sinner that believes, for there is no difference whatsoever, is good news indeed; to be able to say "And I stand connected with that God and with that salvation" is blessed. But we must receive into our own souls and for our own selves that mercy, stand upon it, live under it and from it, if there is to be lasting blessing. Reader, can you say, "God, thou knowest that Thy mercy by Christ Jesus dwells in my mind and that I love it and glory in it and try to live as one that has found it. Mercy is behind me as to my past; mercy is with me and in me as to my present; mercy is my hope as to all that is before me.' These are solemn truths: for chap. xi. shows us why the nation Israel was cut off. They walked not in mercy's path. "Elias had to make intercession to God against Israel (for whom Moses had interceded!) saying, Lord, they have killed Thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life" (ver. 3). The restraining power of God's hand had however, unknown to the prophet, been acting. "But what said the answer of God to him?" "I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to Baal." What a blessed thing it is that the same One who said to Moses, "I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion," (at a time when Moses stood all alone for God) should have reserved, at a time when Elias thought he was left alone, seven thousand men. And why? It was the proof at once of His power and of His love of mercy. But the self-confident mass who gave the character and stamp of things even to the eye and mind of an Elias,-they stood for themselves and for their competency and their ability to obtain righteousness by their own works. And where, I pray you, is the conscience and mind and heart of a ruined sinner who is occupied with what "I can, and I will, and I mean to do "?" Is such an one set in mercy, a receiver of it, glorying in it and living in and from it? "I and my works among men and my difference from other men "-is it the same thing as "God's mercy to me the chiefest of sinners." And what if God really does delight in mercy-has

set Himself for a display of mercy, and that a stream of mercy flows forth and they who profess to be connected with God and His throne and possessors of the privileges of being associated with Him,-what I say, if such lie and do not the truth; will not stand for mercy in and from God to man a ruined sinner, but claim and wait for the righteous judgment of God upon human works"? This was the case with Israel of old, in Elias's, in David's, in the Lord's, in Paul's days. Must God give up His mercy, or take a new position for Himself, and while carrying to it all that would have mercy, leave behind to providential judgments all that despised His mercy? That is: Is God, or is sinful man to take the lead, to have the upper hand, to rule? Blessed be God! though man tried, instigated by Satan, to put God out of the way, and killed the Son lest the Romans "should come and take us away," they in their blindness and dark sightedness were but putting forward God's mercy. They were giving the proof that mercy had no place in them, when they killed the Prince of life; and so they were justifying God's departure from themselves, yea, provoking Him to judge them according to their boasted measure of self-righteousness; and, so far as in them lay, too, they were thrusting Him whom they murdered into the new place, the new position which God would take; for Christ on earth was Messiah to Israel. Christ earthrejected, heaven-welcomed, is Lord and Christ for "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord." The sphere of Israel a nation on earth had rejected, renounced and denounced mercy: Alas! for it, then and there. But, blessed be God, mercy was as dear to Him as ever. -He felt that Israel's sphere was not large enough for Him for the display of His mercy. Little was the mountain from which and small the sphere to which, through Moses' intercession, He had proclaimed mercy. Great the height of His throne in heaven and wide the range of the sphere to every human being under heaven, to whom mercy was now to be proclaimed, beginning at Jerusalem. And, not only so, but in the out-sounding of mercy in this larger sphere, He thought to provoke Israel, that cared not for mercy, to emulation. What a

love of mercy is His! "Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness (ver. 11, 12)?” "For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead (ver. 13)?" Their fall was not of God that the nation should be lost; but that, they removed for a time, salvation might be proclaimed to the Gentiles, to provoke them to jealousy. If their removal from the place of honour for a time be for the enriching of a larger circle, what blessing will pertain to that larger circle when all the fulness of Israel's blessing is set forth? God's delight in mercy led Him to take a new position with such thoughts in His mind. How everything as to the revelation of mercy and the making of it good to any and in any, in every position which the God of mercy has taken, all depends upon Himself, His absolute power and His delight in mercy! And this as surely for eternity as for time!

