3. The Fulness of it. If, when we were ungodly and un- righteous, helpless subjects and slaves of our sins, God so loved us as, altogether of Himself, for the praise of the glory of His own grace, apart from any merit or answer or anticipation of love on our part — nay, while we were yet enemies to Him — if then and thus God so loved us as, at such a price and cost, to provide for us so great a salvation ; if upon the ground of the salvation thus provided, and our acceptance of it with a faith answering to His grace, He receives us into a state or status of complete filial relationship with Himself and takes no account of anything within us save our need and our will to be saved, — if all this is so, can or will He fail us in what remains, the task and attainment of our actual salvation ? The distinction is kept up between our salvation in faith and our salvation in fact, and the argument is that if God so gave Christ objectively to our faith He may be trusted to give Him subjectively in our lives. Whether objectively, however, to our faith or subjectively in our lives, Christ is always one and the same thing — our own divine holiness, righteousness, life. We do not believe in Him at all if we do not believe in Him as all these, not only for us, but in us.
Like a cradle rocking, rocking,
Silent, peaceful, to and fro, Like a mother's sweet looks dropping
On the little face below, Hangs the green earth, swinging, turning
Jarless, noiseless, safe and slow; Falls the light of God's face bending
Down, and watching us below.
And as feeble babes that suffer,
Toss and cry, and will not rest, Are the ones the tender mother
Holds the closest, loves the best; So when we are weak and wretched,
By our sins weighed down, distressed, Then it is that God's great patience
Holds us closest, loves us best.
ROMANS v. 8 321
0 great heart of God ! whose loving
Cannot hindered be nor crossed ; Will not weary, will not even
In our death itself be lost — Love divine ! of such great loving
Only mothers know the cost — Cost of love which, all love passing,
Gave a Son to save the lost.1
4. The Duration of it. The proof is one of perpetual validity. The Bible does not say, God commended ; it does not say, God has commended; it uses the perpetual present and says, God commendeth. There are some proofs for the being and attributes of God that serve their purpose and then pass away. There are arguments that appeal to us in childhood, but lose their power in our maturer years. And there are proofs that may convince one generation, and yet be of little value to the next; not a few evidences, such as that from design, which were very helpful to the believers of an older school, are well-nigh worthless to their thinking sons, imbued with the teaching of the present day. But there is one argument that stands unshaken through every age and every generation. It is the triumphant argument of the Cross of Christ. Knowledge may widen, thought may deepen, theories may come and go, yet in the very centre, unshaken and unshak- able, stands Calvary, the lasting commendation of the love of God. To all the sorrowing and to all the doubting, to all the bitter and to all the eager, to every youthful heart, noble and generous, to every weary heart, burdened and dark, to-day, and here, as nineteen hundred years ago to all like hearts in Eome, " God commendeth his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." 2
Hi. Something Personal.
However clear our views upon this subject, we shall not feel the full force of these considerations until we turn from the race to the individual, from mankind to ourselves in particular, and contemplate each for himself the love of God, as exhibited on the Cross of Christ, as if that love had had no other object. He loved
1 Saxe Holm, in Sunday School Times, xxxv. 20, p. 318. «
a G. H. Morrison. ACTS & ROM. — 21
322 GOD'S OWN LOVE
me, and gave Himself for me. It is quite true that God's love is as wide as the world, for " God so loved the world " ; but it is equally true that it is as narrow as the individual. Wide enough to comprehend all, it is also sufficiently concentrated to apprehend each with its own merciful arrest, laying a strong hand upon our heart, and changing the whole course of our lives with its own mighty power.
If Life — our common life — with its discipline of experience, will surely teach us how little, comparatively, upon reason, and how largely, comparatively, upon the heart, depend the issues of living. The most precious things we possess, the highest relation- ships in which we stand to one another — are they not, one and all of them, bound up with love, which thinks not in the syllogisms of reason, but rather by the tender intuitions of the heart. " We do not prove," says Pascal, "that we ought to be loved, by arranging in order the reasons for love. . . . The way of the heart is different from that of the mind, which is by statement and proof."