The statement is true, taken with the most general reference. All the beauty, and comfort, and joy in our lives come from God; and this as bounties, as free gifts to us, the undeserving. Whatever intermediate agencies He may have chosen to employ, yet to Him the gifts are wholly due; and we should never rest in the view merely of secondary agencies, but rise in thought to the great Fountain of life and joy, and praise the divine love. It is God that 'healeth our diseases, redeemeth our lives from destruction, and satisfieth our mouths with good things.' 'The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.' 'O Lord, Thou preservest man and beast. How excellent is Thy loving-kindness, O God! Therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of Thy wings.'

It is evident, however, from the nature of the argument on which the apostle is engaged, that he speaks of God's gifts here with special reference to their action on the soul of man ; for he is exhibiting the truth which stands opposed to the error that God is the author of sin. It is by no means improbable that the direct influences of the Holy Ghost were primarily in his thoughts, in speaking of 'good gifts.' At least the expression would very naturally suggest to him (or.be suggested to him by) the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?' (Matt. vii. 11); of which last expression the Lord Himself, by the form in which He repeated the declaration on another occasion, showed the chief reference in His mind to be to divine influence on the heart: How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?' (Luke xi. 13.) I have before had occasion to remark that the Sermon on the Mount had evidently made a peculiarly deep impression on this apostle, and exercised great sway in the formation of his cast of religious thought, and over the language of the Epistle. In the verse before us, then, as it appears to me, he says: All the influences brought into action on men's hearts which are in their nature good and perfect, and tend to make

men good and perfect, all the enlightening and quickening dealings of the Holy Ghost, are from God.' But, further, everything that God has created may, under certain circumstances, exert power over our moral nature. All these things

too, then, the apostle would have us understand, are in their original tendency, as designed by God, 'good,' and helpful to man's soul. As they come from the divine hand, they are, as regards moral influence, as well as in all other respects, 'perfect' in their kind; and if, in the influence they actually exert on men, there be anything bad or imperfect, drawing to sin and not to holiness, this element has entered from another source than God-even, as the apostle has already told us, from man's perverse desires. Corruption is in the world through lust.' The harvest-field, waving with golden grain, is in itself a 'good gift,' a 'perfect boon,' fitted and designed to fill the soul with thankfulness and love to the great Giver, though the fertility may swell the possessor's heart with sinful pride and self-confidence, tempting him to say, 'Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.' 'Every gift that is good, and every boon that is perfect, is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.'

This peculiar name here given to God, 'the Father of lights, calls now for consideration. By the statement that 'every good gift is from above'-'from that world yonder,' as we instinctively conceive the apostle saying, pointing upward-the thoughts of any reflective and imaginative person might very easily be carried at once to that glorious effulgence of light which the sun is pouring forth on the world from day to day, quickening and gladdening all nature, as both in itself a 'good gift' of God, and a lively type or picture for the heart of that boundless outflow of kindness, that golden radiance of blessing, ever streaming forth from heaven to undeserving To a Hebrew, to whose warm Eastern imagination the language of figure and symbolism was almost as natural as the plainest prose is to us, the thought I have mentioned could hardly fail to occur, remembering as he did that every

men.

where in his ancient Scriptures light is the favourite image for every kind of good and perfect gift'—for knowledge, for holiness, for happiness, for all excellences of mind and heart, for whatever is most noble, and beautiful, and precious. 'Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart.' 'The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?''There be many that say, Who will show us any good? Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.' To 'the twelve tribes scattered abroad,' therefore, nothing could appear more natural than the apostle's expression, 'Every good gift and every perfect boon is from above, and cometh down from the great Creator of the lights,—the grand primal Fountain of all that illumines, and enlivens, and glad dens in the universe. The reference is in the first place, no doubt, to the material luminaries, particularly the two great lights that God has set in the sky-the sun to rule the day,' and the moon 'to rule the night;' but this simply as the starting-point of thought regarding all those joys and excellences, those myriad 'good gifts and perfect boons,' of which light is the type. The use of the term 'Father' for 'Creator' is due, as I have already explained, to the figure of birth or generation which runs through the whole passage, and which we find showing itself again in the next verse, in ‘begat.' It is not impossible that James had in his mind the words spoken by Jehovah Himself to Job out of the whirlwind, Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?' (Job xxxviii. 28.)

In the words which follow, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, there is an implied contrast between God, the Creator of the lights, and all the lights He has created, material or spiritual. The 'gifts,' which are 'good and perfect' as they come from Him, are marred by the weakness and folly of man; and the lights of the firmament, which symbolize these, have, by God's appointment, revolutions and variations. The sun is not always with us. He leaves us to the gloom of night—a night at some seasons longer than the day; and this gloom of night is not always dispelled by the

moon, 'walking in brightness:' for she, too, has her times of darkness. Sometimes, also, in the revolutions of the earth, and of its satellite the moon, the sun is eclipsed from us by the intervention of the moon, or the moon by the shadow of the earth. But with the Father of lights there is no variableness, nor any shadow from turning,'-any shadow, that is to say, caused by revolution; for this appears to be the meaning, and not what the English words 'neither shadow of turning' most readily import, 'not the slightest turning,' 'not a shadow of change.' The statement is obviously substantially equivalent to that of John, 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all' (1st Ep. i. 5).

We have here, you observe, an important link in the apostle's argument, which may be stated thus: 'God cannot be in any sense or measure the author of sin; for sin is darkness,1 whereas God is light, light that knows no darkness, no shadow,―essentially, eternally, immutably light.' He is 'the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever,' the Giver of 'good and perfect gifts,' of nothing but 'good and perfect gifts.' Storm and earthquake have great ends of kindness to work out. Afflictions, as God designs them, are among His choicest blessings. The final judgments on the obstinately impenitent are designed and needed to maintain the honour of the divine government, and thus secure the highest and everlasting good of the moral universe. 'Every gift that is good, and every boon that is perfect, is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither any shadow from turning.'

In a world such as this is—a world of confusions, of sins, and struggles, and sorrows-even the 'lights' that the church of God enjoys will always be subject to 'change' and 'shadow,' though their Creator knows none; but it will not be so with her always. She counts Him faithful who hath promised: 'Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.'

1 Compare 1 John i. 6, and indeed the whole of the first part of that Epistle.

VI.

REGENERATION.

'Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of His creatures.'-JAMES I. 18.

THI

HIS is a verse of very great interest. The truth set forth in it is in itself one of unspeakable importance; and the statement of it here has a special value for students of this Epistle, from the fact that it exhibits more clearly and fully than any other passage what sceptically-inclined persons have often questioned the perfect harmony between the teaching of James and that of the other apostles respecting the way of salvation, the essence of evangelical truth. The object James had mainly in view led him to draw the attention of his readers chiefly to the fruits of piety; here its roots are described, very briefly, but with marvellous completeness and beauty, and in a form so Pauline, that probably most persons who heard the words quoted apart from the context would look for them first in Romans or Ephesians.

The statement is, that 'God, the Father or Originator of all enlightening and quickening influences, has of His free will originated a new life in us Christians, by means of the word of His truth, and to the intent that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures.' The connection with the previous argument is somewhat on this wise: 'Consider the greatest of all His good and perfect gifts; He has given us life: how is it conceivable that He, immutable, always consistent, without variableness or shadow from turning, could be the author of death?'

We have brought before us in this verse, then, the subject of regeneration or the new birth, that great change of heart elsewhere spoken of as a new creation, or a resurrection from the