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Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God.—1Jn_4:7.
2. Of this love there could be no more illustrious example than was St. John himself. It was undoubtedly the loving nature of St. John that drew towards him the sympathetic affection of Jesus Christ. Between the two there existed a harmony of character, which bound them necessarily to each other. In both there was the humility and calmness of that highest kind of love which is as far removed from the vehemence of passion as it is elevated above the changes inherent in passionate affection.
These is a tradition that, when St. John was too old to walk, he used to be carried by his friends to the Christian Assembly in Ephesus. Then followed a hush among those who were present. The Apostle who had leaned on the breast of Jesus, the Apostle who had been with Him through His ministry, who knew more of His mind than others, was about to speak to them, and when he did speak it seemed that time after time the only word which he uttered to them was, “Beloved, let us love one another”: “Little children, love one another.”1 [Note: Archbishop W. Alexander.]
Love in its Origin
1. God is love.—This is the first fact in the universe—first in time, and first in significance. Man cannot be the only or the highest thing that loves in this vast universe. There is—there must be—in it some great, deep heart of sympathy, the infinite counterpart of our faint and feeble human love; for we could not be so moved and awed by unreality and deadness; and till we feel this—till we feel that the holy tenderness which comes over us at the sight of boundless oceans or setting suns or starry skies, that the strong sympathies which seize us when we think of human sufferings and wrongs, and will not let us rest till we have done our utmost to relieve and redress them, cannot be explained by any curious network of nerves and fibres, by any laws of chemistry or mechanics, but is a living breath from the Omnipresent Love, working unseen but ever active beneath the material veil of things—we do not truly believe; the cold inference of reason is not yet quickened into a living faith; God is still a name rather than a power, a force than an agent, an operation than a person.
There is a gem which is called the flystone gem. To the naked eye there is no peculiarity to differentiate it from other like gems; but place it under a microscope and you will see in the midst of its luminous brilliancy a tiny insect, perfect in all its proportions, even to the minute framework of its gauze-like wings and the network of facets on its tiny eyes. Diamond-enclosed, diamond-protected, it is a riddle in the book of Nature. How it came there no one knows, and no human skill could remove it. Whoso would touch that fly must first crush the wall of adamant around it. It is hid in the bosom of the gem, and the natural eye perceiveth it not, for it is microscopically discerned. The analogy fails, for it is dead, and we speak of life. But there is in man that which can call God Father, and which can never cease to be Divine, for it is similarly buried in the heart of the Omnipotent.1 [Note: B. Wilberforce, Feeling after Him, 130.]
Love is the mightiest power in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, pure and overflowing at the heart of the universe. How marvellously it is akin to another most attractive force in Nature—gravitation. Remove this single binding influence, and worlds with all they contain instantly dissolve into chaos. Remove the single bond of spiritual love, and society melts into a social chaos. And just as the sun is the principal seat of gravitation, and the planets are the inferior seats of gravity, so God is the central source of love, and His angels and children are subordinate sources of love. Then, again, as gravitation is extended equally everywhere, so also the love of God. No matter to what depths of sin the heart of man has sunk, be it steeped in degradation and vice, or paralysed by carelessness and indifference, God’s love is ever-present, able and ready to save. No man is beyond its reach and secret influence. Its force never fails or decreases. Love can never die: it is infinite and eternal as God Himself. And because He reigns and directs, and lovingly takes measures unceasingly for the betterment of His children, this world of His is daily and hourly progressing and improving. To-day the world is better than yesterday. To-morrow it will be better than 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.”1 [Note: D. S. Govett, in The Church Family Newspaper, Oct. 13, 1911, p. 764.]
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.
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 unavailing 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 it meets the sinful, and it is in all a Divine power which men cannot help recognizing to be Divine. Jesus Christ is the incarnation 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 improvement 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 individuals, 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.”1 [Note: W. T. Stead, article on Meredith in Review of Reviews, March 1904.]
If love is not worth loving, then life 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.2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 127.]
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. 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.
God’s love is reflected in His children. The veriest beam of light passing through the vault of heaven and smiling in through your windows is exactly the same as the great surging ocean of light in the distant sun. Catch that slender beam, split it open on your prism, and it will tell you what the sun is made of. The difference between the beam and the sun is only one of degree. One drop of water on the palm of your hand has in it all the tides and motions of the sea; it is smaller, but the same.1 [Note: J. M. Gibbon, The Gospel of Fatherhood, 30.]
There is an Eastern legend of a rose so sweet that even the earth which lies around its roots becomes permeated with fragrance and little bits of it are sold as amulets and worn by princes. You and I are but common clay, but if we will lie close to Jesus Christ, His sweetness will flow through our very lives and make them fragrant and precious for ever.2 [Note: H. van Dyke, The Open Door, 121.]
Faces, loving faces,
Lifting up their light,
With a thousand graces,
Shining in the night;
Lighting up with glory
All this darkened earth,
Telling us the story
Of our heavenly birth.
For, in holy faces,
Faces full of love,
We may find the traces
Of our God above.
