with the sublimities that awkwardness and coarseness are destroyed.  We lose our reverence when we desert the august.  But has reverence no relationship to the practical?  Shall we discard it as an irrelevant factor in the purposes of common life?  Why, reverence is the very clue to fruitful, practical living.  Reverence is creative of hope; nay, a more definite emphasis can be given to the assertion; reverence is a constituent of hope.  Annihilate reverence, and life loses its fine sensitiveness, and when sensitiveness goes out of a life the hope that remains is only a flippant rashness, a thoughtless impetuosity, the careless onrush of the kine, and not a firm, assured perception of a triumph that is only delayed.  A reverent homage before the sublimities of yesterday is the condition of a fine perception of the hidden triumphs of the morrow.  And, therefore, I do not regard it as an accidental conjunction that the psalmist puts them together and proclaims the evangel that “the Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in them that hope in his mercy.”  To feel the days before me I must revere the purpose which throbs behind me.  I must bow in reverence if I would anticipate in hope.

Here, then, is the Apostle Paul, with the redemptive purpose interweaving itself with all the entanglements of his common life, a purpose reaching back into the awful depths of the eternities, and issuing from those depths in amazing fulness of grace and glory.  No one can be five minutes in the companionship of the Apostle Paul without discovering how wealthy is his sense of the wealthy, redeeming ministry of God.  What a wonderful consciousness he has of the sweep and fulness of the divine grace!  You know the variations of the glorious air:  “the unsearchable riches of Christ”; “riches in glory in Christ Jesus”; “all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ”; “the riches of his goodness and forbearance and long-suffering.”  The redemptive purpose of God bears upon the life of the apostle and upon the race whose privileges he shares, not in an uncertain and reluctant shower, but in a great and marvelous flood.  And what to him is the resultant enfranchisement?  What are the spacious issues of the glorious work?  Do you recall those wonderful sentences, scattered here and there about the apostle’s writings, and beginning with the words “but now”?  Each sentence proclaims the end of the dominion of night, and unveils some glimpse of the new created day.  “But now!” It is a phrase that heralds a great deliverance!  “But now, apart from the law the righteousness of God hath been manifested,” “But now, being made free from sin and become servants to God.”  “But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.”  “But now are ye light in the Lord.”  “Now, no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”  These represent no thin abstractions.  To Paul the realities of which they speak were more real than the firm and solid earth.  And is it