This is an utter perversion of the truth. There is no such antagonism as is here represented. The justice of God, one of His essential attributes, could not allow the bestowal of pardon without a previous expiation; but it was the Father's love which provided the sufficient sacrifice for sin. "God is love," and He has proved it by sending His own Son into the world to die for sinners. This is a side of His character not seen in the giving of the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, but none the less belonging to it.

Let us divest ourselves of the idea that God is a grand, majestic, cold abstraction, and believe that He has a heart to feel, as well as an intellect to think. Only thus can we understand what is meant by those Scriptures which attribute to Him affections and emotions. He is full of love; He, therefore, pities the fallen, grieves for the wretched, and compassionates the suffering. He does not mock us when He tells us of His sympathy for men. If we are told that such expressions are employed to bring the facts down to our comprehension, we insist that it be admitted that there are facts which underlie them and are fairly represented by them. So it still remains that God is grieved by sin, that He hates and abhors it, that He pities the sinner, and delights in them that love Him. And, if it be said that, by adhering so strongly to such words, we are lowering the proper idea of God, we reply that we the rather exalt Him by taking the exact representation which He has given of His own perfections. The soul wants a God that can meet its needs; and not a God stripped of all but cold intellect and mighty will, or, worse still, reduced to a blind force. We look into our own minds, and we learn what He means by love and grief. For God made man in His own image, with intellectual and moral traits of the same nature with His own; and He more than once appeals to these traits, and our knowledge of them, as grounds of our judgment of Himself. Or we may take the man Christ Jesus, in whom were none of the perversions of sin, who could say to Philip "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," and believe that in Him God was trying to make Himself as manifest to men as possible, and show us as nearly as He could how He thinks and feels and acts.

How much nearer to us the thought that God has a heart to feel brings Him. As a loving Father, He grieves when His children offend Him; but His grief has in it no perturbed feeling as in men. It is, nevertheless, a great reality, to be measured only by the infiniteness of His nature. By all His purity He loathes and hates sin, and by all His justice He must condemn and punish it; but equally by all His love is He grieved by it, and especially when men sin against light and knowledge, against the admonitions of conscience, and against the abundant exhibitions of His mercy and long-suffering. No man has a right to say of Him that He does not care for sin; or, if He cares, He cares only to punish. He does care for the sin, and for the misery it causes, and even for the punishment that He will finally inflict. They have read the Scriptures to little purpose who fail to see His tender-heartedness among the characteristics of Himself which He has taken special pains to make prominent in their pages. 'In all their affliction He was afflicted," are words that mean what they say.

Out of the depths of His great heart came the sacrifice of His own Son for the sins of men. Christ wept over sinners. Does not God have the very feeling that in Jesus expressed itself in tears? And, as we look forward to the day of final judgment, can we doubt that the just and awful word "Depart" will strike the deeper home because of the manifest sorrow for their ruin which will accompany its utterance?

Sympathy with God.

We all know very well what sympathy among men is. emotion of a very peculiar and distinctive quality.

We know it is an

Sympathy is not the same as admiration. We admire many with whom we do not sympathise. Sympathy is not the same as pity. Pity may, indeed, sometimes be an ingredient of sympathy; but we oftentimes sympathise with many who have no possible need of our pity. Sympathy is not the same as love. We love frequently those with whom, nevertheless, we cannot sympathise.

/No! Sympathy is that emotion which arises from harmony with another in the emotion which he feels. It results from a kind of mental putting of ourselves in another's place. It comes from sharing-not merely observing -the feelings and purposes which actuate him.

Now is such a sentiment as this a legitimate one to feel toward God? Perfectly, I answer. Sympathy with God is one of the most valid and practical emotions a man can feel.

But does some one object that the infinite distance at which God is removed from men in the volume and quality of His being, constitutes a bar to this emotion? No, I reply, it does not constitute a bar.

The humble day-labourer who digs some garden-patch in the obscure corner of a vast empire, is at a very considerable remove from the statesman who directs that empire's affairs. The private soldier of a great army is widely separated from the general-in-chief who orders that army by his single will. But both of them may sympathise with those above them. The benignity of the statesman's intent, the patriotism of the commander's purpose, are matters which, just so far as they are understood, bring both of them within the reach, not of admiration and reverence only, but of sympathy.

However great a being may be, all that is necessary to awaken sympathy with him, is some measure of knowledge of what he is and does, and approbation of what is known. Grant this, and we can leap across an even infinite remove, and can exercise a fellow-feeling even toward God.

But certainly the knowledge of God is not wanting to men. God Himself has provided for the importation of this knowledge by the very act of making man in His own image. And having made him so, He has poured in upon him through a hundred avenues the truth respecting Himself upon which man's intelligence can fasten. He has shown to us His character. He has revealed to us His plans. He has let us into the motives which actuate Him. He has told us what He loves and what He hates.

