all comes from the one source--God's endless desire for the blessedness
of His creatures.

But while all God's works do thus praise Him by testifying that He seeks
to bless His creatures, the loftiest example of that desire is, of
course, found in His revelation of Himself to men's hearts and
consciences, to men's spirits and wills. That mightiest act of love,
beginning in the long-past generations, has culminated in Him in whom
'dwelleth the whole fulness of the Godhead bodily,' and in whose work is
all the love--the perfect, inconceivable, patient, omnipotent love of
our redeeming God.

And then, remember that this is not inconsistent with or contradicted by
the sterner aspects of that revelation, which cannot be denied, and
ought not to be minimised or softened. _Here_, on the right hand, are
the flowery slopes of the Mount of Blessing; _there_, on the left, the
barren, stern, thunder-riven, lightning-splintered pinnacles of the
Mount of Cursing. Every clear note of benediction hath its low minor of
imprecation from the other side. Between the two, overhung by the hopes
of the one, and frowned upon and dominated by the threatenings of the
other, is pitched the little camp of our human life, and the path of our
pilgrimage runs in the trough of the valley between. And yet--might we
not go a step farther, and say that above the parted summits stretches
the one overarching blue, uniting them both, and their roots deep down
below the surface interlace and twine together? That is to say, the
threatenings and rebukes, the acts of retributive judgment, which are
contained in the revelation of God, are no limitation nor disturbance of
the clear and happy faith that all which we behold is full of blessing,
and that all comes from the Father's hand. They are the garb in which
His Love needs to array itself when it comes in contact with man's sin