GOD IS LOVE.

T is difficult to account for the evident taste which many able preachers of the Gospel have imbibed for presenting the character of Jehovah to men in its severest and most terrible aspects. This taste certainly cannot arise from their experience of the Almighty's dealings with themselves, for, in most cases, they have been men on whom the choicest of His spiritual blessings have been most richly conferred. It must surely spring from a mistaken view of the disposition of human nature; a view which leads them to act as though they supposed that the most effectual means of persuading men to taste the tokens of the love of God was to be continually exhibiting to them the signs of His justice and the terrors of His wrath. Doubtless the faithful ministry of the truth demands that all the glorious perfections of Deity should be unfolded, and that men should be earnestly warned against provoking God to anger, as well as urged to partake of His mercy; but this should never be made to seem inconsistent with a persuasive display of His love to mankind in general, and His pity and long-suffering towards sinners in particular.

In studying the Word of God we often read of His holiness, His justice, His sovereignty, His power, His inflexibility, and His wrath; but it is only very rarely that we find His character summed up in any abstract quality, and in these very few instances it is always by some beneficent attribute that He is designated, and in no single case is he presented under a repulsive or forbidding name. Thus, while His sterner attributes are often set before us, we never read that God is justice, God is wrath, or God is holiness; but we do read such alluring descriptions of Him as this, God is truth—God is light-God is love. These latter characteristics, then, seem to be the essence

of the divine nature, and all the other less suasive attributes ascribed to Jehovah are but modifications of these. God is a spirit, and, therefore, it is impossible that there can be in His nature, as an essential part of that nature, anything merely outward or assumed; all His attributes must be literally a part of Himself. The attributes of Jehovah are manifold and widely diverse in themselves; but they are all ingredients, so to speak, of the divine nature-a nature perfect in its every detail, and which, when contemplated in all its sublime proportions, presents, without a contradiction or a flaw, an embodiment of pure, complete, and perfect love.

Now, it may appear difficult, at first sight, to reconcile many of the seemingly incongruous characteristics of the Divine nature with the unreserved and unqualified assertion, "God is love." For example, it may seem hard to recognise a God of love in that Being who opened the windows of heaven and poured forth a deluge to engulph a helpless world-in Him who scourged the land of Egypt with repeated plagues, and then destroyed its army in the sea-in the awful power which dispatched Korah, Dathan, and Abiram to a living tomb; in Him who, for three dreadful years, pursued His own elect and chosen people with corroding famine, and chastised them with devouring pestilence in Him who drowned in fire and brimstone the devoted population of two cities, and who smote, with quick and winged death, the priests whose hands had waved the censer before His altars, and ministered at the shrines of His own holy temple. Such acts as these, although known and acknowledged to be mighty and awful indications of Jehovah's justice, appear to carry upon their surface something like a contradiction, or at least a modification, of the characteristic so emphatically ascribed to Him in the text; but we think a very little consideration is sufficient to convince us that such summary and seemingly severe assertions of sovereign supremacy as these are not inconsistent with the fullest acceptation or construction of the statement, "God is love." The love of which the Divine nature is MADE UP, must necessarily be pure, and extend to all that is pure and good. Now, the quality of justice is pure and good, and, therefore, cannot be inconsistent with perfect love. It is

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impossible for love itself to love everything, for that is not love which delights in evil; and surely a love of the pure and holy, which is worthy of a God, could not exist without a proportionate hatred of opposite principles, without a corresponding aversion to the polluted and unholy; and this hatred must find vent in a denunciation of those who have pursued the one, in some degree corresponding in severity with the beneficence. of the complacency vouchsafed on those who have followed the other. Love is a positive attribute, and of necessity implies a negative, for just as the delicately poised needle of a compass cannot point with both extremes towards the same quarter, but, while it stretches forward to the north, must likewise stretch backward to the south, so, neither can that perfect mind which positively loves the good, avoid, as a consequence, negatively hating the evil.

But, while the selection of isolated instances of God's dealings with men may appear to call for the exercise of argument to reconcile them with the character here ascribed to Him, the contemplation of His moral government, as a whole, is proof of itself, and defies philosophy to confirm, or sophistry to invalidate, His claim to the attribute of love, in the fullest sense in which it can be attributed to Him.

