* J. A. Davies, Seve7i Words of Love, 138.
EPHESIANS III. 17-19 179
And here is a word of Samuel Eutherford which he wrote to Matthew Mowat when Mowat was in great distress: "I would not wish a better stock, while salvation be my stock, than to live upon credit at Christ's hands, daily borrowing. Surely running- over love — that vast, huge, boundless love of Christ which will try the skill of men and angels to tell — is the only thing I most fain would be in hands with. He knoweth that I have little of love beyond that love ; and that I shall be happy, suppose I never get another heaven but only an eternal lasting feast on that love. Christ, all the seasons of the year, is dropping sweetness. If I had vessels I might fill them ; but my old, riven and running-out dish, even when I am at the well, can bring little away. . . . How little of the sea can a child carry in his hand ! As little do I take away of my great sea, my boundless and running-over Christ Jesus." ^
(1) The Breadth. — Think of the love of Christ in its breadth. It is broad as the necessities of the world and as the expanse of the nations of the earth. It embraces all men — both Jews and Gentiles, the inhabitants of the Old World and those of the New, and men of all ages and generations. The Lord Jesus Christ, " by the grace of God, tasted death for every man," and His gospel is to be preached to " every creature." The great salvation is free as the air or the sunlight. Jesus unfolded the breadth and compre- hensiveness of His love when He told His townsmen in His first sermon at Nazareth what He had come into the world to do. He came to pity and help the poor, and they are the world's sad majority in every age ; He came to succour the broken-hearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised, and such-like. And does not every Gospel invitation bear upon the face of it the evidence of the boundless breadth of Jesus' love ? " God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth : for I am God, and there is none else." " Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money ; come ye, buy, and eat ; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price." " Let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."
^ The conception of Christ by the Church is larger than that of any specific Church. He is in each, but is fuller and finer than ^ J. H. Jowett, in The British Gongregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909.
i8o THE LOVE OF CHRIST
any one of them represents Him to be. It is the Church universal which bodies forth the Christ, which reincarnates Him. Churches have their " family-likeness." We mean by family-Kkeness, that each face in a family has much in common with the others, yet its own individual character. Galton made interesting experi- ments with the portraits of the members of a family who had family-likeness, and found that when the portraits were cast one upon the other, so as to get a kind of " composite photograph," the result was not a blur and a blotch, but a new face, which was like each, but different from all. Churches have their family-likeness ; put them all together and you get a new face, the face of Christ, which is like each, yet finer and grander than any one of them shows Him to be. I must know what all the saints see Him to be ere I know Him.^
^ So long as I have a good conscience towards God, and have His sun to shine on me, and can hear the birds singing, I can walk across the earth with a joyful and free heart. Let them call me " broad." I desire to be broad as the charity of Almighty God, who maketh His sun to shine on the evil and the good ; who hateth no man, and who loveth the poorest Hindoo more than all their committees or all their Churches. But while I long for that breadth of charity, I desire to be narrow — narrow as God's righteousness, which as a sharp sword can separate between eternal right and eternal wrong.^
^ At Pretoria the town council has passed regulations for- bidding the natives riding with white people on the trams ; they must confine themselves to the occasional car which runs for coloured people only. They must not walk in the general park, or buy stamps in the general hall of the post office, or walk on the side pavements of the streets. So, you see, ordinary love has very severe limitations, and is apt to be very exclusive. Eacial barriers impede it. Social barriers can check its flow. Ecclesiastical barriers can imprison it. But not so with the love of the Lord. It is not a little barricaded pool, but is like a tide, rolling in and obliterating the petty bulwarks of isolation built along the shore.^