The great poems of the world have been love-poems; they have been poems of love betrayed, or unrequited, or they have been thunders wailed out over a dead and buried love. But the greatest love-story of all is of One who loves for ever because He lives for ever. The Lord Jesus Christ has awakened a passionate love in unnumbered hearts, but among them all not one sweet, dead, disappointed face — like Elaine's confronting Lancelot at the river-gate of Arthur's palace — upturned in mute appeal, has ever reproached the Crucified for having offered to Him in vain an unmeasured affection. The love of the living has been offered to the living, and only a living Lord could have awakened and satisfied a love which has been poured out at His feet like spikenard. It is this consciousness of being loved that gives ever deeper meaning and ever gathering volume to the great doxology, " Unto him be the dominion for ever."
^ When Sir James Mackintosh lay dying, his friends by the bedside saw his lips slightly moving, and as one of them desired to catch, if possible, the last words of the great and good man, he leaned over, and applying the ear close, heard him saying, " Jesus, love, the same thing ; Jesus, love, the same thing." ^
^ There is a highroad which I knew full well away in the
* J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, 237.
* A. H. Drysdale, A Moderator's Year, 99.
REVELATION i. 5, 6 7
distant North, and a gladsome, shining river keeps it company. Their tracks remain in closest fellowship. They turn and wind together, and at any moment you may step from the dusty high- way and drink deep draughts from the limpid stream. " There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God." Here is the hard, dusty highway of the individual life, and near it there flows the gladdening river of the Eternal Love. It turns with our turnings, and winds through all the perplexing labyrinths of our intensely varied day. We may ignore the river ; we cannot ignore it away. Thrice blessed are they who heed and use it. " They drank of that spiritual Eock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ." The inspiring resources are always just at hand. The river of love runs just by the hard road. It never parts company with the highway.^
3. We can set no limit to the extent of this love. — " Unto him that loveth us." The words become especially beautiful if we remember that they come from the lips of him whose distinction it was that he was " the disciple whom Jesus loved." It is as if he had said, " I share my privilege with you all. I was no nearer Him than you may be. Every head may rest on the breast where mine rested. Having the sweet remembrance of that early love, these things write I unto you that ye also may have fellow- ship with me in that which was my great distinction. I, the disciple whom Jesus loved, speak to you as the disciples whom Jesus loves." He is speaking of One who had been dead for half a century, and he is speaking to people none of whom had probably ever seen Jesus in His lifetime, and most of whom had not been born when He died. Yet to them all he turns with that profound and mighty present tense, and says, " He loveth us." He was speaking to all generations, and telling all the tribes of men of a love which is in active operation towards each of them, not only at the moment when St. John spoke to Asiatic Greeks, but at the moment when we Englishmen read his words, " Christ that loveth us."
When we extend our thoughts or our sympathies to a crowd, we lose the individual. We generalize, as logicians say, by neglecting the particular instances. That is to say, when we look at the forest we do not see the trees. But Jesus Christ sees each tree, each stem, each branch, each leaf, just as when the crowd
* J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism , 239.
8 REDEEMING LOVE
thronged Him and pressed Him, He knew when Uie tremulous finger, wasted and shrunken to skin and bone, was timidly laid on the hem of His garment; as there was room for all the five thousand on the grass, and no man's plenty was secured at the expense of another man's penury, so each of us has a place in that heart ; and my abundance will not starve you, or your feeding full diminish the supplies for me. Christ loves all, not with the vague general philanthropy with which men love the mass, but with the individualizing knowledge and special direction of affection towards the individual which demands for its fulness a Divine nature to exercise it. And so each of us may have our own rainbow, to each of us the sunbeam may come straight from the sun and strike upon our eye in a direct line, to each of us the whole warmth of the orb may be conveyed, and each of us may say, " He loved me, and gave himself for me."
U Let us now turn aside and look upon this great sight, of Love that burneth with fire, yet is not consumed ; of Love that having poured out its soul unto death, yet liveth, to see of that soul's long travail and to be satisfied with it. " Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world." When were Love's arms stretched so wide as upon the Cross ? When did they embrace so much as when Thou, O Christ, didst gather within Thy bosom the spears and arrows of the mighty to open us a Lane for Freedom ! ^