hat God has entrusted His praise, and in their
hands that He has lodged the sacred deposit of His own glory.

Think loftily of that office and honour, lowly of yourselves who have it
laid upon you as a crown. His honour is in our hands. We are the
'secretaries of His praise.' This is the highest function that any
creature can discharge. The Rabbis have a beautiful bit of teaching
buried among their rubbish about angels. They say that there are two
kinds of angels--the angels of service and the angels of praise, of
which two orders the latter is the higher, and that no angel in it
praises God twice, but having once lifted up his voice in the psalm of
heaven, then perishes and ceases to be. He has perfected his being, he
has reached the height of his greatness, he has done what he was made
for, let him fade away. The garb of legend is mean enough, but the
thought it embodies is that ever true and solemn one, without which life
is nought--'Man's chief end is to glorify God.'

And we can only fulfil that high purpose in the measure of our union
with Christ. 'In Him' abiding, we manifest God's glory, for in Him
abiding we receive God's grace. So long as we are joined to Him, we
partake of His life, and our lives become music and praise. The electric
current flows from Him through all souls that are 'in Him' and they glow
with fair colours which they owe to their contact with Jesus. Interrupt
the communication, and all is darkness. So, brethren, let us seek to
abide in Him, severed from whom we are nothing. Then shall we fulfil the
purpose of His love, who 'hath shined in our hearts' that we might give
to others 'the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ' Notice, lastly,

IV. The eternity of the work and of the praise.

As in the former clauses the idea of the transcendent greatness of the
power of God was expressed by accumulated synonyms, so here the kindred
thought of its eternity, and consequently of the ceaseless duration of
the resulting glory, is sought to be set forth by a similar aggregation.
The language creaks and labours, as it were, under the weight of the
great conception. Literally rendered, the words are--'to all
generations of the age of the ages'--a remarkable fusing together of two
expressions for unbounded duration, which are scarcely congruous. We can
understand 'to all generations' as expressive of duration as long as
birth and death shall last. We can understand 'the