Tell me first, why did the father go out to meet the prodigal son when he was yet a great way off? Why are a thousand seeds scattered for every tree that grows? Why is the love of our heavenly Father not doled out after our scant mortal measure, but lavished with the profusion of boundless benignity?

On the other side what? Eternal impurity, eternal rebellion. Eternal looking backward upon unrepented sin; eternal looking forward to accumulated guilt. On every side judgment and fiery indignation. Infinite regret, but no penitence; infinite rage, and no power; infinite rebellion, and no reconciliation; infinite remorse, no forgiveness; infinite agony, without hope, for millions upon millions of sensitive souls, born with no volition of their own into circumstances not subject to their control; moulded by evil for evil before they were capable of resisting, or even of recognizing evil; all the horror and hate of time duplicating and reduplicating themselves forever and forever through the countless ages of eternity. What price would be too great to pay for the possibility of escape from the infinite despair of such a prospect? We see the work of evil begun in this world; we seem to see in its beginning the elements of perpetual reproduction. The Divine revelation of the Word and the demoniac revelation of wickedness seem to point in the same direction: but if in the path of ultimate restoration there stood no greater obstacle

than indefiniteness regarding the duration of the Christian heaven, if the oracles of God could be softened down to meet a surrender of that which is only sweet but not essential, what radiance of unspeakable hope would arise! By some way which we know not, through the introduction of some power whose workings we had never beheld, by some brighter vision of the love of the atoning Saviour than the earth had ever yet witnessed, we should be sure that the wandering sheep would finally be brought back into the fold. It was more than any promise, which Moses relinquished: "Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.' Commentators have found trouble in explaining this passage, but it needs not to be explained to those who go to the Bible for truths, not texts, and carry thither the hearts which God gave them. It is but the instinctive cry of the clinging, loving human soul, the “Would God I had died for thee!" Paul felt it in the great heaviness and continual sorrow in his heart: “For I could wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." All understand it who have ever felt the throbbing of human brotherhood. In this world we can bear the pain and peril of those we love, the groan and travail of creation. We soothe our sympathy with active effort, and hope, unreasonable perhaps, but spontaneous and irresistible,

underlies every evil. How in any future world we are to endure peace, not to say happiness, knowing that in any remotest corner of the universe a solitary, sentient being is shut up to irremediable, unmitigated torture, is to me, I must admit, a hitherto insoluble problem. Organized as we are, I could almost say that life would be more tolerable in hell, preaching to the spirits in prison, sharing the sorrow which we could not alleviate, than in heaven, conscious of the existence of that sorrow-full world. Better, it would seem, to labor without reward for the upspringing of a little light in the outer darkness, than to sit down in the full blaze of light, knowing all the while that there were souls shrouded in the impenetrable gloom. There is said to be a skeleton in every house; but more dreadful, more aweinspiring than any earthly terror, would be that skeleton in the heavenly mansions. Only a ceaseless endeavor for the restoration of these lost could atone for the grief of living.

But God is good. Through every creed, in spite of every contradiction, past all bewilderment, his tender mercies are over all his works. It is ours to judge only of what we see and from what we see. We behold mortal pain, finite suffering, and find that they are not irreconcilable with Divine love. If the time ever comes when we behold immortal pain, infinite suffering, there will be some further revelation which will save to us

our God unchangeable in goodness. Meanwhile, let us not reason from the untrue to the unknown; from selfishness to severity; but seeing what is revealed of the terror of the Lord, persuade men to holiness.

VI.

CHRIST AS A PREACHER.

HE general opinions of the Orthodox Church regarding the relations between man and the Gospel are well represented by the following extracts "You some

says:

from two criticisms. The first times fall into fallacious reasoning: as, for instance, when you argue that men want the Gospel and appreciate it as they do law and physic. They need it, but they do not want it. The ministers of Christ contend, as did their Master, with a natural opposition to divine truth. Man has a capacity but not a passion for spiritual realities. And with all the charm of novelty on his side, with all his beneficent and miraculous gifts of healing, with all the marvel of a faultless presence, and of wise and apt words such as man never spake, directed by a knowledge of what was in the hearts of men, knowing just how to read and meet men, yet according to your Yankee standard of success, Christ's life as a minister was one signal failure.”