1. The conventional idea of riches is pecuniary abundance, superfluity of goods personal and heritable. The typical rich man is Dives, " clothed in purple and fine linen, and faring sumptuously every day." His riches are pre-eminently calculable, can be written down and reckoned up in black and white. Kiches of this order the average English mind instinctively understands and appreciates. There is nothing so wonderful to it as property. To own it is to be a great man, and the more he owns the greater a man he is. The millionaire is our permanent social wonder, a man made admirable by his millions. And there is a point where material wealth is a thing of quite infinite significance, the point where it expresses immanent energies, where it is the outcome and product of a nature so rich that it must to fulfil itself burst into wealth. An empty nature feels no oppression in a vacant universe; a rich nature must strenuously labour to create a without that at once reflects and satisfies the within. And St. Paul conceives Christ as of a fulness so infinite that He could not but create, and of His fulness all creation had received. Of Him, and to Him, and through Him, were all things ; in all. His thought was manifested. His energies active; He was before all things, and in Him all stood together in divinest system for divinest ends. And to be so rich within and without was indeed to have infinite wealth.
2 COR. VIII. 9 257
^ Awe comes into the soul of man as he looks into the clear midnight heaven and watches its innumerable hosts, each a point of light to the eye, yet so speaking to the imagination as to be- wilder it by visions of a starlit immensity, of a space mind cannot limit, instinct with thought, throbbing with generative, progressive, mighty life. If you stood on what seems the remotest star in space, trembling like the veriest rushlight on the verge of outer darkness, you would find yourself in the heart of a mightier sun than your own, while all round new constellations would glow like the myriad eyes of God, looking through the very points that made space visible into the minds that made it living ; and if there stood beside you a master spirit to teach the bewildered, his response to your cry — "Whose are these?" — would be: "The eternal Reason men call the Christ made and owns the worlds ! So rich was His essential nature that He thought into being whatever is. The universe is His wealth, and its weal His joy." ^
^ When we wish to show foreign potentates the glory of England, we take them in our ignorant human way to the Southampton waters, and show them ironclad ships of war as they belch out fire and smoke, and make the whole region tremble with their thunder. But when the Psalmist would show us the glorious majesty of God's Kingdom he takes us to the corn-fields. " He openeth his hand, and satisfieth the desire of every living thing." He rules through feeding us: and a well-fed people makes a stable government. ^
2. The Eternal Son was rich in the wealth that is well-being. He was not doomed to the splendid misery of being alone in His ownership of the worlds, of having nothing but material, calculable wealth. He was rich in the honour God enjoys, in the worship of angel and spirit, in the happiness which is at once the essence and the manifestation of Divine perfection, in the affection given by the Eternal Father to the only begotten Son.
Did you ever think what the mystery we call Trinity means ? You speak perhaps of the time when God was alone, when, before the worlds were. He dwelt solitary in His own eternity. But God was never alone, could never be alone. He is by His very nature not solitude but society. Were He solitude, He could not be the absolute perfection which is our only God. God is love, and love is social. You cannot have love without a subject loving and an object loved. The object is as necessary as the subject.
1 A. M. Fairbairn, The City of God, 300. =" D. W. Simon.
2 COR. & GAL. — 17
258 THE LIBERALITY OF CHRIST
Where there is no person to be loved, love is impossible. God is reason, and reason is social. Knowledge implies subject and object, the person that knows, the person known. Deny the distinction of knowing subject and known object, and the very possibility of knowledge is denied. But if God is essentially love and knowledge. He is essentially social; and if the time never was when these were no realities to Him, the time never was when His nature was without the loved person and the known object. When we speak of the person loved, we name Him " Son " ; of the object known, we name Him " Word." And who shall tell the Divine beatitude of the eternity when the Son lay in the bosom of the Father, and the arms of the Father held the person of the Son, and the tides of love flowed and ebbed with a rhythm that beat out as it were the music of the eternal joy ? In that wealth of essential being Christ lived with the Father "before the foundation of the world," so "rich" that -'in him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily."