The oneness of these two words together will have been marked by most of those who read these pages. Most will have known too that each of the words signifies the same, so that "Father, Father" would be the literal translation. One is Hebrew, or Aramean, and the other Greek, in the New Testament.

Three times are the two words brought thus together, and nothing is without its importance which God has given us in His Word. In Mark's gospel, chap. 14:36, we have the first occurrence, in the Lord's intercourse with the Father in the garden; but nothing in the use of the words appears there to help us to the understanding of their import. The other two passages are Rom. 8:15 and Gal. 4:6. Both these epistles deal with the foundation-truths of Christianity. The one unfolds, in a systematic way, the grace of God visiting the two great divisions of the human family with salvation, upon the common basis of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which God had been pleased to meet the need alike of those under law, as well as of those Who had no law, with a righteousness of His own providing, through faith. The other, Galatians, presenting the same truths in a somewhat different way, and rescuing the truth from the perversions of enemies, or the enemy, through his agents, treats of the same things in great degree, and shows alike Jew a Gentile sharing in the blessings of the gospel faith. In both these epistles, then, we have, as the Holy Spirit's utterance in the heart of the believer -the Spirit of adoption, or sonship, these words:"Abba, Father." Surely, it is plain that this is nothing else than to teach us our common brotherhood with the family of faith, and is the cry of the Jew and the Gentile, as we read in Eph. 2:18, " Through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father." Not that the Jew says, "Abba," and the Gentile, "Father;" but each uses the double form, each recognizes by the words of his cry that the enmity between Jew and Gentile-that deep hatred nothing else could destroy-is gone, and in his access to a common Father, each owns the other's share in all that that name implies. Thus the gospel, as alike to Jew and Gentile-to all that are afar off as well as to those that were nigh, is given us in these precious and oft-used words. And may we not well believe that the Lord's use of these word's in Mark 14:36 is but another of the beautiful and distinctive features of that book in which Jesus our Lord is presented in His servant-character, ministering the gospel of God.

" ' Abba, Father! 'Lord, we call Thee,
(Hallowed name !) from day to day ;
'Tis Thy children's right to know Thee,
None but children 'Abba' say."

R.T.G.