Hadler, late of the Metropolitan | don. The Rev. G. A. Brown has, on Tabernacle College, of the church account of ill-health, resigned his at Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex. charge at Mint-lane, Lincoln, with the intention of settling in New

The following reports of MINIS-Zealand; the Rev. J. Turner has TERIAL CHANGES have reached us resigned the pastorate of the church since the preparation of our last at Parson's hill, Woolwich; the issue-The Rev. W. H. Harris, of Rev. J. Matthew has resigned his Liverpool, to Fishergate, Preston; pastorate at Milton-road, Wokingthe Rev. F. Timmis, of Rugby, to ham, Berks. Spaldwick, St. Neots, Hunts; the Rev. W. Chapman, of Vale, near Todmorden, to Hucknall Torkard, Notts; the Rev. F. Forbes, of Lochgilphead, to Tobermory; the Rev. G. Eales, M.A., of Leicester (until recently a minister among the Primitive Methodists), to Dewsbury, Yorkshire; the Rev. W. H. J. Page, of Calne, Wilts, to Chelsea Chapel, Lower Sloane-street, Lon

We regret to announce the death of the Rev. F. W. Goadby, M.A., of Watford, at the age of thirtyfour; also of the Rev. T. Williams, of Middlemill and Solva, Pembrokeshire, at the age of thirty-two; also of the Rev. W. Cutcliffe, for fortyfive years the pastor of the church at Brayford, Devon, at the age of seventy-three.

TO OUR READERS.

THE annual volumes of "THE CHURCH" and THE APPEAL for 1879 are now ready. They will be found to be full of interesting and attractive reading for family and home use. It is hoped that they will have a wide circulation in their more permanent form. They may be had by order of any bookseller.

We wish also to announce that the number of "THE APPEAL" for January, 1880, will be a Special New Year's Number, containing Narratives, Sketches, and Addresses specially adapted to the season. It will supply a most useful New Year's Tract for circulation in Sunday Schools, and for general distribution by Tract Distributors, District Visitors, and others who are engaged in visiting the poor and circulating Gospel Literature. Our readers are invited to send in early orders for the extra copies they will require, as the demand for this number is expected to be very great.

May we express the hope that our Readers will avail themselves of the opportunity which the commencement of a New Year will give to recommend both our Magazines, wherever they can do so, with a view to an enlarged circulation? Several new and able writers have already promised their help for the New Year; and it is believed that the new volumes of both "THE CHURCH" and "THE APPEAL will be quite as attractive, and as much adapted for usefulness, as any that have gone before them. No effort on the part of the conductors will be wanting to make both the Magazines as worthy as ever of the large circulation in the Churches which they have enjoyed now for so many

years.

DECEMBER, 1879.

GOD REVEALING HIMSELF IN THE FURNACE OF FIRE.

BY THE REV. W. T. ROSEVEAR,

V.-The Two Beings; or, "The Fourth Man."

There are at least three respects in which this new revelation of God through the manhood of Jesus Christ, which was the subject of the last paper, is a marked advance upon all His former revelations: it is closer; it is more complete; it is more direct.

It is closer. There are moments in which our souls intensely long for a closer revelation of God than can be obtained through nature. We long to rise above second causes, to get behind them, and to gaze upon the Alpha Himself of all being. This, however, we could not do. We could not thus ascend to Him, but He descended to us. He came on this side the vail, and walked visibly up and down the world in front, if I may so speak, of the line of second causes. Nothing was between Him and men-nothing but the perfect humanity by which He came closer to them than the all-embracing powers of nature; closer even than the blood circulating in their own veins. And as He moved among them thus closely, He healed the maladies of their bodies and the deeper and darker maladies of their souls. He stood with them on the shore, sat with them in their boats, ate and drank with them in their homes; He gathered into His arms their children, and blessed them; He darted rays of purity into the hearts of "publicans and harlots," and called them back to a life of higher virtue than they had lost; He walked with the lonely and the sad, and caused their heart to burn within them as He talked with them by the way; He wept with the bereaved, raised the dead, and with the glance of His eye cast Satan like lightning to the ground.

It is more complete. All the older and more ordinary modes by which God had been revealing Himself had been fragmentary, partial,, typical, or prophetic, reaching forward to, and finding their completion in, this new revelation. In it the greatest and most vital truths of all-truths, of which the previous knowledge of mankind had been at best only very partial and dim-now meet and shine out with noontide splendour. One of these truths is that of the Divine atonement for human sin; how entirely it is centred and completed in Christ. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews having described Him as the express image of God's person, and upholding all things by the word of his power," affirms that He "by Himself purged our sins."* And in this self-revelation of God through Christ there is, side by side with * Heb, i. 3.

VOL. XXII. N.S. XII.

