righteousness is keeping Christ's commandment, and Christ's commandment is, that we love one another. And to those who long to do that, God's Spirit will come to fill them with love; and where the Spirit of God is, there is also the Father, and there is also the Son; for God's substance cannot be divided, as the Athanasian creed tells us (and blessed and cheering words they are); and he who hath the Holy Spirit of Love with him hath both the Father and the Son, as it is written: 'If a man love me, my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.'

And then, if we have God abiding with us, and filling us with His Eternal Life, what more do we need for life, or death, or eternity, or eternities of eternities? For we shall live in and with and by God who can never die or change, an everlasting life of love, whereof St. Paul says, that though prophecies shall fail, and tongues shall cease, and knowledge shall vanish away, because all that we know now is but in part, and all that we see now is through a glass darkly, yet Love shall never fail, but abide for ever and ever.

'Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.'

I

SAY, writes St. Paul, in the epistle which you

heard read just now, 'that the heir, as long as he is a child, differs nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and governors, until the time appointed by his father. Even so,' he says, we 'when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: but when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under a law, to redeem them that were under a law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.'

When we were children. He is not speaking of the Jews only; for these Galatians to whom he was writing were not Jews at all, any more than we are. He was speaking to men simply as men. He was speaking to the Galatians as we have a right to speak to all men.

Nor does he mean merely when we were children in age. The Greek word which he uses, means infants, people not come to years of discretion. Indeed, the word which he uses means very often a simpleton, an ignorant or foolish person; one who does not know who and what he is, what is his duty, or how to do it.

Now this, he says, was the state of men before Christ came; this is the state of all men by nature still; the state of all poor heathens, whether in England or in foreign countries.

They are children—that is, ignorant and unable to take care of themselves; because they do not know what they are. St. Paul tells us what they are. That they are all God's offspring, though they know it not. He likens them to young children, who, though they are their father's heirs, have no more liberty than slaves have; but are kept under tutors and masters, till they have arrived at years of discretion, and are fit to take their places as their father's sons, and to go out into the world, and have the management of their own affairs, and a share in their father's property, which they may use for themselves, instead of being merely fed and clothed by, and kept in subjection to him, whether they will or not. This is what he means by receiving the adoption of sons. He does not mean that we are not God's children

till we find out that we are God's children.

That

is what some people say; but that is the very exact contrary to what St. Paul used to say. He told the heathen Athenians that they were God's children. He put them in mind that one of their own heathen poets had told them so, and had said, 'We are also God's offspring.' And so in this chapter, he says, 'You were God's children all along, though you did not know it. You were God's heirs all along, although you differed nothing from slaves; for as long as you were in your heathen ignorance and foolishness, God had to treat you as His slaves, not as His children; and so you were in bondage under the elements of the world, till the fulness of time was come.

And, then, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under a law, to redeem those who were under a law that is, all mankind. The Jews were keeping, or pretending to keep, Moses' law, and trying to please God by that. The heathens were keeping all manner of old superstitious laws and customs about religion which their forefathers had handed down to them. But heathens, and indeed Jews too, at that time, all agreed in one thing. These laws and customs of theirs about religion all went upon the notion of their being God's slaves, and not his children. They thought that God did not love them; that they must buy His favours.

They thought religion meant a plan for making God love them.

Then appeared the love of God in Jesus Christ. As at this very Christmas time, the Son of God, Jesus Christ the Lord, in whose likeness man was made at the beginning, was born into the world, to redeem us and all mankind. He told men of their Heavenly Father; He preached to them the good news of the kingdom of God; that God had not forgotten them, did not hate them, would freely forgive them all that was past; and why? Because He was their Father, and loved them, and loved them so that He spared not His only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for them. And now God looks at us human beings, not as we are in ourselves, sinful and corrupt, but He looks at us in the light of Jesus Christ, who has taken our nature upon Him, and redeemed it, and raised it up again, so that God can look on it now without disgust, and henceforth no one need be ashamed of being a man; for to be a man is to be in the likeness of God. Man was created in the image and likeness of God, and who is the image and likeness of God but Jesus Christ? Therefore man was created at first in Jesus Christ, and now, as St. Paul says, he is created anew in Jesus Christ; and now to be a man is to partake of the same flesh and blood which the Lord Jesus