ll be as tepid as our love to God. Did you ever notice that,
historically, the widest benevolence to men goes along with what some
people call the 'narrowest' theology? People tell us, for instance, to
mark the contrast between the theology which is usually called
evangelical and the wide benevolence usually accompanying it, and ask
how the two things agree. The 'wide' benevolence comes directly from the
'narrow' theology. He that knows the plague of his own heart, and how
Christ has redeemed him, will go, with the pity of Christ in his heart,
to help to redeem others.

So, dear friends, 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.'
'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,
and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.'

A TEST CASE

'Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in
me first Jesus Christ might show forth all
long-suffering, for a pattern to them which should
hereafter believe.'--1 TIM. i. 16.

The smallest of God's creatures, if it were only a gnat dancing in a
sunbeam, has a right to have its well-being considered as an end of
God's dealings. But no creature is so isolated or great as that it has a
right to have its well-being regarded as the sole end of God's dealings.
That is true about all His blessings and gifts; it is eminently true
about His gift of salvation. He saves men because He loves them
individually, and desires to make them blessed; but He also saves them
because He desires that through them others shall be brought into the
living knowledge of His love. It is most especially true about great
religious teachers and guides.

Paul's humility is as manifest as his self-consciousness when he says in
my text, 'This is what I was saved for. Not merely, not even
principally, for the blessings that thereby accrue to myself, but that
in me, as a crucial instance, there should be manifested the whole
fulness of the divine love and saving power.' So he puts his own
experience as giving no kind of honour or glory to himself, but as
simply showing the grace and infinite love of Jesus Christ. Paul
disappears as but a passive recipient; and Christ strides into the front
as the actor in his conversion and apostleship.

So we may take this point of view of my text, and look at the story of
what befell the great Apostle as being in many different ways an
exhibition of the great verities of the Gospel. I desire to sign