He must

the Divine atonement for human sin, and shining forth upon the world with equal lustre, the truth of human immortality. Through "the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ" death is abolished; "life and immortality" are brought to light. And yet farther, side by side with these two truths, and shining out with even greater clearness, is another which previously would seem to have been more dimly apprehended than either-the Fatherhood of God. Prior to the Incarnation, this truth, with the exception of a few bright gleams of it in the Old The Testament, was almost entirely unknown throughout the world. highest minds, with nothing before them but the worlds of nature and of man, had utterly failed to reach anything like the true conception of God as a just and wise and merciful Father, who actually identifies Himself with the life of His human children. Prior to the Advent of Christ it may have been impossible, as for the highest minds to form this true conception of God, so also for God Himself clearly and fully to reveal to them His own Fatherhood. For, it must be remembered, that while His power of revealing Himself is in itself infinite, it is in its relation to us very circumscribed, being at all points determined and limited by the capacities of the nature He has given us. therefore bring His revealing power down to the level and the measure of the minds to whom He would make Himself known. It is only by entering into human life and by teaching us through human analogies that even He can give us the clearest conception of Himself in His closest parental relationship to the human soul. It was reserved for Jesus Christ to bring out in its highest and completest form-a form in which it had scarcely been even conceived before the Divine Fatherhood. It was reserved for Him to reveal God as the Almighty Father yearning after fellowship of life with His own children; longing for the glad home-coming of those who had wandered into the far country and lost themselves in the dark mazes of their own sins. Moreover, it was reserved for Jesus Christ to reveal the Father as opening the way by which His lost ones might all return. Yes; Christ, by means of a human life and human analogies, has given the world that true conception of God; has revealed the "I AM, the Eternal Lawgiver, the Omnipotent Ruler, as also and specially the compassionate and tender Father. In that parable of inimitable beauty, which is a kind of gospel in itself, He has described God as the Father who, when He caught in the far distance a glimpse of the lost prodigal beginning to bend his steps homewards, "had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck, and kissed him :" and said, "This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." Nay; He not only thus described, but in His own person He embodied, the Father as actually coming forth from His palace-home into the wilderness "to seek and to save that which was lost." "How sayest thou," He said to Philip, "Show us the Father? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. lievest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?

* 2 Tim. i. 10.

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The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself, but the Father who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works."

It is more direct. God in Christ not only gives us a closer and more complete, but also a more direct, revelation of Himself than He could possibly do when He spoke to us through His works in the surrounding earth and heavens, or through the writings of the Old Testament. In the history of the Word who became man, the glory of God's paternal character presented itself to believers with marvellous directness. Its rays shone forth so as to be distinctly recognised and felt through the veil of His manhood. Indeed, that veil -His human life was so fine, so pure, so transparent, so akin through its whole texture to the very Divinity which it covered, that when His disciples, in their moments of clearest vision, turned towards it, they did not see the veil at all, but only the Divine glory which shone through it. That glory darted itself into their souls in direct beams. There had been nothing like it before. The universe, as we have already seen, is a revelation of God; but as compared with that in Christ it is not only distant and incomplete, but indirect. The knowledge of God from that source comes to us by way of inference only. "The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made, even his eternal power and Godhead." That is to say, "the eternal power and Godhead are understood by us because, constitated as we are, we cannot but infer that the effects we see around us must have had a cause adequate to their production. But our knowledge of God through Christ is not thus inferential; it is direct. "The life was manifested, and we have seen it." The visible things of the creation are themselves no part of the Creator, whom by means of them we come to "understand;" but the visible Christ was Himself the embodiment of the invisible uncreated God whom He revealed. They were only the mirror from whose surface God was reflected. He " was God." His human life was not a mere reflection: it was the actual expression of the Divine. The word "brightness," in that fine description of Christ in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews" Who being the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His person - contains no trace whatever "of the meaning reflection. Nor would the idea be apposite here. The Son of God is, in His essential majesty, the expression, and the sole expression, of the Divine light." This rendering of the word "brightness" is, in our judgment, not only applicable to the essential majesty of Christ in heaven, but also to the whole course of His humiliation on earth; for through it all, including His tears, His sufferings, and His death, there was the direct expression of the Divine glory. He was as much the express image of His Father's glory when, standing upon the plain surrounded with a dense atmosphere of sin and misery, He, in answer to a father's prayer, cast out the unclean spirit which had been tor

* Dean Alford, in loco.

the Divine atonement for human sin, and shining forth upon the world with equal lustre, the truth of human immortality. Through "the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ" death is abolished; "life and immortality" are brought to light. And yet farther, side by side with these two truths, and shining out with even greater clearness, is another which previously would seem to have been more dimly apprehended than either-the Fatherhood of God. Prior to the Incarnation, this truth, with the exception of a few bright gleams of it in the Old Testament, was almost entirely unknown throughout the world. The highest minds, with nothing before them but the worlds of nature and of man, had utterly failed to reach anything like the true conception of God as a just and wise and merciful Father, who actually identifies Himself with the life of His human children. Prior to the Advent of Christ it may have been impossible, as for the highest minds to form this true conception of God, so also for God Himself clearly and fully to reveal to them His own Fatherhood. For, it must be remembered, that while His power of revealing Himself is in itself infinite, it is in its relation to us very circumscribed, being at all points determined and limited by the capacities of the nature He has given us. He must therefore bring His revealing power down to the level and the measure of the minds to whom He would make Himself known. It is only by entering into human life and by teaching us through human analogies that even He can give us the clearest conception of Himself in His closest parental relationship to the human soul. It was reserved for Jesus Christ to bring out in its highest and completest form-a form in which it had scarcely been even conceived before the Divine Fatherhood. It was reserved for Him to reveal God as the Almighty Father yearning after fellowship of life with His own children; longing for the glad home-coming of those who had wandered into the far country and lost themselves in the dark mazes of their own sins, Moreover, it was reserved for Jesus Christ to reveal the Father as opening the way by which His lost ones might all return. Yes; Christ, by means of a human life and human analogies, has given the world that true conception of God; has revealed the "I AM," the Eternal Lawgiver, the Omnipotent Ruler, as also and specially the compassionate and tender Father. In that parable of inimitable beauty, which is a kind of gospel in itself, He has described God as the Father who, when He caught in the far distance a glimpse of the lost prodigal beginning to bend his steps homewards, "had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck, and kissed him :" and said, "This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." Nay; He not only thus described, but in His own person He embodied, the Father as actually coming forth from His palace-home into the wilderness "to seek and to save that which was lost." "How sayest thou," He said to Philip, "Show us the Father? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. lievest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?

* 2 Tim. i. 10.

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