incarnation and in the Holy Scriptures. Suppose that a father has been separated from his children for many years. He had been cast away on a desert island, rarely visited by ships of the ocean. When at length he reaches his home, he finds that his wife is dead, and that his children do not know him. But the eldest girl says that mother, before she died, told them that they would know their father, if he ever returned, by marks upon his hands. How eager he is to show them these marks, and how glad to hear the responsive cry, "Our father, our father!" Thus does Jesus stand in the midst of us, the wondering sons of men and sons of God, showing us His hands and His feet, and exclaiming-" He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

We are thus led to observe that it is not cold theism we are speaking about, but warm fervid Christianity. It is not God in stones and stars, but God in his only begotten Son. It is as the Saviour Himself represented the subject, "the true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent," or as we have it in Paul's writings, "God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." It is eternal life to know such a God. The people who live in a certain village might have known that the noble proprietor who has purchased the great estate was a mighty man and a rich man; but they never rightly knew him till the night when the village took fire, and he came down from the hall, in the cold winter weather, with his only son, and encouraged the lad to risk his life to save the villagers. And when it was all over and their lives were saved, but the boy lay bruised and bleeding and burned, and they heard the father say, "I feel for you, my lad; but let us both rejoice because the people are rescued," ah! then they came to know him, and love him too. Now it is when we understand that it pleased the Lord to bruise his Son, and put him to grief, that we might be saved, that we acquire the grandest knowledge the mind of man can receive. Indeed, the Lord Himself said that such knowledge was life eternal.

But the sceptical philosopher often replies, "How can you really know God in that way? We come to know anything that is proved to us by ocular or mathematical demonstration; but how can we come to know this invisible and impalpable God?" Let us ask our imaginary objector if he never carried on a correspondence with an individual whom he had never seen. Such intercourse by letter frequently takes place in the world; and the correspondents come to know not merely one. another's hand writing and style, but one another's heart. Do you not know Ruskin's style, or Carlyle's, or Tennyson's,

even although the composition before you may be anonymous? And can you not detect the grand superhuman divine style that is in the Bible? The believer can. He says "It is my Father's voice; I know it when I hear it."

There is also the knowledge of experience and familiar intercourse. We may be said to know a man whenever we are introduced to him; but as years run on how much better do we know him than we did at first! Now, in many a true Christian's heart there has been for years such sweet communion with God that he cannot doubt that he knows him, and knows him well. When Mr. Spurgeon went to visit the Hon. and Rev. Baptist Noel on his dying bed, he asked him if he had any message for his congregation in the Metropolitan Tabernacle that Sabbath morning. "Tell them," said the venerable minister, "We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen, and they receive not our witness.'" Of a truth the deductions of heart-experience are well worthy of being called knowledge, in the highest sense of the word.

We have thus shown in what light God is revealed to us in the science of Christian theology, and also why it is that the faith of the Christian is worthy of the name of knowledge. It only remains now to indicate what that eternal life is which comes through the knowledge of God, and may even be said to consist in it. First, it is the life of pardon. Our city bells rang on the Tuesday because the Lords of Justice were coming into the city to try the prisoners, although they did not ring when the Lords of Science came in next day. There was a strange contrast all week-the height of terror at the east end, among degraded criminals; and the height of enjoyment at the west end, among refined and cultured philosophers. But when, after all the anxiety, the verdict "not proven" was returned, the accused man who heard that decision given rejoiced with joy unspeakable. It was life to know it; but it was only temporal life. This, however, which we obtain through the knowledge of the truth is life eternal-life for evermore. Secondly, it is the life of holiness. Its heavenly origin and future prolongation make it worthy of the name "eternal;" but in itself it is essentially a life of union and communion with God, a life of holiness. When we come to know a good and sanctified man, whom we admire much, we grow like him. His life seems to pass into us. In this sense truly it is eternal life to know God; for the character of Jehovah, by faith and fellowship, becomes ours. High life! This of which we are speaking is higher far than that which is spent by the aristocracy of intellect in their halls of science, or

the aristocracy of rank, in their castles of splendour. Truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.

Finally, it is eternal life to know God in Christ; because thus is the assurance of immortality obtained. Apart from revelation we have only the wish and the guess about immortality; but from Jesus we receive the assured promise as well as the earnest of it in the heart. He said, "In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so I would have told you: I go to prepare a place for you." Oh! how many have fallen asleep in Christ with the assured expectation of waking up in glory. Science could do nothing for them; worldly pleasure, and possessions, and sinful indulgence still less; but Jesus satisfied fully their longing souls. We saw before they left us that their faces were radiant with eternal life. In fact. they were in heaven before they entered it. "For ever with the Lord; Amen, so let it be." See how much more this science. of the Gospel can do for man than all the other sciences! They leave him just to die out like plants, and beasts, and birds; and all the comfort they can give him is this, that vast geologic periods will run on when he is gone, as ran on before; and that he will be as unconscious of the one as of the other. But see what Christianity promises him-eternal life!

