The Analysis

After contrasting Love with these things, Paul, in three verses, very short, gives us an amazing analysis of what this supreme thing is. I ask you to look at it. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It is like light. As you have seen a man of science take a beam of light and pass it through a crystal prism, as you have seen it come out on the other side of the prism broken up into its component colours—red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all the colours of the rainbow—so Paul passes this thing, Love, through the magnificent prism of his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other side broken up into its elements. And in these few words we have what one might call the Spectrum of Love, the analysis of Love. Will you observe what its elements are? Will you notice that they have common names; that they are virtues which we hear about every day; that they are things which can be practised by every man in every place in life; and how, by a multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, the supreme thing, the summum bonum, is made up?

The Spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:—

Patience: "Love suffereth long." Kindness: "And is kind." Generosity: "Love envieth not." Humility: "Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Courtesy: "Doth not behave itself unseemly." Unselfishness: "Seeketh not her own." Good Temper: "Is not easily provoked." Guilelessness: "Thinketh no evil." Sincerity: "Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth."

Patience; kindness; generosity; humility; courtesy; unselfishness; good temper; guilelessness; sincerity—these make up the supreme gift, the stature of the perfect man or woman. You will observe that all are in relation to men and women, in relation to life, in relation to the known today and the near tomorrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day.

There is no time to do more than make a passing note upon each of these ingredients. Love is:

Patience. This is the normal attitude of Love; Love passive, Love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work when the summons comes, but meantime wearing the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. Love suffers long; beareth all things; believeth all things; hopeth all things. For Love understands, and therefore waits.

Kindness. Love active. Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's life was spent in doing kind things—in merely doing kind things? Run over it with that in view and you will find that He spent a great proportion of His time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people. There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping; but what God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them.

"The greatest thing," says someone, "a man can do for his Heavenly Father is to be kind to some of His other children." I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are? How much the world needs it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly it is remembered. How super-abundantly it pays itself back—for there is no debtor in the world so honourable, so superbly honourable, as Love. "Love never faileth." Love is success, Love is happiness, Love is life.

"Love," I say, with Browning, "is energy of Life."

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe And hope and fear, Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love— How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.

Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God. God is Love. Therefore love others, without distinction, without calculation, without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very easy; especially upon the rich, who often need it most; most of all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. There is a difference between trying to please and giving pleasure. Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure. For that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit.

I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Generosity. "Love envieth not." This is Love in competition with others. Whenever you attempt a good work you will find other men doing the same kind of work, and probably doing it better. Envy them not. Envy is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in the same line as ourselves, a spirit of covetousness and detraction. How little Christian work even is a protection against un-Christian feeling. That most despicable of all the unworthy moods which cloud a Christian's soul assuredly waits for us on the threshold of every work, unless we are fortified with this grace of magnanimity. Only one thing truly need the Christian envy, the large, rich, generous soul which "envieth not." And then, after having learned all that, you have to learn this further thing,

Humility. To put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done. After you have been kind, after Love has stolen forth into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and say nothing about it. Love hides even from itself. Love waives even self-satisfaction. "Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." The fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange one to find in this summum bonum:

Courtesy. This is Love in society, Love in relation to etiquette. "Love doth not behave itself unseemly." Politeness has been defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little things. And the one secret of politeness is to love. Love cannot behave itself unseemly. You can put the most untutored person into the highest society, and if they have a reservoir of love in their heart, they will not behave themselves unseemly. They simply cannot do it.

Carlyle said of Robert Burns that there was no truer gentleman in Europe than the ploughman-poet. It was because he loved everything—the mouse, and the daisy, and all the things, great and small, that God had made. So with this simple passport he could mingle with any society, and enter courts and palaces from his little cottage on the banks of the Ayr. You know the meaning of the word "gentleman." It means a gentle man—a man who does things gently, with love. And that is the whole art and mystery of it. The gentleman cannot in the nature of things do an ungentle, an ungentlemanly thing. The un-gentle soul, the inconsiderate, unsympathetic nature cannot do anything else. "Love doth not behave itself unseemly."

