have recognised to be the
highest strain of human virtue to do, unless He Himself were doing it
first? 'If thine enemy hunger, feed him. If he thirst, give him
drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.'

Not only by the great demonstration of His stooping and infinite
desire for our love which lies in the life and death of Jesus Christ,
nor only by His outward work, nor by His providence, but by many an
inward touch on our spirits, by many a prick of conscience, by many a
strange longing that has swept across our souls, sudden as some
perfumed air in the scentless atmosphere; by many an inward voice,
coming we know not whence, that has spoken to us of Him, of His love,
of our duty; by many a drawing which has brought us nearer to the
Cross of Jesus Christ, only, alas! in some cases that we might recoil
further from it,--has He been beseeching, beseeching us all.

Brethren! God pleads with you. He pleads with you because there is
nothing in His heart to any of you but love, and a desire to bless
you; He pleads with you because, unless you will let Him, He cannot
lavish upon you His richest gifts and His highest blessings. He
pleads with you, bowing to the level, and beneath the level, of your
alienation and reluctance. And the sum and substance of all His
dealings with every soul is, 'My son! give Me thy heart.' 'Be ye
reconciled to God.'

II. And now turn, very briefly, to the next suggestion arising from
this text, the terrible obverse, so to speak, of the coin: Man
refusing a beseeching God.

That is the great paradox and mystery. Nobody has ever fathomed that
yet, and nobody will. How it comes, how it is possible, there is no
need for us to inquire. It is an awful and a solemn power that every
poor little speck of humanity has, to lift itself up in God's face,
and say, in answer to all His pleadings, 'I will not!' as if the
dwellers in some little island, a mere pin-point of black, barren
rock, jutting up at sea, were to declare war against a kingdom that
stretched through twenty degrees of longitude on the mainland. So we,
on our little bit of island, our pin-point of rock in the great waste
ocean, we can separate ourselves from the great Continent; or,
rather, God has, in a fashion, made us separate in order that we may
either unite ourselves with Him, by our willing yielding, or wrench
ourselves away from Him by our antagonism and rebellion. God
beseeches because God has so settled t