ness and obedient to the law of his holiness. God is a just judge because he is a God of love. He judges his children in order that he may save them, make them pure, keep them in harmony with his law and commandment. There is no conflict in his providence, between mercy and judgment, between severity and tenderness, between love and chastisement. They are simply differing phases of one great attribute. God's judgment is his mercy approving or rebuking man, for man's good. God's severity is his tenderness restraining man's errancy and waywardness. God's chastisement is his love exerting itself in discipline and in correction. But all the sterner aspects of his dealings are manifestations of his love, put forth in warning, in rebuke, and in resistance to man's evil.

I dimly guess from blessings known

Of greater out of sight,

And with the chastened Psalmist own
His judgments, too, are right.

John G. Whittier.

HE fact of punishment is not an evidence of God's wrath. That was a primitive and mistaken view which men took before they grew to the larger comprehension of his love as his dominant attribute. His anger is really the indignation of love, the resentment of purity against the foul and the depraved. And the love of God toward men does not alter when they sin against him. He has not changed his love for sinful men, because he has changed his method of dealing with them from reward to penalty, from tenderness to chastening.

One reason why God loves sinners is because he finds in them something worthy of himself, something deserving of his love. The image of God in which man was created is never lost, cannot be lost indeed, without absolutely destroying the distinguishing marks of manhood. It is this image of himself, this divine spark which still smoulders in the vilest man, this eternal possibility of manhood, sainthood, angelhood, which God loves in the sinful and the

depraved. This image he longs to renew and restore. This spark he would fan into a glowing flame. This possibility he would make a reality, and so win back his lost child. Another reason why God always loves sinners is because he will not and cannot annul the relationship which he himself has chosen to assume toward man. He who begets a child is always and forever that child's father; and there are obligations growing out of that fact which no act of the child can destroy, alter, or modify. Once a father, man is always a father. So also it is with God. Having undertaken the obligations of fatherhood, he will never repudiate them. He cannot deny them without wholly altering his nature. The lower the child of God sinks, the more impossible does it become for him who is the Father of all, to be anything but the friend, the guardian, the savior, and the lover of that child. "But God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5: 8).

And though we turn us from thy face,
And wander wide and long,

Thou hold'st us still in thine embrace,
O Love of God, most strong!

Eliza Scudder.

X.

How does God deal with sinners?

He tries every man's work as by fire. 1 COR. 3: 13.

HROUGHOUT the Bible, the figure of fire is used to set forth God's way of dealing with the evil of man's nature, and the results of that evil. God is represented as being like a refiner's fire, as refining his people as silver is refined. John the Baptist preached of him as working in his kingdom and its forces so as to burn up the chaff, the dross, the refuse and rubbish of life with fire unquenchable. Paul declares that every man's work will be tried as with fire, and that whatever has been done wrong or evilly must perish. The meaning is plain and impressive. Evil cannot stand the strain of life and its experiences. It breaks down when it is put to the test of trial and adversity. There is no falsehood so subtle, there is no fraud so adroit, there is no sham so ingenious, there is no cruelty so strong in power, that it is not found out and broken and destroyed at last. It is impossible for a wicked principle or a wicked man to go unscathed through God's moral world. The Lord of the harvest may spare the tares till it

is time to reap, but then he burns them. He destroys the evil. He puts the unsightly thing out of existence.

But it is not his purpose to destroy the sinners. These God would and will save. It is the way of the ungodly which, we are told, will perish, not the ungodly himself. God tries our work by his many ways of reaching and testing us, and "If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire” (1 Cor. 3: 15).

But in the same tests of the years on personal life or the constitution of society, righteousness and they that love it are only made the more illustrious by trial. They and their works will shine out more brightly under the strain. Good endures while evil is purged away. Only the things that offend are consumed in the fires of doom. Nothing of goodness, of virtue, of love can perish.

He kindles for my profit, purely,

Affliction's glowing, fiery brand,
And all his heaviest blows are surely
Inflicted by a Master's hand;

So say I, praying, as God will!

And hope in him, and suffer still.

From the German, by Charles T. Brooks.