As a man deepens so his longings deepen, till they reach to the Infinite and the Eternal. And the strange thing is, that as these cravings alter, and rise from the transient to the enduring, so God is ever there before us, with His prepared answer to our quest. We crave for light, and the sun and moon are there, and they have been shining for unnumbered ages. We crave for love, and love is not of yesterday. It is as ancient as the heart-beat of humanity. We come to crave for pardon and for peace and for unbroken fellowship with God ; and all that, in Jesus Christ our Lord, has been made ready for us long ago.
2. God's prevenient goodness is very conspicuous in the privileges of the Gospel. Our spiritual needs are all anticipated by an ample provision. And that is signified by our baptism. God's goodness came to a point there, so to speak, and was set forth with gracious impressiveness. For baptism is the seal of our lineage and signifies that we come of the elect stock. It is the Christian circumcision, and denotes that we belong to tho community of the faithful, whose life is sustained by tlie living
372 THE MINISTRY OF SURPRISE
Lord, and have our right and portion among them in all the goodness He has introduced into human life.
^ To me one of the surest proofs that the Bible is indeed the Word of God is the way in which it goes before us through all the changing experience of life. Other books we leave behind. They were before us once ; they are behind us now. We have outgrown them. We have reached an hour when they were powerless to cheer and guide. But always as we battle through the years, and break through the thicket into another glade, a little ahead of us, with eyes of love, we descry the figure of the Word of God. It is before us in the day of triumph. It is before us in the hour of fall. In every new temptation it is there ; in every joy, in every bitterness. We move into the shadow and the heartbreak, or into the sunshine with the play of waters, and yet the Bible understands it all, and is there to meet us when we come. We are not above it when we scale the heavens, nor beneath it when we make our bed in hell. It is always a little higher than our highest. It is always a little deeper than our deepest. And that to me is an argument unanswerable that God is in Scripture as in no other book. It is not so much that / find Him there. It is rather that there He finds me.^
^ Geologists find the presence of tropical species in latitudes now subjected to the rigours of a cold climate, and arctic forms in regions at present belonging to the temperate zone. In en- deavouring to explain these anomalies of climate, scientists in past days went in search of vast cosmic changes, such as an alteration in the position of the terrestrial axis, a diminution in the amount of solar heat, or a gradual cooling of the earth's crust ; but modern scientists are satisfied to explain these climatic conditions as the result of a familiar agency close at hand, of which we have daily experience. A genial current of water or air deflected toward our coast is, in their opinion, sufficiently powerful to create the difference of temperature which rescues us from the rigours of Lapland and fills our island with summer's pageantry and autumn's pride. So to give the nations of the earth a sweet summer for the long dark winter of their dis- content God makes the stream of His grace to flow through our sanctuaries, schools, and homes, silently blessing and enriching human life.^
^ G. H. Momson, The Return of the Angels, 150. » W. L. Watkinson, The Fatal Barter, 37.
PSALM XXI. 3 2>7Z
IV.
A God who is always Befoeeiiand.
1. God is before at every stage of this life. Whatever good we have gained to ourselves, there is a better still before us. The best is always in store. We go from strength to strength. And if we have an eye for the working of His Hand at all, we need never fail to find the traces of God's power marking out before- hand the path in which we go.
(1) God is hcfore us to enrich and to 'piirify our joys, — Indeed those joys are of God's own making. They arrive we know not whence or how. They come as a surprise. We had not looked for them, or learned perhaps to desire them. And then they befell us, and woke our nature into music, and made all life new. Is it not so for the most part that our great joys have come to us ? the choice gifts of Providence ? the signal blessings of grace ? And what does this mean but just that the Divine loving-kindness had prepared for us such mercy, and then at the fitting moment laid it bare ? He who has planned our path is in ambush for us, and oftenest it is at some unexpected turn of the way that His goodness stands disclosed. We stumble upon His bounty ere we know, and find to our surprise how long it had been stored for us. Does not the greatest of all gifts, the Gift Unspeakable, at times arrive upon us in this way, hiding Himself in some unlooked-for experience, then striding into our life suddenly ? And of other gifts also, the arrival is, as a rule, as unexpected, and betokens a preparation we had not thought of. Our path has been sown with goodness beforehand, and we reap the harvest of it as we go.