which is obedience; grace in the Church triumphant, which is the reward of glory; grace everywhere, and grace for ever! But what is this grace? It is the free favour and loving disposition of our heavenly Father, which disposes Him to bless and receive His fallen creatures. Trace the word through all languages, and you are led, step by step, onward and upward to the fountain of Divine benevolence. Fix your eye upon any one stream of the royal beneficence of God, be it ever so small, or ever so far removed from its source, or ever so dissimilar in form to its fellows, you will find, if you follow it, that it brings you to the fountain of grace, the boundless ocean of Divine goodness and love. Grace is in the Holy Scripture in every way connected with God. The Father is the God of all grace (1 Pet. v. 10); Jesus is the author, giver, and dispenser of grace (Acts xv. 11, 2 Cor. viii. 9, Rom. xvi. 20, 1 Thess. v. 28); and the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of grace (Heb. x. 29), who dispenses to the Church His gifts and graces as He pleases (1 Cor. xii. 1-14). The seat of the Divine Majesty is the throne of grace (Heb. iv. 16); the Gospel is called the Word of His grace, and believers are the children of His grace. The first word the young believer utters is grace, and the oldest dies with the same word on his lips. It is this free grace which makes God the sovereign giver, and man the humble receiver; it is this which lends to the Gospel its chief glory, and renders speechless in the presence of God those who reject it. It is this which roots out the principles of pride and human merit, and surrounds the mercy of God with unparalleled splendour; which annihilates the pretensions of a sacrificing priesthood, and opens up to believers visions of inexpressible brightness and glory. The portals of heaven are thrown open to mankind ;

the river that flows from the smitten rock is free for all that are thirsty; and an amnesty, free as the air and wide as the world, is announced to the guiltiest rebels. This is grace. Jehovah makes no conditions with His creatures; He took no counsel with men in forming the plan of redemption; and the Sun of Righteousness, like the sun of nature, sheds His beams over us whether we will or not. Incarnation, atonement, resurrection, and mediation are but steps in the manifestation of His grace. His acts are in keeping with His character; and neither in creation nor in providence does the Divine Majesty shine forth more gloriously than it does from the throne of grace. The apostle connects grace with peace: "Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ." Peace is a lovely characteristic of the Gospel. Everything breathes peace and pardon to the believer. Jehovah is called the God of Peace (Rom. xv. 33, Phil. iv. 9, 1 Thess. v. 23, 2 Thess. iii. 16, Heb. xiii. 20). Jesus is called "the Prince of Peace" (Isa. ix. 6), and peace is in every way associated with His character and work. His name is the King of Peace; angels sang over Him in Bethlehem the song of peace; His Gospel is the Gospel of peace; His kingdom is the kingdom of righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. He Himself came and preached peace to them that were near and to them that were far off. His blood is the seal of peace. In one sweet passage it is said, "He is our peace;" and the ministers of the Gospel are the messengers of peace. But what does the word mean? It includes peace with God, peace of conscience, and peace with our fellow-men; it declares that the veil between you and God is rent, and that you have free access to the Holiest of all; it is the assurance to your trembling conscience that the enmity

is taken away, and that God is love. This is what we receive in believing, which Jesus promised, and which the world can neither give nor take away. It is strong

and perfect in proportion as the eye rests on Christ; it becomes weak and broken in proportion as you love earthly things. In the assurance of this peace we brave the storms of life, and in the same tranquillizing conviction we fall asleep in Jesus. Sin alone can disturb this calm and blissful repose. It bids defiance to the rage of the persecutor, and is never more radiant than when in pain and torture it looks upward to the martyr's crown (Acts vii. 60). These two blessings of grace and peace are "from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ." The Socinian gloss which makes this sense, "Grace and peace from God the Father of us and of the Lord Jesus Christ," is forced and improbable; nor would it answer their purpose, for Christ is constantly represented in Scripture as the Author of grace and peace (Acts xv. 11, 2 Cor. viii. 9, 1 Tim. i. 14). It is therefore very manifest that Christ the Son is joined with God the Father in this prayer of the apostle, and both are represented as the fountain of spiritual blessings. I do not think the passage teaches that grace is to be referred specially to the Father and peace to the Son, for other Scriptures attribute these blessings indifferently to both. The meaning is, that grace and peace flow equally from the Father and the Son: they are both equally the fountain of blessing. We ought not to forget the deep meaning of that name-" God our Father." Luther has observed that the glory of the Scriptures stands in the pronouns. Everything is personal, and goes directly to the heart. It is not God, but my God; not Father, but my Father; not confession in the mass, but God be merciful to me, a sinner. This is living, saving, appropriating faith, as

