Man is not what God made him for; man is not what God made him to be; and God is God. His purpose may lapse for a little, His designs may be delayed on the way, but if the beginning points to the grand end, that end will be reached. God meant it. God means it. God shall do it. We stand farther on along the track of God's providential dealings with men. We see more than the writer to the Hebrews saw. He, too, remembered that psalm when he described man as he ought to be. Why did he still let it live and exist as a thing that is true? He could wait. What was he waiting for? And what were the singers thinking of as they chanted that psalm? They thought of a good time coming, they thought not the less of the disaster, they thought of God redeeming men, of God causing a Man to be born who should be a Deliverer, they thought of Him reaching out hands of help to all who came to Him, and the writer to the Hebrews writes truly when he says that that is prophesied of Christ. It is a prediction of His coming. God cannot be foiled. Man is not yet what God created him to be, the crown of all the earth-creation, but in the divine heart and mind there has been that vision—man wanting but little of exaltation to be next to God—man the lord of all—and the writer to the Hebrews was able to say, "God has achieved it; in Christ, crowned King and Lord of all creation, the psalm is fulfilled." What depth of meaning and of wonder, of future joy and triumph, there is in that feeling he has of Christ as the Flower and Fruit of God's design in all creation! What depth of meaning there may be I do not dare to fathom, of good to all mankind; but this I will think,—that in the end of time when all things have been summed up and restored in Jesus Christ, when God shall have gathered together in one the broken threads, when the whole creation that with man groaneth until now, shall be delivered from its bondage—God will be seen not to have failed. What future revelation of grandeur, and of Divine goodness, and of redemption beyond our utmost thoughts, there may be, I do not think we were meant to know. I do not think we should dare to dogmatise; but we were meant to have our eyes drawn away to that glorious, radiant, splendrous future, and we are bidden there to see all God's loving pity and wise provision for us. Ah! God is working; He is creating, loving; He is providing, planning; He is redeeming creation, gathering together into one grand whole a restored humanity and a ransomed creation; and all mysteriously and strangely wrought into a great unity with Christ, and through Christ, with God. XIV. _CHRISTIAN GIVING._ PREACHED IN WILLESDEN PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEPTEMBER 24TH, 1882.