enly
depths, and that gives solemnity, grandeur, elevation, to this epistle
all its own. We are carried, as it were, away up into the recesses of
the mountains of God, and we look down upon the unruffled, mysterious,
deep lake, from which come the rivers that water all the plains beneath.

Now of these two types of reference to the divine will and the divine
wealth, I should like to gather together the instances, as they occur in
this letter, in so far as I can, in the course of a sermon, touching
them, it must be, very imperfectly. But I fear that it is impossible to
deal with both the phases of this 'according to,' in one discourse. So I
confine myself to that which is suggested by the first of our two texts,
in the hope that some other day we may be able to overtake the other. So
then, we have set before us here the Christian thought of the divine
will which underlies, and therefore is manifest by, the work of Jesus
Christ, in its whole sweep and breadth. And I just take up the various
instances in which this expression occurs in a great variety of forms,
but all retaining substantially the same meaning.

I. Note that that divine will which underlies and is operative in, and
therefore is certified to us by the whole work of Jesus Christ, in its
facts and its consequences, is a 'good pleasure.'

Now there are few thoughts which the history of the world has shown to
be more productive of iron and steel in the human character than that of
the sovereign will of God. That made Islam, and is the secret of its
power to-day, amidst its many corruptions. Because these wild desert
tribes were all stiffened, or I might say inflamed, by that profound
conviction, the sovereign will of God, they came down like a hammer upon
that corrupt so-called Christian Church, and swept it off the face of
the earth, as it deserved to be swept. And the same thought of the
sovereign will, of which we are but instruments--pawns on its
chessboard--made the grand seventeenth century Puritanism in England,
and its sister type of men and of religion in Holland. For this is a
historically proved thesis, that there is nothing which so contributes
to the formation, and valuation of, and the readiness to die for, civil
liberty, as the firm grasp of that thought of the divine sovereignty.
Just because a man realises that the will of God is supreme over all the
earth, he rebels against all forms of human despotism.

But with all the good that is in that