to alienate the affections
of his other children. To show it on the bench is to sully the
ermine, and bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
Whoever else may exhibit it, the church is required to have clean
hands in the matter (James ii.)

We are so constituted that we cannot love or hate by a mere fiat of
the will. Before we can love one another with complacency, there
must be the perception of excellence. And it is the same as regards
God. Hence it is of the last importance that to our mental view He
should be pure, holy, impartial, good. To love Him if we thought Him
otherwise, would be impossible. Now God has abundantly shown, both
in providence and in the Bible, that He is not a respecter of
persons. He executes His laws indiscriminately--upon all alike. Fire
burns, poison kills, water drowns all and sundry. If the laws of
health are broken, the penalty is enforced on each transgressor
according to the measure of his transgression. It is the same with
moral penalties. If a man lies, or steals, or is mean, or selfish,
he will suffer moral deterioration, which will pass through his
moral being as a leprosy. Our physical, mental, and moral natures
are thus under their respective laws, and whosoever breaks these
laws God executes the penalty on the transgressor. There is in this
respect no favouritism--no respect of persons.

There are, as a matter of course, diversities upon earth. All cannot
occupy the same place. We have not the brilliancy and luxuriancy of
the tropics, but we have our compensations. And it is the same with
life in general. In comparison with the rich the poor have a rough
road to travel, but they are not without their compensations. The
moral life is the higher life of man, and in the stern school of
adversity there are developed noble traits of character.

"Though losses and crosses
Be lessons right severe,
There's wit there you'll get there,
You'll find no other where."

The diversities we find in life are not arbitrary acts, as we have
already seen, but dependent upon adherence or non-adherence to law.

The same great principle that regulates the providential government
of God, is brought clearly out in the Scriptures. It is remarked by
Cruden that "God appointed that the judges should pronounce their
sentences without any respect of persons (Lev. xix. 15; Deut i. 17);
that they should consider neither the poor nor the rich, nor the
weak nor the powerful, bu