We have already seen that God loves everything that is good; but there is something also which he loves most tenderly, which, so far from being good, is corrupt, depraved, and base. This favoured, though undeserving object of Almighty love, is fallen human nature. Man, the sport and prey of evil passion, the ready victim and almost passive toy of foul and vicious influence. Man, the child of darkness and the slave of sin, the captive of the tempter and the candidate of hell, is the blessed pensioner on eternal love. Now, it is to be hoped that it would oe no difficult to task to prove, to the satisfaction of everybody here, the reality of this love of God for man, as a mere abstract truth; but we have undertaken to attempt more than this, for we desire to furnish such a representation of divine love, as shall not only vindicate the righteousness of every sovereign act of Almighty supremacy, but shall show that the severest and most terrible of those acts proceeded primarily from this very love

itself. God hates nothing that He has made, therefore, He loves mankind. But he made man, let us recollect, in His own image, and He hates the mark of the beast by which that image is obscured. The isolated cases in which summary justice has been executed upon offenders against God's law, may, we think, without any violent distortion of idea, be traced up to Jehovah's love to man. Is it unnatural to suppose, that He who sees the end from the beginning, and has long watched the hardening process going on in the man's heart; who has seen the steady persistence with which he has resisted His grace, should, from a merciful design, strike down the culprit while he is filling up the measure of his guilt, lest his conduct should lead others of His beloved creatures to fall after the same example of unbelief? Or, take a different case: take the case of the priests who were destroyed for offering strange fire on the altar. These men were, perhaps, not the hardened and determined transgressors and despisers of God's law, which the severity of the punishment might seem to imply; they might even revere those sacred rites they were led in an evil hour to pervert, and be but the victims of an unhappy impulse, and not the dupes of a rebellious heart. Of course, it is impossible to doubt, but that one of the motives which prompted the Divine Being to visit them thus summarily with punishment was jealousy for the inviolability of His ordinances. But the primary motive appears to be easily traceable to His love towards man. For, let us remember, the fruition of God's merciful designs towards the human race depended upon the purity and propriety of the ritual observances He had appointed, and, therefore, He makes a summary example of those priests who had defiled, by an unholy ministration, those observances, lest their conduct, being taken as a precedent for similar abuse by other priests, the free development of these merciful designs should be frustrated. So that we see, it is not only possible, but likely, that the divine conduct, even in this extreme case, was guided by His mercy and His love, in pro- . tecting from hindrance the ultimate consummation of His beneficent designs. And, in like manner, that most prominent example of the divine displeasure-the deluge-may be ascribed rather to benevolent than vengeful motives; for what is true in

reference to individuals, is also true respecting any aggregate of human beings. This terrible and general visitation was the consequence of the universal degeneracy of mankind; and it is as easy to imagine that their destruction was appointed out of love to succeeding generations, upon whom the filthy mantle of their sires would fall, as that it was executed purely and exclusively as an instance of vengeance and retribution. The former sup

position is, indeed, much the more probable, when we consider the depth to which mankind had sunk-only one family that feared God left upon the earth. How was it likely that the posterity of such a race should be any holier than their fathers, who would train them to the vices, and nurture them in the profligacy, to which they had fallen? and was it not obviously a course of mercy to succeeding generations to arrest the propagation of such destructive wickedness, and prevent, by an act of temporary severity, millions of immortal souls being born to utter and inevitable ruin?

And the same law of love, which is thus traceable in these special and individual instances, pervades His whole dealings with men of all conditions now. God's hatred of sin, which we have seen is necessarily involved in His love of holiness, springs not only from His jealousy of His own honour, but, in quite as high a degree, from His love towards mankind; for He knows that the effect of sin is to ruin and destroy the creature whom He loves, and to precipitate to death the being on whom He longs to confer eternal life. He is willing and anxious to confer that life on every sinner, and to show His love in their salvation. But if the sinner refuses to accept the salvation which He offers, he cannot prevent Him still from showing His love; for as soon as He sees that He cannot show that love in the sinner's salvation, He shows it just as strongly in his destruction. This sounds strange. How can love be shown in the eternal destruction of a sinner? Is it love to the sinner himself that is exhibited ? No; that has been tried and not appreciated, but ungratefully refused; and God banishes from His presence that soul which takes no pleasure in Him: not that He loves the sinner the less, but that He loves His saints more. God hates sin, and those who are like God hate it too; and when men stubbornly refuse