The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself, but the Father who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works."

It is more direct. God in Christ not only gives us a closer and more complete, but also a more direct, revelation of Himself than He could possibly do when He spoke to us through His works in the surrounding earth and heavens, or through the writings of the Old Testament. In the history of the Word who became man, the glory of God's paternal character presented itself to believers with marvellous directness. Its rays shone forth so as to be distinctly recognised and felt through the veil of His manhood. Indeed, that veil

His human life-was so fine, so pure, so transparent, so akin through its whole texture to the very Divinity which it covered, that when His disciples, in their moments of clearest vision, turned towards it, they did not see the veil at all, but only the Divine glory which shone through it. That glory darted itself into their souls in direct beams. There had been nothing like it before. The universe, as we have already seen, is a revelation of God; but as compared with that in Christ it is not only distant and incomplete, but indirect. The knowledge of God from that source comes to us by way of inference only. "The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made, even his eternal power and Godhead." That is to say, "the eternal power and Godhead" are understood by us because, constituted as we are, we cannot but infer that the effects we see around us must have had a cause adequate to their production. But our knowledge of God through Christ is not thus inferential; it is direct. "The life was manifested, and we have seen it." The visible things of the creation are themselves no part of the Creator, whom by means of them we come to "understand;" but the visible Christ was Himself the embodiment of the invisible uncreated God whom He revealed. They were only the mirror from whose surface God was reflected. He " was God." His human life was not a mere reflection: it was the actual expression of the Divine. The word "brightness," in that fine description of Christ in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews-" Who being the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His person contains no trace whatever "of the meaning reflection. Nor would the idea be apposite here. The Son of God is, in His essential majesty, the expression, and the sole expression, of the Divine light." This rendering of the word "brightness" is, in our judgment, not only applicable to the essential majesty of Christ in heaven, but also to the whole course of His humiliation on earth; for through it all, including His tears, His sufferings, and His death, there was the direct expression of the Divine glory. He was as much the express image of His Father's glory when, standing upon the plain surrounded with a dense atmosphere of sin and misery, He, in answer to a father's prayer, cast out the unclean spirit which had been tor* Dean Alford, in loco.

menting his child, as when, standing with His three friends on the mount of transfiguration, "His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light." Through His entire history as the Incarnate Word, the glory of God's complete character, in its relation to men in the present life, shines in upon their souls, when they are humble and prayerful, in direct, self-evidencing, and life-giving rays.

The physical constitution of the sun appears to me to furnish an illustration of this great spiritual truth. What the photosphere-the disk of the sun-is to its unseen sources of light, Christ is to the unseen God. I say unseen sources of light, for by means of spectrum analysis it has been proved that those sources are unseen; that the fountains themselves of the golden day lie deep within the recesses of the sun, hidden away in impenetrable night.* If we might for a moment imagine some malignant power mighty enough to stretch his dark arm across the sky, and strip off the sun's disk, what would follow? The absolute destruction of light? No. In its unseen source light would remain absolutely untouched. Would nothing, then, be destroyed? Yes; the one and only medium in and through which the light ever had or ever could become visible and operative, shining abroad in life-giving rays through the planetary worlds-that would be destroyed; and, consequently, the great orb of day, the glorious sun itself, would be, in relation to those worlds, " a black body;" a central mass of darkness. In like manner, if we may for a moment be allowed to suppose such a thing possible, to strip off the Incarnate Word who "was in the beginning with God," would be to destroy the one and only medium through which God has chosen to manifest Himself. It would be to destroy the one bright disk in which all the beams of the Sun of Righteousness converge and become visible, and through which alone that "True Light" shines forth, "which lighteth every man that cometh into the world; " and would therefore be to leave the God of light and love absolutely invisible to the human soul. The great human world in time and in eternity would sink down into absolute darkness. But happily the case we have pictured in imagination is impossible in fact. Never can the sun's disk be stripped off, because it is as really included within the physical constitution and purpose of the sun itself as the inner unseen sources from which it is eternally replenished with the light it emits; nor can the Incarnation ever be stripped off, because on its inner side it essentially belongs to the Divine nature, of which it is the outward expres

* "We arrive, therefore, at the conclusion that the sunlight must have come originally from some black body, or opaque body, which is intensely self-luminous, and which may be either in a solid or liquid state, possibly even in a state of extremely compressed gas. However this may be, the source of light in the sun, whatever it is, must, in so far as we can see, give off all kinds of radiations, so it is practically a black body."-Recent Advances in Physical Science. By P. G. Tait, M.A. London: Macmillan & Co. (Page 219.)

sion, and from which it is eternally replenished with the fulness of God for the light and life of men.

