unmerited love, bending down to creatures far beneath, and making a
radiant pathway from earth to heaven, like the sevenfold rainbow. It
is so, not merely because this mission is the result of God's love,
but also because His grace is God's grace, and therefore every act of
Christ which speaks His own tenderness is therein an apocalypse of
God.

The second of these two expressions, 'the gospel of the glory of God,'
leads up to that great thought that the true glory of the divine
nature is its tenderness. The lowliness and death of Christ are the
glory of God! Not in the awful attributes which separate that
inconceivable Nature from us, not in the eternity of His existence,
nor in the Infinitude of His Being, not in the Omnipotence of His
unwearied arm, nor in fire-eyed Omniscience, but in the pity and
graciousness which bend lovingly over us, is the true glory of God.
These pompous 'attributes' are but the fringes of the brightness, the
living white heart of which is love. God's glory is God's grace, and
the purest expression of both is found there, where Jesus hangs dying
in the dark, The true throne of God's glory is not builded high in a
remote heaven, flashing intolerable brightness and set about with
bending principalities and powers, but it is the Cross of Calvary. The
story of the 'grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,' with its humiliation
and shame, is the 'gospel of the grace,' and therefore is the 'gospel
of the glory, of God.'

III. The good news of Christ and of God is the gospel of our salvation
and peace.

We read of 'the gospel of your salvation' (Eph. i. 13), and in the
same letter (vi. 15) of 'the gospel of peace.' In these expressions we