2. The Apostle invokes the love, not of the Father but of God. He is contemplated in the completeness of His Being, and the Name is used which includes all relationships. The Christian revelation concerning Him is that He is Love. From everlasting to everlasting God is Love. Does not the fact of Eternal Love involve personal subjects and objects of love within the Godhead ? Is it possible to conceive of love absolutely unrelated ? It was Eternal Love that gave the gift of the Eternal Son. Love was behind grace, and grace made way for love. Christ brings us to the Father, and makes known to us the love of God. Love could not flow to us save through the grace of atonement ; and the grace
* Buskin, TJie Lord's Prayer and the Church ( Works, xxxiv. 196).
2 COR. XIII. 14 319
of atonement could not flow to us save through the love of God. Eealization of the love of God in the redeeming work of grace brings the conscious experience of the love of God to the soul. The love of God is shed abroad in the heart through the Holy Ghost, The general love of God for the world becomes through faith a personal and conscious possession. The barriers of the soul disappear, all sense of distance and alienation is lost, every shrinking fear and haunting dread is cast out, and the heart finds its rest and home in God.
^ Susanna Wesley, this mother of nineteen children — who had to be their teacher and almost their bread-winner, as well as their mother — yet resolutely spent one hour every morning and another every evening in prayer and meditation. In addition she generally stole another hour at noon for wholesome privacy, and was in the habit of writing down at such times her thoughts on great subjects. Many of these are still preserved, marked " Morning," " Noon," or " Evening " ; and they have a certain loftiness of tone, a detachment from secular interests nothing less than amazing. Airs from other worlds seem to stir in them. Here is one example : —
" Evening. — If to esteem and to have the highest reverence for Thee; if constantly and sincerely to acknowledge Thee, the supreme, the only desirable good, be to love Thee, I do love Thee. If comparatively to despise and undervalue all the world contains, which is esteemed great, or fair, or good ; if earnestly and con- stantly to desire Thee, Thy favour. Thy acceptance, Thyself, rather than any or all things Thou hast created, be to love Thee, I do love Thee ! ... If to rejoice in Thy essential majesty and glory ; if to feel a vital joy o'erspread and cheer the heart at each perception of Thy blessedness, at every thought that Thou art God ; that all things are in Thy power ; that there is none superior or equal to Thee, be to love Thee, I do love Thee ! " ^
My eyes for beauty pine, My soul for Goddes grace: No other care nor hope is mine, To heaven I turn my face.
One splendour thence is shed From all the stars above: 'Tis named when God's name is said, 'Tis Love, 'tis heavenly Love.
* W. H. Fitchett, Wesley and his Century, 57.
320 THE APOSTOLIC BENEDICTIOM
And every gentle heart, That burns with true desire, Is lit from eyes that mirror part Of that celestial fire.^
^ When I was in India, mine was the terrible experience of living through a famine. I do not know what the loss of life was in that famine, but I daresay a million human beings died directly or indirectly of hunger. If I take the deaths which were conse- quent upon it directly or indirectly, and not in British India only but in native states, it will not, I think, be an exaggeration to assert that the famine cost India a million of human lives. What is the thought which such a visitation suggests to a Christian ? Is it not this ? How can God, if He be All-loving, as He is, and All-powerful, suffer His children in such multitude to perish of hunger ? But a Mohammedan will not, I think, entertain that cruel doubt. To him the famine appears solely as an imperious reason for bowing his head before the throne of God. And why ? Because his God is a God of power and not of love ; He is like some gigantic shadow of an earthly Sultan; and His power becomes only more awful and more admirable, when it asserts itself in vengeance against human sin. No Mohammedan would b«> staggered in his faith by such a calamity as the earthquake of Lisbon or the volcanic eruption in the island of Martinique. For the God of Islam is a God of power ; but the God of Christianity is a God of love.*
3. How then is God's love made known ?
(1) There is first of all the love we have spoken of already, the love that gave Jesus. Even that is the outcome and expression of another love, electing love. And then there is the love that draws the soul to Jesus Christ. All these are manifestations of the Father's love, but it is not to these that the text alludes. These also are past and gone, they are historical. The Corin- thians had already the love, and the knowledge and memory of it drew them one by one to Christ.