out of that great reservoir of patient, pardoning, condescending, and
bestowing love. Then there may be taken into view a meaning which is
less prominent in Scripture but not absent, namely, the resulting
beauty of character. A gracious soul ought to be, and is, a graceful
soul; a supreme loveliness is imparted to human nature by the
communication to it of the gifts which are the results of the
undeserved, free, and infinite love of God.

Now if we take all these three thoughts as blended together in the
grand metaphor of the Apostle, of the ample space into which the
Christian man passes, we get such lessons as this. A Christian life
may, and therefore should, be suffused with a continual consciousness
of the love of God. That would change everything in it. Here is some
great sweep of rolling country, perhaps a Highland moor: the little
tarns on it are grey and cold, the vegetation is gloomy and dark,
dreariness is over all the scene, because there is a great pall of
cloud drawn beneath the blue. But the sun pierces with his lances
through the grey, and crumples up the mists, and sends them flying
beneath the horizon. Then what a change in the landscape! All the
tarns that looked black and wicked are now infantile in their
innocent blue and sunny gladness, and every dimple in the heights
shows, and all the heather burns with the sunshine that falls upon
it. So my lonely doleful life, if that light from God, the beam of
His love, shines down upon it, rises into nobility, and flashes into
beauty, and is calm and fair and great, as nothing else can make it.
You may dwell in love by dwelling in God, and then your lives will be
fair. You have access into the grace; see that you go there. They
tell us that nightingales sing by the wayside by preference, and we
may have in our lives, singing a quiet tune, the continual thought of
the love of God, even whilst life's highway is dusty and rough, and