, or contents, or purpose of the whole Gospel, is to set forth
and make manifest to men the glory of God.

Now what do we mean by 'the glory'? I think, perhaps, that question may
be most simply answered by remembering the definite meaning of the word
in the Old Testament. There it designates, usually, that supernatural
and lustrous light which dwelt between the Cherubim, the symbol of the
presence and of the self-manifestation of God. So that we may say, in
brief, that the glory of God is the sum-total of the light that streams
from His self-revelation, considered as being the object of adoration
and praise by a world that gazes upon Him.

And if this be the notion of the glory of God, is it not a startling
contrast which is suggested between the apparent contents and the real
substance of that Gospel? Suppose a man, for instance, who had no
previous knowledge of Christianity, being told that in it he would find
the highest revelation of the glory of God. He comes to the book, and
finds that the very heart of it is not about God, but about a man; that
this revelation of the glory of God is the biography of a man; and more
than that, that the larger portion of that biography is the story of
the humiliations, and the sufferings, and the death of the man. Would it
not strike him as a strange paradox that the history of a _man's_ life
was the shining apex of all revelations of the glory of _God_? And yet
so it is, and the Apostle, just because to him the Gospel was the story
of the Christ who lived and died, declares that in this story of a human
life, patient, meek, limited, despised, rejected, and at last crucified,
lies, brighter than all other flashings of the divine light, the very
heart of the lustre and palpitating centre and fontal source of all the
radiance with which God has flooded the world. The history of Jesus
Christ is the glory of God. And that involves two or three
considerations on which I dwell briefly.

One of them is this: Christ, then, is the self-revelation of God. If,
when we deal with the story of His life and death, we are dealing simply
with the biography of a man, however pure, lofty, inspired he may be,
then I ask what sort of connection there is between that biography which
the four Gospels gives us, and what my text says is the substance of the
Gospel? What force of logic is there in the Apostle's words: 'God
commendeth _His_ love toward us in that whilst we were yet sinners
_Christ_ died fo