love, behind some concealing thing, over the efforts of their little ones left purposely alone to try their powers and guide themselves by rules. He himself was the schoolmaster, bringing them, by the constant checks, corrections, humiliations, and pointings of the law, to seek and find, and believe in His own unknown love, His personal value, and His grace to them. The whole history is full of the Christ of the fulness of times-His own often-perplexed heart turning about to every hand in holy anger and yearning love; pronouncing sentence of destroying punishment; turned from it willingly by the intercession of Abraham, or Moses, or David, or Hezekiah, to sparing mercy; hasting with fulness of blessings, like the prodigal's father in His own parable, to meet and encourage every return. In the Old Testament histories we are wont to look for types, resemblances of His work of saving and blessing which the fulness of times was to begin. Those of Christ. old events were not types of His work; they were His own earlier works of salvation, and types only as the miracles of the three years were types of eternal healing and forgiveness and purifying-assurances, properly speaking foretastes in relative or the same manifestations of grace.

Old histo

ries not

types, but

parts of the love

Recognition of

study of faith.

28. The historical identification illustrated in the preceding Christ the pages is in excellent agreement with the description which the Bible gives of what is the study of faith; that it is to "comprehend what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fulness of God" (Eph. iii. 18, 19). We recognise this one love filling all extensions of man's condition, this one loving being the object of faith in all times. It is a view of man's faith in the love of God being really one faith in all periods which is satisfying both to the understanding and to the heart to attain. It is a sight of faith which unites most clearly the characteristics of faith advanced in previous chapters; manifesting that it is an emotional thinking, a contemplation by the heart of the love of God; not reasoning on it as an attribute, but looking on it in a person that person the engrossing object of adoring human love, and grateful and desirous possession; one whom we can

form an imagination of to ourselves as a visible being apparent to our senses, and whom we think of by a history. We have now to see how in Christ, the object of faith, there is set before us the essential form of affection which our faith is to contemplate in the love of God-viz., the family affection, the union to God both by relationship and nature which Scripture language requires and invites us to think of as man's connection with God.

29. That this peculiar manner of love-family love-is the The Gospel revelation, nature of God's love of man, was indicated and assured by the that of habitual adoption, in His revelations all through the prepara- Sonship; tory dispensations, of names implying family ties; and by the faith in such family love which He enabled His servants to have towards Him. When His love and our invited faith became fully unveiled in the fulness of times, this was the distinctive form in which it was to be seen by us. Our Redeemer, the first-born of us His many brethren to immortal life, who revealed God to us as being His God and our God, His Father and our Father, is called the Eternal Son of God. In this language all the perfected instruction given to man in the New Testament of what he is to believe in is expressed. The Old Testament prophetic names are superseded-the Messiah, the Prince, the Messenger, the Branch of righteousness, the Counsellor, Immanuel, &c. The Christ, the full revelation, is God's own son. "This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son" (1 John v. 11). How is faith to use this so marked form in which the "glad tidings" are given to us? In two ways, giving us separately assurance of God's love. That "record" is the declaration of a connection guaranteed by such a title as that of sons. It is also the revelation of such a relationship as being an essential fact of our nature, as created originally, and by salvation quickened" from a state of death.

Christ

30. First, What is given us logically to gather of assurance declared in of peace with God and grace from Him by everything being Jesus; offered and guaranteed to us in terms of His Son. The thought of Jesus Christ as God, and yet as the Son of God, must be always beyond our power to make a distinct thought logically

intelligible; and it is not philosophical to seek after more distinctness of theological idea upon the subject than Scripture language presents to common readers, which, by clear declaration and habitual assumption, sets Christ Jesus before us as God Himself, and as clearly requires us to think of Him as the only-begotten well-beloved Son of God, the brother suffering for man, and heir of all things with man. John's 14th chapter, which is a treasure of faith if we think of the Father and the Son as one, is unintelligible if we logically separate the individualities. While, however, difficulty never yet surmounted overpowers the attempt to place these two teachings of Scripture in logical connection, if we think of that divine sonship as implying separation of individualities and possible difference of feelings, such as we would associate with a human sonship having a similar work of propitiating suffering-and we thereby run great risk of importing into our religious thoughts logical elements which the heart, seeking salvation, is disturbed and distracted by— we may take richest logical food of faith, though not of philosophy, from the thought of sonship which envelops all the perfected revelation of God's love to man. Though we cannot lay open to mental comprehension the operation of the relationship in which Christ is spoken of as the Son of the Father in so many different lights, every connection with us in which He is so spoken of sets before us, in a new and completing light, God's love to us as the same love that a father has for an only son, while it adds also an assurance wanting in the experience of the strongest human parental love, in the fact that the guaranteeing love is one that is inseparable from the idea of self-love;-"I and the Father are one." God's love to man is as great and as assured as that of a father of prodigal children who would give up a son in whom he was ever well pleased to save the undeserving children from death. God's love to man is as near and as perfect in fellow-feeling as if a brother would give himself to death to save prodigal brothers and sisters, and be straitened till, by the sacrifice of himself, he could accomplish their recovery. Our right feeling of the consequence of sin, is as if

