I, so infirm of will, so tainted with guilt, so averse to many forms of goodness, to whom it is so easy to go wrong and so hard to do right-I to be quickened to an immortal life, a steadfast love and pursuit of all things good, a growing hatred of all things evil--O, it cannot be!" Yes, to us, as to Sarah, the news seems too good to be true. And so God has to shew us that He knows what we are, and what we are doing, and whither we are tending, before we can believe that we shall ever become what we ought to be, what He promises that we shall be. He convinces us that He does love us as we are, and despite our weakness and our sins and from the love He shews us now, we begin to argue to the still greater love which as yet we cannot see, and by which our redemption is to be accomplished; and we say: "If He loves me as I am, what cannot He do for me? what may He not make of me?" And thus, by the revelation of his love, we are borne on and up to a saving trust in his love, ana venture to believe that He will yet make us what we long to be, and give us all that we need to possess.

Every word that God speaks to us is a hard word, a word hard for us to believe; and that because his thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts, and his ways so much kinder than our ways. The very greatness of his thoughts, of his compassion, of his love and the purpose of his love for us, render them incredible to us. We cannot believe for joy and wonder, even if there be no other hindrance in the way. Whether He assure us that it is nobler and happier to walk after the spirit than after the flesh, to live for truth, justice, kindness, goodness than for gain and ease and pleasure, and that He therefore means

to draw us up into that higher happier life; or whether He assure us that we are put on earth for a little space, and hardened by its discipline that we may learn to bear the beams of an unclouded Love, and that that is why we are called to endure hardness here: whatever his word, his promise to us may be, it is so much larger and better than we deserve, or had looked for, that it is very hard for us to grasp it, to fling ourselves upon it with an unhesitating faith, to wait for its fulfilment with a glad and unwavering hope. The whole secret of the difficulty lies in this-that He is so good, so much better than we take Him to be, and so bent on securing the very best things for us.

Our best way out of the difficulty is Sarah's way; viz., to look away from the word of the moment, the promise of the moment, to Him who has spoken the word, and who stands behind it, and to ask ourselves whether or not we account Him faithful who has promised. If we feel that He is true; if we cannot so much as conceive of Him as going back from his word; if we are sure that He must always be more and better than his word, why should we doubt, why hesitate to commit ourselves to any word that He has spoken? It is often our wisdom to argue from his character to his promises. If we can trust Him, we need not distrust his word. And as we go on our way, leaning on his word, that word will be more and more fully verified; every new verification of it will increase and confirm our faith; faith will unseal the fountains of love; and love will well forth in songs of praise,

S. COR.

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STUDIES IN THE LIFE OF CHRIST.

XVII. THE CRUCIFIXION.

THE cross of Christ has in a most wondrous way, like the glittering eye of God, held man spell-bound, and made him listen to its strange story "like a three years' child" who "cannot choose but hear." Were not the fact so familiar, men would call it miraculous. Had its action and history been capable of a priori statement, it would have seemed, evẹn to the most credulous age, the maddest of mad and unsubstantial dreams. For it is not only that in the immense history of human experience it stands alone, a fact without a fellow, the most potent factor of human good, yet with what seems the least inherent fitness for it, but it even appears to contradict the most certain and common principles man has deduced from his experience. We do not wonder at the cross having been a stumbling-block to the Jew and foolishness to the Greek. We should have wondered much more had it been anything else. In the cross by itself there was nothing to dignify, and everything to deprave. Men would at first interpret it rather by its old associations than its new meaning. It had by its positive achievements to prove its peculiar significance and merit before it could make out an indefeasible claim on man's rational regard. But the extraordinary thing was how, with its ancient obloquy and intrinsic unsuitableness to its destined end, it could ever accomplish any positive good. There would indeed have been little to marvel at in the posthumous fame and power of Christ. His was a name and personality that could hardly but be

made beautiful by death. One who had been so loved and lovely could not fail to be idealized when He lived only to the memory too fond to forget and the imagination too deeply touched to be prosaic. The dead are always holier and more perfect to us than the living. To lose is only to love more deeply, to become forgetful of faults that pained, mindful only of virtues that ennobled and graces that adorned. Could we love and think of our living as we love and think of our dead, the loftiest dreams and most hopeful prophecies as to human happiness would be more than fulfilled. But Christ's death was in all that strikes the senses not one the memory could love to recall or the imagination so dwell on as to idealize and glorify. It was the worst the men that hated Him could think of. Even they were satisfied with its horror and shame. It made Him, in the eye of their law and people, accursed.I We can hardly imagine what the cross then was-so different has it now become. It stood almost below hatred, was the instrument of death to the guiltiest and most servile. Rome in her nobler and simpler days had not known it, had only, when depraved by conquest and brutalized by magnificence, borrowed it from the baser and crueller East. But she had used it with proud discrimination, too much respecting herself in her meanest citizen to crucify him, crucifying, as a rule, only the conquered, the alien, and the enslaved. To be doomed to the cross was to be doomed not simply to death but to dishonour, to be made a name hateful, infamous, whose chief good was oblivion. The death was horrible enough, so cruel as to be abhorrent to the merciful I Deut. xxi. 23; Gal. iii. 13.

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spirit that animated the Hebrew legislation. But the very horror that surrounded the death now commended it to "the chief priests and elders." He who had claimed to be above their law was to die a death it hated. The very act that ended his life was to outlaw Him, was to prove Him a disowned Child of Abraham, a Son Moses had repudiated. The name that had so gone down in infamy could never be honoured, bore a curse from which it could be saved only by oblivion. The voice that had first cried, "Crucify him!" seemed to have formulated a new and final argument against all high Divine claims-disproof by odium, refutation of the claim to the Messiahship by the abhorred symbol of shame and crime.

But Providence, by an irony infinitely subtler and more terrible than the priests', was to prove their genius but idiocy. Their elaborate attempt at refutation by odium became only the most splendid opportunity possible for the exercise of Christ's transforming might. The cross did not eclipse his name, his name transfigured the cross, making it luminous, radiant, a light for the ages, the sign of the gentleness of God. What is so extraordinary is the suddenness and completeness of the change. It was accomplished, as it were, at once and for ever. Suddenly, by the very fact of Christ's dying on it, it ceased to be to the imagination the old loathed implement of death and became the symbol of life. Time was not allowed to soften its horrors; it was not left to distance to weave its enchantments round it; in the very generation when, and the very city where, He died the cross was glorified. This is one of the strangest yet most certain historical facts. There is nothing more primitive in