he became poor." It interweaves itself with all his salutations. It
exhales in all his benedictions like a hallowing fragrance. You can
not get away from it. In the light of the glory of redemption all
relationships are assorted and arranged. Redemption was not degraded
into a fine abstract argument, to which the apostle had appended his
own approval, and then, with sober satisfaction, had laid it aside, as
a practical irrelevancy, in the stout chests of orthodoxy. It became
the very spirit of his life. It was, if I may be allowed the violent
figure, the warm blood in all his judgment. It filled the veins of all
his thinking. It beat like a pulse in all his purposes. It determined
and vitalized his decisions in the crisis, as well as in the lesser
trifles of the common day. His conception of redemption was regulative
of all his thought.

But it is not only the immediacy of redemption in the apostle's
thought by which I am imprest. I stand in awed amazement before its
vast, far-stretching reaches into the eternities. Said an old villager
to me concerning the air of his elevated hamlet, "Ay, sir, it's a fine
air is this westerly breeze; I like to think of it as having traveled
from the distant fields of the Atlantic!" And here is the Apostle
Paul, with the quickening wind of redemption blowing about him in
loosening, vitalizing, strengthening influence, and to him, in all his
thinking, it had its birth in the distant fields of eternity! To
the apostle redemption was not a small device, an afterthought, a
patched-up expedient to meet an unforseen emergency. The redemptive
purpose lay back in the abyss of the eternities, and in a spirit of
reverent questioning the apostle sent his trembling thoughts into
those lone and silent fields. He emerged with, whispered secrets such
as these: "fore-knew," "fore-ordained," "chosen in him before the
foundation of the world," "eternal life promised before times