Unselfishness. "Love seeketh not her own." Observe: Seeketh not even that which is her own. In Britain the Englishman is devoted, and rightly, to his rights. But there come times when a man may exercise even the higher right of giving up his rights. Yet Paul does not summon us to give up our rights. Love strikes much deeper. It would have us not seek them at all, ignore them, eliminate the personal element altogether from our calculations. It is not hard to give up our rights. They are often external. The difficult thing is to give up ourselves. The more difficult thing still is not to seek things for ourselves at all. After we have sought them, bought them, won them, deserved them, we have taken the cream off them for ourselves already. Little cross, then, perhaps, to give them up. But not to seek them, to look every man not on his own things, but on the things of others—id opus est.

"Seekest thou great things for thyself?" said the prophet; "seek them not." Why? Because there is no greatness in things. Things cannot be great. The only greatness is unselfish love. Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is almost a mistake. Only a great purpose or a mightier love can justify the waste. It is more difficult, I have said, not to seek our own at all, than, having sought it, to give it up. I must take that back. It is only true of a partly selfish heart. Nothing is a hardship to Love, and nothing is hard. I believe that Christ's yoke is easy. Christ's "yoke" is just His way of taking life. And I believe it is an easier way than any other. I believe it is a happier way than any other.

The most obvious lesson in Christ's teaching is that there is no happiness in having and getting anything, but only in giving. I repeat, there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. And half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It consists in giving, and in serving others. He that would be great among you, said Christ, let him serve. He that would be happy, let him remember that there is but one way—it is more blessed, it is more happy, to give than to receive. The next ingredient is a very remarkable one:

Good Temper. "Love is not easily provoked." Nothing could be more striking than to find this here. We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man or woman's character. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements in human nature.

The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposition. This compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is there are two great classes of sins—sins of the Body, and sins of the Disposition. The Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder Brother of the second. Now society has no doubt whatever as to which of these is the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But are we right? We have no balance to weigh one another's sins, and coarser and finer are but human words; but faults in the higher nature may be less venial than those in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is Love, a sin against Love may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianise society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom off childhood; in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone.

Look at the Elder Brother, moral, hard-working, patient, dutiful—let him get all credit for his virtues—look at this man, this baby, sulking outside his own father's door. "He was angry," we read, "and would not go in." Look at the effect upon the father, upon the servants, upon the happiness of the guests. Judge of the effect upon the Prodigal—and how many prodigals are kept out of the Kingdom of God by the unlovely characters of those who profess to be inside? Analyse, as a study in Temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it gathers upon the Elder Brother's brow. What is it made of? Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness, touchiness, doggedness, sullenness—these are the ingredients of his dark and loveless soul. In varying proportions, also, these are the ingredients of all ill temper. Judge if such sins of the disposition are not worse to live in, and for others to live with, than sins of the body. Did Christ indeed not answer the question Himself when He said, "I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of Heaven before you." There is really no place in Heaven for a disposition like this. A man with such a mood could only make Heaven miserable for all the people in it. Except, therefore, such a man be born again, he cannot, he simply cannot, enter the Kingdom of Heaven. For it is perfectly certain—and you will not misunderstand me—that to enter Heaven a man or woman must take it with them everywhere they go.

You will see then why Temper is significant. It is not in what it is alone, but in what it reveals. This is why I take the liberty now of speaking of it with such unusual plainness. It is a test for love, a symptom, a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one's guard; in a word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins. For a want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolised in one flash of Temper.

Hence it is not enough to deal with the temper. We must go to the source, and change the inmost nature, and the angry humours will die away of themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in—a great Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate the inner man. Will-power does not change men. Time does not change men. Christ-Truth does. Therefore "Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus."

Some of us have not much time to lose. Remember, once more, that this is a matter of life or death. I cannot help speaking urgently, for myself, for yourselves. "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." That is to say, it is the deliberate verdict of the Lord Jesus that it is better not to live than not to love. It is better not to live than not to love.

