men who recognise the source of their blessing, and turn to it with
grateful hearts, are nearer Him than those that do not do so. Let us
take care, lest for the sake of seeming to preserve the impartiality of
His love, we have destroyed all in Him that makes His love worth
having. If to Him the good and the bad, the men who fear Him and the
men who fear Him not, are equally satisfactory, and, in the same
manner, the objects of an equal love, then He is not a God that has
pleasure in righteousness; and if He is not a God that 'has pleasure in
righteousness,' He is not a God for us to trust to. We are not giving
countenance to the notion that God has any step-children, any petted
members of His family, when we cleave to this--they that have welcomed
His love into their hearts are nearer to Him than those that have
closed the door against it.

And there is one more point here about this matter of ownership on
which I dwell for a moment, namely, that this conception of certain men
being in a special sense God's possession and inheritance means also
that He has a special delight in, and lofty appreciation of, them. All
this material creation exists for the sake of growing good men and
women. That is the use of the things that are seen and temporal; they
are like greenhouses built for the great Gardener's use in striking and
furthering the growth of His plants; and when He has got the plants He
has got what He wanted, and you may pull the greenhouse down if you
like. And so God estimates, and teaches us to estimate, the relative
value and greatness of the material and the spiritual in this fashion,
that He says to us in effect: 'All these magnificences and magnitudes
round you are small and vulgar as compared with this--a heart in which
wisdom and divine truth and the love and likeness of God have attained
to some tolerable measure of maturity and of strength.' These are His
'jewels,' as the Roman matron said about her two boys. The great Father