but the rays from the centre of life pass on to each of the sister spheres in its turn, and travel away outwards to where the remotest of them all rolls in its far-off orbit, unknown for millenniums to dwellers closer to the sun, but through all the ages visited by warmth and light according to its needs.  Like that poor, sickly woman who could lay her wasted fingers on the hem of Christ’s garment, notwithstanding the thronging multitude, we can reach our hands through all the crowd, or rather He reaches His strong hand to us and heals and blesses us.  All the guests are fed full at that great table.  One’s gain is not another’s loss.  The multitudes sit on the green grass, and the last man of the last fifty gets as much as the first.  ’They did all eat, and were filled’; and more remains than fed them all.  So all beings are ‘nourished from the King’s country,’ and none jostle others out of their share.  This healing fountain is not exhausted of its curative power by the early comers.  ’I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.’  ’Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’

III.  The love of God is raised above the power of time.

‘Nor things present, nor things to come,’ is the Apostle’s next class of powers impotent to disunite us from the love of God.  The rhythmical arrangement of the text deserves to be noticed, as bearing not only on its music and rhetorical flow, but as affecting its force.  We had first a pair of opposites, and then a triplet; ’death and life:  angels, principalities, and powers.’  We have again a pair of opposites; ‘things present, things to come,’ again followed by a triplet, ‘height nor depth, nor any other creature.’  The effect of this is to divide the whole into two, and to throw the first and second classes more closely together, as also the third and fourth.  Time and Space, these two mysterious ideas, which work so fatally on all human love, are powerless here.

The great revelation of God, on which the whole of Judaism was built, was that made to Moses of the name ‘I Am that I Am.’  And parallel to the verbal revelation was the symbol of the Bush, burning and unconsumed, which is so often misunderstood.  It appears wholly contrary to the usage of Scriptural visions, which are ever wont to express in material form the same truth which accompanies them in words, that the meaning of that vision should be, as it is frequently taken as being, the continuance of Israel unharmed by the fiery furnace of persecution.  Not the continuance of Israel, but the eternity of Israel’s God is the teaching of that flaming wonder.  The burning Bush and the Name of the Lord proclaimed the same great truth of self-derived, self-determined, timeless, undecaying Being.  And what better symbol than the bush burning, and yet not burning out, could be found of that God in whose life there is no tendency to death, whose work digs no pit of weariness into which it falls, who gives and is none the poorer, who fears no exhaustion in His spending, no extinction in His continual shining?