is the infinite desire to
bestow, and its language is always a gift. Then, according to the
Apostle's thought, there is some one act in which all the fulness of the
divine love manifests itself; some one act in which all the treasures
which God can bestow upon men are conveyed and handed over to a world.

The statement that there is such renders almost unnecessary the question
what such an act is. For there can be but one in all the sweep of the
magnificent and beneficent divine deeds, so correspondent to His love,
and so inclusive of all His giving, as that it shall be the ground of
our confidence and the warrant for our prayers. The gift of Jesus Christ
is that in which everlasting consolation and good hope are bestowed upon
men. When our desires are widened out to the widest they must be based
upon the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ; and when we would think most
confidently and most desiringly of the benefits that we seek, for
ourselves or for our fellows, we must turn to the Cross. My prayer is
then acceptable and prevalent when it foots itself on the past divine
act, and looking to the life and death of Jesus Christ, is widened out
to long for, ask for, and in the very longing and asking for to begin
to possess, the fulness of the gifts which then were brought to men in
Him.

'Everlasting consolation and good hope.' I suppose the Apostle's
emphasis is to be placed quite as much on the adjectives as on the
nouns; for there are consolations enough in the world, only none of them
are permanent; and there are hopes enough that amuse and draw men, but
one of them only is 'good.' The gift of Christ, thinks Paul, is the gift
of a comfort which will never fail amidst all the vicissitudes and
accumulated and repeated and prolonged sorrows to which flesh is heir,
and is likewise the gift of a hope which, in its basis and in its
objects, is equally noble and good.

Look at these two things briefly. Paul thinks that in Jesus Christ you
and I, and all the world, if it will have it, has received the gift of
an everlasting comfort. Ah! sorrow is more persistent than consolation.
The bandaged wounds bleed again; the fire damped down for a moment
smoulders, even when damped, and bursts out again. But there is one
source of comfort which, because it comes from an unchangeable Christ,
and because it communicates unfailing gifts of patience and insight, and
because it leads forward to everlasting blessedness and recompenses, may