Guilelessness and Sincerity may be dismissed almost with a word.

Guilelessness is the grace for suspicious people. And the possession of it is the great secret of personal influence. You will find, if you think for a moment, that the people who influence you are people who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion people shrivel up; but in that atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and educative fellowship. It is a wonderful thing that here and there in this hard, uncharitable world there should still be left a few rare souls who think no evil. This is the great unworldliness. Love "thinketh no evil," imputes no motive, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind to live in! What a stimulus and benediction even to meet with it for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to their belief of our belief in them. For the respect of another is the first restoration of the self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become. "Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." I have called this:

Sincerity. From the words rendered in the Authorised Version by "rejoiceth in the truth." And, certainly, were this the real translation, nothing could be more just. For those that love will love Truth not less than other men or women. They will rejoice in the Truth—rejoice not in what they have been taught to believe; not in this Church's doctrine or in that; not in this ism or in that ism; but "in The Truth." They will accept only what is real; they will strive to get at facts; they will search for Truth with a humble and unbiased mind, and cherish whatever they find at any sacrifice.

But the more literal translation of the Revised Version calls for just such a sacrifice for truth's sake here. For what Paul really meant is, as we here read, "Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth," a quality which probably no one English word—and certainly not Sincerity—adequately defines. It includes, perhaps more strictly, the self-restraint which refuses to make capital out of others' faults; the charity which delights not in exposing the weakness of others, but "covereth all things"; the sincerity of purpose which endeavours to see things as they are, and rejoices to find them better than suspicion feared or calumny denounced.

So much for the analysis of Love. Now the business of our lives is to have these things fitted into our characters. That is the supreme work to which we need to address ourselves in this world, to learn Love. Is life not full of opportunities for learning Love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love.

What makes a man a good cricketer? Practice. What makes a man a good artist, a good sculptor, a good musician? Practice. What makes a man a good linguist, a good stenographer? Practice. What makes a man a good man? Practice. Nothing else. There is nothing capricious about religion. We do not get the soul in different ways, under different laws, from those in which we get the body and the mind. If a person does not exercise their arm they develop no biceps muscle; and if they do not exercise their soul, they acquire no muscle in their soul, no strength of character, no vigour of moral fibre, nor beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, vigorous expression of the whole rounded Christian character—the Christlike nature in its fullest development. And the constituents of this great character are only to be built up by ceaseless practice.

What was Christ doing in the carpenter's shop? Practising. Though perfect, we read that He learned obedience, He increased in wisdom and in favour with God and man. Do not quarrel therefore with your lot in life. Do not complain of its never-ceasing cares, its petty environment, the vexations you have to stand, the small and sordid souls you have to live and work with. Above all, do not resent temptation; do not be perplexed because it seems to thicken round you more and more, and ceases neither for effort nor for agony nor prayer. That is the practice which God appoints you; and it is having its work in making you patient, and humble, and generous, and unselfish, and kind, and courteous.

Do not grudge the hand that is moulding the still too shapeless image within you. It is growing more beautiful though you see it not, and every touch of temptation may add to its perfection. Therefore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men, and among things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles. You remember Goethe's words: Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Doch ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt. "Talent develops itself in solitude; character in the stream of life." Talent develops itself in solitude—the talent of prayer, of faith, of meditation, of seeing the unseen; Character grows in the stream of the world's life. That chiefly is where men are to learn love.

Now, how to make it easier, I have named a few of the elements of love. But these are only elements. Love itself can never be defined. Light is a something more than the sum of its ingredients—a glowing, dazzling, tremulous ether. And love is something more than all its elements—a palpitating, quivering, sensitive, living thing. By synthesis of all the colours, men can make whiteness, they cannot make light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot make love. How then are we to have this transcendent living whole conveyed into our souls? We brace our wills to secure it. We try to copy those who have it. We lay down rules about it. We watch. We pray. But these things alone will not bring Love into our nature. Love is an effect. And only as we fulfil the right condition can we have the effect produced. Shall I tell you what the cause is?

