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Love is the fulfilment of the law.—Rom_13:10.
I cannot fancy to my self what the Law of Nature means, but the Law of God. How should I know I ought not to steal, I ought not to commit Adultery, unless some body had told me so? Surely ’tis because I have been told so? ’Tis not because I think I ought not to do them, nor because you think I ought not; if so, our minds might change, whence then comes the restraint? from a higher Power, nothing else can bind. I cannot bind myself, for I may untye myself again; nor an equal cannot bind me, for we may untye one another. It must be a superior Power, even God Almighty. If two of us make a Bargain, why should either of us stand to it? What need you care what you say, or what need I care what I say? Certainly because there is something about me that tells me Fides est servanda, and if we after alter our minds, and make a new Bargain, there’s Fides servanda there too.1 [Note: John Selden, Table Talk, 66.]
2. There is a law which men recognize always, even when they refuse to obey it. There is a still, small voice that speaks within, which tells a man that the right is to be followed and the wrong is to be shunned, which condemns a man when he has succumbed to the wrong, and refused the right. To all mankind, said a pagan writer, the voice of conscience is the voice of God. Things may fill us with amazement in this world of perplexities and antitheses, but none of us will refuse to recognize that morality needs no defence. For man, however imperfect his moral ideal may be, will recognize that if he does not obey the voice of conscience, at any rate he ought to do so; and there is a power within, higher than himself, nobler than himself, which speaks to him without the voice of any preacher, “This ought ye to have done.”
3. The Jews designated by the term “law” the entire Old Testament, less in the literary sense, according to which the “prophets” were added, to complete the idea of the volume, than in the theological sense, all the other books being thus regarded as corollaries of the Mosaic legislation. It may be boldly affirmed that in most of the passages in which St. Paul makes use of the word law, it is in the historical or literary sense; the allusion is to the Old Testament as a whole, not to the Pentateuch in particular. On this account the term has most frequently that which was called in the old theology the economic signification—that is, it stands for the entire Old Testament economy.
4. But in the present passage, as often elsewhere in St. Paul’s Epistles, the word “law” signifies purely and simply the Law of Moses as contained in the Pentateuch, or even more particularly, the Ten Commandments. It is true that the word in the original is without the article—“law” simply, not “the law”; and it is important to observe that distinction generally. As Lightfoot says: “The distinction between “law” and “the law” is very commonly disregarded, and yet it is full of significance. Behind the concrete representation—the Mosaic Law itself—St. Paul sees an imperious principle, an overwhelming presence, antagonistic to grace, to liberty, to spirit, and (in some aspects), even to life—abstract law, which, though the Mosaic ordinances are its most signal and complete embodiment, nevertheless is not exhausted therein, but exerts its crushing power over the conscience in diverse manifestations. The one—the concrete and special—is “the law”; the other—the abstract and universal—is “law.”1 [Note: Revision of the New Testament, 110.]
But in spite of this, there is little doubt that in the present passage the Apostle’s thought is of the Law of Moses, and that it is concentrated on that part of the Law of Moses which we call the Decalogue. Not that we are bound to restrict the law which is fulfilled by love to the Ten Commandments. While the argument of the passage is satisfied in that way, love meets not only the negative demands of the Decalogue but also the positive precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. For viewed in its idea and essence as a revelation of God’s will, “law” requires for its fulfilment that we should not only cease to do evil, but also learn to do well.
The subject is the fulfilment of the Law. Its fulfilment is to be contrasted with partial or imperfect obedience to it. So we have these three divisions—
I. Obeying the Law.
II. Fulfilling the Law.
III. Love the Fulfilment of the Law.
Obeying the Law
1. The law may be obeyed through fear; or on account of the punishment which would follow its violation. A person may pay his debts, for instance, because, if he does not, he will go to prison. But you can never be quite sure that the law is really obeyed when you appeal only to fear. If a man is a clever scoundrel he may avoid detection, or, if detected, he may perhaps be able to make his escape before the punishment can be inflicted. And a stupid scoundrel, probably not knowing that he is stupid, will often run a similar risk. Thus, so long as the law depends solely upon fear for its fulfilment, however vigilant may be our police, however upright our courts of justice, however severe may be the condemnation of society, we have no security for its fulfilment, and as a matter of fact we know that it is constantly being violated.
And certainly the law of God can never be obeyed through fear. Despots may feel flattered as they see a population pale with terror at their power. They may think themselves all the safer when their subjects quail before them. And they may not care much, if only outward obedience is rendered, whether there be behind it a feeling of loyalty or not. But we cannot submit to or obey God in any such manner. He is a King and a Father who asks for love—asks for it because He gives His love to us. He says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; not, “Thou shalt dread the Lord thy God.” He is a Monarch whose laws we cannot obey except by loving Him. If there are words we would speak, but that we dread God, we have spoken them in our hearts. If there are deeds we would do, but that we dread God, we have already done them in our hearts. He clearly and strikingly discriminates between what seems obedience and what is. “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.”
