see that He was the same when no created being was, that He would be still the same if there were no creation; that He was as blessed, as perfect, as glorious in Himself, when self-contained in the solitude of the eternal rest ere creation was, as when it had pleased Him to people the heavens and the earth with reasonable life derived from Himself. We must understand that He is essentially external to His creation, though it owes to Him its first and its continued being. As we may look through the microscope and see in a drop of water its living denizens, but are ourselves external to that drop of water, so is God Himself, in His own essence, external to His universe. It is for Him, from Him; but He is not in it; He is not in time, or in space; He is not extended, or diffused through time, or through space; He is all-present everywhere. And all is that is, because He wills that it should be; and it is for His glory which is and must be that for which, all that is, is. This, then, is our Creator.

II. Next, what are we? Creatures whom He has made to be. Whom, further, He has made to be so far as the creature can be, in His image after His likeness; to whom He has given the awful dower of personality, whom He has gathered severally up into a unity of being, which is in its measure the image of His unity, so that each one of us stands in the midst of the multitude of beings round us alone; no other of those like us able to intrude into the essential singleness of our own separate being. Further, He has bound up this mystery of our unity by the band of a will, making us hereby real units not only as regards others, but even as regards Himself. Further, that He has made us capable of knowing, communing with and loving Him, and therefore under the action

of our will capable of either rendering real service to Him, of returning real love to Him, or of really rebelling against Him. Yet, further, He has set us in a state of progression, has planted in us abundantly the seeds of an unlimited development, with power of increase which, so far as we can see, are unbounded, and which He has promised, if we seek Him, to develope for us and in us beyond what eye hath seen, or ear heard, or than it has entered into the heart of man to conceive. And yet, once more, to give room for this development He has made us whom He has thus called out of nothing into being, partakers of His own never-ending condition; so that once being, we must be for ever. Time for us runs not out into nothingness, but into eternity; an eternity which we may spend in His presence and blessedness, or in perpetual banishment from Him.

This, then, is what we are; and, III. See why He has made us so to be.

From the essential love which He is. He made us not of caprice, not to exert His own power, but of love, for God is love. He needed not any. No created being could add anything to the calm, perfect, necessary blessedness of the eternal self-sufficing Godhead. But His love was prolific, and poured out itself into a reasonable creation, whose blessedness should be His glory. This, then, is, I. What He is; II. What we are; III. Why we are what He has made us.

And now, mark IV. some of the consequences which must flow from this relation of Him to us, and of us to Him. And first, the consequence as to Him. Surely it is plainly this, that His right over us is absolute and unlimited. He is the Lord our God. What can the thing formed say to Him who with power, and love,

and wisdom infinite has formed it? If, then, this be the consequence as to Him, the first consequence to us must be that which is the correlative of this absolute right in Him, namely, an absolute submission. We are His. Bear for a moment the thought. Thou art at all, only because God's love and power made thee to be. Go back up the stream of time but a few years, and where wast thou, and what wast thou? nowhere and nothing. The least and most inconsiderable thing that then was, was greater by all the vast immeasurable interval which parts being from nothingness than thou. The smallest insect that floated on the evening air was of more worth than thou, for it was, and thou wast not. And out of that nothingness He called thee into being to be blessed in serving Him. The first consequence of which as regards thee must be that thou art His absolutely; the creature of His hand. And next follows this consequence, that as He made thee of His love to serve Him, and be like Him, only in so serving Him canst thou be happy. For He cannot change, and thou, though thou canst by a free will misused, pervert and render crooked thy being, canst not alter the law on which He planned its lines. Thou the creature canst in the mystery of thy true separate being mar His work, but thou canst not give it another perfectness than that which He designed it for. From both of which consequences follows another, namely, that thy being, in its truest and most essential existence, is really spent with Him alone in time and in eternity. This is the necessary consequence of that mystery of personality which He has imparted from Himself to us. It is true that in one sense we are in the midst of a crowd, but in a far deeper and truer sense we are still alone with Him.

We have others like ourselves around us, near us, and yet we are alone. They touch us, and yet we are untouched. In the greatest and deepest things we are severed from every other. We struggle against the mysterious law of singleness only to find ourselves utterly baffled by its close, clinging, irresistible power. We long to impart ourselves to another, and we cannot; the invisible wall of personality parts us from them. We touch, like globes, at a point, we cannot commingle our beings. Yes, in the thickest crowd Wɛ the true we, are alone. We can see this law acting on others, from birth to death. Look at a little child sleeping, and stirring in its sleep. How alone it is,—there in that small cradle is all the volume of a spirit which shall pervade eternity. You gaze, but you cannot commune, you cannot track the actings of that spirit. And as to all the deepest beings of the soul, the mystery only increases as life goes on, and some small measures of intercommunion of spirit become ours. For as to all the hidden mysteries of our souls, no one knows us, we know no one, and yet ONE is ever with us who knows all, who sees us through and through, whose presence wraps us round so close, that sleeping or waking, we never in our inmost being escape for one moment from His gaze, and His touch, to whom we know we can impart our whole selves, from whom we feel that we can never escape, to whom even in spite of ourselves our spirit will cry out, "Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid Thy hand upon me." With whom, then, are we indeed living? Surely not with these shadows round us, which in spite of all our efforts have at best so impalpable a presence as to us, but with Him in whom we live and move, and have our a Ps. cxxxix. 5.

being. Solus cum solo; this is the awful sentence of our consciousness. Nor is it only in our consciousness that this law of singleness acts; all our being is held under it; every voluntary acting of the life He has given us, not outward actions only, but the most inward conscious stirrings of the mind and spirit, each thought, each desire, which can touch no other, reach straight to Him; in all these things no other can share with us the obligations which living, in its every waking moment, imposes on us, and no one therefore can share in the discharge of them, or in their consequences. They exist between the creature and the Creator alone, they are the correlative of single, personal, reasonable, creaturely being, incommunicable, inevitable; no one can be bound for us, no one can act for us, no one can suffer for us. It is a true, real, personal responsibility; it clings to us, it never leaves us. Every allowed thought, desire, imagination; every word spoken, every act done consciously, is either a fulfilment, or a break of the ever acting law of our creaturely existence. From the lightest stirrings of that being in which consciousness scarcely acts, up to those in which there is a mighty concentration of passion or will, every one is the acting of the personal unit of separated life according to the mystery of its will against or for its supreme ruler and its own perfectness. And, further, all this is ever going on under His eye. The closest to us know little of it. Life in its essential actings is such a secret thing. Thick curtains cover the deep mystery of being. They shut in such volumes of existence, whilst they shut out wellnigh all the pryings of the most curious gazers. But all is ever naked and open unto Him. All those secret stirrings of life, each motive in its varying force and colour, the measure of every effort, the true amount