If you turn to the Revised Version of the First Epistle of John you will find these words: "We love, because He first loved us." "We love," not "We love Him." That is the way the old Version has it, and it is quite wrong. "We love—because He first loved us." Look at that word "because." It is the cause of which I have spoken. "Because He first loved us," the effect follows that we love, we love Him, we love all people. We cannot help it. Because He loved us, we love, we love everybody. Our heart is slowly changed. Contemplate the love of Christ, and you will love. Stand before that mirror, reflect Christ's character, and you will be changed into the same image from tenderness to tenderness. There is no other way. You cannot love to order. You can only look at the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and grow into likeness to it.

And so look at this Perfect Character, this Perfect Life. Look at the great Sacrifice as He laid down Himself, all through life, and upon the Cross of Calvary; and you must love Him. And loving Him, you must become like Him. Love begets love. It is a process of induction. Put a piece of iron in the presence of a magnetised body, and that piece of iron for a time becomes magnetised. It is charged with an attractive force in the mere presence of the original force, and as long as you leave the two side by side, they are both magnets alike. Remain side by side with Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us, and you too will become a centre of power, a permanently attractive force; and like Him you will draw all men unto you, like Him you will be drawn unto all men. That is the inevitable effect of Love. Any individual who fulfils that cause must have that effect produced in them.

Try to give up the idea that religion comes to us by chance, or by mystery, or by caprice. It comes to us by natural law, or by supernatural law, for all law is Divine. Edward Irving went to see a dying boy once, and when he entered the room he just put his hand on the sufferer's head, and said, "My boy, God loves you," and went away. And the boy started from his bed, and called out to the people in the house, "God loves me! God loves me!" It changed that boy. The sense that God loved him overpowered him, melted him down, and began the creating of a new heart in him. And that is how the love of God melts down the unlovely heart in man, and begets in him the new creature, who is patient and humble and gentle and unselfish. And there is no other way to get it. There is no mystery about it. We love others, we love everybody, we love our enemies, because He first loved us.

The Defence

Now I have a closing sentence or two o add about Paul's reason for singlng out love as he supreme possession. It is a very remarkable reason. In a single word t is his: it lasts. "Love," urges Paul, "never faieth." Then he begins again one of his marvelous lsts of the great hings of he day, and exposes hem one by one. He runs over he hings hat men hought were going o ast, and shows hat they are all fleetng, temporary, passing away.

"Whether here be prophecies, hey shall fail" It was he mother's ambion for her boy n hose days hat he should become a prophet. For hundreds of years God had never spoken by means of any prophet, and at that tme he prophet was greater than he king. Men waied wstfuly for another messenger to come, and hung upon his ps when he appeared as upon he very voice of God. Paul says, "Whether here be prophecies, they shall fail" This Book s full of prophecies. One by one hey have "faied"; hat s, having been fulfiled their work s finished; they have nothing more to do now n he world except to feed a devout man's faih.

Then Paul alks about ongues. That was another hing hat was greaty coveted. "Whether there be tongues, they shall cease." As we all know, many, many centuries have passed since ongues have been known n his world. They have ceased. Take t n any sense you ke. Take t, for ustraton merely, as anguages n general—a sense which was not n Paul's mnd at all, and which hough t cannot give us he specific esson wl point he general ruth. Consider he words n which hese chapters were writen—Greek. It has gone. Take he Latn—the other great ongue of hose days. It ceased ong ago. Look at he Indian anguage. It s ceasing. The anguage of Wales, of Ireland, of he Scotsh Highlands s dying before our eyes. The most popular book n the Englsh ongue at the present me, except he Bible, s one of Dickens's works, his Pickwick Papers. It s argely writen n he anguage of London streetfe; and experts assure us hat n fifty years t wl be unintelgible to the average Englsh reader.

