life, if that light from God, the beam of
His love, shines down upon it, rises into nobility, and flashes into
beauty, and is calm and fair and great, as nothing else can make it.
You may dwell in love by dwelling in God, and then your lives will be
fair. You have access into the grace; see that you go there. They
tell us that nightingales sing by the wayside by preference, and we
may have in our lives, singing a quiet tune, the continual thought of
the love of God, even whilst life's highway is dusty and rough, and
our feet are often weary in treading it. A Christian life may be, and
therefore should be, suffused with the sense of the abiding love of
God.

Take the other meaning of the word, the secondary and derived
meaning, the communication of that love to us, and that leads us to
say that a Christian life may, and therefore should, be enriched with
continual gifts from God's fullness. I said that the Apostle was
using a metaphor here, regarding the grace as being an ample
space into which a man was admitted, or we may say that he is
thinking of it as a great treasure-house. We have the right of
entrance there, where on every side, as it were, lie ingots of
uncoined gold, and masses of treasure, and we may have just as much
or as little as we choose. It is entirely in our own determination
how much of the wealth of God we shall possess. We have access to the
treasure-house; and this permit is put into our hands: 'Be it unto
thee even as thou wilt.' The size of the sack that the man brings, in
the old story, determined the amount of wealth that he carried away.
Some of you bring very tiny baskets and expect little and desire
little; you get no more than you desired and expected.

That wealth, the fullness of God, takes the shape of, as well as is
determined in its measure by the magnitude of, the vessel into which
it is put. It is multiform, and we get whatever we desire, and
whatever either our characters or our circumstances require. The one
gift assumes all forms, just as water poured into a vase takes the
shape of the vase into which it is poured. The same gift unfolds
itself in an infinite variety of manners, according to the needs of
the man to whom it is given; just as the writer's pen, the
carpenter's hammer, the farmer's ploughshare, are all made out of the
same metal. So God's grace comes to you in a different shape from
that in which it comes to me, according to our different callings and
needs, as fixe