And if this be so, if the Divine Manhood of Christ be "the perfect image, the visible representation of the unseen God,"* we may go a step further. We may not only conclude, as we have already done, that this is a closer, more complete, and more direct revelation than any former one, or than all former revelations combined, but also that it is the closest, the most complete, and the most direct revelation that will be made so long as the world endureth. Can we even conceive of any additions being ever made to it that would make it a closer, more complete, and more direct revelation of God to man in the present world than it now is? If we can conceive of additions to it that would be improvements in either of these three respects, what are they? Let us name them, let us note them down, let us put them into clear language. We cannot. For since it is in the selfsame humanity which is of the very essence of our own being that God is now revealing Himself to us through Christ, we cannot conceive how He can give us a revelation which shall be either nigher to us than that, or more complete, and direct. For how can the Divine Spirit ever more directly and completely communicate with our spirits on the earth than through Himself as "God manifest in the flesh"? In this indescribable condescension, this ununspeakable humiliation, which led on to the death of the cross, God is most essentially the God of love, for He is here expressing to us the love which is the very essence of His nature in its most fathomless fulness. This revelation of God through Christ, which we already possess in the New Testament, contains more than enough of Divine pity and tenderness and power to meet all the needs of men, through all nations, age after age, and epoch after epoch, to the end of the world.

THE THREE PICTURE-MAKERS; OR, "GOD IS YOUR
FATHER."

"THE pictures are beautiful, Davy. Just turn your head this way and look at them."

"Beautiful! Such pictures beautiful! If you were half frozen to death, Hettie, you'd see something beautiful," said the sick boy, Davy, in an irritable tone, as he turned his head-not "this way," as his sister wanted him to, but the other way, facing the wall a bare, smoky wall, where there were no pictures to be seen.

"Do look this way, please do," continued Hettie. "You like pictures, and make very pretty ones yourself. Mr. Bell told me, the other day, that your drawings in your last winter's drawing - book were many of them worthy of a frame."

"A great deal he did," answered Davy in a still irritable tone, but yet a tone that showed he was fond of his school-teacher's praise.

"Yes, he positively did, and he

* Colossians i. 15. As rendered by Bishop Lightfoot.

you had a decided genius for the
pencil. He's missed you, and is
coming soon to see you."
"He'd better stay away from
this shanty," replied Davy.

said more than that. He said that picture-maker as Jack Frost. I don't. It's all well enough when he does his work on rich people's windows. They've no reason to dislike him. He don't do them any harm; but he's enough to drive two orphan children like us crazy. If I were only up and well, I'd take my knife and scratch off all his detestable pictures, for they make me think of the long, hard winter that's before us, with nobody to help us."

"But this isn't a shanty, Davy," said Hettie, as she tried to smile and keep up her courage.

"I call any place a shanty," replied Davy, where the wind whistles in and blows on a fellow's aching head, and where all the wood that is burned is green, and not much of that. If I weren't ill, I wouldn't mind anything. I'd stir about and earn money and fix up this airy house, or get out of it and into another. And I wouldn't let a green stick come within a mile of the house; for if there's anything that makes me angry, it is green wood. But here I have to lie and hear it boil while the water drops out of it, and see you blow and blow as if you really thought you could make it burn. Oh, dear, how my head aches!"

Davy turned his head on the pillow, as if ashamed to resist his sister any longer, and for a few minutes he seemed diverted by Jack Frost's pictures on the glass. But he found it more in harmony with his mood to look toward the wall, and he again turned his head on the pillow, and began to talk about the "shanty" and "poverty" and his "sick head."

"You may look at the 'beautiful pictures,' Hettie, as much as you like," he said, "if you like such a

66

"Davy," said Hettie, in a motherly tone, although she was the younger of the two, we mustn't forget what mother told us before she went away. She told us to 'take short views.' And we're looking ahead all the time into the long winter. Mother told us something else, too, Davy," continued Hettie, and her voice dropped into almost a whisper, as she thought of the mother who stayed with them as long as she could, and comforted them as well as she could, before she went away.

"Someway I don't like to talk about mother," replied Davy; “for I think that if we hadn't grown so poor she might have lived."

"But the last words she said were, God is good,' and 'God is your father.' So I know, Davy, that God must be good; and I know, too, that God is our father. Then we are not orphans, you see."

"No, I can't see. Oh, dear, how my head aches! I tell you, Hettie, these windows are dreadful. There isn't fire enough here to touch them. What a poor crazy fellow I was, though, last night! And who knows I'll keep straight through the day? Where did you go yesterday afternoon?"

"I left you asleep, and thought I'd be home before you waked." "But where did you go, Hettie ?" "Oh, only on a little errand and to get the fresh air."

"Ah! a little errand,' and 'to

.

"No, no, Davy. Take a good rest now," replied Hettie; and again the "little sister" patted and caressed her brother as if she had power over all evil spirits. And indeed she seemed to control the Hettie did not go up to her bed evil spirits that tormented her that night until Davy was quiet in brother, for sleep came and poured his; and then she lay down, but balm on his feverish, aching head. not to sleep. Her brother was He thought no more of Jack breathing as if in refreshing sleep;