ESSAY IV.

ON THE LOVE OF GOD.

Ir is, I conceive, one of the many advantages of a publication such as yours,* that it affords to correspondents a means of communicating occasional reflections and desultory hints, which have no connexion with any lengthened train of thoughts, and which, consequently, could find no place in volumes of another description. With this preface, I shall lay before you one or two observations which have lately presented themselves to my mind, on "the love of God."

1.-The love of God, shed abroad in the heart, is the only solid ground on which we can build the hope that we are justified in his sight. And this I argue, on principles independent of the general and just admission, that a sense of pardon freely granted cannot fail to call forth gratitude,

* A few of the Essays in this volume will be found to begin in the epistolary form. This arises from the fact of their having been originally addressed to the editor of the "Christian Examiner."

and thus to raise the affections to God. This truth I fully grant, but I deny that it is the whole truth. There are, in my opinion, still deeper grounds on which it can be proved that reconciliation with, and the love of, God, are indissolubly connected.

When peace is made between two contending parties, the effects which follow must always bear a strict relation to the terms on which the parties stood before hostilities commenced. When strangers, or persons previously indifferent, fall out, and when, in any such instance, the grounds of quarrel are removed, no further benefit can be expected, than that mutual annoyance and provocations should cease. The parties either separate and meet no more, or they return, on both sides, to that state of indifference in which they had been used to live. But if, unhappily, offences come or jealousies arise where harmony and love previously existed, here the work of reconciliation is twice blessed, and the "peace-makers," with double emphasis, are " called the children of God." Who, that ever has suspected, yet strongly loved-who, that ever felt the pang of being at enmity where he once "had garnered up his heart," can need be told with what glad associations peace revisits the soul? It is, in such a case, impossible that a cessation of hostilities can take place, without the

return of the heart to all, nay, to more than, its former tenderness.

And thus it must be at the reconciliation of a soul to God. Between these parties an amity and friendship, as old as the creation of man, originally subsisted. The apostasy of the soul from God, though in one sense it may be termed its natural state, is, nevertheless, a disorder superinduced upon its primitive constitution. Man was, in his first estate, designed and formed for God. The only happiness of which he is capable, is a happiness which flows from, and which constitutes him a partaker of, the divine nature. Severed as he is from God, by the extrinsic force of sin, and held down in chains to the service of a usurper, all his native aspirations remind him of his true allegiance, and all his miseries evince that he is out of his right place, and that all the foundations of his being are out of course.

The fall of man is, in its very essence, the loss of God;-the loss of that food which alone can fill the soul; the loss of that rest, out of which it can find no repose. The great purpose, then, for which a Saviour came down from on high, was to heal the breach, and slay the enmity which separates man from God. The same great sacrifice which satisfied the justice of Heaven, holds out a signal to repentant sinners that they may now

draw nigh. If we obey that signal, we are justified by faith, and have peace with God. The barriers are then removed, the intervening clouds are dissipated, and God and man return to their ancient amity. The sun shines forth, as in times of old, to gladden the soul, and warm it with its beams. The restless dreams of man's apostasy are over, and the days of his mourning are ended. The spiritual nature, rectified and restored, is again obedient to its fundamental law; and man fulfils the first and great commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and mind, and soul, and strength."

Such are the grounds on which I argue, that a state of justification must imply a state of filial love. No physical necessity can bind cause and effect more indissolubly together. And as water, when freed from accidental hinderances, returns with unfailing tendency to its own level, and as the liberated stream unerringly obeys that law which points it to the ocean; so does the human soul, when the barriers of its condemnation are broken down, rush, as it were, to the passage which it now finds open, and fill with the whole tide of its affections those channels which lead to God.

2. The love of self, and the love of God, are principles deeply and inseparably associated

together in the human soul. For, in spite of the general prejudice which runs against the former, there is, beyond doubt, a true and genuine selflove, which lies at the root, and forms the spring, of all our aspirations after good. It is distinguishable from selfishness, by the broadest lines of separation.

Selfishness is, in its essence, delusion. It is the substitution of another object for that very self from which it derives its name. All its anxieties are about the body, or about the circumstances which affect the body. To be rich or great, to steep in sensuality, or shine in the eyes of men ; these are the prizes which the selfish man keeps in view. This is the competition in which he takes every mean advantage, and would appropriate, if he were able, every thing to himself, or, rather, to what, in his delirium, he takes to be himself; for, wonderful to say, about true self-about that which is really and essentially one's self-about his soul; about that in which his true identity and higher nature consist; about that of which the body is but the changeable and perishable habitation; about this soul, and its concerns, he is utterly regardless; nay, he makes a free-will offering of them all to the idol of his insanity.

But self-love is, on the contrary, the recovery