referring to God's unutterable love in the gift of His Son-"Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift." I.

JESUS CHRIST IS GOD'S GIFT TO THE WORLD.

Of the truth of this proposition we have abundant proof in the volume of the Book. The first passage to which I would refer is that sublime and well-known one in the Gospel of John-a passage which deserves to be written in legible characters upon the brow of the firma

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ment, so that all men might read and believe, and in believing be saved. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." A kindred passage is found in John's First Epistle, In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." These two passages will suffice to prove the truth of our proposition, that Jesus Christ is God's gift to the world.

And a marvellous proposition it is! Men are so constituted that it affords them pleasure to receive a gift. It implies that the recipient is the object of the donor's respect and affection; and as it affords us pleasure to enjoy the esteem of our friends, when any of them sends us a gift, it awakens in the mind the liveliest emotions of satisfaction and delight. Even if the gift be small and intrinsically worthless, we receive it joyously when it comes as the token and the proof of a friend's attachment. The reception of a gift implies that a man has a friend somewhere. Even if he is ignorant of the quarter whence the gift has come, he feels absolutely certain that it has come from a friend. No enemy has sent it. Enemies never send

gifts to those they hate. If a gift comes without any intimation as to who has sent it, we never conceive it to be the act of an enemy, but in every case that of a friend.

These things being so, what are we to think of the Donor referred to by the apostle? Is He our enemy, or shall we give Him a place in the category of our friends? What has He done? He has sent us a precious gift, even the gift of His only begotten Son. Those who send gifts are friends, and not enemies; and therefore the conclusion to which we must come is, that God is our friend, and not our enemy.

But He might have been our enemy. And were He not God He would have been. Had we sinned against a fellow-man as long and as persistently as we have sinned against Him, he would never have forgiven us; we should never have received a gift at his hands. We have sinned against God not once or twice merely; but we have been sinning against Him ever since we were able to distinguish between good and evil. He has endowed us with faculties which render us capable of loving Him; but instead of loving Him, have we not been supremely selfish? He has given us strength of body and vigour of mind; but instead of devoting them to His service, have we not employed them in the debasing and corrupting service of iniquity? He has spared our lives month after month, and year after year; but instead of glorifying Him in our body and in our spirit which are His, have we not "walked according to the course of this world, and had our conversation in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind?" In a word, have we not for years together set His authority at nought, lived to ourselves, and done that which was right in our own eyes, irrespective altogether of His will concerning us? Practically we have lived without God. For years we returned Him no thanks

for the favours He conferred upon us; we never consulted His will as to what we should do; He had no place whatever in our affections; nor had we the remotest idea of making His laws the rule of our conduct. Nor was our sin that of a negative kind only; for we positively violated every precept of the decalogue, and thereby subjected ourselves to the anathema pronounced upon sinners in the words" Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." It is plain, therefore, that we were enemies to God, and that as a sequence He might have been our enemy. If He is not our enemy, it is not because we have not forfeited His favour and merited His displeasure. If He is not our enemy, it is not because He has not received sufficient provocation to induce Him to assume a hostile attitude toward us and to launch upon our heads the thunderbolts of His avenging ire. If He is not our enemy, then it is the most wonderful case in the history of the moral universe; for of this I am certain that we have not an enemy anywhere against whom we have sinned one thousandth part so much. If after all the sins we have committed against Him, God is not our enemy, angels may well be struck with mute astonishment, devils may be petrified with awe and wonder, and man, in the exuberance of unutterable joy, may exclaim-" Who is a God like unto thee ?"

But is it an incontrovertible fact that God is not our enemy? What! have we been sinning against Him all these years, and does He feel no enmity toward us yet? Notwithstanding all our rebellion against Him, and all the provocation He has received at our hands, is He still our friend? Oh what gross injustice we have done Him! For years we have laboured under the sad delusion that He was our enemy, that because of our transgressions and our sins we

have been the guilty objects of His hatred and His indignation. Have you not, reader, been bound under the spell of the delusion that God is your enemy? You were conscious of having sinned against Him, of having despised His authority, set at nought His counsel, and run counter to His will as made known in the Scriptures. And being conscious of having displayed enmity of heart toward Him, you came to the conclusion that He was therefore your enemy. Hence you have been afraid to think of Him, and when you have thought of Him you have conceived Him to be your enemy, and not your friend. Behold, then, the egregious mistake into which you have fallen! Instead of being an enemy, as you falsely supposed, the God against whom you have sinned so long and so wantonly is your warm and disinterested friend; and to prove the sincerity and the tenderness of His friendship, He has sent you a gift, and that gift is His Son.

But perhaps you ask, "How is the gift of His Son which God has made to the world any proof of His friendship to me?" You accept the statement as true that God has given His Son to the world, but you wish to know how this fact proves His friendship to you; in other words, you are at a loss to know whether He has given Christ to you. It is confessed at once that your name is nowhere inserted in the Bible; it is not said in express terms that Jesus Christ is given to John, William, and Thomas, or any other sinner by name. But what is equivalent, aye, and more than equivalent to this is the fact, that Christ is said to be given to the world; and if He is given to the world He must be given to you, for you are part and parcel of the world. Had it been somewhere said in the New Testament that God gave Christ to John, and William, and Peter, and Thomas, and Mary, we should have been utterly at a loss to know what John, and William, and Peter,

and Thomas, and Mary were meant ; but when it is said that God gave His only begotten Son to "the world," it is manifest beyond all contradiction that He gave him to all the Johns and the Peters and the Thomas's and the Marys that are in it. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." The gift of His Son is the proof and the measure of His love to the world, not the proof and the measure of His love to a part of the world; but to the world in its most extensive signification, in its utmost latitude of meaning. God gave His Son to the world; and as none of its inhabitants are excepted and excluded, each and every man amongst us has a right to receive the gift, and in adoring gratitude to exclaim, "Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift to me."