Then Paul goes farther, and wh even greater boldness adds, "Whether there be knowedge, it shall vanish away." The wsdom of he ancients, where s t? It s wholy gone. A schoolboy oday knows more han Sir Isaac Newon knew. His knowedge has vanished away. You put yesterday's newspaper n he fire. Its knowedge has vanished away. You buy the old edions of the great encyclopaedias for a few pence. Their knowedge has vanished away. Look how the coach has been superseded by the use of steam. Look how electriciy has superseded hat, and swept a hundred almost new inventons into oblvion.

"Whether here be knowedge, t shall vanish away." At every workshop you wl see, in he back yard, a heap of old ron, a few wheels, a few evers, a few cranks, broken and eaten wh rust. Twenty years ago that was the pride of the ciy. Men flocked in from he country to see the great inventon; now it is superseded, is day is done. And all he boasted science and phiosophy of his day wl soon be old.

But yesterday, in the University of Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the faculty was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of chloroform. His successor and nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the librarian of the University to go to the library and pick out the books on his subject that were no longer needed. And his reply to the librarian was this: "Take every text-book that is more than ten years old, and put it down in the cellar." Sir James Simpson was a great authority at the time: men came from all parts of the earth to consult him; and almost the whole teaching of that time is consigned by the science of today to oblivion. And in every branch of science it is the same. "Now we know in part. We see through a glass darkly."

Can you tell me anything that is going to last? Many things Paul did not condescend to name. He did not mention money, fortune, fame; but he picked out the great things of his time, the things the best men thought had something in them, and brushed them peremptorily aside. Paul had no charge against these things in themselves. All he said about them was that they would not last. They were great things, but not supreme things. There were things beyond them.

What we are stretches past what we do, beyond what we possess. Many things that men denounce as sins are not sins; but they are temporary. And that is a favourite argument of the New Testament. John says of the world, not that it is wrong, but simply that it "passeth away." There is a great deal in the world that is delightful and beautiful; there is a great deal in it that is great and engrossing; but it will not last. All that is in the world, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, are but for a little while. Love not the world therefore. Nothing that it contains is worth the life and consecration of an immortal soul. The immortal soul must give itself to something that is immortal. And the only immortal things are these: "Now abideth faith, hope, love, but the greatest of these is love."

Some think the time may come when two of these three things will also pass away—faith into sight, hope into fruition. Paul does not say so. We know but little now about the conditions of the life that is to come. But what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet therefore that everlasting gift, that one thing which it is certain is going to stand, that one coinage which will be current in the Universe when all the other coinages of all the nations of the world shall be useless and unhonoured. You will give yourselves to many things, give yourselves first to Love. Hold things in their proportion. Hold things in their proportion. Let at least the first great object of our lives be to achieve the character defended in these words, the character,—and it is the character of Christ—which is built around Love.

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice how continually John associates love and faith with eternal life? I was not told when I was a boy that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should have everlasting life." What I was told, I remember, was, that God so loved the world that, if I trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called peace, or I was to have rest, or I was to have joy, or I was to have safety. But I had to find out for myself that whosoever trusteth in Him—that is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the avenue to Love—hath everlasting life. The Gospel offers a man life. Never offer men a thimbleful of Gospel. Do not offer them merely joy, or merely peace, or merely rest, or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give men a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love, and therefore abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in enterprise for the alleviation and redemption of the world. Then only can the Gospel take hold of the whole of a person, body, soul, and spirit, and give to each part of their nature its exercise and reward. Many of the current Gospels are addressed only to a part of man's nature. They offer peace, not life; faith, not Love; justification, not regeneration. And men and women slip back again from such religion because it has never really held them. Their nature was not all in it. It offered no deeper and gladder life-current than the life that was lived before. Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can compete with the love of the world.

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love. We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live tomorrow. Why do you want to live tomorrow? It is because there is someone who loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back. There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved. It is when a person has no one to love them that they commit suicide. So long as they have friends, those who love them and whom they love, they will live; because to live is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep them in life; but let that go and they have no contact with life, no reason to live. The "energy of life" has failed.

