So it is with the attributes of God; our knowledge of them serves us for our daily welfare; they give us light and warmth and food and guidance and succor; but go forth with Moses upon the mount and let the Lord pass by, 15 or with Elias stand in the desert amid the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, and all is mystery and darkness; all is but a whirling of the reason, and a dazzling of the imagination, and an overwhelming of the feelings, reminding us that we 20 are but mortal men and He is God, and that the outlines which Nature draws for us are not His perfect image, nor to be pronounced inconsistent with those further lights and depths with which it is invested by Revelation. 25 Say not, my brethren, that these thoughts are too austere for this season, when we contemplate the self-sacrificing, self-consuming charity wherewith God our Saviour has visited us. It is for that very reason that I dwell on them; the higher He 30 is, and the more mysterious, so much the more glorious and the more subduing is the history of His humiliation. I own it, my brethren, I love to dwell on Him as the Only-begotten Word; nor is it any forgetfulness of His sacred humanity to contemplate His Eternal Person. It is the very 5 idea, that He is God, which gives a meaning to His sufferings; what is to me a man, and nothing more, in agony, or scourged, or crucified? there are many holy martyrs, and their torments were terrible. But here I see One dropping blood, 10 gashed by the thong, and stretched upon the Cross, and He is God. It is no tale of human woe which I am reading here; it is the record of the passion of the great Creator. The Word and Wisdom of the Father, who dwelt in His bosom 15 in bliss ineffable from all eternity, whose very smile has shed radiance and grace over the whole creation, whose traces I see in the starry heavens and on the green earth, this glorious living God, it is He who looks at me so piteously, so tenderly 20 from the Cross. He seems to say,--I cannot move, though I am omnipotent, for sin has bound Me here. I had had it in mind to come on earth among innocent creatures, more fair and lovely than them all, with a face more radiant than the 25 Seraphim, and a form as royal as that of Archangels, to be their equal yet their God, to fill them with My grace, to receive their worship, to enjoy their company, and to prepare them for the heaven to which I destined them; but, before I 30 carried My purpose into effect, they sinned, and lost their inheritance; and so I come indeed, but come, not in that brightness in which I went forth to create the morning stars and to fill the sons of