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judging, determining faculty — upon these Calvary -facts, we bring, as it were, fresh supplies of fuel in order that with them we may feed the fire of Christian exercise and action.
^ My apprehension of the love of Christ must come in be- tween its manifestation and its power to grip, to restrain, to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music. Love, in like manner, must be believed and known ere it can be responded to.^
^ In the convent of San Marco in Florence, in cell after cell there are depicted upon the walls the scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus by the brush of that poet-painter-preacher, Fra Angelico. The painter has seemed to feel that the figure of Jesus crucified was more than he could compass ; he has left it most convention- ally treated. All the depth of his power he has put into the figure of St. Dominic, who stands at the cross representing the Christian soul in all the various phases of feeling which pass over it, as it contemplates the spectacle of Jesus crucified. First, there is the mere bewilderment, as of one who contemplates a sight shocking and horrible, and he hides his face in horror, as from something disgraceful. You pass into another cell, and the scene is changed. Now he is looking up in questioning bewilder- ment ; he has not yet taken in the meaning of the scene, but he is sure that there are hidden there depths of misery and truth. You pass to another cell, and now he has understood what it is. He has seen in Jesus One who is suffering for human sin ; he is determined that he will not share those sins, he feels there a penitence which is represented by the scourge at the foot of the cross. You pass into another, and now he has found the joy and repose of that forgiveness which passeth out of the loving heart of Christ. He kneels there, he contemplates in ecstasy Jesus who has forgiven him. Once more. Alone he is standing, with his arms outstretched, as one who simply contemplates in admira- tion the glory of that great love for all the world which beams from the cross. Once more, he is kneeling there, kneeling on one knee, as one who had prepared to start up ; he is there half in homage, half in recognition that this cross lays upon his life the allegiance of a great service ; he is grasping it as one who is just leaving for his mission.*
* A. Maclaren. ' Bishop Gore.
2 COR. V. 14, 15 157
III.
The Power of the Ckoss Constrains to Unselfish Service.
" The love of Christ," says the Apostle, using a highly forcible expression, " constraineth us." The corresponding word in the original primarily signifies to " shut up " or to " compress," as by some coercive power which cannot be withstood; and in its secondary sense it means to "impel," to "bear away," or to " hurry onwards," as if by the force of some rapid and impetuous torrent. As employed in the text, it intimates that the love of Christ exerts somewhat of this mighty and well-nigh irresistible influence on His people as often as it takes full possession of their souls, captivating their every thought, engaging their every affection, shutting them closely up, or hemming them completely in, so that only one line of conduct can be adopted by them — urging all their energies into action, bearing them on in the face of every obstacle, and leaving them no alternative but to obey its dictates.
1. The first great effect of Christ's love is to change the centre of life. — All love derives its power to elevate, refine, beautify, ennoble, conquer, from the fact that, in a lower degree, all love makes the beloved and not the self the centre. Hence the mother's self-sacrifice, hence the sweet reciprocity of wedded life, hence everything in humanity that is noble and good. Love is the antagonist of selfishness and the highest type of love should be, and in the measure in which we are under the influence of Christ's love will be, the self-surrendering life of a Christian man. The one power that rescues a man from the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of all sin and ignobleness, is when a man can say, " Christ is my aim," " Christ is my object." There is no secret of self-annihilation, which is self-transfiguration and, I was going to say, deification, like that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has loved me so.
*[j Keith Falconer, that noble young man who died in Arabia in starting a mission among the Mahommedans, said, " Let people call you eccentric. Eccentric means nothing more than out of centre, and if you have got a new centre in God of course you are out of the old centre of the world. Let the world's machinery
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move round the old centre. You have begun to move by that eccentric movement about quite another pivot than that around which the world moves." ^