But perhaps you will say, "If God has given His Son to every man, then every man will be saved." No, my reader, that does not follow, for many reject the gift, and consequently perish. Whilst it is said that Jesus Christ is "the propitiation for the sins of the whole world," it is nowhere said that" the whole world" shall be saved. In order to be saved, the gift must be received; but as multitudes reject the gift, therefore multitudes perish in their sins. Christ has been given to all that "whosover believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." And inasmuch as Christ has been given to the world, "not to condemn the world," but to bear its "sins in His own body on the tree, to suffer the just for the unjust to bring us to God," you may receive Him and trust in Him as God's gift to you, and with a thankful heart exclaim"Christ is mine." Christ is God's gift to the world, and therefore to me, and therefore to you. Once for all the gift has been bestowed. God has given His Son-Christ has come into the world and made peace for us by the blood of his cross, and

consequently we may be saved, or we may be lost. If we receive Christ as the gift of God's love to us, and trust solely in Him for pardon, we shall be saved; but if we reject Him, it will be more tolerable for the savages of Africa and for the inhabitants of China in the day of judgment than for us. You may be assured, my reader, that God loves you now, for He has given you His Son to be a propitiation for your every sin; and if you accept the gift, and trust wholly in Jesus for salvation, you will be the beloved of God for ever and for evermore.

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Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." All the blessings of this life are God's gifts of love. When I have gone into a lunatic asylum, and witnessed men and women bereft of reason and acting like irrational animals, I have been constrained to exclaim with heart-felt gratitude, "Thanks be unto God for the gift of reason." When I have gone to the house of mourning and witnessed a fellow-creature suffering excruciating pain under some virulent disease, in the morning wishing it were evening, and in the evening wishing it were morning, and in his agony praying for death to come to his relief, I have involuntarily exclaimed-" Thanks be unto God for the blessing of health." When I have gone to the poorhouse, and seen the outcast and the destitute dependent upon the cold charity which government officials rudely dole out to the friendless and helpless of our country, I have once and again been constrained to exclaim"Thanks be unto God for a house and a home that I can call my own." But what would it avail us were we to enjoy to the full all the bounties

of providence during all the days of the years of our pilgrimage, if when we come to appear before the bar of God we should be cast away from His presence as a filthy thing, and consigned to the blackness of darkness for ever? We may be endowed with reason, have the use of all our faculties, and enjoy the most perfect health; nay more, we may live in a palace, be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day, but what boots it all if at length we shall be driven away from the presence of God, and from the regions of the holy, to mingle in the fray of devils and to make our bed in hell? In such a case we cannot doubt for a moment that it would have been better for us if we had not been born. But this must have been the case with us if God had turned His back upon us, and not bestowed upon us the gift of His only begotten Son. He might have lavished upon us, with the utmost profusion, all the blessings of this life; but if He had withheld His Son there could have been no hope entertained by us of a blissful future "in the land of the hereafter." But because He has not withheld His Son, His only Son, from us, but freely delivered him up for us all, He has, without controversy, bestowed upon us an unspeakable gift."

1. Jesus Christ was unspeakably dear to the Father's heart. He was His only Son. He was His Son in a far higher, in a much nearer and dearer sense than that in which the angels, and some of the sons of men, are said to be "the sons of God." He was His Son in the sense of being in all respects equal with Him. Whatever can be predicated of the Father, the same can with equal propriety be predicated of the Son. Is the Father Almighty? So is the Son. Is the Father omniscient? So is the Son. Is the Father omnipresent? So is the Son. Whatever the Father is, that also is the Son. Hence in the days of His flesh, He

said "I and my Father are one." Not only was He in this high and mysterious and exclusive sense the Father's only Son; but He was His "well beloved Son." Of Him it is written "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him." In Him the Father was ever well pleased. He was His best beloved, dearer to Him than the whole material universe, than all the angels in heaven, than all the sons of men upon earth-dearer to Him than tongue can express, or imagination conceive-he was unspeakably dear to Him. When, therefore, He freely gave His Son for us all, He bestowed upon us the greatest gift which it was in His power to confer. Though He were the infinite and eternal God, He had nothing greater, nothing better to bestow; and when He gave His only begotten Son to procure the salvation of His enemies, He displayed a love to us which never had, nor ever will have, a parallel in the universe-a love which has heights, and depths, and lengths, and breadths, which neither man nor angel can fathom or comprehend. God's gift of Christ, then, to the children of men, is beyond all doubt an ипspeakable gift."

2. It is so because it is necessary to our salvation. A gift is sometimes greatly valued not for its intrinsic worth, nor as a proof of the donor's friendship, but because it is absolutely essential to our very existence. If a person on the burning sands of Africa were dying of thirst, he would value a cup of cold water not so much because of the friendship it betokened, or for its own sake; but because, save for it, he must have perished in the desert. So the gift of Christ is an "unspeakable gift," since, but for it, the whole human family must have perished eternally. We had departed from God, and none but Christ could bring us back. We were lost, and