•[[ Perhaps we do not yet know what the word "to love" means. There are within us lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness ; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of the great primitive unity.2
I.
God's own Love.
God commends or proves His own love. It is a love which, like all that belongs to that timeless, self-determining Being, has its reason and its roots in Himself alone. We love because we discern the object to be lovable. God loves by the very necessity of His nature. Like some artesian well that needs no pumps or machinery to draw up the sparkling waters to flash in the sun- light, there gushes up from the depths of His own heart the love which pours over every creature that He has made. He loves because He is God.
Like life, love is of many kinds. There is a love that ennobles and casts a radiance upon life. There is a love that drags the lover down into the mouth of hell. There is a love 1 C. C. Hall. 2 Maurice Maeterlinck.
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that many waters cannot quench. There is a love that is disguised lust. "What kind of love is God's own love ?
1. It is a righteous love. Some of the saddest tragedies in human life spring from the moral weakness of the deepest love. Love is the mother of all tenderness, and tenderness shrinks instinctively from what is stern or rigorous. So love often becomes a minister of ruin. How many a mother, who would have laid down her life for her son, she loved him so, has only helped him down the road to ruin by the immoral weakness of her love. How many a father, to spare the bitter agony of punishing his child, has let his child grow up unchastened. Such love as that is fatal. Sooner or later it tarnishes the thought of fatherhood in the child's eyes. For in his view of fatherhood the child can find no place now for earnest hatred of the wrong, and passionate devotion to the right ; and so the image that, full of moral beauty, should have inspired him through all life's journey, is robbed of its ennobling power by its unrighteous weakness. And if out of the page of history you wipe the atoning death on Calvary, you carry that tragedy of weakness into the very heavens. Blot out the Cross, and I, a child of heaven, can never be uplifted and inspired by the thought of the Divine Fatherhood again. Yes, I have sinned, and know it. I deserve chastisement and death ; I know it. And shall my Father never whisper a word of punishment ? and never breathe His horror at my fall ? And will He love me, and be kind to me right through it all without a word of warning ? I tell you, the moment I could believe that, the glory of the Divine Fatherhood is tarnished for me, God's perfect law of goodness and awful hatred of the wrong are dimmed; and all the impulse and enthusiasm these Divine passions bring sink out of my life for ever. But when I turn to Calvary, and to that awful death, I see a love as righteous as it is wonderful.1
^[ Love grows out of holiness, and holiness in its turn flows out of love, and they cannot exist apart. A father loves ; and just in proportion to his love is his pain when the children of his love do wrong; no other pain can be like that pain; no disappointed affection, no separation to distant lands, no loss by death, can cut the soul with the same wound as the wrong-
1 G. H. Morrison. ACTS & ROM. — 20
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doing of one on whom the heart is set. A father who sees a loved child dishonour all his love, a sister who sees the brother whom she admires disgracing the picture of him that her mind had drawn, the mother who watches with agony the son of her affections cast himself away on profligate pleasures, is thrilled with a pang whose bitterness stands quite alone. Such pains as these are the measure of that wrath with which God, our Father, tells us that He regards our sins. But in spite of wrath He is still our Father, and still He draws us by the cords of an infinite love back to Himself again.1
Tj I cannot tell you the delight that I have found in thinking of God's love to man as a disapproving love. Man confounds love and approbation, or love and interestedness. Thus a man loves those whom he thinks well of, or who are necessary to his happiness. But God's love acknowledges and demands nothing either amiable or serviceable in its objects. The love of my God is not diminished by His disapprobation of me. There is some- thing remarkable in Christ's substitution for Barabbas in a way more especial than for any other individual, that he might be an example of those for whom He died.2