So to all the races,
So to us and all,
By these loving faces
God to us doth call.1 [Note: R. H. Story, in The Sunday Magazine, 1881, p. 788.]
4. Love can be readily learned in Christ’s school.—The dullest scholar may be a very master of this art, and the most unlettered may read aright the signs and mysteries of love.
It is related of an eminent singer that his teacher kept him day after day, and even month after month, practising the scales, in spite of the pupil’s entreaties for something more advanced. At last the master told him to go forth as the best singer in Europe, having mastered the scales. Not otherwise did our Lord teach His first disciples. For three years He taught them “to love” by miracle and parable, by prayer and sermon. He grounded them in love. When seated with them at the last supper He said: “A new commandment I give unto you,” and behold it was the old one: “That ye love one another.” After His resurrection, He met the disciples on the beach, and He took the repentant Peter and put him through the scales: “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” And then, having perfected them in love, He said: “Go ye into the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Having learned to love, their education was complete, their training ended. They could go everywhere and do all things.2 [Note: J. M. Gibbon, The Gospel of Fatherhood, 20.]
Some one showed me the other day one of the advertisements of a professional athlete, in which it was stated that the average man keeps himself in inferior health because he uses only a small proportion of his lung capacity; there is an infinity of good air around him, but he is not breathing it. Moreover, he does not know how greatly he could enlarge the capacity he already possesses; the more air he can use the more fully he lives. I dare say this is quite true of our physical organization, and it is true of our spiritual organization too. The more fully we breathe the more fully we live. Inhale as deeply as you can of the infinitude of Divine love that is everywhere around and within you, inexhaustible, potent, free. Breathe it forth again in blessing upon the world. You cannot retain it for yourself; you must breathe it forth in order to live; everybody must; there is not a being on the face of God’s earth who does not exhale something of eternal love in his relations with his fellows; the great difference between one person and another is the difference in spiritual lung capacity, so to speak.1 [Note: R. J. Campbell, in The Christian Commonwealth, xxx. 533.]
Love in its Issues
Far above all other motives was his love to Christ. That was the root of his life, and the life of all his effort. It was a conscious, personal, realized devotion. It was too hallowed a feeling for him to speak much of. It coloured and pervaded every thought; was an unceasing presence with him; lay at the foundation of every endeavour, and was brought to bear on every action in life, on every book he read, and almost on every word he spoke.1 [Note: S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 164.]
Nature had done much for Coxe, but grace did more. The personal Religion of the man it was,—the lingering of the dew of the morning,—which kept him so fresh and green. Such a character would else have been spoiled by popularity. The humour would have degenerated into caustic wit, the courtesy, into mere worldliness, the sense of beauty, into æsthetic selfishness. The one only safeguard of a disposition exposed to so many and such various temptations was clearly the love of God. It was this which harmonized his character; preserved him from running into extremes; saved him from secularity; kept his faculties fresh and youthful. He really loved all God’s works, because he loved their Author.2 [Note: J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, ii. 143.]
2. Love is the parent of many virtues.—In the first place, love begets justice. Not only justice of deed but justice of thought—of which we all stand even more in need. When we love anyone we are sure to judge him more fairly, to make more sound and proper excuses for him and to give all the credit due to his better motives. And even when he has deserved just condemnation, true love will not shut its eyes to his fault or close the lips of just reproach. You cannot be just to anyone whom you dislike or hate, you cannot be just and true to anyone for whom your love is not pure and true, for it is not true love that is ever blind to real faults. True love then adds to justice the quality of mercy, not sparing in the condemnation of the sin, but tender, merciful, and forgiving to the sinner. Then we find love the faithful parent of patience, forbearance, humility, and meekness, all elements of the highest humanity and sources of unspeakable blessing and peace. When we truly love, we show all these virtues in their lustre.
How can one man, how can all men,
How can we be like St. Paul,
Like St. John, or like St. Peter,
Like the least of all
Blessed Saints? for we are small.
Love can make us like St. Peter,
Love can make us like St. Paul,
Love can make us like the blessed
Bosom friend of all,
Great St. John, though we are small.
Love which clings, and trusts, and worships,
Love which rises from a fall,
Love which, prompting glad obedience,
Labours most of all,
Love makes great, the great and small.
3. It is love that gives value and charm to all our actions.—For the love spoken of here is not merely a sentiment. It is a pure and holy affection, a controlling principle of action, a consuming, abiding life. It would be a great mistake to regard Christian love as a passion, as a state or quality of heart unconnected with activity, as a mere negation of enmity or dislike. A large part of its force consists in its positive aspects, of the exhibition of active energy in outward conduct. Its full measure is realized only when, besides restraining us from its opposite vices, it impels and directs us into that course of conduct which is consistent with its high and imperious claims.
“It seems to me,” remarked Isabel, “that love is the leaven that leavens the whole lump. It is only when people begin to care for each other that the fineness of human nature is seen. I was horribly selfish myself till I really cared for somebody, and then I gradually became quite nice.
