Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all, Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold, Eend each man's temple veil and bid it fall, That we may know that Thou hast been of old;
Gather us in.
Gather us in : we worship only Thee ; In varied names we stretch a common hand In diverse forms a common soul we see; In many ships we seek one spirit-land;
Gather us in.
Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow light; Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven Thou art the fulness of our partial sight, We are not perfect till we find the seven;
Gather us in.
3. To whom, then, is our love directed ?
(1) It is love to God in Christ — The immediate and supreme object of love is the ever-blessed God. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
1 Dean Wace. I COR. — 27
418 THESE THREE
thy strength, and with all thy mind." This is the first command- ment. And with God as the centre of the heart, all the faculties and all the powers have unbounded scope for their operation.
TJ I spoke to H about the worship of the Virgin, and he
thought one reason for its prevalence is, that it puts before men the more affectionate side of truth ; and he deplored the want of a more large appeal to the affections in Protestantism, saying that we worship Christ, but none of us love Him. I was silent, but the result of a scrutiny into my own mind was that, with an exception, I scarcely love any one, or anything else, and that not because of any reference to His love for me, which somehow or other never enters into my mind, but solely in consequence of what He is and was, according, at least, to my conception of Him and His mind and heart. I do not know that this consciousness pleased me, because it presented itself rather as a deficiency than as a power — a lack of human sympathy, the existence of a con- tinually increasing number of repellent poles in my constitution, which isolate me from my species, and make my antipathies more marked than my sympathies. Whereas St. John's conception of genuine love for Him was that of an affection trained in love for beings who exhibit the same Humanity which was in Him, in weaker images, in the various relationships of life. "If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? " Through the visible as a school we rise up to the appreciation of the invisible. Now my nature forces me to reverse the order, or rather to skip the first steps, for I certainly have some sympathy — dreamy, perhaps useless — with the invisible — invisible personality, justice, right ; but there they end, and almost never go on, or go back, to the visible and human. Those lines you have often quoted, of Burns —
I saw thee eye the general weal With boundless love —
express a feeling which I can only imagine, not realize, except by a sort of analogy which is dreamy.1
^| The very blessed in Paradise, beholding the infinite Beauty of God, would faint and fail from longing to love Him more if His most Holy Will did not fill them with His own sweet Eest. But they love His sovereign Will so entirely that theirs is wholly merged in it, and they rest content in His Content, willing to submit to the limit Love puts to love. Were it not so, their love would be alike delicious and poignant — delicious in the possession
1 F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 341.
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 419
of so great a gift, poignant in the intensity of desire for more. Thus God in His Wisdom sends perpetual shafts into the hearts of those who love Him, to teach them that they do not love Him nearly so much as He deserves to be loved. And be sure that the man who does not crave to love God more does not as yet love Him well enough. There is no " enough " ; and he who would stop short in what he has attained, has attained but little, be sure.1
(2) It is love to man. — We cannot love God without loving man. The love of God is the love of man expanded and purified. To love man is to love God. The testimony of St. John, the disciple of love, is decisive on this point. His love to God was unearthly, pure, spiritual; his religion had melted into love, and here is his account : " He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? " According to him, it is through the visible that we appreciate the invisible, through the love of our brother that we grow into the love of God. At the same time, true love for man must flow primarily from love to God. The love of God is the root, the love of man the fruit ; the love of God is the fountain, the love of man is the stream in which it flows. Both are parts of one whole, links of one chain, threads of one cord which binds us to God, descending from Him to us, and lifting us up to His very being, which is love.2