ome it by moral
discipline. Men of all sorts must be brought to realize their need of
God, utterly to expel the false dream of independence, and humbly to
welcome the unmerited bounty of the divine 'mercy,' the free gift of
pardon and new life. This then is the way in which the fundamental
purpose of God for man shows itself in a world of sin; it is by a
discipline preparing men to welcome a divine mercy of which they have
learnt to know their need. 'That he may have mercy upon all'--this is
the generous end upon which all the divine dealings with men converge.
The Jews by one kind of discipline while they still were standing
together as the elect people of God, and by another when, having
rejected the Christ and fallen out of their religious leadership, they
were to be stirred to {86} jealousy by the spectacle of a divine
fellowship from which they were excluded: the Gentiles by a different
sort of discipline, and each separate race by its own; nay more, every
individual, Jew and Greek, Englishman or Hindoo, by a distinctive
personal chastening, in as many ways as man is various and God is
resourceful: all men are so to be dealt with as that all men shall be
brought to confess themselves to be as they are in God's sight, and
surrender themselves to Him to be refashioned after the divine image.
Through all national and personal vocations realized, by which human
character is educated: through all national and personal humiliations,
which are divine judgements by which human character is corrected and
made docile: God's untiring patience and forbearance, in sternness and
in love, works on to the one universal end--that He might have mercy
upon all. The uttermost and most pitiable collapse, even the imminence
of death itself, may be, nay certainly in God's intention is, His
remedy for human wilfulness: a means by which--

'God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain, which must not be[17].'

{87} --must not be, that is, so far as the resourcefulness of divine
love, going all lengths short of destroying the fundamental moral
choice of the soul, can avail to prevent it. This teaching of St. Paul
suggests a wonderful way of reading human history, and inspires us with
the right sort of patience and hopefulness in our attitude towards the
wider problems of missionary work and our own dealings with
individuals. The races to whose conversion we would fain minister seem
so immovable and so indifferen