ST. JOHN XXI. 15-17 429
liberately stakes everything on this single qualification. " Lovest thou me ? " is His sole test for discipleship. It seems as if nothing else seriously mattered in His judgment, compared with this one master passion of the soul. " Lovest thou me ? " — will there be any other question for us to answer at the last assize ? ^
What is the beginning ? Love. "What the course ? Love still. What is the goal ? The goal is Love on the happy hill. Is there nothing then but Love, search we sky or earth ? There is nothing out of Love hath perpetual worth: All things flag but only Love, all things fail or flee; There is nothing left but Love worthy you and me.^
• ^ Let me take this as my Master's question to myself; and
see how deep it goes, not only into my feelings, but into my life.
For it is not, " Believest thou Me ? " or " Understandest thou Me ? "
i or " Confessest thou Me ? " or " Obeyest thou Me ? " or even,
i " Servest thou Me ? " It goes closer home. It is, " Lovest thou
I Me ? " ; and all these other things may be where love is not.
i Again, He does not ask, " Lovest thou My word ? " or " Lovest
I thou My work ? " or " Lovest thou My brethren ? " He asks,
1" Lovest thou MeV And yet again. He does not ask, "Art thou
in the company of those that love Me?" He will not let me
.shelter myself by losing myself in a crowd who all profess to love
iHim. He brings me out into the light, to stand alone, and asks,
[' Lovest thou Me ? " ^
2. Love is a personal affection. — From our own experience we know that love, as the best and utmost expression of our own personality, can find a worthy object only in another personality. No person can really love a thing. In easy-going speech a man talks of loving his family or his country. But it is never strictly true. What he really loves is each individual person belonging to his family or nation. There is no more difficulty in loving six than in loving two. But he can by no possibility love even one, unless that one be, like himself, a living person, — or at least potentially such, as is the new-born babe, — capable first of appre- ciating and then of reciprocating the self which, as with out- stretched hands, a person offers when he loves. Nothing else, nothing less than this, is meant by Christ's doctrine of the love of God. Its true significance and expression are for ever found
1 T. H. Darlow, The Upward Calling, 322. 2 q q_ Rossetti.
^ G. H. Knight, The Master's Questions to His Disciples, 355.
430 LOVE AND SERVICE
in what St. Paul said concerning Christ Himself — "Who loved me and gave himself up for me." That Divine love should be thus truly focused, without mistake and without difficulty, in each individual human being, is the distinctive, wonderful, awful assertion of the Christian gospel alone of all the religions upon earth.
3. Love is reciprocal. — Jesus was not thinking only of Simon Peter when He asked him, " Lovest thou me ? " He was as truly thinking of Himself, and He was revealing to His denying and yet true servant the longing his Lord and Master had for his love. Indeed, this yearning for a return of affection is of the essence of all true love. We cannot love any one very dearly without desiring that our love should find an answering response in the heart thus loved, and it is because Jesus loves His own disciples so deeply that He seeks for their love as the one sweet requital for His own to them. It is this longing of the loving heart for love that explains, in part at all events, the first great commandment : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." The love of God for man goes forth to seek the answering love of man for God ; and the sin and guilt of a cold and loveless heart are never fully and rightly felt until we realize that want of love to God is not only an injury to ourselves, but is an injury done to God.
^ Love that is centred in a personality can be satisfied with nothing less and nothing else than the reciprocating love of that person. On our own little human scale this is at once the glory and the tragedy of life. Its default is even more dreadful than death, as numberless poor pitiful suicides have testified. The old word is as true and tender, as fierce and insatiable as ever, " If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned." If, as we sit in peace and comfort at the sweetest feast, or the liveliest entertainment, or the most solemn service, a voice that we could not doubt whispered in our ear that the one we loved most felt towards us no love in return, then the poet would be bitterly, crushingly true who wrote —