2. This is the first, the absolutely first, commandment, ex- pressing that which is of the first, the absolutely first, importance ; expressing that, indeed, without which no other commandment can in any sense that God accepts be said to be obeyed at all. Before': we do anything else, and in everything else we do, our whole being' must be inspired with love for the Lord our God. Otherwise we cannot keep any of God's commandments, as God counts keeping. Otherwise we cannot do anything good, as God counts good. Do what we may that appears to men to be righteous, — fast twice in the week ; mortify ourselves by our own stern strength of will, till our life is joyless and passionless ; observe a thousand and one traditions of men, till we are ready to drop with fatigue ; deny ourselves all things in a spirit of ascetic pride, — God is not pleased in the least little bit unless our heart and mind and soul are full of love for Him, as the sole motive of all that we do. Bow and posture as we will, unless our hearts swell with a full tide of love for God it profiteth nothing. To quote the words of our great singer, unless our hearts swell with love for God with
Such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound or foam.
304 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
all genuflections and prostrations are the merest mimicry of reverence.
^ It is surely true to say that our growing sensitiveness to human sorrow may sometimes have blunted our sensitiveness to human sin, and again in no way more certainly than by adhering to the order of Christ's two commandments can we ensure our recognition of the truth — absolutely vital to the Christian faith — of sin and its significance. The world has recently been enriched by the permanent memorial, drawn by a master hand, of one of the most striking personalities which — in our own land at least — the recent centuries have seen. Whatever opinion any man may have formed about the changes and chances of Mr. Gladstone's eventful life, no reader of these illuminating volumes will, I imagine, be found to doubt the indomitable vigour of his religious faith. In a remarkable passage, headed " Eeligion the Mainspring," the biographer has eloquently described that characteristic of the man. " All his activities," says Lord Morley, " were in his own mind one. This is the fundamental fact of Mr. Gladstone's history. Political life was only part of his religious life. ... It was religious motive that, through a thousand channels and avenues, stirred him and guided him in his whole conception of active social duty. . . . Life was to him, in all its aspects, an application of Christian teaching and example." When Mr. Gladstone himself records how the Bible had, at every crisis, been his stay, and recounts the very texts which, at special junctures in his earlier public life — the Oxford contest, his first Budget, the Crimean War, and so on — had, as he says, " come home to him as if borne on angels' wings," it grows clear and ever clearer that he had made his own the principle that, for the Christian man, the love of God comes first, and the love of man is its outcome and its fruit.^
^ Mazzini, all alone, as he tells us in his Autobiography, with the two great things in nature, the sky and the sea, felt the presence of God whose will was the redemption of Italy. Mazzini, in the strength of that knowledge, gave himself to serve his neighbours; he planned a revolt; he bound together the aspirations of the young; he held aloft a noble ideal; he encouraged, he rebuked, he restrained. Mazzini's love, unlike that of his predecessor Eienzi, who took memories for hopes, was not a copy of other men's love. He did not repeat in the nineteenth century the ways of a previous century ; he came as a man with a mission ; he did what he was bound to do ; he had learnt God's will, and with St. Paul he felt, " And woe is me if I do not obey." *
1 Archbishop Davidson. " S. A. Barnett.
ST. MARK 305
^ A child stood at the window of a baker's shop, looking in with hungry eyes. A lady passing by took compassion on her. The little one received the purchased dainties without a word, until at parting she quaintly and pathetically said, " Be you God's wife?" There was profound philosophy at the bottom of that. All true kindness proceeds from the best and noblest — yes, from God within us.^
ii. The Lord is one.
The Trinity of our faith means a distinction of persons within one common indivisible Divine nature. It implies, therefore, as its base, that the Divine nature is one and indivisible. It excludes the notion of gods many and lords many. For this reason God revealed the essential oneness of His being first ; and it was only after Israel had, through many weary centuries and many bitter lessons, learned that truth, that Jesus did or could disclose to His disciples " the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." On polytheistic soil no such revelation could have been, in the first instance, intelligible. Gentiles, accustomed to think of a throng of conflicting deities, would certainly have misunderstood it. It was to monotheistic Israel — to Israel, whose whole history had been one prolonged, and at the last successful, inculcation of this primary truth, " The Lord our God is one Jehovah," — that the later message could be sent with any hope of its being understood, that Jehovah's name is the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. When you think how passion- ately the Hebrews of our Lord's time clung to that peculiar tenet which their nation had been set in the heart of pagan polytheism on purpose to defend — the truth that God is one ; and when you see at the same time how such Hebrews as John, Paul, and Peter came to revere Jesus the Son of God as equally to be worshipped with the Father, and received the invisible Spirit who came at Pentecost as no less truly a Divine Person, you must feel that this new revelation of a Trinity in God left quite unaltered their old faith that God is one. It was a mighty and a blessed addition to tlixjir knowledge of Jehovah ; but it did not shake what they knew before — " Hear, 0 Israel : Jehovah our Lord is one Jehovah."