T is in the sanctuary of God that the mystery of man's condition can find its only interpretation in the wonders of redemption. It is here alone, that light dawns upon the night of the grave, and that the enigmas of a present world, and of a mortal life, at once so sweet, and sad, and strange, can be to any extent resolved. It is here that an inscrutable Fate, which, like the fabled Saturn, seems to destroy its own offspring, gives place to a beneficent Power, gathering the harvests of Time into the garners of eternity, and selecting from the nurseries of earth those flowers which may fitly bloom forever in the gardens of heaven. It is here that order is imparted to a [134] seeming chaos; meaning and purpose to an unintelligible maze; dignity to debasement; power to weakness; wisdom and goodness to seeming unprofitableness and decay. It is here, too, amidst these wondrous lessons, that man discovers his own inefficiency, and learns to trust, in trembling hope and humble adoration, an over-ruling and Infinite Intelligence.

      It is hence here in vain that carping unbelief may seek to awaken dubiety or fear through those uncomprehended facts of the present, which appertain to the unrevealed secrets of the future. However mysterious the controversy between good and evil; however varied the fortunes of the struggle; however protracted the toils and sufferings of the righteous, or boastful the transient triumphs of the ungodly, it is here that an assured faith preserves in perfect peace the heirs of salvation, the called according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. It is hence here that the disappointments of life, the failure of fond human hopes, the complications which oft enshroud in obscurity the plans of Providence, disturb not [135] an equanimity which reposes upon the Divine faithfulness; and though the seeds of truth may oft be scattered upon the waste places of the earth to yield apparently no genial harvest, though the brightest and the best may be prematurely snatched away, or the cherished objects of affection be ensnared by the Tempter, and dragged to endless ruin, there still remains the blessed assurance amidst all the dimly comprehended problems of the present, that the eternal God is our only refuge, and that "beneath are the everlasting arms." Amidst the inscrutable mysteries of nature, the pious heart humbly rests secure in the infinite wisdom and goodness of an Omnipotent Power who fills the universe with created wonders in munificent profusion, and imparts the charms of life and beauty to myriad forms of dependent beings, each perfect in its sphere, and tributary to the grandeur, the glory, and the completeness of the whole. Nor, amidst the still greater mysteries of religion, does the renewed soul fail equally to humble itself before the unsearchable judgments of God, and, encompassed with the doubts, the fears, the oppressive secrets [136] of human life and destiny, to accept in joyful confidence the guidance of Divine truth.

      It is hence here that to hearts beleaguered within the narrow walls of sense, Faith, like the swift-winged passenger-dove, brings blessed messages from the distant and unseen world, to enlighten and to cheer. How joyful these news of approaching deliverance! How sweet these assurances of triumph! How absorbing these intimations of intended movements, these glimpses of ulterior purposes! Involved in sin and sorrow, mortality and death, by one man's disobedience, we learn that by the obedience of one we shall be ransomed from the power of the grave, and that "as by the offense of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all to justification of life." If hence, sin has reigned unto death, righteousness shall reign unto eternal life, the Omnipotent One having provided for every woe a solace--a balm for every wound.

      How glorious is the Divine scheme of redemption! How potent and far-reaching those agencies which countervail the pervading virus of evil [137] which flows onward in the life-current of our race! What world-wide oppositions! What wondrous analogies and resemblances! If the first Adam gave rise to sin, the second Adam brings in an everlasting righteousness. If the former brought death upon the world, the latter brings life and immortality. If, in the one case, the innumerable offenses of many supplemented the disobedience of one--in the other, the obedience unto death of one, singly and alone, secured for all the free gift of justification.

      It were, however, to conceive unworthily of this glorious salvation to esteem it merely the counterplot or counterpoise of sin, and to imagine that, with this, the redemption which is in Christ Jesus forms but an equation whose members are equal to each other. While, with our feeble powers, we may not essay to sound the depths of that vast deluge of suffering with which sin has overwhelmed the world, or estimate aright either the malignity of its nature or the eternal consequences which result from it; nor, upon the other hand, form any adequate conception of those gifts of grace and blessedness which God [138] has prepared for those that love him, we are nevertheless divinely assured that the work of Christ is not a mere antagonism to sin, a mere neutralization of its power and its effects, a mere restoration to a precedent condition. Ah! no; in the infinite purposes of Jehovah a nobler, mightier consummation is designed. It is here that the eternal is to replace the temporal; the spiritual, the carnal; the Paradise of God, the earthly garden of Eden. It is here that the most precious and beautiful things of earth can be but types and imperfect emblems of the unfading glories of the future, and that the divine promises shall confer a "far more exceeding" weight of endless bliss than sin had here ever exacted of suffering and affliction. Whatever, in the decrees of a just and holy God, may be the significance of the symbolic pictures of the Apocalypse, or of the brief literal announcement of "everlasting punishment," or an "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power," as the doom of the finally impenitent; however deep and awful may be the meaning of the announcements, both of the [139] privation of good and the infliction of evil, in which the wicked shall share with those malignant spirits who left their first estate and seduced man from his allegiance, it may not be affirmed that the penalties of retribution shall bear an exact proportion to the rewards of the righteous, or that the unmerited gifts of grace shall be bestowed upon the redeemed in equal measure only with the merited anguish of the lost. It is in the dispensation of blessedness that a beneficent Deity, with whom judgment is "strange," and who takes no delight in the death of the wicked, has imposed upon himself no limitation, but reserves for the righteous the highest joys, honors, and dignities of heaven, exalting them to the heirship of all things, and to the participation of infinite delights adapted to new and enlarged capacities of enjoyment. If sin, then, with its evils, has abounded, grace, with its blessings, hath much more abounded. If death, in all or any of its forms, has reigned by one, much more they who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ. [140]

      How precious, then, in the sweet hours of sacred meditation, these simple but expressive memorials of that death which brings to us more than life--of that humiliation which has exalted humanity to the throne of the universe! How dear to the heart are those yearnings of faith and love which here bring us near to him who hath washed us from our sins in his own blood! And oh! how bright, amidst the darkness of the world and all the sad mysteries of sin, that light of eternity which here illumines the pathway of the just! [141]

[CITS 134-141]