If It is to be regretted that Edna Lyall's religious stories are being neglected. They are full, not only of artistic power, but likewise of rich Christian instruction. In one she describes one of her characters in this significant fashion : " Carlo had the rare and enviable gift of seeing people as they might have been under happier circumstances, and the still rarer gift of treating them as such." The life of Christ was full of this enviable hopefulness. Head how He dealt with sinners, and you will rejoice to find that His compassion dwelt upon them in their sin.2
Tf Dr. Westcott has told us — what those who are acquainted with the poet's works will recognize as a statement of fact — that Browning " has dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms of action and passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes, and he has brought back for us, from this universal survey, a conviction of hope." As a single specimen of this, we may refer to the scene described in the brief poem bearing the title, " Apparent Failure." It is a picture of the Morgue in Paris, into which the poet entered to gaze upon the ghastly spectacles that there presented themselves — the bodies of men who hated life, or whose ideals were shattered, or whose hearts were broken. And, after plucking up courage to look fearlessly upon them all, trying to conceive what such a sight represented, how each victim came to meet with his terrible fate, he sums up his reflections thus —
My own hope is, a sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst, Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.3
1 R. Collyer, The Life That Now Is, 63.
'J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 117.
■ J. Flew, Studies in Br aiming, 121.
4H THESE THREE
LOVE.
1. Now consider the greatest of the three — chariby or Christian love. It is no use studying Greek or Latin to find out what Christian love is. The dictionaries to consult here are our own hearts in relation to our nearest and dearest, the thirteenth chapter of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, and St. John's pregnant phrase, "God is love." Christian love is the feeling begotten in our hearts towards God and towards our fellow-men by the penetration into our hearts of the sense of the love of God to us when He gave His Son to die for us. " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins ... we love, because he first loved us." That is at once the natural and the supernatural history of Christian love.
^f Nothing suggests better what Christian love is than Giotto's drawing of " Charity " in Padua. It is a corrective to all that misconception of love which left room for such a phrase as "cold as charity." This is how Euskin describes the drawing- "Usually Charity is nursing children or giving money. Giotto thinks there is little charity in nursing children; bears and wolves do that for their little ones ; and less still in giving money. His Charity stands trampling upon bags of gold — has no use for them. She gives only corn and flowers (with her right hand); and God's angel (to whom she looks) gives her, not even these — but a Heart."1
*J The great religions of the world are distinguishable from each other by some supreme characteristic. Thus, the genius of Hinduism is mysticism, that of Buddhism is asceticism, that of Parseeism is dualism, that of Mohammedanism is fanaticism, that of Confucianism is secularism, — and that of our own faith is altruism, or love. No other inference than this is possible from the teachings of the New Testament. There God is represented as sending His Son to the earth because He loved, and He in this way " commends " His love ; and then St. John, seeking to sum up His nature in a single word, exclaims : " God is love ! " 2
2. Note three things in the very conception of love.
(1) It is a personal relation. — The word may, indeed, be used loosely of our mere liking for inanimate or impersonal objects;
1 R. J. Drummond, Faith's Certainties, 240.
a G. C. Lorimer, The Modern Crisis in Religion, 2-33.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 415
it may be degraded to express an animal passion. But all such uses of the word are either abuses of its meaning or are figurative. As the modern poet of chivalry has exquisitely expressed it: " True love's the gift which God has given to man alone beneath the heaven ; " it is " the tie, which heart to heart, and mind to mind, in body and in soul can bind." The discriminating genius of the Greek language has marked the absolute difference of this love from the lower forms of passion by assigning special words to each ; and there are some who have regretted that no similar distinction has been maintained in our own language. But, we may perhaps be permitted to think, there is another point of view from which the absence of any such verbal distinction may appear prompted by a true instinct in a Christian nation. It was necessary for a Greek to recognize sensual passion as one form of human relationship. But the Christian best expresses the lofty ideal which is ever before his eyes, and best exemplifies that charity which thinketh no evil and which belie veth all things, by refusing to contemplate men and women as united by any lower tie than that of love, or by refusing to contemplate our lower nature except in the light shed upon it by the higher.