^ Rainy, Life, i. 131. 2 y^ y^-^ Bobertson, Sermons, ii. 101.
i6o WHERE HE DELIGHTS TO DWELL
communion with the Most High. The reason is at once apparent. True obedience can spring only from love. " He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me." Love is the hidden fountain; obedience is the visible stream. In its truest and highest forms Christianity is a religion of principles. It works from the centre outwards to the circumference. Its language is not " Do this," and " Forbear from that," but " Love, and thou fullillest the law."
[ ^ That is exactly what distinguishes and lifts the morality of the Gospel above all other systems. The worst man in the world ; knows a great deal more of his duty than the best man does. It is \ not for want of knowledge that men go to the devil, but it is for want of power to live their knowledge. And what morality fails to do, with its clearest utterances of human duty, Christ comes and does. The one is like the useless proclamations posted up in some rebellious district, where there is no army to back them, and the king's authority from whom they come is flouted. The other gets itself obeyed. Such is the difference between the powerless morality of the world and the commandment of Jesus Christ. Here is the road plain and straight. What matters that, if there is no force to draw the cart along it ? There might as well be no road at all. Here stand all your looms, polished and in perfect order, but there is no steam in the boilers ; and so there is no motion, and nothing woven. What we want is not law but power. And what the Gospel gives us, and stands alone in giving us, is not merely the knowledge of the will of God and the clear revelation of what we ought to be, but it is the power to become it. Love does that, and love alone. That strong force brought into action in our hearts will drive out from thence all rivals, all false and low things. The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth has it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless work to wheel out the filth in wheel- barrows loaded by spades : turn the stream in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes into the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold. When Christ comes into my heart, then all the obscene and twilight-loving shapes that lurked there, and defiled it, will vanish like ghosts at cock-crowing before His calm and pure presence. He, and He alone, entering my heart by the portals of my love, will coerce my evil and stimulate my good. And if I love Him, I shall keep His commandments,^
* A. Maclaren, Holy of Holies, 72.
ST. JOHN XIV. 23 161
^ When the sun rises in the east, the sunflower opens towards its rays, and turns ever eagerly towards the sun, even until its setting in the west ; and at night it closes and hides its colours and awaits the return of the sun. Even so will we open our hearts by obedience towards the illumination of the grace of God, and humbly and eagerly will we follow that grace so long as we feel the warmth of love. And when the light of grace ceases to awaken fresh emotions, and we feel the warmth of love but little, or feel it not at all, then it is night, when we shall close our heart to all that may tempt it ; and so shall we shut up within ourselves the golden colour of love, awaiting a new dawn, with its new brightness and its fresh emotions; and thus shall we preserve innocence always in its pristine splendour.^
2. The outcome of true love is ohedience. — There is no love worth calling love which does not obey. All the emotional and the mystic, and the so-called higher parts of Christian experience, have to be content to submit to this plain test — Do they help us to live as Christ would have us, and that because He would have us ? Love to Him which does not keep His commandments is either spurious or dangerously feeble. The true sign of its presence in the heart and the noblest of its operations is to be found not in high-pitched expressions of fervid emotion, or even in the sacred joys of solitary communion, but in its making us, while in the rough struggle of daily life, and surrounded by trivial tasks, live near Him, and by Him, and for Him, and like Him.
So the test of love is obedience ; and the more overmastering the love, the more will the obedience — not as reluctant, but as eager, not as a yoke or a burden, but as a passion and a life — dominate the whole self. It may be true that obedience which is not love is valueless. It is certainly true that love which does not express itself, perforce, in obedience, is not love. To the natural self the obedience of Christ seems burdensome. It is only experience of obedience that gives the lie to the instincts of the natural self. It is only experience that makes the religious man realize at last that Christ's yoke is easy, and His burden is light — not indeed because it dispenses with self-denial, but because self-denial itself, as the necessary expression of desire towards God, finds in its own very suffering a gladness which is greater and deeper than the pain.