a father could not pass it by in a weak and tempted child unless his only other son, who knew no sin, took upon him all its shame and all its punishment, so that he would atone for it even with his life. The assurance we have of the sufficient bountifulness of God's love is what unworthy children might have in a father's love who had delivered up his wellbeloved son for them, that after that he would freely give them all things. Our hope of the eternal inheritance is made as sure, notwithstanding our feeling of undeserving, as if the enemies of a great benefactor were made by him joint-heirs with his own only son. Our blessedness of the everlasting inheritance is full as that of the only child of a perfect father; appropriate and perfect in kind as the blessedness of likeness to such a father combined with the blessedness of his affection. Our saving, blessing union with God is to be as close and sure as His who is God himself;-"That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us" (John xvii. 21). Our new and everlasting life is to be as sure as His own. It is that of the "branch grafted into the vine." These assurances are unavoidably, some of them expressly, contained in the declaration of man's sonship in Christ.

Him as man's

original

stored.

31. A second form of assurance is to be found by faith in revealed in the revelation of man's sonship to God which the sonship of Christ made to the world. We throw away much consolation nature, offered to us in those key-words of full revelation, "life in and reHis Son," if we think of the new life thus revealed as altogether and in all respects new. Are we to think of the relational oneness of man with God, the union of affection and nature, as coming with Christ Jesus, or rather as restored by Him from long obscuration in consequence of the darkness of man's understanding, and restored to conscious possession from long suppression of all feeling of it by the power of sin? The coming of Christ was no first uniting of the human nature to God; it was the perfect discovery of a unity that is original -a sonship which was part of our created nature, though needing to be "redeemed" (Rom. viii. 23) and "quickened" (1 Cor. xv. 45). Adam was the son of God (Luke iii. 38).

we were no more

The mistranslation of Heb. ii. 16-" He took not on Him the nature of angels; but He took on Him the seed of Abraham," instead of, "He taketh not up," or helpeth, "angels; but He taketh up the seed of Abraham"-must naturally misguide the thoughts in this matter; but it is not the nature of man that He is said to have taken upon Him, but the form and likeness "the form of a servant," "the likeness of sinful flesh," "the fashion of a man." It is not said that He who created us in His own nature needed to take that nature upon Himself. We had fallen in character"worthy to be called sons" of God; but He had not changed His nature when man dishonoured it. He had not arisen far away from our first nature, repudiating it in its disgrace. Hiding Himself, withdrawing from our unworthy eyes, was not any putting away of the likeness that we had defiled. In that nature He waited, unseen by man, but not afar off, until the fulness of times, when He could be unveiled in it, to win back the fallen, deceived, apostate ones to seek to be created anew, restored to that lost estate. And the time which the I AM chose to call Himself the Son of God was when He was manifest as also the Son of man-when again the two parts of man's first condition were for a season brought together before the eyes of the world. But in all periods of God's saving communion with man we may see the relational oneness of nature between God and man, in those historical traces we have reviewed of the presence of our own human Saviour to the lives of believers in the old dispensations. It is an unchanging God and Father that we see, and an unchanging manner of fatherly love that the faith of all times is desired to think of. The human appearances vouchsafed to Abraham and Jacob and Joshua, and the human sympathies that fill up so much the pictures of God's drawings-nigh to man from the beginning, were no accidents of the manifestations. They belonged to the very being of the manifester. It was Himself He was showing, in body or in spirit, to their love and their faith. "Adam was the son of God" was no metaphor expressing that Adam had proceeded immediately from the hand of God; it told Adam's nature. Is it Luke's own expression,