loved the church, and gave himself up for it.”  If he is seeking to cultivate the grace of liberality, he brings the heavenly air around about the spirit.  “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that tho he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor.”  It interweaves itself with all his salutations.  It exhales in all his benedictions like a hallowing fragrance.  You can not get away from it.  In the light of the glory of redemption all relationships are assorted and arranged.  Redemption was not degraded into a fine abstract argument, to which the apostle had appended his own approval, and then, with sober satisfaction, had laid it aside, as a practical irrelevancy, in the stout chests of orthodoxy.  It became the very spirit of his life.  It was, if I may be allowed the violent figure, the warm blood in all his judgment.  It filled the veins of all his thinking.  It beat like a pulse in all his purposes.  It determined and vitalized his decisions in the crisis, as well as in the lesser trifles of the common day.  His conception of redemption was regulative of all his thought.

But it is not only the immediacy of redemption in the apostle’s thought by which I am imprest.  I stand in awed amazement before its vast, far-stretching reaches into the eternities.  Said an old villager to me concerning the air of his elevated hamlet, “Ay, sir, it’s a fine air is this westerly breeze; I like to think of it as having traveled from the distant fields of the Atlantic!” And here is the Apostle Paul, with the quickening wind of redemption blowing about him in loosening, vitalizing, strengthening influence, and to him, in all his thinking, it had its birth in the distant fields of eternity!  To the apostle redemption was not a small device, an afterthought, a patched-up expedient to meet an unforseen emergency.  The redemptive purpose lay back in the abyss of the eternities, and in a spirit of reverent questioning the apostle sent his trembling thoughts into those lone and silent fields.  He emerged with, whispered secrets such as these:  “fore-knew,” “fore-ordained,” “chosen in him before the foundation of the world,” “eternal life promised before times eternal,” “the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Brethren, does our common thought of redemptive glory reach back into this august and awful presence?  Does the thought of the modern disciple journey in this distant pilgrimage?  Or do we now regard it as unpractical and irrelevant?  There is no more insidious peril in modern religious life than the debasement of our conception of the practical.  If we divorce the practical from the sublime, the practical will become the superficial, and will degenerate into a very lean and forceless thing.  When Paul went on this lonely pilgrimage his spirit acquired the posture of a finely sensitive reverence.  People who live and move beneath great domes acquire a certain calm and stately dignity.  It is in companionship