Zacharias, in accordance with Old Testament metaphor, speaks,
allocating the seat of the emotions which we attribute to the heart.
Conventional notions of delicacy think the Hebrew idea coarse, but
the one allocation is just as delicate as the other. We can get no
deeper down or farther back into the secret springs of things than
this--that the root cause of all, and most especially of the mission
of Christ, is the pitying love of God's heart. If we hold fast by
that, the pain of the riddle of the world is past, and the riddle
itself more than half solved. Jesus Christ is the greatest gift of
that love, in which all its tenderness and all its power are
gathered up for our blessing.

The modern civilised world owes most of its activity to the
quickening influence of Christianity. The dayspring visits us that
it may shine on us, and it shines that it may guide us into 'the way
of peace.' There can be no wider and more accurate description of
the end of Christ's mission than this--that all His visitation and
enlightenment are meant to lead us into the path where we shall find
peace with God, and therefore with ourselves and with all mankind.
The word 'peace,' in the Old Testament, is used to include the sum
of all that men require for their conscious well-being. We are at
rest only when all our relations with God and the outer world are
right, and when our inner being is harmonised with itself, and
supplied with appropriate objects. To know God for our friend, to
have our being fixed on and satisfied in Him, and so to be
reconciled to all circumstances, and a friend of all men--this is
peace; and the path to such a blessed condition is shown us only by
that Sun of Righteousness whom the loving heart of God has sent into
the darkness and torpor of the benighted wanderers in the desert.
The national reference has faded from the song, and though it still