My conscience may deal with my experiences, and I may be humbled by the character and the measure of them, but my faith deals with God and His wondrous revelations. If, for instance, I have but little delight in the sense of His everlasting love to me, it should humble me; but then faith receives the fact of my Father's delight in these same thoughts of everlasting love, and I have "joy and peace in believing." There is music in heaven over the repentant sinner, and the little tiny pleasure that we, once repentant sinners, may have in God's love to us is but the echo of that music, and often the very faint and distant echo. But we must not be hanging over the echo, grieving and moaning because it is so faint and indistinct, but rather with free and happy thoughts be led from this poor and distant joy in our own hearts to the rich and full delight of that heaven where the Father's love, in spirit, brings us. So in everything, let faith be in exercise; let faith, as another instance of its way, know and allow that the ascending love is never equal to the descending. A child never loves a parent with the same intenseness that a parent loves a child; and, more than this, the parent is very satisfied to have it so. And thus with our heavenly Father. He cannot be indifferent to the state of our affections toward Him, but still He understands that His love never can and never will receive its full answer from us. And He is more than satisfied to have it so. He is in the higher place Himself, and the descending affections flow more largely, and with a richer and a more generous tide, than the ascending. With all this, then, faith deals; it takes up God's delight in His own thoughts and counsels about us—it trusts the reality and the fervency and the unrepentancy of His love, and learns that no counsels or plans of glory and of joy are too magnificent for such love.