His gifts, and is glad when men accept them. It is
something, surely, amid all the griefs and sorrows of this
sorrow-haunted and devil-hunted world, to rise to this lofty region and
to feel that there is a living personal joy at the heart of the
universe. If we went no further, to me there is infinite beauty and
mighty consolation and strength in that one thought--the happy God. He
is not, as some ways of representing Him figure Him to be, what the
older astronomers thought the sun was, a great cold orb, black and
frigid at the heart, though the source and centre of light and warmth to
the system. But He Himself is joy, or if we dare not venture on that
word, which brings with it earthly associations, and suggests the
possibility of alteration--He is the blessed God. And the Psalmist saw
deeply into the divine nature, who, not contented with hymning His
praise as the possessor of the fountain of life, and the light whereby
we see light, exclaimed in an ecstasy of anticipation, 'Thou makest us
to drink of the rivers of Thy pleasures.'

But there is a great deal more than that here, if not in the word
itself, at least in its connection, which connection seems to suggest
that, howsoever the divine nature must be supposed to be blessed in its
own absolute and boundless perfectness, an element in the blessedness of
God Himself arises from His self-communication through the Gospel to the
world. All love delights in imparting. Why should not God's? On the
lower level of human affection we know that it is so, and on the highest
level we may with all reverence venture to say, The quality of that
mercy . . . 'is twice blest,' and that divine love 'blesseth Him that
gives and them that take.'

He created a universe because He delights in His works, and in having
creatures on whom He can lavish Himself. He 'rests in His love, and
rejoices over us with singing' when we open our hearts to the reception
of His light, and learn to know Him as He has declared Himself in His
Christ. The blessed God is blessed because He is God. But He is blessed
too because He is the loving and, therefore, the giving God.

What a rock-firmness such a thought as this gives to the mercy and the
love that He pours out upon us! If they were evoked by our worthiness we
might well tremble, but when we know, according to the grand words
familiar to many of us, that it is His nature and property to be
merciful, and that He is far gladder in giving than we can