Christ for today Author:Jesus Christ Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WHAT GOD IS. BY CANON SCOTT HOLLAND, ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, AND CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD. " God is Love."—I John iv. 16. CIMPLE, clear, easy, and welcome th... more »e good words look; a child would lightly accept them from the authority of a mother's lips ; they would be to it the key to the gladness that it found in the happy ways of innocence, sheltered and hedged from all the outrage of pain, from all the terror of sin. " God is Love :" yes ! who would not believe it amid the kindly and encompassing graces of home, before the touch of weariness, or the shadow of regret, has saddened at all the bright gaieties of an untainted life ? And yet, how were they spoken ? By an old man of rare and slow speech, of long ponder- ings and deep contemplations, drawing close to a mysterious end, gathering up, with deliberate and meditative effort, the sum of strange and many-sided experiences. He sits, far from home and country, an exile from his people, surrounded by influences that once he would have abhorred, by faces that, in his youth, he would have cursed. He looks back on a life crowded with anxieties, crossed by bitter sorrows, hot with many passions, saddened by a thousand losses, full of surprises, and doubts, and fears, and scruples, cloven in two by the breach of a tremendous disaster—a life of much pain, and struggle, and strife, filled with visions ofdark desolation, of angels who smite with awful swords, of vials of God's wrath that pour out plagues, of thun- derings, and lightnings, and mighty voices, of blood and fire and vapour of smoke—a life that is now sinking down, widowed of all old familiar friends, amid threaten- ings of foes, amid rumours of tumult and trouble. He had felt the fury of kings, he had looked on the madness of mobs, he had swooned at the terrors of divine in...« less