distinguished from a cold, dead, inoperative faith, which only makes men and devils tremble. Chalmers observes that a being of known power, but unknown purpose, necessarily terrifies us; and we add that the power and the purpose are both made known in the glorious name, "God our Father." Here majesty and love are united, and the thunderbolts of Omnipotence are guided by a Father's hand. He is the great and terrible God before whom the sinner trembles; but He is, at the same time, the loving Father who invites the returning prodigals to his arms. In His Godhead we see the power that can, and in His paternity the disposition that will, protect us and bless us. He is our God and Father. His power and His love are around us. We are not creatures only, but children also, and sharers of the heavenly inheritance. We can say, not only "God be merciful to me a sinner," but also, "Our Father which art in heaven." Consider now for a moment the Son of God, which stands opposed to the name "God our Father" in our text-"the Lord Jesus Christ." First, The name Lord is the highest in the Greek language for denoting the underived and eternal King and Creator of all things. Hence the Seventy use it everywhere for the unutterable name Jehovah ; sometimes for Elohim, as Job xix. 21, xxxiii. 26; sometimes for El, as Job v. 8, ix. 2, xii. 6; and sometimes Jah, Ps. cxv. 17, cl. 6. This glorious title is in our text and in the New Testament generally applied to Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world. He is emphatically and in the highest sense Kurios or Lord (Mark xvi. 19, 20, Acts viii. 25, xix. 10, 2 Cor. iii. 17, Eph. v. 10, Col. iii. 23, 2 Thess. iii. 1-5, 2 Tim. iv. 8). He is Lord; He is the Lord; He is our Lord (Eph. iii. 11, 1 Tim. i. 2, 2 Pet. i. 1); He is Lord of all (Rom. x. 12); He is the Lord Jehovah (Ps. cii. 25), who created the

universe (Heb. i. 10); and believers are emphatically said to be "in the Lord"-that is, united to Him-in their earthly trials and in their heavenly glory (Phil. iii. 1, 1 Cor. i. 31). Lord, therefore, applied to Jesus denotes all power, dominion, and authority over the Church and the creation. Second, He is called JESUS, which is, in fact, the Hebrew Jehoshua, Jehovah the Saviour, so called because He shall save His people from their sins (Matt. i. 21). Jesus was a common personal name among the Hebrews, and is applied to Joshua (Acts vii. 45, Heb. iv. 8) and to Justus, the fellowlabourer with Paul (Col. iv. 11). It is therefore the human name of the Redeemer, the name which connects Him with us, and is for that very reason the sweetest of all His names. It sounds sweet in a believer's ear. As "God and Father" unites the ideas of power and love in the Godhead, so "Lord Jesus" unites in the Mediator majesty and condescension, lordly dominion and weeping tenderness. He is the lion and the lamb, the mightiest and the meanest, the sceptre-bearer of creation and the burden-bearer of a ruined world. All contrarieties and diversities meet and are harmonized in Him. He is the possessor of all, and yet He has nothing; He stills the tempests and raises the dead, and yet he sits weary on the mouth of a well; He is the Ancient of Days and the infant of Bethlehem; He is the Son of God and the Son of the Virgin Mary. These names, Lord and Jesus, taken from the most distant and contradictory objects, are intended to show that He is the Great Unity or Head, in whom all things in heaven and on the earth are to be gathered up (Eph. i.), in whom all promises and threatenings should find their proper expression, in whom the mortal and the immortal, the finite and the infinite, the conditioned and the unconditioned, should