But what as to this new position taken by God, and what as to the position of those that gather down here under the preaching of it? are either of them permanent ? God's mercy is permanent: that is clear. The position of God bidding His Son sit in heaven until He makes His foes to be His footstool, is not to those who count the long suffering of God to be salvation His permanent one; it is until. Until what? Until He make His foes Father bids the Son to

to be His footstool. Until the rise up and fetch the adopted children to His house on high (John xiv.), to fetch the Church which is to be the Bride, the Lamb's wife, in heaven,-to claim the land of Israel that it may be Beulah, married to Jehovah, and that from the City Jehovah-Shammah, the knowledge of the glory of the Lord may flow out to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And Paul puts before us the other side of this truth, viz., Gentiles graffed into the channel of testimony and fruit-bearing down here on earth for a time (see Rom. xii. 17-25).

The Gentiles had been of a wild olive tree, but were made to partake of the root and fatness of the olive tree (ver. 17). What brought them there? God's delight in mercy. In mercy they might boast then, but not against the branches, when upon a root which was not theirs by nature. Fear, surely, becomes one who is brought into a place of responsibility out of which, for failure, another has been removed; and not high-mindedness. It is a place of responsibility and in time, and God is a righteous judge. If He spared not the natural branches, will He spare those who were made, because of the failure of these to be their supplanters? No: He is good, for He stands for merey. But He does stand for mercy, and therefore He is determined and cuts off whatever receives not, abides not in, mercy. If He cut them off and graffed us in, why should He not cut us off and graff them in again if we stand not for mercy? They have the birthright in their favour, and the root is called by their name. If the Church, as the house of God down here, had received and stood, and walked and hoped in mercy, it would never be removed, shaken, cut off; but God's righteous judgment would find another way of fulfilling His promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in Israel. But Roman and Greek churches, and all Protestant churches too, have failed, utterly failed in responsibility as to holding and living in and hoping in mercy, and nothing but mercy. this my hard-hearted thought-or God's? God's it is most surely, who also gave it to Paul that he and all other true servants of God, might not be overwhelmed in seeing that as man had failed upon earth from Eden down to Pentecost, in every responsibility put into his own hands to keep,-so would it be again from Pentecost onward. God has no faith in man's competency, or wisdom, or energy or faithfulness. "For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in." Then shall Israel, as a whole nation, be saved: " as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness

from Jacob" (ver. 26). For there is a covenant with them to this effect, when He shall take away their sins. Enemies they were to the gospel in its present formand allowed to be so, that mercy's voice might sound out in the wider circuit of "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord." But the promises to the fathers remain unfulfilled as yet, and God is true and knows not the shadow of a turn. Israel was chosen to be the earth's centre of blessing, and endowed and called thereto. And though generations of them have refused to have this place upon the ground of mercy, this will not hinder the nation as a nation having it hereafter, "for the gifts and calling of God are without repentance" (ver. 29). God is absolute, and He stands for mercy to the nation Israel. The Gentiles once did not know God so as to be able to believe in Him; when Israel disbelieved in mercy, the Gentiles obtained mercy; Israel disbelieved and rebelled against mercy to the Gentiles; God left them to their unbelief and to the judgments consequent thereon, that they might learn that they could not do without mercy (ver. 30, 31). For God has shut them up in their unbelief, left them to their own way, that so when He comes to bless them it may be clear to all that the blessing flows upon the ground, is received too upon the ground of mercy-pure, free, unmixed mercy.

The present house of God upon earth has been the birth-place of many a soul for heaven, part of the family of God the Father, part of that body of which Christ is the head: they shall all be removed to heaven. But the house on earth committed to man's building and care, man has defiled and it will come into judgment. And the eternal lover of mercy will return to Israel and mercy's streams shall flow forth thence to the uttermost parts of the earth, even to the extern nations-those beyond the four Gentile dynasties, and be among them in power too. The language of Paul, when he wrote on these things, well becomes us. "O the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable his judgments, and his ways past finding out" (ver. 33). And then he goes on with thoughts