And we have the same knowledge that he had of that " love of Christ which passeth knowledge." We have before us continually, in one form after another, that picture of Christ loving man which moved St. Paul so deeply. We have that history of love ever open before us, to which nothing done by man for man can compare. There have been men like ourselves, who have lived — as far as man can live — only for their fellow-men ; who have spent their * Samuel Longfellow.
I90 THE LOVE OF CHRIST
lives in ministering to their good ; who have taught them, and fed them, and healed them, and comforted them ; who have spent this world's riches in providing, not for their own pleasure, but for the welfare of numbers who would never know or thank them ; men who have left home and kindred to toil in the hardest and weariest way among the lost and the unthankful. And there have been women who have left ease and comfort, and all the tenderness in which they were nurtured, to attend on the sick, to minister to the forsaken and friendless sinner, to spend days of labour and sleepless nights in hospitals. We know what love means in these. But there was One, greater than they, who did more than any of them ; who fed the hungry, and healed the sick, and taught the ignorant, and called back the wanderers, and was gentle and merciful to the sinners and the forsaken, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister ; whose whole life was one endless display of love without stint, love careless of self, love doing its heavenly work without thanks, without return, without comfort. We hear sometimes of men, in their generous love to others, giving up what was their own, contenting themselves with a lower place, throwing up advantages, and coming down from a worldly position, in order to do more good to their fellows. But who among men came down as Christ did ? Who among men gave up what He did, that He might cast in His lot with us ? Who among men has that to throw away, for the good of his fellows, which Christ sur- rendered, when the Lord of the worlds became for us a little child, born in the lowest rank of life, born to poverty and neglect, without even where to lay His head ?
^ I could tell you, says one who himself was a great kinsman of the Lord, of friends who have been fifty years in Christ, and though they hold a constant jubilee in the sense of His love, yet they will tell you that they are only scholars in the lowest form, beginning to spell out the alphabet of the grace of our Lord Jesus. After fifty years in Christ, only just beginning to know, only just matriculated in the Academy of Love ! ^
2. Why does the love of Christ surpass knowledge ?
(1) Because our experience of it is incomplete. — We are like the settlers on some great island continent — as, for instance, on the Australian continent for many years after its first discovery — a ^ J. H. Jowett, in The British CongregationcUisi, Jan. 28, 1909.
EPHESIANS III. 17-19 191
thin fringe of population round the seaboard here and there, and all the bosom of the land untraversed and unknown. So after all experiences of and all blessed participation in the love of Jesus Christ which come to each of us by our faith, we have but skimmed the surface, but touched the edges, but received a drop of what, if it should come upon us in fullness of flood like a Niagara of love, would overwhelm our spirits.
^ When St. Paul prays for the Ephesians that they may be able " to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge," he means, not that he desires they should ever come to think that they have explored all " the unsearchable riches of Christ," or are able to pronounce with confidence on all the reasons and modes of God's dealings with men ; but that they should, through the in- dwelling spirit of Christ's own love in them, be led on to a deeper and ever deeper sense of the love with which He has loved them, to a firmer conviction that that love lies at the root of all their disciplines in life no less than of all their blessings, to a more perfect faith in it as the constant feeling, with which God's heart is moved towards them.
They only miss
The winning of that final bliss.
Who will not count it true that love,
Blessing, not cursing, rules above,
And that in it we live and move.^
^ Columbus discovered America ; but what did he know about its great lakes, rivers, forests, and the Mississippi valley ? He died without knowing much about what he had discovered. So, many of us have discovered something of the love of God ; but there are heights, depths, and lengths of it we do not know. That Love is a great ocean ; and we require to plunge into it before we really know anything of it.^
(2) Because after all experience it will still be beyond our range. — It is possible for people to have, and in fact we do possess, a real, a valid, a reliable knowledge of that which is infinite, although we possess, as a matter of course, no adequate and complete know- ledge of it. But we have before us in Christ's love something which, though the understanding is not by itself able to grasp it, yet the understanding led by the heart can lay hold of, and can find in it infinite treasures. We can lay our poor hands on His