rs your own, and incorporate into your being and into
the very substance of your soul, and work out in all the blessed
activities of a Christian life, the gifts that His royal and kingly hand
has bestowed upon you. Take for granted that God loves you and gives you
His whole self, and work on in the fulness of His possessed gift.

That is the connection of the words before us. I take them just as they
lie in our passage, dealing first of all with this question--God's call
to you and me; how it is done. Now I do not know if I can venture to
indulge any remarks about Biblical criticism, but you will perhaps bear
with me just for a moment whilst I say that the people who know a great
deal more about such subjects than either you or I, agree with one
consent that the proper way of reading this verse of my text is not as
our Bible has it; 'Him that has called us _to_ glory and virtue,' but
'Him that hath called us _by_--by his own glory and virtue.' Do you see
the difference? In one case the language expresses the things in
imitation of the Divine nature to which God summons you and me when He
calls us. That is how our Bible has taken it; but the deeper thought
still is the things in that Divine nature and activity itself which
constitute His great summons and invitation of men to His side; and
these are the two, whatever they might be, which the Apostle here
describes in that rather peculiar and unusual language for Scripture,
'Who has called us by His own glory and His own virtue.' I venture to
dwell on these two points for a moment or two.

Now, first of all, God's glory. Threadbare and consequently vague as the
expression is in the minds of a great many people who have heard it with
their ears ever since they were little children, God's glory has a very
distinct and definite meaning in Scripture, and all starts, as I think,
from the Old Testament use of the expression, which was the distinct
specific name for the supernatural light that lay between the cherubim,
and brooded over the ark on the mercy-seat. The word signifies
specifically and originally the glory of God, and irradiation of a
material, though supernatural, symbol of His Divine and spiritual
presence. Very well, lay hold of that material picture, for God teaches
us as we do our children, with pictures. Take the symbol and lift it up
into the spiritual region, and it is just this: the glory of God in its
deepest meaning is the irradiation and the perpetual pou