ir. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.
1. If any man — a little weary of the modern cant about charity — should ask, " Why does Christ lay so much stress on love ? why does He declare the commandments which enjoin love of God and man to be the two commandments which include all others ? " the answer is plain and clear. Selfishness is the root and essence of all sin ; and love is the one passion that can conquer selfishness. When we do what our conscience condemns, it is because we seek thereby to advance our own interests, or supposed interests, or because we want to seize what we take for pleasure. We set up our own will against another and a higher Will That is to say, in the last resort, sin is always selfishness, the selfishness which defeats itself. Whenever we do wrong, we are making self our centre — self-interest, self- gratification, self-love. This base passion is natural to us, or natural to that which is base in us ; and, being natural, it is strong. The one passion that always masters it, that masters it for a time even in the basest and most grasping nature, is the passion of love. It is of the very essence of love that it is unselfish, that it prefers the welfare, the gain, or the pleasure of another to its own.
Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, ^nt for another gives its ease, ""^mS" builds a heaven in hell's despair.
It is only lust, that base and sensual counterfeit of love, which—
ST. MARK 309
Seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite.
2. There is no more deep and permanent pleasure in life than that which comes from the return of love and friendship from those whom you have steadily tried to train and teach, and set forward in life ; for whom you have laboured, and sacrificed your own delights, and limited your expenditures, that you might make Hfe easier and brighter to them hereafter. The steady love of children to their parents is the one all-compen- sating reward of all their toils. Now this love of being loved, . strongest in the noblest natures, is evidently an image of someV thing deeper still in God our Father, hard as it is at first to think that we can give any pleasure to Him. But so it must be. If Christ speaks of doing always those things which please Him, why should not we ? Enoch had this testimony that he " pleased God." Divine service ceases when we lose the idea of giving pleasure to God by loving Him and doing His will. The popular loss of this idea is, perhaps, the chief loss of modern religious thought. And it is a loss fatal to enthusiasm in religious life. The glow of a " good conscience " is the Lord's witness to His delight in a disinterested action, or in a sincerely grateful song.
God who registers the cup
Of mere cold water, for His sake
To a disciple rendered up —
Disdains not His own thirst to slake
At the poorest love was ever offered:
And because it was my heart I proffered,
With true love trembling at the brim,
He suffers me to follow Him
For ever ! ^
3. Let no man deceive you with vain words, when he would carry the whole matter into some region high above you, and say that the love of the Invisible God must differ in nature from that which we have all felt toward the created. The love which God bespeaks is that very feeling which makes you hurry back
^ B. Browning.
3IO THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
to your home from a journey — and encroach upon night-hours that you may write that letter which is the communion of the absent — and thrill with a joy which cannot deceive, when you casually meet, eye to eye and heart to heart, one from whom years and lands and all save thoughts have divided you — and weep bitter tears at the grave of him whom disease or accident, consumption or drowning, have torn from you prematurely — the love is this love — no colder or calmer, no duller or less exciting — •when God, not man, is its object.
^ Have you never seen a young mother with her babe upon her arm, sitting, with steady gaze of unspeakable love fixed upon her little one, pouring down upon it from her soul-lighted countenance a radiance of tenderness which might awake almost a stone to life, and waiting, with finger upon those infant lips, till they opened in a smile, and the answering guileless eyes dissolved in the sunbeams of a love which could not speak its meaning, but which more than satisfied and repaid her for all her sorrow and her sleepless care ? Even so may one see, as in a vision, the Soul in the arms of God, who is Father and Mother both; who hath bestowed on it His own life and redeemed it for eternal joys ; but as yet it lies passive and unintelligent in the warm Divine embrace, and all the return that it can make for the " love that passeth knowledge," and for the adoption, and the covenants, and the treasures of everlasting joy, is but as an infant's smile — a flickering ray of sunlight which lasts but for a moment, and which gives but faint promise of the strong filial love of maturity. Now, if the young mother is satisfied, is not God, who made her, satisfied too ? If the one reads in the faint and vanishing light of her baby's features the pledge of her son's love and devotion when he becomes a man, shall not the everlasting God under- stand the smile of His little children, and value it infinitely as the promise of a love that shall strengthen with the ages, and never, never die ? ^