HIS DAY of merciful visitation, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, that beheld Him on earth receiving graciously the strangely-persistent prayer of Abraham, and the kindred supplication of the Tyrian mother two thousand years after, and in heaven beholds Himself interceding for men with the same unfainting prayer ; HIS DAY of unchangeable judgment, in which, with the same sorrowful holy anger, He destroyed the cities of the plain, and condemned the heathendom of Tyre and Sidon and the unrepenting Chorazin and Bethsaida, and will judge the world because it "believeth not on" Him; HIS DAY of long-suffering patience, in which He spared, and taught, and waited for the generations of the old world, and chastened the new at Babel, and made Himself known in waiting forbearance in Egypt and Canaan, and among the peoples of the Isles and of the River, and winked at their times of ignorance, and instructed them in ways known and ways unknown to human history, sending prophets to Egypt and Assyria as well as to Israel, and "wisdom" among the children of the East, and bare with them, and had long patience, until the night came of their time in which they would not be wise; HIS DAY of fellow-feeling of man's infirmities filled to the Saviour of men all along its ever-present, ever-passing course with the endlessly-changing diversities of His human-hearted sorrows and joys—the first rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth-Eden in its gladness and Eden in its darkeningthe new life of outcast Adam, and of the repentant hoping woman looking for the promised "seed "—the wanderings of pitied, protected Cain-the godly, deathless life of Enoch -Noah's hundred years-the sojourning of Abraham, His "friend," with whom He ate bread, His chosen who lived by faith of Him looking afar off upon His day, and making himself glad in it-gentle Isaac's meditations-worldly and worldtried Jacob's exile and bereavements-Joseph's afflictions, and his forgivingness and saving love, so like a foreshadow of the love of the Son of man-the cry that came up from Egypt-Moses in the court of Pharaoh, in Horeb, in Sinai, in the wilderness, and on Pisgah-the passover in Egypt, the tabernacle of witness, the lamb slain morning and evening so long-Gilgal, and Shiloh, and Mizpeh, and Nob, and Gibeon, and Jerusalem, and Babylon, and all that they beheld-the times of Israel's afflictive judgments and delivering saviour-judges or kings-Eli and Samuel's lives, like types of the weakness and strength of men's service of Him-Saul's mingled faith and mingled fortunes-David's as great though different diversity of soul's experience, of fleshly sin and spiritual desires, bright faith and dark fears, hardness and bitter repentance-the weak and faithless luxurious kings and nobles, and the fearless prophets whom He sent unto His people then, "rising up early and sending, but they would not hear"-Hezekiah, and Asa, and Josiah, sights of joy amidst their darkened times—and beyond the chosen race, the lives of Abraham's Pharaoh, and Abimelech, of the king of Salem, the man of Uz, and the Mesopotamian prophet faithless to light and given up to his idol and destroyed in his sin-His grace to Benhadad and Hazael, and the king of Nineveh, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Cyrus His "servant "the obscurer lives also which men saw not, but He looked upon who seeth in secret and rewardeth openly, the domestic lives of faith, those gentler softer lights of redeemed human life, like Ruth, or Hannah, or like the women of Bethany, and of the sepulchre, and of Berea, and Thyatira;— HIS DAY that brought to Him, in the fulness of its time, the wondrous manifestation in human flesh-the man's life of sorrows acquainted with grief-the contradiction of sinners-the love of a human mother-the longing after the comfort of human friends-the baptism of death for man, gaining and quickening him back to sonship-"the joy" also that broke over those years, lights of the eternal day, in the fields beheld white to the harvest, and the foretastes of their fruitfulness which solaced His wearied spirit in the love of John, the faith of Peter, the coming of the "publicans and sinners" to Him, to follow Him and sin no more-the human home of Nazareth and Capernaum-the days by the Lake of Galilee, and at Bethany, and at Sychar, and in the temple of His Father-His intercession for Peter-His opening of heaven to Stephen's The Rest- sight-His "cheering" of Paul-His vision to John in Patmos -the ages also of His Spirit's helping of His servants' infirmities, and guiding them unto all truth, while, like the springingcorn, the truth that is to save "springeth and groweth up," "man knoweth not how "-the foolishness of preaching, in which the doings of that endless day of His love become the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation-and the second coming, without sin, to take His many brethren to His Father's house, where He hath prepared a place for them, that where He is there they may be also. 36. Such is faith to see the day of the Son of man, exercising itself and rising up in power to see it thus; looking as if it could look with His all-blending eyes, while He looks on the whole life of the race whom He so loved-beholding all earth's history one day of His love, unbroken by the terms of human time-one day that embosoms in His never-slumbering care the countless lives, measured by so-called years, of fallen and repentant and believing, or impenitent God-grieving men-a day of care and sorrow still to His love as well as of satisfying sight of the travail of His soul; but in which that shall decrease, but this shall increase until it is finished. That day faith is to behold ending to Him and to man, not in night, but in "rest and the joy of man's Lord-not the "rest" which man's body needs, the rest of night and sleep, nor the absorption of lost life unconsciously sinking into the being of another, the sad dream of heathen philosophy which knows nothing of salvation, and seeks but the end of suffering-but the rest which man's spirit, his human heart, recognises and seeks as its own rest even now, and which recruits even his fleshly body more than food and sleep can do the rest of love and union with the loved. That rest and union the Saviour and the Friend of man also beholds and desires as yet, because it is yet unperfected— when they whom He loved and who love Him shall enter into a union called oneness, that will not absorb but multiply the consciousness of redeemed eternal life- and into a "rest" in which that new life shall go forth in joyous liberty and everlasting power, in all the ways of kindred love's communion and admiration that are the life of man's heart which God our Saviour made in His own likeness. It shall be that life of union and of rest the endless good of which He sets before us now in a wealth of suggestive relationships, in which distinctness of feature is sacrificed to cumulative assurance the union-life of sons in their recovered Fatherthe assimilating life of brethren with their Brother, who gave them new life, when they shall see Him as He is the life, gathered again into one in Him and in one another to be separate no more, of the spirits of the just made perfect, by whose even earthly union the world is to believe that He has come. CHAPTER IX. normal. THE DIVERSITY OF FAITH. MARK ix. 40.-He that is not against us is on our part. 1 Cor. xii. 6.-There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. 2 Cor. iii. 18.—We, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image. Diversity 1. THE habitual thoughts of a variety of persons upon one in emotional and the same long history of love, the central object of which, thinking, though one person, is presented in many strongly-impressive aspects, will not exhibit uniform phenomena. The emotional contemplation, which is the thinking of faith, will be marked by characteristic diversity, both because of the diversity of permanent or occasional mental conditions of the thinkers, and because of the immense range of matters of thought, among which their faith finds appropriate attraction. Every person's individual state of feelings, however arising, from the providential mould in which the habits of thought have grown up, or from natural temperament, the soul's gift received from the body's peculiarities, must always direct the thoughts to some classes of subjects more than to others. With the same knowledge, the habitual thinking of believers in God's love will be diverse. The children of God will differ in propensities of thought and in their impressions of particular things of their family relationship, as do the children of an earthly father. This diversity is recognised in, or at any rate accords with, Scriptural language respecting spiritual conditions—the “house of many mansions, and places prepared" therein-" diverse stones built into one temple "- some least some greatest in |