“As long as you don’t love anybody much your character is like a garden in winter; one virtue is under a glass shade, and another is covered over with straw, and all of them are dreadfully pinched and sickly. Then love comes by, and it is summer; and your garden rejoices and blossoms like the rose, without your bothering about it at all.”1 [Note: Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Isabel Carnaby, ch. xxiv.]
It is hard now to represent adequately the extraordinary personal charm which so many of his contemporaries felt in John Henry Newman. The letters convey much of it, but not all. Yet the tradition of this charm is a fact which must be set down in his biography. It was a charm felt by intellectual minds and even sceptical minds, and by simple and practical men. Blanco White, Mark Pattison, Henry Wilberforce, Frederick Rogers, R. W. Church, and Ambrose St. John were all among his most intimate friends. The almost unique combination of tenderness, brilliancy, refinement, wide sympathy, and holiness doubtless went for much. He had none of the repellent qualities which sometimes make asceticism forbidding. He had an ample allowance of those human sympathies which are popularly contrasted with asceticism. Again, he seemed able to love each friend with a peculiarly close sympathy for his mind and character and thoughtfulness for the circumstances of his life. The present writer’s father—never one of the most intimate of the circle which surrounded Newman at Oxford—used to say that his heart would beat as he heard Newman’s step on the staircase. His keen humour, his winning sweetness, his occasional wilfulness, his resentments and angers, all showed him intensely alive, and his friends loved his very faults as one may love those of a fascinating woman; at the same time many of them revered him almost as a prophet. Only a year before his death, after nearly twenty years of misunderstandings and estrangement, W. G. Ward told the present biographer of a dream he had had—how he found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he exclaimed, “I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford.” “I am John Henry Newman,” the lady replied, and raising her veil showed the well-known face.1 [Note: W. Ward, The Life of Cardinal Newman, ii. 348.]
Love in its Insight
Love is the clue to the knowledge of God. Men grub and toil in dust and mud, they explore the depths of the ocean, and sweep the breadths of heaven: they analyse all things, and, baffled at last, they say: “Here is law; where is God? There is no God in the world.” Now, is this wise? Is it thus we come to know men? God is not among the gases! Why seek ye the living among the dead? You cannot by searching find out God. “God is not any one of these things, nor the sum of all, nor the mere maker of all”—God is love, and he that loveth, to the extent that he loveth, knoweth God.
The sun can mirror his glorious face
In the dew-drop on the sod;
And the humblest human heart reflect
The light and love of God.1 [Note: J. M. Gibbon, The Gospel of Fatherhood, 27.]
Standing the other day on the topmost ridge of Leith Hill, and looking where I had been told to look, through a small gap in the South Downs, more than thirty miles away, I could dimly perceive the shining sea. It was little more than a bright speck on the horizon, but I knew that if I made towards it that gap would open and let me through, and I could sail round the whole world upon the bosom of the deep represented by that shimmering patch of silver. It is not a perfect figure, but it does something to illustrate the mode or approach to perfect knowledge of God. Where love is, God stands revealed, small and restricted though our capacity for Him may be. But that shining spot is not a cloud, not a delusion; it is the real thing; follow it up and you shall see.2 [Note: R. J. Campbell, in The Christian Commonwealth, xxx. 533.]
A child has very few notions in regard to his mother, expressible or inexpressible,—not nearly as many as he will have later on. The faculties whose business it is to manufacture ideas are not yet fairly at work in him. But he knows his mother a great deal better than any psychological expert from the university knows her or can know her unless he gets into some other relation toward her than that of an expert. Thinking goes round and never gets there; love makes a cross cut and arrives.3 [Note: C. H. Parkhurst, The Sunny Side of Christianity, 116.]
Literature
Binney (T.), Sermons in King’s Weigh-House Chapel, 1st Ser., 191.
Buckland (A. R.), Text Studies for a Year, 162.
Calthrop (G.), in Sermons for the People, v. 47.
Carter (T. T.), The Spirit of Watchfulness, 206.
Chadwick (W. E.), Social Relationships, 173.
Deshon (G.), Sermons for the Ecclesiastical Year, 254.
Dyke (H. van), The Open Door, 109.
Gibbon (J. M.), The Gospel of Fatherhood, 14, 22.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Sundays after Trinity, i. 223.
Moberly (R. C.), Sorrow, Sin, and Beauty, 179.
Newman (J. H.), Parochial Sermons, ii. 51.
Scott (M.), Harmony of the Collects, Epistles and Gospels, 148.
Stevens (W. B.), Sermons (1879), 1.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), ii. (1870), No. 92.
Voysey (C.), Sermons, iv. (1881), No. 42.
Christian Commonwealth, April 20, 1910, p. 533 (Campbell).
Christian World Pulpit, xxii. 72 (Butler); xxxii. 178 (Beach); liv. 20 (Alexander); lvi. 107 (Holland).
Churchman’s Pulpit: First Sunday after Trinity, 450 (Farquhar), 454 (Lawrence), 456 (Taylor).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vii. 358 (Candlish).
Homiletic Review, xxxii. 315 (Mcllwaine).