prayers, partaking? Are your pure souls — your tender hearts — with love and
longing breaking For God, and your neighbour and your enemy?"
Our souls are filled with heavenly peace — our hearts with love
untiring, And Jesus with His radiant love our feeble love is firing, Till nought we crave but love for all, in this our joyous
choiring From God, for our neighbour and our enemy.2
(3) It is love to the brethren. — The love of the brethren is often referred to as distinguished from love; the one having reference to moral character, the other to the race in general. " Be kindly affectioned one to another." " Be ye all of one mind, . . . love as brethren."
1 Bishop Winnington Ingram, Banners of the Christian Faith, 43, 3 Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 54,
422 THESE THREE
Tj Gibbon has discussed the reason of the wonderful expansion of Christianity at the outset of its career, and he has alleged five causes: the zeal of the primitive Christians, their doctrine of immortality, the miraculous powers of the Apostolic Church, her pure morality, and the union and discipline of the Christian republic. And these, no doubt, were efficient causes, but Gibbon has overlooked the strongest of all. The reason why Christianity spread over the world and won the nations, was that the Chris- tians understood the blessed secret of love as the Lord had taught it. It is said by Tertullian that in those early days the heathen would often exclaim : " See how they love one another ! " All this changed, and during the days of bitter controversy over the doctrine of the Person of Christ, when the Christians were wrangling and excommunicating and persecuting one another, it was said by a Latin historian that their hatred of each other exceeded the fury of savage beasts against mankind. It was then that Christianity lost its power, and if we would recover the ancient power, we must rediscover and practise the ancient secret.1
^[ In Samoa, Stevenson had left his small hut and removed into a large house. There had not yet been time for Love to line it. Stevenson felt sad and weary, and had forgotten to bespeak his nightly coffee and cigars. Whilst he was thinking, the door quietly opened and the native boy entered carrying the tray with that on it for which he longed. Stevenson said in the native tongue, " Great is your forethought." The boy corrected him and said, " Great is the love." 2
If The writer remembers a curious expression used by a Mohammedan who had become a Christian and then relapsed, " Un ki muhabbat dekhke, bhul gaya ; un ki dushmani dekhke, yad aya," " Their (the Christians') love made me forget my re- ligion ; their hostility made me remember it." 3
4. But God in Christ is the source as well as the object of love. Where are we to look for the inspiration that breathed into the idea of " love " that intense spirituality — that perfect purity and almost infinite longing and desire, which demanded almost a new word to meet a new conception, as much in advance of all that the heathen world knew as the Gospel of St. John transcends all the Greek philosophies? The answer to this question is to be found, at least in the first instance, in the words of our Lord
1 D. Smith. 2 A. K. Simpson, These Three, 47.
• 0. Field, The Charm of India, xi,
i CORINTHIANS xm. 13 423
Jesus Christ Himself, as reported to us in that very Gospel — the spiritual Gospel, as it has been well called — of the beloved Apostle ; to the effect that " God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved."
So kindly was His love to us,
(We had not heard of love before),
That all our life grew glorious When He had halted at our door.
So meekly did He love us men,
Though blind we were with shameful sin,
He touched our eyes with tears, and then Led God's tall angels flaming in.
He dwelt with us a little space, As mothers do in childhood's years,
And still we can discern His face Wherever Joy or Love appears.
He made our virtues all His own,
And lent them grace we could not give,
And now our world seems His alone, And while we live He seems to live.
He took our sorrows and our pain, And hid their torture in His breast,
Till we received them back again, To find on each His grief impressed.
He clasped our children in His arms,
And showed us where their beauty shone,
He took from us our grey alarms, And put Death's icy armour on.
So gentle were His ways with us,
That crippled souls had ceased to sigh,
On them He laid His hands, and thus They gloried at His passing by.
Without reproof or word of blame, As mothers do in childhood's years,
He kissed our lips in spite of shame, And stayed the passage of our tears.