cross, from Calvary to Olivet, if we are to know its deepest
tenderness and catch its gladdest notes. That such a man has lived and
died is beautiful, and the portrait will hang for ever as that of the
fairest of the children of men. But that in that life and death we
have our most authentic knowledge of what God is, and that all the
pity and truth, the gentleness and the brotherliness, the tears and
the self-surrender, are a revelation to us of God; and that the cross,
with its awful sorrow and its painful death, tells us not only how a
man gave himself for those whom he loved, but how God loves the world
and how tremendous is His law--this is good news of God indeed. We
have to look for our truest knowledge of Him not in the majesties of
the starry heavens, nor in the depths of our own souls, not in the
scattered tokens of His character given by the perplexed order of the
world, nor in the intuitions of the wise, but in the life and death of
His Son, whose tears are the pity of God as well as the compassion of
a man, and in whose life and death the whole world may behold 'the
brightness of His glory and the express image of His person,' and be
delivered from all their fears of an angry, and all their doubts of an
unknown, God.

There is a double modification of this phrase. We hear of 'the gospel
of the grace of God' and 'the gospel of the glory of God,' which
latter expression, rendered in the English version misleadingly 'the
glorious gospel,' is given in its true shape in the Revised Version.
The great theme of the message is further defined in these two
noteworthy forms. It is the tender love of God in exercise to lowly
creatures who deserve something else that the gospel is busy in
setting forth, a love which flows forth unbought and unmotived save by
itself, like some stream from a hidden lake high up among the pure
Alpine snows. The story of Christ's work is the story of God's rich,