be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.' We
generally use that word 'grace' with a restricted signification to the
gifts of God to men here on earth. It is the earnest of the inheritance,
rather than its fulness. But here it is quite obvious that by the
expression the Apostle means the very same thing as he has previously
designated in the preceding context by three different phrases--'an
inheritance incorruptible and undefiled,' 'praise and honour and glory
at the revelation of Jesus Christ,' and 'the end of your faith, even the
salvation of your souls.' The 'grace' is not contrasted with the
'glory,' but is another name for the glory. It is not the earnest of the
inheritance, but it is the inheritance itself. It is not the means
towards attaining the progressive and finally complete 'salvation of
your souls,' but it is that complete salvation in all its fulness.

Now, that is an unusual use of the word, but that it should be employed
here, as describing the future great object of the Christian hope,
suggests two or three thoughts. One is that that ultimate blessedness,
with all its dim, nebulous glories, which can only be resolved into
their separate stars, when we are millions of leagues nearer to its
lustre, is like the faintest glimmer of a new and better life in a soul
here on earth, purely and solely the result of the undeserved,
condescending love of God that stoops to sinful men, and instead of
retribution bestows upon them a heaven. The grace that saved us at
first, the grace that comes to us, filtered in drops during our earthly
experience, is poured upon us in a flood at last. And the brightest
glory of heaven is as much a manifestation of the Divine grace as the
first rudimentary germs of a better life now and here. The foundation,
the courses of the building, the glittering pinnacle on the summit,
with its golden spire reaching still higher into the blue, is all the
work of the same unmerited, stooping, pardoning love. Glory is grace,
and Heaven is the result of God's pardoning mercy.

There is another suggestion here to be made, springing from this
eloquent use of this term, and that is not merely the identity of the
source of the Christian experience upon earth and in the future, but the
identity of that Christian experience itself in regard of its essential
character. If I may so say, it is all of a piece, homogeneous, and of
one web. The robe is without seam, woven throughout of the sam