He is the One that loves man. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to the end that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

What is the measure of this love of God for man? All love is measured by willingness to give time, trouble, thought, our possessions, all that we most value, to the object of our affection. Your little child comes to you with a flower squeezed in his hot little hand and offers it to you. You take it not for the value of the gift, but for the love which prompts the gift. The highest gift that a man can offer is his life" greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"; yet we can conceive of an even greater height of love, though it may not be possible for us, and that is when a man is willing to give the life of one who is dearer to him than his own life, for the person or the cause that he wishes to save. This, the highest conceivable measure of love, was the measure of the love of God for man. "He gave His only begotten Son."

It is hard, it is indeed impossible, for us to realise the greatness of God's sacrifice for us. We can faintly picture what it would mean for a human father to give up his son or daughter, to live the narrow life of a horse or a dog, and to die at last a degraded death from stupid malice, but the distance between human and animal life is as nothing to the distance between the life of God and the life of man. What it meant of sacrifice in God to give His Son to be made man, to live as man, to die as man, is utterly beyond our comprehension. We only know that the sacrifice was the most tremendous that can possibly be conceived.

And what was it for? What was the object of it all? It was that Whosoever believeth on Him should not perish."

"Whosoever." The word rings out amid the darkness and spiritual confusion of the old heathen world like the midnight hail of rescuers to shipwrecked mariners drifting fast to destruction.

There had been religions and philosophies in abundance

in the world before Christianity, and in many of them there had been much that was good and true, but it was characteristic of them that all their hope and their message was for the naturally good, the honourable and selfrestrained, the wise and learned; for the poor, the ignorant, the suffering and the sinful, they had no message and no hope. Even Judaism had become crystalised into the bitter saying, "This people (brother Jews remember), this people that knoweth not the law is accursed." To the poor, the weak, the ignorant and the sinful came this great word of deliverance. "Whosoever." Whosoever will let him take of the water of life freely.' No more distinctions, no more disqualifications, no condemnations; the offer of salvation was open to all without restriction.

Yet the same sentence which opens out this glorious universality of hope touches a note also of warning and of terror: "Should not perish." There is a real danger lest the human soul should perish, that is, be utterly and hopelessly destroyed.

There is a tendency in the present day to discredit and explain away all the pains of hell, the flaming fire and the torment which under the most grossly material images dominated for so long the thought of Christendom. It may at once be admitted that the representations of hell so long popular were as materialistic as the popular conceptions of the joys of heaven with its golden streets and material harps; and all the other obviously mistaken interpretations of the purely figurative language of St. John, than whom no one would have been more astonished at the way in which it has been understood. It may be at once admitted that the material body perishes at death, and that it is not at all probable that the spiritual body of the resurrection will suffer from material pains, but two things must be borne steadily in mind.

In the first place we have no reason to suppose that mental and spiritual pains are more easy to bear than physical pains. All the evidence points the other way. Even extreme physical pain is often borne with calmness, and even with cheerfulness, but "who can minister unto

a mind diseased? It is in our minds and our souls that we are most deeply alive to pain, and it is there and not in the body that we must expect to suffer. Secondly, we must remember that our Lord, while not defining their nature, did both deliberately and continually dwell on the pains of hell as one of the most awful and inevitable consequences of sin.

Indeed, unless it be for the reality of the perishing of souls, with all the suffering that such a perishing involves, it is hard to see why Christ had to die upon the Cross. If there was no terrible fate from which man was to be saved, why this heroic remedy, so very greatly in excess of the needs of the case?

If sin were so unimportant in its consequences, and forgiveness so easy to attain, as some would nowadays have us to believe, why ever did the Son of God pass through the garden of Gethsemane and hang upon the Cross? It all becomes meaningless. As a matter of fact, however, so far from there being no hell, not a few find it so real even in this life, that they kill themselves in the vain hope of escaping from it. It was because souls do perish, because the danger is both real and awful, that Jesus, the Son of God, died for man. But there is a condition: "That whosoever believeth on Him should not perish." Why this condition? Probably it is because no man can consciously reject Christ, knowing what He is and what He stands for, without also consciously rejecting all that is good and true. Consciously reject Christ-for there are thousands who, owing to the sins and infidelities of nominal Christians, think they are rejecting Christ when in reality they are rejecting only the false figure that His unworthy followers have made of Him. Nay, there are even those who, while they think they are rejecting Him, are really drawing nearer to Him. But no man knowing what the true Christ is can reject Him without rejecting all that is good. So when a man consciously accepts Christ, he is accepting all that is best and most true in the world.

Such a one will have everlasting life, which, according

to our Lord's own definition, means " to know Thee the only God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent."

This then is the great message of the Son of God which underlies all the rest of the Gospel, that the supreme fact for man is that God loves him, that He has given a supremely convincing proof of this love in giving up His Son to die for us, that there is a real and terrible danger of our souls perishing if we turn our back upon His revelation of Himself to us in Christ, but that if we accept and believe it there is the sure promise of eternal life.

Well may we cry: "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power, for Thou hast created all things and for Thy pleasure they are, and were created."

VII. THE CHRISTIAN RACE

Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.-1 CORINTHIANS IX. 24, 25.

ΤΗ

THERE is little doubt that St. Paul is here referring to the Isthmian games, which were at this time the best known of the four great Greek festivals celebrated at various intervals. The games were taken very seriously and formed a most important part of the national life, being the chief occasions that brought together in social intercourse the independent and often warring cities of Greece. There were two important qualifications carefully insisted on in the case of every candidate. The competitor must in the first case be of pure Hellenic race, and in the second place he must be of blameless character. The

candidates were selected a year before the race, and they had to spend ten months in rigorous training under the eyes of the appointed officers, so that there was little chance of fraud. The games were inaugurated by imposing religious ceremonies, and the popular interest in the city champion was shown by the enormous crowds which gathered from every part of Greece, a truce being proclaimed between all warring states during and for some time before and after the games. The only prize was a crown of parsley, pine leaves or wild olive, but so great were the honours paid to the victor that even princes would train for and run in the races, and the city so honoured its successful representative, that on his return he was escorted home by a triumphal procession in which his praises were sung, often in poetry of the highest order, and he was frequently chosen to represent his city as commissioner or general.

It is of such a kind of race, so serious and so honourable, that St. Paul was thinking. The Greeks attached great importance to running, and before the battle of Marathon the Athenian Pheidippides actually ran from Athens to Sparta, over rough mountain tracks, one hundred and fifty miles in forty-eight hours, to ask in vain for Sparta's help in the hour of his country's need.

It was of such an honourable contest that St. Paul was thinking, of runners who ran for honour, or for duty, when he likened the Christian's course to a race.

Yet the Christian race is a far greater and nobler race than any earthly contest, and it will be well to note the differences in qualifications, training, interest, and reward. The Christian race is not limited, as the Greek race was, to people of a particular race or nationality. The gospel call of Christ comes to all the world. There are no limitations. As St. Paul reminds us, in Him "there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all." It is well that we should always remember this. Just as there were Germans who spoke of "our German God," so there have been those who thought that God was a kind of Anglican God and the gospel something for home use only, and