And what facts in the divine conduct does this great word represent?  A God that beseeches.  Well, think of the tears of imploring love which fell from Christ’s eyes as He looked across the valley from Olivet, and saw the Temple glittering in the early sunshine.  Think of ’O Jerusalem!  Jerusalem! ... how often would I have gathered thy children together ... and ye would not.’  And are we not to see in the Christ who wept in the earnestness of His desire, and in the pain of its disappointment, the very revelation of the Father’s heart and the very action of the Father’s arm?  ’Come unto me, all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’  That is Christ beseeching and God beseeching in Him.  Need I quote other words, gentle, winning, loving?  Do we not feel, when looking upon Christ, as if the secret of His whole life was the stretching out imploring and welcoming hands to men, and praying them to grasp His hands, and be saved?  But, oh, brethren! the fact that towers above all others, which explains the whole procedure of divinity, and is the keystone of the whole arch of revelation; the fact which reveals in one triple beam of light, God, man, and sin in the clearest illumination, is the Cross of Jesus Christ.  And if that be not the very sublime of entreaty; and if any voice can be conceived, human or divine, that shall reach men’s hearts with a more piercing note of pathetic invitation than sounds from that Cross, I know not where it is.  Christ that dies, in His dying breath calls to us, and ’the blood of sprinkling speaketh better things than that of Abel’; inasmuch as its voice is, ‘Come unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.’

Not only in the divine facts of the life and death of Jesus Christ, but in all the appeals of that great revelation which lies before us in Scripture; and may I say, in the poor, broken utterances of men whose harsh, thin voices try to set themselves, in some measure, to the sweetness and the fulness of His beseeching tones—­does God call upon you to draw close to Him, and put away your enmity.  And not only by His Word written or ministered from human lips, but also by the patient providences of His love He calls and prays you to come.  A mother will sometimes, in foolish fondness, coax her sullen child by injudicious kindness, or, in wise patience, will seek to draw the little heart away from the faults that she desires not to notice, by redoubled ingenuity of tenderness and of care.  And so God does with us.  When you and I, who deserve—­oh! so different treatment—­get, as we do get, daily care and providential blessings from Him, is not that His saying to us, ’I beseech you to cherish no alienation, enmity, indifference, but to come back and live in the love’?  When He draws near to us in these outward gifts of His mercy, is He not doing Himself what He has bid us to do; and what He never could have bid us to do, nor our hearts have recognised to be the highest strain of human virtue to do, unless He Himself were doing it first?  ’If thine enemy hunger, feed him.  If he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.’