thout measure--a SPIRIT, even the spirit of God--a spirit
within you, possessing you, and working on you, and in you--then that
which seems most petty and unimportant will often be most important, the
test of the soundness of your heart, of the reality of your feelings.

We all know--every writer of fiction, at least, should know--how true
this is in the case of love between man and woman, between parent and
child: how the little kindnesses, the half-unconscious gestures, the
petty labours of love, of which their object will never be aware, the
scrupulousness which is able "to greatly find quarrel in a straw, when
honour is at stake,"--how these are the very things which show that the
affection is neither the offspring of dry and legal duty, nor of selfish
enjoyment, but lies far down in the unconscious abysses of the heart and
being itself:--as Christ--to compare (for He Himself permits, nay
commands, us to do so in His parables) our littleness with His immensity-
-as Christ, I say, showed, when He chose first to manifest His glory--the
glory of His grace and truth--by increasing for a short hour the
pleasures of a village feast.

I might say much more on the point; how He showed these by His truth; how
He proved that He, and therefore His Father and your Father, was not that
Deus quidam deceptor, whom some suppose Him, mocking the intellect of His
creatures by the FACTS of nature which He has created, tempting the souls
of His creatures by the very faculties and desires which He Himself has
given them.

But I wish now to draw your minds rather to that one word GRACE--Grace,
what it means, and how it is a manifestation of glory. Few Scriptural
expressions have suffered more that this word Grace from the storms of
theological controversy. Springing flesh in the minds of Apostles, as
did many other noble words in that heaven-enriched soil, the only
adequate expressions of an idea which till then had never fully possessed
the mind of man, it meant more than we can now imagine; perhaps more that
we shall ever imagine again. We, alas! only know the word with its
fragrance battered out, its hues rubbed off, its very life anatomized out
of it by the battles of rival divines, till its mere skeleton is left,
and all that grace means to most of us is simply and dryly a certain
spiritual gift of God. Doubtless it means that; but if it meant nothing
more at first, why was not the plain word Gif