d all the powers arise to joyous service.
We are lords of the world and ourselves when we are Christ's servants
for love's sake; and earth and its good are never so good as when the
power of His echoed love rules our lives. Do you know and believe
that Christ loves you? Do you know and believe that you had a place
in His heart when He hung on the Cross for the salvation of the
world? Have you answered that love with yours, kindled by your faith
in, and experience of, His? Is His love the overmastering impulse
which urges you to all good, the mighty constraint that keeps you
back from all evil, the magnet that draws, the anchor that steadies,
the fortress that defends, the light that illumines, the treasure
that enriches? Is it the law that commands, and the power that
enables? Then you are blessed, though people will perhaps say that
you are mad, whilst here; and you will be blessed for ever and ever.

THE ENTREATIES OF GOD

'Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God
did beseech ... by us: we pray ... in Christ's stead,
be ye reconciled to God.'--2 COR. v. 20.

These are wonderful and bold words, not so much because of what they
claim for the servants as because of what they reveal of the Lord.
That thought, 'as though God did beseech,' seems to me to be the one
deserving of our attention now, far rather than any inferences which
may be drawn from the words as to the relation of preachers of the
Gospel to man and to God. I wish, therefore, to try to set forth the
wonderfulness of this mystery of a beseeching God, and to put by the
side of it the other wonder and mystery of men refusing the divine
beseechings.

Before doing so, however, I remark that the supplement which stands
in our Authorised Version in this text is a misleading and
unfortunate one. 'As though God did beseech _you_' and 'we pray
_you_' unduly narrow the scope of the Apostolic message, and confuse
the whole course of the Apostolic reasoning here. For he has been
speaking of a world which is reconciled to God, and he finds a
consequence of that reconciliation of the world in the fact that he
and his fellow-preachers are entrusted with the word of
reconciliation. The scope of their message, then, can be no narrower
than the scope of the reconciliation; and inasmuch as that is
world-wide the beseeching must be co-extensive therewith, and must
cover the whole ground of humanity. It is a universal message that
is set forth