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like union, the love grows fond, intense, eternal It is entire love. The love itself is part of God. The love rests. Our whole being gathers itself up to one focus, and the demand becomes possible, and the duty becomes a necessity : " Hear, 0 Israel : the Lord our God is one Lord : and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."
^ When one of the Eoman Emperors — after a great triumph, a military victory — was coming back to Eome, he went up the Appian Hill in great state, with his foes dragged at his chariot wheels. Many soldiers surrounded him, adding to his triumphant entry. On going up the hill, a little child broke through the crowd. " You must not go there," said the soldiers, " that is the emperor." The little child replied, "True, he is your emperor, hut he is my father ! " ^
Be Thou the well by which I lie and rest;
Be Thou my tree of life, my garden ground;
Be Thou my home, my fire, my chamber blest,
My book of wisdom, loved of all the best ;
Oh, be my friend, each day still newer found,
As the eternal days and nights go round !
Nay, nay — Thou art my God, in whom all loves are bound ! ^
▼. With all thy Heart, and with all thy Soul, and with all thy Mind, and with all thy Strength.
The fourfold repetition of the word " all " lays great emphasis on the entirety of the love. This does not mean that the love of God excludes all other love — for then, indeed, the second commandment would contradict the first. But it means that our love for God is to be supreme, admitting no rivalry. Nor is it implied that no progress in this perfect love is possible. ^ To-day we love God to our utmost capacity ; to-morrow our capacity may be enlarged, and still we are to love God with all our enlarged capacity. Thus there need be no limit to the growth of love. Our nature shall go on to expand for evermore, and our expanding nature shall evermore be filled with God.
Heart — Soul — Mind — Strength. — These distinctions are not nominal ; they are not the urgent reiterations which seek * James Vauglian. ' George MacDonald.
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to press upon the mind an all-important interest ; they mark not different degrees, but different kinds of love, each of which is needed to make our piety complete, to preserve devotion from being partial in its directions or morbid in its fruits, to bring our whole nature into the fulness of its relations with Him who is both the Object and the Nourisher of all our faculties. With his heart man appreciates God's mercies ; with his soul he appreciates God's holiness, the living impulses of His Spirit ; with his mind he appreciates the majesty and order of God's thought ; with his strength he adores and imitates the constancy of God's will, the righteousness of His rule ; but it is very possible for one of these principles or affections to be in a state of high vitality, while others are torpid and unused, not exerting the energy that is in them to make us like to God. For this is the end of every faculty and affection we possess, to draw us towards Him in whom it perfectly exists, and from whom it receives inexhaustible supplies.
No man completely and worthily loves any noble thing or person unless he loves it with his mind as well as with his heart and soul and strength. That will not, I think, be very hard to see. Take, for instance, your love for some beautiful scene of nature. There is somewhere upon the earth a lovely, lordly landscape which you love. When you are absent from it, you remember it with delight and longing. When you step into the sight of it after long absence, your heart thrills and leaps. While you sit quietly gazing day after day upon it, your whole nature rests in peace and satisfaction, Now, what is it in you that loves that loveliness? Love I take to be the delighted perception of the excellence of things. With what do you delightedly perceive how excellent is all that makes up that landscape's beauty — the bending sky, the rolling hill, the sparkling lake, the waving harvest, and the brooding mist ? First of all, no doubt, with your senses. It is the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the sense of feeling which in the glowing cheek is soothed or made to tingle, the sense of smell which catches sweet odours from the garden or the hayfield, — it is these that love the land- scape first ; you love it first with all your senses. But next to that what comes ? Suppose that the bright scene is radiant with associations ; suppose that by that river you have walked
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witli your most helpful friend ; upon that lake you have floated and frolicked when you were a boy ; across that field you have guided the staggering plough ; over that hill you have climbed in days when life was all sunshine and breeze. That part of you which is capable of delightedly perceiving these associations as they shine up to you from the glowing scenery, perceives them with delight and takes the landscape into its affection. You love the scene with all your heart. But yet again, suppose a deeper faculty in you perceives the hand of God in all this wondrous beauty ; suppose a glad and earnest gratitude springs up in you and goes to meet the meadows and the sky ; suppose that all seems to tell to some deep listening instinct in you that it was all made for you, and made by one who loved you; suppose that it all stands as a rich symbol of yet richer spiritual benefits of which you are aware ; what then ? Does not another part of you spring up and pour out its affection — your power of reverence and gratefulness ; and so you love the landscape then with all your soul. Or yet again, if the whole scene appears to tempt you with invitations to work : the field calling you to till it, and the river to bridge it, and the hill to set free the precious- ness of gold or silver with which its heart is full and heavy. To that you respond with your powers of working ; and then you love the scene with all your will or all your strerigth. And now, suppose that, beyond all things, another spirit comes out from the landscape to claim another yet unclaimed part of you ; suppose that unsolved problems start out from the earth and from the sky. Glimpses of relationships between things and of qualities in things flit before you, just letting you see enough of them to set your curiosity all astir. The scene which cried before, " Come, admire me," or " Come, work on me," now cries, " Come, study me." What hangs the stars in their places and swings them on their way ; how the earth builds the stately tree out of the petty seed ; how the river feeds the cornfield ; where lie the metals in the mountains — these, and a hundred other questions, leap out from the picture before you and, pressing in, past your senses and your emotions and your practical powers, will not rest till they have found out your intelligence. They appeal to the mind, and the mind responds to them ; not coldly, as if it had nothing to do but just to find and register their