the Christian life.

I. The universal privilege of the Christian life.

'Beloved of God.' Now we are so familiar with the juxtaposition of
the two ideas, 'love' and 'God,' that we cease to feel the
wonderfulness of their union. But until Jesus Christ had done His
work no man believed that the two thoughts could be brought together.

Does God love any one? We think the question too plain to need to be
put, and the answer instinctive. But it is not by any means
instinctive, and the fact is that until Christ answered it for us,
the world stood dumb before the question that its own heart raised,
and when tortured spirits asked, 'Is there care in heaven, and is
there love?' there was 'no voice, nor answer, nor any that regarded.'
Think of the facts of life; think of the facts of nature. Think of
sorrows and miseries and pains, and sins, and wasted lives and
storms, and tempests, and diseases, and convulsions; and let us feel
how true the grim saying is, that

'Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With rapine, shrieks against the creed'

that God is love.

And think of what the world has worshipped, and of all the varieties
of monstrosity, not the less monstrous because sometimes beautiful,
before which men have bowed. Cruel, lustful, rapacious, capricious,
selfish, indifferent deities they have adored. And then, 'God hath
established,' proved, demonstrated 'His love to us in that while we