THE GREAT WHITE THRONE.

THERE are red rays as well as blue and yellow. In the sun they are blended together, and their union gives the limpid daylight; but by transmitting through a prism the brightest beam, you can sever it into bars of many tints, all, however, ultimately resolved into ruby, gold, and sapphire. And conversely, you may take these parted beams and reunite them, and their commingling lustre gives you again the white transparent sunshine.

To Moses, the first of inspired penmen, the Most High revealed His Name, "The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children." To John, who fifteen centuries afterwards wrote the closing line of Scripture, the Most High announced His Name in a single word, and ever since it has been the Christian's joy to know that "GOD IS LOVE."

With many, however, there is still much confusion or misunderstanding. Say some, If God is Love, then I may go on in sin: I may do as I please, and still hope in His mercy. And a class very different-one which draws no encouragement to sin from God's abounding grace-is apt to be distressed by the severity with which sin is punished, and by the fearful amount of suffering which in consequence prevails. They not only stand in awe of God's judgments, but they find it difficult to reconcile these judgments with His boundless benevolence.

And yet, if we do not greatly err, the revelation of

Horeb is identical with the revelation of Patmos or Ephesus; and the graciousness, the truth, and the justice, which were proclaimed to the lawgiver, are not only consistent with the "love" announced by the evangelist, but they form the ingredients of which that love is composed. Through the murky medium of guilt nothing may be able to penetrate except the red ray of retributive justice; and, diffracted in the prism of our human thought and speech, we may be constrained to distinguish one perfection from another; but as they exist in the Godhead these attributes are a glorious unity. The wisdom is the forethought of goodness, and the retributions are the justice of One who is loving. But whether split into the spectrum of Sinai, or re-collected and combined in the focus of the gospel, these various perfections are the sunshine of the universe, and are all lost in the one Infinite Excellence of the Light Inaccessible. "God is Love," says St. John. This loving God says of Himself to Moses, that He is true, and merciful, and righteous.

Fixing our regard on God's kindness, but remembering at the same time that He is wise and righteous withal, let us suppose that moral evil has appeared in some province of His dominions. The plague has broken out. There is an individual or a family in revolt. The Father of that individual or family has always felt the fondest affection for it, and has lavished on it ceaseless favours, and even now fatherliness and affection would fain forgive. But can it be? He is the Father of other families also. Is it kind to these others to connive at this? Is it kind to those who still are happy, and happy only because they still are holy, -is it kind to them to make no distinction in the treatment of obedience and transgression? Is it kind to the unfallen to bestow on the fallen the same blessings as before? Is it kind to the uncontaminated to allow the infected and disordered to range amongst them unmarked and unrestrained?

JUSTICE AND BENEVOLENCE.

83

In a Father at once wise and almighty, would not kindness itself necessitate in such a case the repression of feelings merely fatherly, and would it not constrain the exercise of judicial functions-functions which are penal to one because paternal to all the rest,-severe on sin because tenderly solicitous for the welfare of the universe?

In this view of it, "retributive, or rather vindictive, justice, arises from a competition between the objects of benevolence. Even when it inflicts suffering, it is manifestly the same as goodness; and, in fact, s nothing else but the preference of a greater to a lesser gool,-a regard to the general welfare, requiring the sacrifice of a welfare which is limited [and which has already criminally sacrificed itself]. The justice of a public character is goodness regulated by the decisions of wisdom. God is infinitely good and infinitely wise, and therefore essentially and at all times just. His justice even, severe as is its aspect, springs from that view of His nature which is given in the glorious definition, God is Love.""*

Should any of our readers still find a difficulty in reconciling the retributive justice and the benevolence of the Most High, it is probably from overlooking the distinction between true kindness and a promiscuous tenderness; or from confounding moral disapprobation and judicial displeasure with personal vindictiveness.

There is a certain indiscriminate tenderness which, however indulgently we may view it, can scarcely be called a virtue. It passes by and it sees in the House of Correction a prisoner. True, he is a robber. They were his own crimes which brought him there. But what of that? Is it not sad that he should be shut up in that blank and dreary cell whilst there is warm summer in the world? and perhaps the poor wretch has a wife and children whom he has not

• Gilbert on the Atonement, p. 137.