We do not mean to say that there is any real antagonism between science and Christianity. Such instances as those of Brewster and Faraday, who are gone, and the Duke of Argyll, and the devout Dr. Gladstone, who got up the prayer-meetings in our city, for the members of the British Association, make it plain that the true Christian may be also a man of the highest scientific attainments. It is pleasant to see the two united; but it is sad when they are separated, and when Christianity receives hostile home thrusts from philosophy falsely so called.

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Let us all rejoice because it is possible to have eternal life in the knowledge of Christ. It was out of the power of many of our readers to visit the sections of the British Association, and even although they had gone, not a few of them would have been unable to appreciate all the discussions. But let us rejoice if our names are written in heaven;" for the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men. What the Christian knows is the noblest of all the sciences. Even for ourselves it was distracting and discouraging to go from section to section, and to feel how little we knew; but we have pleasure in now inscribing upon this page-""Tis eternal life to know Him; Oh how He loves!" We close by quoting the affecting contrast which Cowper drew, a hundred years ago,

between the philosophic Voltaire, and "the humble cottager who knew her Bible true."

Oh, happy peasant! oh, unhappy Bard!
His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward;
He praised, perhaps for ages yet to come,
She, never heard of half a mile from home;
He, lost in errors his vain heart prefers,
She, safe in the simplicity of hers."

THE PURE IN HEART.

"THE pure in heart shall see God," has a future reference to the good time that is to come, the kingdom of Heaven, or the kingdom of God. They shall see God, they shall be brought to the King's presence, for their pure heart shall be their title, and they shall be thought worthy. But, it also very obviously suggests, that the pure in heart alone can see God; they only have the seeing faculty; their pure heart is their ability to see God; the rest have a veil upon their hearts that unfits them for that beautiful and blessed vision.

And who are the pure in heart? and what is the purity that is proper to the heart? A pure eye would be an eye that sees well; a pure ear would be an ear that hears well. A pure heart will most simply be a heart that loves well. A heart that is truest to its own nature; that does its own loving part the best, a kind and loving, a right or rectified, a good and honest heart,

"The Lord preserves all more and less,

Who bear to Him a loving heart.”

The words of the Saviour, which form the basis of this paper, imply that a man's happiness lies neither wholly without him nor wholly within him, but both within and without him, and in a right adjustment between what is within and what is without. A man's blessedness lies in God; in God, not in himself; but, whether he shall see God-the God who is without him-depends on the purity of the heart that is within him. When the purity of the heart is provided as the inward condition, and the vision of God is provided as the external condition, that is a man's blessedness. The principle of the proposition simply is, that our spiritual happiness lies in what we see; but what we shall see depends on what

we are.

This world is the same world to us all; yet for all that it is not the same world to two of us alike-for we each look at it

in a slightly different way, and with different eyes and different experience of the heart. It does not all depend on what is placed before our eyes in the scene of this world; it fully as much depends on what kind of heart we have; what kind of men we are, as to how much we are able to see and take out of what is placed before us. For there is as much in the world, and especially in the world of human things, as any of us has the power of seeing, and far more; and it depends not altogether on what is there to be seen, but on our power of seeing what really is there.

The dog behind the house, the cattle in the field, look on the same things as we do, and have their own idea of them; they see what they have the power of seeing. But consider how many things are around them, which they cannot see or take in, or feel any interest in at all, or comprehend. The world of business; the world of human sorrow and joy; the world of religion-they can see nothing of all that; and it is all as effectually hidden from their eyes as if it were not there. The soldier, on his fellow-soldier's funeral day, follows his comrade to the grave with a heavy sorrow on his heart; but the steed he reins can feel nothing of the human sorrow, and can take nothing of its pathetic meaning in. It feels its master's weight; but it does not feel the sorrow that weighs on his heart. It can feel, and understand, and see only as far as its kind of heart and experience goes. A widow's child, in the first dread days of his mother's widowhood and nothingness that follow her bereavement, sees the tear on her face, and the workings of misery and anguish about the silent mouth; but the child cannot see very far into all that; it supposes the mother must be crying for something like what it cries for itself—a postponed holiday, or a broken or a lost toy. The boy cannot understand, or as we say, cannot enter into the woman's bitter and speechless grief, or into the difference between her sorrow and his own. His comprehension and his sympathy can only go as far as his own feeling and experience. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things."

It is the same everywhere; we see according to the quantity of our experience. And as the Saviour says, according to the quality of our experience too, "The pure in heart shall see God." "Unto the pure all things are pure," but the converse of that is equally true, "Unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure, but even their mind and conscience is defiled." It is not that the impure heart does not see at all; small evil if it were only stone blind; but it sees everything; and sees it wrongly, untruly, distorted, and awry.