lism.
And not truth without grace. That would be a cold stern repellent
insistence on certain high standards. But grace and truth coupled,
intermingling.

Of course real grace and truth always are coupled. They tell the
exquisite poise that is in everything God does. Truth is the back-bone
of grace. Grace is the soft cushioning of flesh upon the bony framework
of truth. It is the soft warm breath of life in truth. Truth is grace
holding up the one only standard of purity and right and insisting upon
it. And as we look we know within ourselves we never can reach it. Grace
is truth reaching a strong warm hand down to where we are and _helping_
us reach it.

With God these things are always coupled. _We_ get them separated badly,
or would I better say, imitations of them. There is a sort of thing we
have called truth. It is not so common now as a generation or more ago.
It is a sort of stern elevated preaching of righteousness, but with no
warm feel of life to it. I can remember hearing preaching in my immature
boy days that made me feel that the man and the thing must be right, but
neither had any attraction for me. It was as though a man went fishing
with a carefully-made properly-labelled metallic-bait at the end of a
long stout cord, and said, as he dangled it in the sinful waters to the
elusive fish, "Now, bite; or be damned."

It was never put so baldly, of course, in words. And I was only a child
with immature childish imaginations. Yet that was the feeling about the
thing the child got. But it's scarcely worth while talking of that now
except to point the contrast; things have swung so far to the other
extreme.

The current thing to-day is grace without truth, or what is supposed to
be grace. It is a sort of man-made substitute. It's something like this.
Here's a man in the gutter, the moral gutter. It may be the actual
gutter. Or, there may be the outer trappings of refinement that easy
wealth provides; or, the real refinement that culture and inheritance
bring. But morally and in spirit, it's a gutter. The slime of sin and
low passion, of selfishness and indulgence and self-ambition, oozes over
everything in full sight. The man's in the gutter.

And along comes the modern philosopher of grace, so-called. He looks
down compassionately, and says, "Poor fellow, I'm so sorry for you. Too
bad you should have gotten down there. Let me help you a bit, my
brother." So he puts some flowering plants down in the slime