ast fifty gets as much as the first. 'They did all eat, and were
filled'; and more remains than fed them all. So all beings are
'nourished from the King's country,' and none jostle others out of
their share. This healing fountain is not exhausted of its curative
power by the early comers. 'I will give unto this last, even as unto
thee.' 'Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God.'

III. The love of God is raised above the power of time.

'Nor things present, nor things to come,' is the Apostle's next class
of powers impotent to disunite us from the love of God. The
rhythmical arrangement of the text deserves to be noticed, as bearing
not only on its music and rhetorical flow, but as affecting its
force. We had first a pair of opposites, and then a triplet; 'death
and life: angels, principalities, and powers.' We have again a pair
of opposites; 'things present, things to come,' again followed by a
triplet, 'height nor depth, nor any other creature.' The effect of
this is to divide the whole into two, and to throw the first and
second classes more closely together, as also the third and fourth.
Time and Space, these two mysterious ideas, which work so fatally on
all human love, are powerless here.

The great revelation of God, on which the whole of Judaism was built,
was that made to Moses of the name 'I Am that I Am.' And parallel to
the verbal revelation was the symbol of the Bush, burning and
unconsumed, which is so often misunderstood. It appears wholly
contrary to the usage of Scriptural visions, which are ever wont to
express in material form the same truth which accompanies them in
words, that the meaning of that vision should be, as it is frequently
taken as being, the continuance of Israel unharmed by the fiery
furnace of persecution. Not the continuance of Israel, but the
eternity of Israel's God is the teaching of that flaming wonder. The
burning Bush and the Name of the Lord proclaimed the same great truth
of self-derived, self-determined, timeless, undecaying Being. And
what better symbol than the bush burning, and yet not burning out,
could be found of that God in whose life there is no tendency to
death, whose work digs no pit of weariness into which it falls, who
gives and is none the poorer, who fears no exhaustion in His
spending, no extinction in His continual shining?

And this eternity of Being is no mere metaphysical abstraction. It is
eternity