1. Love is everlasting. — It is from the first to the last. Love was, before love was expressed, as design is in the mind of the architect before he produces his drawings, and as harmony in the
1 Walter C. Smith.
122 EVERLASTING LOVE
soul of the composer of music before he has written a musical passage. From everlasting, until the day of creation, love was pent up, if one may so speak, in the being of God, as the central fires of our globe, or as the waters of a spring without an outlet. It was unmanifest then, as the light below the horizon ere the morning has dawned. This cannot be said of selfishness or sin in any form. Sin is old, but sin is not eternal. One can look back through the past and see where sin begins ; we cannot look back through the past and see where love begins, it is from everlasting.
T| In a letter dated June 22, 1864, Clerk Maxwell, who was then Professor of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London, wrote to his wife : " Love is an eternal thing, and love between father and son or husband and wife is not temporal if it be the right sort, for if the love of Christ and the Church be a reason for loving one another, and if the one be taken as an image of the other, then, if the mind of Christ be in us, it will produce this love as part of its complete nature, and it cannot be that the love which is first made holy, as being a reflection of part of the glory of Christ, can be any way lessened or taken away by a more complete transformation into the image of the Lord. I have been back at 1 Cor. xiii. I think the description of charity or Divine love is another loadstone for our life — to show us that this is one thiDg which is not in parts, but perfect in its own nature, and so it shall never be done away. It is nothing negative, but a well-defined, living, almost acting picture of goodness ; that kind of it which is human, but also divine." x
2. God's love is continuous. — " He loved us from the first of time, He loves us to the last." As His love cared for us in the past, it continues to care for us during the whole of our earthly life, notwithstanding all that may appear to be at variance with it. As it embraced us at first, irrespective of any good qualities in ourselves, so it embraces us throughout the whole of our varying experience. Our trials are no proof of its having forsaken us. Our unworthiness and sinfulness have not driven it away. When Israel was suffering as the consequence of wrong-doing, even then God bore testimony to His everlasting love, and intimated that through their suffering He would wean them from their sin, and thus promote their welfare. Thus did it prove its immutability
1 The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 338.
JEREMIAH xxxi. 3 123
amidst all changes in their experience, and in spite of all faults in their character.
Man's love ebbs and flows like the tide. Often it is as fickle as it is fervent. Sometimes when it talks loudest we can trust it least. Absence may cool it. Some little disappointment or opposition may change it into ill-concealed or unconcealed dislike. But there are no such changes in the love of God. His is no ebbing and flowing tide, but a sea, like the Mediterranean, ever full. His is no waxing and waning moon, but a full-orbed sun for ever shining in its strength. It shines as brightly and strongly now as it has ever done throughout the ages that are past ; and it will continue to shine with the same brightness and strength throughout all the ages that are to come.
Our hearts may be well-nigh broken under some crushing sorrow ; the light of our life may be taken away ; the bitterness of death may enter our homes ; the winter of an intolerable dis- content may smite within us every spring of happiness and leave only the consciousness of a misery that hardly dares to lift its head. God may seem far away from us — at least as a power of love — in the midst of the darkness that surrounds us. The very sun may be turned into blackness, and the flowers of the earth and the charms of the sea and sky, which were once as the breath of Paradise, may seem only to add to our misery. But the voice of God is not still because man does not hear it, and the love of God is not gone because man does not feel it. It is still crying to us ; it abides as an everlasting fact. No cloud can extinguish it, however it may obscure it ; no misery born of the depths of human despair, no tragedy of human agony or of human crime, can make that love doubtful. It is still there ; it is around us ; it is with us ; its everlasting arms are holding us even when we cannot feel it, and grasping us in its soft embrace although our feet may be bleeding and sore with the hardness of the road along which we travel.