1 Canon Body. 2 Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems 0/ Love and Life, 13.
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meet and are consummated in the love of God. May He who has prepared for them that love Him such good things as pass man's understanding, pour into our hearts such love towards Him, that we, loving Him above all things, may obtain His promises, which exceed all that we can desire, and " be filled with all the fulness of God."
My God, I love Thee; not because
I look for Heaven thereby, Nor yet because who love Thee not
Are lost eternally.
Thou, 0 my Jesus, Thou didst me
Upon the Cross embrace, For me didst bear the nails and spear,
And manifold disgrace.
Then why, 0 blessed Jesus Christ,
Should I not love Thee well, Not for the sake of winning Heaven,
Or of escaping Hell,
Not with the hope of gaining aught,
Not seeking a reward ; But as Thyself hast loved me,
0 ever-loving Lord ?
Even so I love Thee, and will love,
And in Thy praise will sing, Solely because Thou art my God,
And my eternal King.
ii. The Cry.
We have already seen that the word adoption distinguishes those who are made sons by an act of grace from the only- begotten Son. But we have also seen that the act of grace gives not only the status but the heart of sons. It is accordingly in this, the true and full, spirit of adoption that we are able to cry, Abba, Father.
1. "Abba, Father." Our Lord, speaking in Aramaic, the vernacular of Palestine, is recorded by St. Mark to have said in
ROMANS vm. 15 471
His hour of agony " Abba." And even in the Greek-speaking churches of St. Paul's day, that sacred word was still used side by side with its Greek equivalent, according to the witness of this and the parallel passage, Gal. iv. 6. St. Paul appears to be referring to some occasion on which the Church was in the habit of calling on God with the Aramaic and Greek words side by side, and it is more than likely that he is making a definite reference to the Lord's Prayer, as recited by the Koman and Galatian Christians in the form prescribed for us in St. Luke's version, beginning, " Father." The retention by Greek Christians of an Aramaic word in a familiar religious formula is like the later retention by the Latins of the Greek prayer, Kyrie eleison, or the retention by us of the names Te Deum, Magnificat, etc. St. Paul's meaning would come home to us better if we were to read — " whereby we cry Our Father."
•[J The repetition of this word, first in Aramaic and then in Greek, is remarkable, and brings home to us the fact that Christianity had its birth in a bilingual people. The same repetition occurs in Mark xiv. 36 (" Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee ") and in Gal. iv. 6 : it gives a greater intensity of expression, but would only be natural where the speaker was using in both cases his familiar tongue. Lightfoot {Hor. Heb. on Mark xiv. 36) thinks that in the Gospel the word "Abba" only was used by our Lord, and Father added as an interpretation by St. Mark, and that in like manner St. Paul is interpreting for the benefit of his readers. The three passages are, however, all too emotional for this explanation : interpretation is out of place in a prayer. It seems better to suppose that our Lord Himself, using familiarly both languages, and con- centrating into this word of all words such a depth of meaning, found Himself impelled spontaneously to repeat the word, and that some among His disciples caught and transmitted the same habit. It is significant, however, of the limited extent of strictly Jewish Christianity that we find no other original examples of the use than these three.1
^f From my recollections as a student in the New College, Edinburgh, I am able to supply an interesting instance of the influence of strong, deep feeling towards a polyglot expression. One morning in the course of his opening prayer in the Senior Hebrew Class, the late Eabbi Duncan was led to use the expression in Ps. lxviii. 35, " 0 God, thou art terrible out of
1 Sanday-Headlam, Romans.
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thy holy places," adding in the same breath, "Thou art Nora" " venerandus." Indeed the Eabbi had something of a habit of " polyglotting " (if I may coin a word) his ideas.1
2. "We cry" says the Apostle; and he uses a strong word (often followed by " with a great voice "). It denotes the loud irrepressible cry with which the consciousness of sonship breaks from the Christian heart in prayer.
3. What do we cry? Of all words which can ever express man's thought, the word which comprises most of wisdom, tender- ness, and love, is the name of " Father." What a repose lies in that " My Father." And if we were not so familiar with it, the wonder would never cease to awaken the deepest feeling of admiration that we are ever permitted to say of the great, the holy, the awful, the unseen, the unutterable Jehovah, "My Father." And yet, as soon as the Spirit begins to work in a sinner's heart, what is the very first thing that the Spirit plants there ? "I will arise and go to my father, and I will say unto him, my father." And if only we could take in the simple conception that God is a " Father," well-nigh the whole work of our religion would be done. It is just what we want, for peace, for holiness, for heaven, to be able to say " My Father." Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, acknowledge it as true; but few, very few think of how much has passed in the deepest counsels and in the sublimest operations of Almighty God, that we might use that paternal name. All heaven had to come down to earth that we might stand to God again in that lost relationship. All the blood of Christ could only purchase it; and no man could ever frame his heart to conceive or his lips to utter it, but by the power of the Holy Ghost ; for none can cry, "Abba, Father," but by the "spirit of adoption." It will be a marvel, one day, to find what stupendous processes were necessary before we could really say the two first words of that prayer, which some people call, and most beautifully call, " Our Father."