t enough for the Apostles?
Why did they use Grace? Why did they use, too, in the sense of giving
and gifts, nouns and verbs derived from that root-word, CHARIS, grace,
which plainly signified so much to them? A word, the root-meaning of
which was neither more nor less than a certain heathen goddess, or
goddesses--the inspirer of beauty in art, the impersonation of all that
is pure, charming, winning, bountiful--in one word, of all that is
graceful and gracious in the human character. The fact is strange, but
the fact is there; and being there, we must face it and explain it. Of
course, the Apostles use the word grace in a far deeper and loftier
meaning; raise it, mathematically speaking, to a far higher power. There
is no need to remind you of that. But why did they choose and use the
word at all--a word whose old meaning every heathen knew--unless for some
innate fitness in it to express something in the character of God? To
tell men that there was in God a graciousness, as of the most gracious of
all human beings, which gave to His character a moral beauty, a charm, a
winningness, which, as even the old Jewish prophet, before the
Incarnation, could perceive and boldly declare, drew them with the cords
of a man and with the bands of love, attracting them by the very human
character of its graciousness.

"The glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace."
Meditate on those words. "Full of grace,"--of that spirit which we, like
the old heathens, consider rather a feminine than a masculine excellence;
the spirit, which, as St. James says of God the Father, gives simply and
upbraideth not; gives gracefully, as we ourselves say--in the right and
happy use of the adverb; does not spoil its gifts by throwing them in the
teeth of the giver, but gives for mere giving's sake; pleases where it
can be done, without sin or harm, for mere pleasing's sake; most human
and humane when it is most divine; the spirit by which Christ turned the
water into wine at the marriage feast, and so manifested forth His
absolute and eternal glory. And how? How?

Thus, if you will receive it; if you will believe a truth which is too
often hidden from the wise and prudent, and yet revealed unto babes;
which will never be understood by the proud Pharisee, the sour fanatic,
the ascetic who dreads and distrusts his Father in heaven; but which is
clear and simple enough to many a clear and simple