And now all that is requisite to awaken sympathy with God in any human heart, is an active and loving approbation of what God has made known. Feeling this, a man feels with God. The emotion is not mere admiration or even love. It is a sympathetic responsiveness of soul by which a man joins himself to God in the fellowship of a common experience. He who thus feels is, in the Scripture phrase, "one spirit with the Lord."

But perhaps the reality of this sympathy with God may be vivified to some minds by mentioning one or two points when its exercise is sometimes practically manifest.

God's feeling of compassion toward sinners may afford one example. How God feels toward lost men He has not left us vaguely to conjecture. He has written the declaration out for us in Bethlehem and Calvary. The measureless pathos of Christ's humiliated life, and the unfathomed wonder of His dying pains, tell us how God loves sinning men and longs to rescue them. Now is it possible for a man so to sympathise with God in this feeling as almost to sink and lose his own individuality of interest and aim, in his response to this feeling of God? Men have so sympathised with God. The emotion of God in this matter has entered into them and almost consumed them by its power. Paul, willing himself to be cursed from Christ if his nation might be saved; Martyn, driven by his fiery desire across and across Asia to his early grave; Payson, crying in his agony, "Give me souls or I die"-these are illustrations not to be gainsaid of sympathy with God in His pity for sinning men.

Or there may be sympathy with God in His opposition to iniquity. God is setting Himself against evil every day. His heart is in the conflict which right and wrong are waging the world over. Not His hand only but His will and determinations are engaged in it.

But in this longing and endeavour, man also can sympathise. It can become the very aim and passion of a man's soul. It did become so to Knox, striving to render afresh the fetter in which Scottish consciences were bound by the delusions of the Papacy. It did become so to Wilberforce, crying in the midst of an almost unheeding generation against the iniquity of human slavery. It is so still in God's militant servants, striving on many a hard-fought battle-field to war for the right and the pure, against the false and corrupt.

There are but two illustrations of that sympathy with God which over a wide range, and in many and many a point beside, it is permitted to a man to feel. Yes, man can feel it, and in that feeling become united to God.

He can become " one spirit with the Lord," in living abiding sympathy. In all reverence it may be said he feels as one putting himself in God's place. No other feeling he knows, no other purpose he cherishes, can be so vital or so controlling as that feeling and purpose of God which he recognises and makes his own.

G. L. WALKER.

MORNING prayer in the family is the time to keep the rest of the day from revelling.

IN Matthew, our Lord's explanation is this: "He that receiveth seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty." In Mark, for "understand " we have the word "receive." Luke's version is peculiar, but concurrent, and significant : "That on the good ground are they which, in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience." In the expression in Matthew, "Which also beareth fruit," the word "also" should rather have been rendered " 'now"; the idea being, that after a three-fourth's wading through wilderness soil, we now at length strike good, fruit-bearing ground.

Taking the three evangelists together, and analysing their statements,

we make out no fewer than eight characteristics of the good-ground hearers.

1. They are ingenuous hearers; candid, honourable, and upright. It is in this sense we understand the "honest and good heart" named in Luke. And so meant our translators; for here, as in other places, their "honest" is to be taken in its old sense of "honourable." The two original words are used together, just as here, to intensify their common meaning, and are even found combined into one. They variously denote the handsome, well-born, noble, and good. "Wellborn" is the literal meaning of that word which Luke, in Acts xvii. 11, applies to the Bereans, and that, too, of the same conduct as hereacting honourably with the Divine Word: "These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures daily whether these things were so." "Noble" is thoroughly the right word to use, for both it and the original which it represents bear the secondary meaning of nobleminded, generous, manly, candid. Hence the maxim Virtus vera nobilitas, and its fine expansion by Tennyson :

"Howe'er it be, it seems to me,

'Tis only noble to be good;

True hearts are more than coronets,

And simple faith than Norman blood."

So with our word "ingenuous," which means well-born, and thence honourable and upright. Both meanings are found combined in the women mentioned in that same chapter of Acts; for while they were "chief women in position, they were "honourable women "} in character (Acts xvii. 4, 12). They, and the Bereans of the verse before, were too noble to repel our apostle summarily and disdainfully as a Nazarene ; and they were too high-minded to receive his doctrines on trust. Hence they "searched the Scriptures," or "tested" his tenets, as the word means, by that divine criterion. Exactly such were the front and attitude of the good-ground hearers. Between them and the noble men and women of Acts xvii. the parallel is triply expressive-first, in the same words being used; secondly, from the pen of the same Luke; and thirdly, in the self-same meaning of candid and ingenuous. Such spirits love and long for the truth; but for this very reason they will test it well. They will take the heavenly manna as thankfully from a wooden trencher as from a golden tray; but they will see well that it is genuine. They are confiding, yet candid, trustful yet truthful, resolved to buy the truth at any price and sell it at none. This is the source and sum of all good hearing. "Ingenuous and noble" is the general expression for all the rest; the enclosing bud out of which all other forms of good hearing evolve.