this, as long as the first man is a recognized existence before God, God must, in consistency with Himself, demand from him; but this very demanding from him is in itself keeping man at a distance, as he cannot meet the claims of a Holy God. When I speak of the first man, I mean man as he is by nature connected with Adam, who brought ruin upon the race; and when I speak

of a recognized existence, and God making demands upon it, I mean that judgment had not been executed upon it: God looked at man as still to be tested and tried, and consequently looked for what became Him from man.

But to turn to the history of Saul of Tarsus; how different it is there. God comes to give righteousness, not to look for it or demand it. His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, had been to earth, had died on the cross, and by His precious death had both completely and fully glorified God, as well as judged and condemned sin in the flesh, and in doing so He most blessedly and righteously supplied an answer to every righteous claim of a holy God. God can now come out and express His love for the sinner, yea, for the very chief of sinners; and here it may be well to look at what made Saul of Tarsus the chief of sinners. It surely was not that he was an immoral man, or an outcast from society, as we say : were he of this character he would never have been selected for, and charged with, the mission on which he was running when God stopped him; on the contrary, Phil. iii. tells us that Saul was one unequalled among his fellows for morality. “If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the Church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.' What then constituted him chief of sinners? not immorality, not the gross wickedness at which refined society blushes, but the dreadful will and malignant opposition with which he set himself against the purpose and mind of God. Hear his own account of it: "I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Which thing I also did in Jerusalem and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them. And

I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities." (Acts xxvi. 9–11.) Who could conceive wilfulness or hatred of Christ and God more desperate than this? To force from city to city the scattered saints of God, and not this only, but to compel them to blaspheme the One who was to them above everyone; on whose account they are suffering at the hands of this relentless hater of Jesus of Nazareth.

Oh, what contrasts rise up before the soul as we think of it! With our natural thought of God and His ways, what should you predicate would be the course He must adopt with a wretch like Saul, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the object of his terrible hate? Why, of course you say, Almighty power would sweep from the earth such a plague; the sword of Divine vengeance and justice must be unsheathed to overtake such an one in his wild wickedness. But oh, how different from all this natural thought of God was His blessed way with poor Saul. Stop him God will; but with what? with the pit? No; but with glory. A light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shone round about him. At midday, when the sun is brightest, Saul is arrested by that which is brighter still. What a sight! A scorner, despiser, hater of Christ in heaven, awakened, arrested, addressed by that very blessed One Himself" Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" That very One Himself, too, who had been on the cross, under the judgment, because of man's sin-that very One Himself who, in that wonderful moment, knew what it was to be forsaken of God, that such as Saul might never be forgotten of Him; now risen up from among the dead, and received up into glory. He it is who commands the rays of that glory to fall upon the persecutor's path, draws nigh to him, speaks to him, comes not to hurl him into the bottomless pit, but to take him up, in the riches of

grace and mercy, to give him forgiveness, righteousness, glory, to make a pattern man of him, a chosen vessel unto Himself, to bear His name before the Gentiles, kings and children of Israel. Such is the way of His grace now, even to the vilest sinner. Christ has died, and by His death righteousness has been established; the love of God, which was not set free to travel out to sinners until righteousness is established, now goes out world-wide. There is not only salvation for the vilest sinner, but glory. of the heart of God to minister now everything from Himself to sinners, even the vilest of the vile, and to make them not only vessels of mercy in themselves, platforms as it were upon which the blessed God makes declarations of His grace and goodness; but He delights to make them living witnesses of what His own Son the Lord Jesus can be to them, as well as what great things He has done for them.

It is the very joy

W. T. T.

TRUTH AND LOVE.

1 and 2 JOHN.

THERE is a peculiar rest to the heart in meditating on St. John's writings. For in them God in the grace of the Father and the Son seems to shine immediately on the poor sinner; and though all committed to man may have failed, yet in Jesus there is a something (and that the true eternal good) outliving all wreck and failure. The world is a ruin, we know; but the Church in the world is a ruin also. Nothing can touch or even soil her, as "the LAMB's wife." But as responsible to God on the earth, like as the garden of Eden was lost when in man's hand, and the inheritance of Israel was lost when in man's hand, so do I believe it is with the Church also. All is safe in Christ, to be manifested in due time; but man holds nothing.

Now the comfort of the soul in reading the epistles of John is this that he does not contemplate the Church as the Lord's "candlestick." Paul does. He looks at it at Corinth, at Philippi, and elsewhere; and we may have to grieve, when reading his epistles to Churches, that things are not in the same ecclesiastical power, and order, and grace that they once were. And such grief is holy, if it be in the measure of the mind of God, who has provided the relief for all this. But John does not call forth that grief; for he does not look at things ecelesiastical, but at things personal. He deals with the sinner and the saint in immediate personal connection with God, and thus deals with truths which are independent of all ecclesiastical outward state.

From this I do feel and judge that there is peculiar rest to the soul in meditating with St. John upon God's revelations. Because we must, in the present state of things, be conscious of sad disorder. But Jesus as Saviour survives, the sinner still lives, and consciously has his being in our very selves, and there can be a meeting between the Saviour and the sinner-happy, restoring, satisfying, though the light of the "candlestick be gone; there can be a learning of the secrets of the Father and of the Son by the renewed mind, in the power of the Holy Ghost, who still also survives in the consciousness of our new man within, though again I may say, the light of the "candlestick" is no more.

Thus St. John meets very much the desire of the poor wearied saint now-a-days. He rises upon the soul to tell it there is something better, something more enduring, something even giving a brighter light than any "candlestick." And as this is the character of the message he bears to the soul, as it is of the Father, the Word, and the Comforter he speaks, and as they live and shine still for the poor sinner, though all else may have failed him, so the perfect stillness of the soul is that attitude in which His message is to be listened to. The soul to be silent, and let the Lord pass by,