Eternal fe also s o know God, and God s ove. This s Christ's own definion. Ponder it. "This s fe eternal, that they mght know Thee he only rue God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Love must be eternal. It is what God s. On he ast analysis, then, Love s Life. Love never faieth, and fe never faieth, so ong as here s ove. That is he phiosophy of what Paul is showng us; the reason why n he nature of hings Love should be he supreme hing—because t is going o ast; because n he nature of things t is an Eternal Life. That Life s a hing hat we are ving now, not that we get when we die; hat we shall have a poor chance of getng when we die unless we are ving now. No worse fate can befall a man or woman n his world han o ve and grow old alone, unloving, and unloved. To be ost s o ve n an unregenerate condion, loveless and unloved; and o be saved s o ove; and he hat dweleth in love dweleth already in God. For God is love.

Now I have all but finished. How many of you wl join me n reading his chapter once a week for the next three months? A man did hat once and t changed his whole fe. Wl you do t? It is for he greatest thing n he world. You mght begin by reading t every day, especialy he verses which describe he perfect character. "Love suffereth ong, and s kind; ove envieth not; ove vaunteth not iself." Get these ngredients nto your lfe. Then everything hat you do s eternal. It s worth doing. It s worth giving me o. No man or woman can become a saint n heir sleep; and o fulfil the condion required demands a certain amount of prayer and mediaton and me, just as mprovement in any directon, bodiy or mental, requires preparaton and care.

Address yourselves o hat one hing; at any cost have his ranscendent character exchanged for yours. You wl find as you ook back upon your fe hat he moments hat stand out, he moments when you have realy ved, are he moments when you have done hings n a Spirit of Love. As memory scans he past, above and beyond all he ransitory pleasures of fe, here eap forward hose supreme hours when you have been enabled o do unnoticed kindnesses o hose round about you, things too rifling o speak about, but which you feel have entered nto your eternal lfe.

I have seen almost all he beautful hings God has made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure hat He has planned for man; and yet as I ook back I see standing out above all the fe that has gone four or five short experiences when he ove of God reflected self n some poor imaton, some small act of love of mne, and these seem o be the things which alone of all one's lfe abide. Everything else in all our lves s ransiory. Every other good s visionary. But the acts of ove which no man knows about, or can ever know about—they never fail.

In he Book of Mathew, where the Judgment Day s depicted for us n he magery of One seated upon a hrone and dividing he sheep from the goats, the test of a man then s not, "How have I beleved?" but "How have I oved?" The est of relgion, he final est of relgion, is not relgiousness, but Love. I say the final test of relgion at hat great Day s not relgiousness, but Love; not what I have done, not what I have beleved, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged he common charites of lfe. Sins of commssion n hat awful indictment are not even referred o. By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwse. For the whholding of love is the negaton of the Spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He ved n vain. It means hat He suggested nothing n all our houghts, hat He nspired nothing in all our lves, that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized wh he spell of His compassion for he world. It means hat:—

"I lved for myself, I thought for myself, For myself, and none beside— Just as if Jesus had never lved, As if He had never died."

It is he Son of Man before whom he natons of the world shall be gathered. It is n he presence of Humanity that we shall be charged. And he spectacle self, the mere sight of it, wl sienty judge each one. Those wl be there whom we have met and helped, or there, the unpied mulude whom we neglected or despised. No other Wness need be summoned. No other charge than ovelessness shall be preferred. Be not deceived. The words which all of us shall one Day hear, sound not of heology but of fe, not of churches and saints but of the hungry and the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of sheler and clothing, not of Bibles and prayer-books but of cups of cold water in the name of Christ.

Thank God he Christaniy of oday s comng nearer he world's need. Live to help that on. Thank God men and women know beter, by a hairsbreadth, what relgion s, what God s, who Christ s, where Christ is. Who s Christ? He who fed he hungry, clothed he naked, visied he sick. And where s Christ? Where?-- whoso shall receive a e child n My name receiveth Me. And who are Christ's? Everyone that loveth is born of God.