God has had to tolerate, for lack of better, such miserable specimens of
humanity! _Jacob have I loved!_ ... _David a man after my heart;_ the
one a poor, mean, calculating man, who had, however, that single glimmer
of the supernatural which Esau, for all his genial sturdiness, was
without; the other an adulterous murderer, who yet had grace enough for
real contrition. Hitherto He has been content with so little. He has
accepted vinegar for want of wine.

Next, God has had to tolerate, and indeed to sanction--such an unworthy
worship of Himself--all the blood of the temple and the spilled entrails
and the nameless horrors. And yet this was all to which men could rise;
for without it, they never could have learned the more nameless horror
of sin.

Last, for His worshippers He has had to content Himself with but one
People instead of _all peoples and nations and languages._ And what a
People,--whom even Moses could not bear for their treachery and
instability! And all this wretched record ends in the Crime of Calvary,
at which the very earth revolts and the sun grows dark with shame. Is it
any wonder that Christ cried, Thank God that is all done with at last!

II. Instead of this miserable past, then, what is to come? What is that
_New Wine He would drink with us in His Father's Kingdom?_ First; real
and complete saints of God are to take the place of the fragmentary
saints of the Old Dispensation, saints with heads of gold and feet of
clay. Souls are to be born again in Baptism, not merely sealed by
circumcision, and to be purified before they can contract any actual
guilt of their own. And, of these, many shall keep their baptismal
innocence and shall go, wearing that white robe, before God Who gave it