3i6 THE BOND OF BROTHERHOOD
to-day. Let then our fixed resolve and maxim ever be: "God, Thou art love. I take my stand on that." " Love's faith in love is the surest anchor amid the waves of this troublesome world." ^
When I found Him in my bosom, Then I found Him everywhere,
In the bud and in the blossom, In the earth and in the air.
And He spake to me with clearness
From the quiet stars that say. As ye find Him in His nearness
Ye shall find Him far away.
I 2. Love had its supreme manifestation in Christ. — What sort
of deity is Cupid, the pagan God of love? A mischievous boy, a winged and beautiful shape, a troubler of men's hearts, a fugitive and irresponsible visitor, who sets the nerves tingling with passion, but does not touch, and cannot touch, the moral nature. The God of love in Christianity is Christ, who went about doing good, and pleased not Himself, but gave His life a ransom for many. Compare these two visions, if comparison be possible, and mark how vast the difference. What wonder is it that love, as described by the ancients, is always a bitter heritage, a golden apple of passionate contention, and that its records are all of the ardour, the distress, and the unavaiHng sorrow of the individual ? But the love which Christianity presents to us is something that forgets itself and is lost in a renunciation which is beatitude. It is not limited, personal, or egotistic; it overleaps all common human relationships, and finds higher relationships with all loving hearts. It comes with no purple wings, beating a delicate and perfumed air, and stirring the mere nerves of a man with passionate delight ; it comes as a Divine power, which enters his heart and transforms it ; it creates a brother in every man and a sister in every woman. It binds a golden girdle round the globe, and claims all those within it in the name of the love of God. It enters every avenue of human life, and sanctifies it. It is mercy when it meets the criminal, sympathy when it meets the fallen, compassion when it meets the suffering, labour when it meets the lost, renunciation when it meets the poor, sacrifice when
'■ D. S. Govett, in The Church Family Newspajper^ Oct. 13, 1911, p. 764.
I JOHN IV. 7 317
it meets the sinful, and it is in all a Divine power which men cannot help recognizing to be Divine. Jesus Christ is the incar- nation of the love of God — love itself incarnated and embodied in the flesh — and those who would learn what love is must learn of Him.
^ " I see," he said to me, " the revelation of God to man in the history of the world, and in the individual experience of each of us, in the progressive triumph of God, and the working of the law by which wrong works out its own destruction. I cannot resist the conviction that there is something more in the world than Nature. Nature is blind. Her law works without regard to individuals. She cares only for the type. To her, life and death are the same. Ceaselessly she works, pressing ever for the im- provement of the type. If man should fail her, she will create some other being ; but that she has failed with man I am loathe to admit, nor do I see any evidence of it. It would be good for us," he added thoughtfully, "if we were to take a lesson from Nature in this respect, and cease to be so wrapped up in indi- viduals, to allow our interests to go out to the race. We should all attain more happiness, especially if we ceased to care so exclusively for the individual I. Happiness is usually a negative thing. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness." ^
If love is not worth loving, then Ufe is not worth living, Nor aught is worth remembering but well forgot;
For store is not worth storing and gifts are not worth giving, If love is not:
And idly cold is death-cold, and life-heat idly hot, And vain is any offering and vainer our receiving. And vanity of vanities is all our lot.
Better than life's heaving heart is death's heart unheaving, Better than the opening leaves are the leaves that rot,
For there is nothing left worth achieving or retrieving, If love is not.^
v/
3. The love of God in Christ to us is the motive of our love to
one another. — " We have known and believed the love that God
hath to us." " We have seen and do testify that the Father sent
the Son to be the Saviour of the world," That is the assurance,
that is the ground Jesus Christ has disclosed for the love of God.
* W. T. Stead, article on Meredith in Review of Reviews, March 1904. ^ Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 127.
3i8 THE BOND OF BROTHERHOOD
Those who believe in the evidence of Divine love are tuned to the sufficient pitch, and the motive in them works sufficiently. If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another ; we ought because we can ; for God Himself in us, through that act of the loving Christ, enables us to do so. By trying to love one another we find ourselves putting out the energies lodged in us by God Himself ; we are bringing into fuller use the force wherewith God has loved us. If we love one another God dwells in us, and we discover that it is His love that is perfected in us. Robert Browning has found in this theme the indisputable proof of the reality of the Gospel story. Our recognition of God as love, and of love as the final principle of life, which now seems to us so habitual, so familiar, has been created in us so easily solely by the force of Christ's recorded passion ; that historic manifestation of God has endowed us with our present capacity for love and for belief in love.