THE LONG-SUFFERING OF GOD. "Howbeit, for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all long-suffering.”—1 Tıм., i., 16. THIS is not the first nor the only time in the writings of Paul in which he recognizes, with vivid sensibility, the patience which God had manifested toward him personally. There seems to have been in his heart a fountain of gratitude for this paticnce which never exhausted itself. The divine goodness in this regard excited in his bosom, from first to last, unbounded thankfulness. The long-suffering of God is much insisted upon in Scripture both by those who have experienced it and by him who exercises it. It is remarkable that the sacred Scriptures should have succeeded in combining the two apparently discordant views, God's terrible avulsion from evil, his hatred of it, and his patience with it, and with them that committed it. The impression of both is vividly presented-that God will punish sin, and yet that God spares, and waits to be gracious; that he is slow to anger, and quick to mercy; and yet that he administers a government of justice, and that in the end he will not clear the guilty. The impression of God's terrible justice and judgment is made strong, and the impression of God's kindness and love is made equally strong. To-night I wish to unfold, somewhat at length, the view of God's long-suffering. In the first place, look upon the radical idea of human society upon earth as of a child-race to be developed and brought forward. Even leaving out the question of moral desert, consider what a work it is to rear up through thousands of years, in long succession, a race that begins, in all its conditions, at nothing, as it were, and feels and finds its way up, little by little, through experience to manhood in the individual, and to carry on, at the same time, a development of nations, and of peoples from barbarism, or that which is next akin to it, up through civilization to the highest degree of human capacity. Consider that the elevation of mankind to that point is the work which God has purposely undertaken. The divine government is not a government that has a nation already furnished; it is the government of a being that essays, through thousands of continuous years, to go on in a circle of perpetual education and development. Parents educate their children from infancy, but after a time the child takes care of itself, and their labor ceases. God, the eternal Father, is forever in the nursery and at the cradle. His work never ends. He has purposed to himself the task of rearing up a race which will require him to bear them in perpetual patience and long-suffering. Consider, next, in the light of history, what this race has been. Consider what has fallen out in the process of this grand experiment of the world. If you regard man comprehensively, nothing can be more striking than that his animal part has predominated since the world began. The less, the inferior, the lower part of man, has been in the ascendant. The power of the human race has been its animal power thus far. Wonderful as have been the achievements of civilization in the world, man has been characteristically an animal on the globe. Of all those that are born, by far the greatest number answer, apparently, no useful end. Why they should be born is a marvel. Why, being born, and only encumbering the ground from year to year, they should be continued in existence, is another marvel. Few have lived that have not been a burden on the earth. Of men in their best conditions in a civilized community, how many are there that have given to the stock of human thoughts one single thought that has lived after they were gone? How many even of those that are civilized, and restrained by the influences of Christianity, so widely diffused, have given incarnation, and so additional force, to the truth, in human life? How many are there who have created any thing that survives them? How many are there who will be mourned one day when they are gone except by those personally connected with them? In respect to ninety-nine in a hundred, it may be said that they would not be missed an hour if they should die. There is, here and there, one at the head of a business, one in a school, or one belonging to a family, that would be missed much longer than that; but in respect to the great majority, it may be said that if they should be stricken out of existence, in an hour they would not be missed more than a pebble is missed, that, being thrown into the water, makes a circle and goes down, never again to be seen by human eyes. The greatest number of men that are born, even into civilization, live and die without one single heroic purpose; without one noble achievement; without doing a thing to make men better. They simply constitute a link in the chain of the race. Consider how unwilling men are to obey both natural and moral laws. Some do not know them, and those we do not blame so much; but those that know, I will not say the Decalogue, but the plainer laws that selfishness should have taught them to obey the laws of man's own body-how many are there that have not done violence to every organ, nerve, and vessel in their physical system? Men violate the laws of the stomach, of the brain, of the heart, of every part of their outward being, and that continually. And this is not so in single instances merely-it is characteristic of the race. It is marked by diseases, which show that vengeance has scarred them for the violation of natural laws. How limited is the understanding, by reason of the violation of the laws of the understanding. How weak is the moral sense, by reason of a perpetual violation of the laws of the moral sense. If you consider, either in detail or comprehensively, what is the great schedule of laws under which this race was created to act, nothing can be more striking than this: that they have been willfully, and pertinaciously, and generically disobedient. Consider how slow has been the progress of amelioration and civilization in the world. After the lapse of six thousand years, what is the state of manhood? The old patriarchs lived, and established institutions, and died, and left records; judges and prophets lived, and bore witness, and passed away, and left records; later prophets lived, and gave their testimony, and departed; the Savior came, and performed his earthly mission, and returned to him that sent him; the apostles appeared, and went forth, and spread a knowledge and faith of the new and living way, and went to their reward; and in every subsequent age the work of disseminating the truth has been faithfully carried forward; and yet to say that of the more than a thousand million souls that now inhabit the globe one million are vitally and experimentally Christians would be an extravagant estimate. To say that there are more nominally Christian nations than heathen nations would be to outrage the facts. If you were to put a shadow on the globe where there is heathenism, and light where there is Christianity, even in its nominal forms, the shadow to the light would be as the little finger to the rest of the hand. There have been six thousand years-six thousand years of dispensation; six thousand years of advancement; six thousand years of history; six thousand years of successive civilization-and it seems as though the parts of the globe where there is civilization, compared with the whole globe, were as the wick or flame of a torch to the torch itself. Consider, too, what have been the characteristic developments of the race in cruelty, in deceit, in selfishness, in wars, and in revolutions. I know that there has been much incarnated justice in laws and institutions; I know that there has |