nd determining them, are
aspects of the divine nature to which only child-like confidence and
calm beatific returns of love do rightly respond. The terror of the
Lord is a garb which our sins force upon the love of the Lord, and
when the one is presented it brings with it the other. Never should
they be parted in our thoughts or in our teaching.

Note what that present grace is. It is a tenderness which gathers
into its embrace all these imperfect, immoral, lax, heretical people
in Corinth, as well as everywhere else--'The grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ be with _you all_.' There were men in that church that said,
'I am of Paul, I of Apollos, I of Cephas, I of Christ.' There were
men in that church that had defiled their souls and their flesh, and
corrupted the community, and blasphemed the name of Christ by such
foul, sensual sin as was 'not even named among the Gentiles.' There
were men in that church so dead to all the sanctities even of the
communion-table as that, with the bread between their teeth and the
wine-cup in their hands, one was hungry and another drunken. There
were men in that church, whose Christianity was so anomalous and
singularly fragmentary that they did not believe in the resurrection
of the dead. And yet Paul flings the great rainbow, as it were, of
Christ's enclosing love over them all. And surely the love which
gathers in such people leaves none outside its sweep; and the
tenderness which stoops from heaven to pity, to pardon, to cleanse
such is a tenderness to which the weakest, saddest, sinfullest,
foulest of the sons of men may confidently resort. Let nothing rob
you of this assurance, that Christ, the coming Lord, is present with
us all, and with all our weak and wicked brethren, in the full
condescension of His all-embracing, all-hoping, all-forgetting, and
all-restoring love. All that we need, in order to get its full
sunshine into our hearts, is that we trust Him utterly, and, so
trusting, love Him back again with that love which is the fulfilling
of the Law and the crown of the Gospel.

III. And now, lastly, note the tenderness, caught from the Master
Himself, of the servant who rebukes.

This last message of love from the Apostle himself, in verse 24, is
quite anomalous. There is no other instance in his letters where he
introduces himself and his own love at the end, after he has
pronounced solemn benediction commending to Christ's grace. But here,
as if he had felt that he must l