Every father fathoms the secret of obedience. You know that it is not worth the name of obedience if your child serves you from dread of consequences. You may have two children, one of whom is self-willed and fulfils your commands only from fear. He may fulfil them with strict literalness, doing exactly what you order, and no more. He may be most careful not to be found wanting in any particular, but you have reason to know that this is from no love of you or of your commands, but from dread of the consequences. Another obeys because he loves; perhaps he is not quite so punctilious in his obedience as the other; there may be occasional failure, occasional forgetfulness, blunders every now and then; but you know that, under all, there is a real love which is never more wounded than when you are wounded. Which of these two do you feel most fulfils your law? which meets most your fatherly sense of what is due to you? in which of them have you most confidence, not only when they are in your sight, but when they are out of your sight? You do not hesitate about the answer; and if the first child were only to do some act of obedience to you because he had begun to love you, you would feel that that one act weighed more than all the deeds of hollow servility he had ever performed. You would feel that love was the fulfilling of the law.1 [Note: E. Mellor.]
Fear acts chiefly as a restraint. It has checked many in a career of wickedness, and brought a few, perhaps, to the scrupulous observance of some precepts. In all things which are thought necessary to avert vengeance, it has often a strong influence, and its effects may even seem greater for a time than that which better principles produce; but it never yet brought a man with his whole heart into the service of Christ; nor does it lead to anything from which we think we may with safety be excused. It neither sets the affection on things above, nor kindles any zeal in the cause of the Redeemer. The dread of God’s anger will not make us cheerfully submissive to His will, or cherish the gentler graces which He requires from us to mankind.
While the law on stone is written,
Stone-like is the mighty word;
We with chilling awe are smitten,
Though the word is Thine, O Lord.
Firm it is as mountains old,
As their snowy summits cold.1 [Note: T. T. Lynch, The Rivulet, 29.]
2. The law may be obeyed from motives of self-interest; there is profit in obedience. To serve for profit is only the other side of the same spirit that serves from fear. Obedience is profitable. But there is a great difference between pursuing a course which is profitable, and pursuing it because it is profitable. A faithful servant of a monarch may be paid for his service; but if he serves only for his pay, he is not a faithful servant. The obedience we render only for the sake of what it will bring, we should not render at all if it brought us nothing; and in such a case the first and ruling motive is not service, but pay.
We cannot in this spirit obey the law of God. The rewards of God, the promised joys and glories of heaven, are far more than the wages of service. The crowns are not given to those who have served for gain; they are given to those who have served from love, who have found the service itself to be a joy, who would be content to serve for love for ever, even if there were no other recompense.
We sometimes meet with men who never commit any punishable injury, but who are to the last degree cold, callous, hard-hearted, and selfish. We are quite sure they would not rob or murder us, but we are equally sure they would not move their little finger to do us any good, would not raise their hand to save us from destruction. These men do incalculable mischief, and that of the worst kind. They injure the moral nature of their neighbours, whose best affections are dwarfed, or it may be destroyed, by their inhumanity, just as fruit is blighted by the frost. They do all that in them lies to make other men into moral pigmies like themselves. Hence, though they are not guilty of any punishable breach of the law, they are guilty of violating it—they do ill to their neighbours.1 [Note: A. W. Momerie.]
3. The law may be obeyed in the letter while its spirit is violated. The letter of the law is enforced by the punishment of society, and just because it is so enforced it is of necessity very limited in its scope. As Bentham explains in his principles of jurisprudence, the written law only takes cognizance of vices which can be clearly defined and readily distinguished. If it attempted to cover a larger area—if, for example, it endeavoured to punish ingratitude or unkindness—it would do more harm than good. It is difficult, or rather impossible, to find out when and to what extent such sins have been committed. If, therefore, the law attempted to deal with them, it would be in constant danger of punishing the less guilty or even the innocent, and of allowing the more guilty to get off scot-free. And, further, this unjust administration of justice would involve an amount of inquisitive surveillance which would be more hurtful to society than the evils which, after all, it failed to prevent. For these reasons, then, the spirit of the law, which is “Thou shalt do no ill to thy neighbour,” has to be narrowed in the letter, where we read only, “Thou shalt not injure thy neighbour in a certain few definite ways.” From this, of course, it follows that the man who is contented with keeping the letter of the law is most undoubtedly guilty of violating its spirit. He goes but a little way along the path of duty.
This was the sin of the Pharisees, the class that Christ denounced most strongly, and the only class that He did denounce. At the time when Jesus first began, with His Gospel of repentance and of Divine love, to teach the simple fishermen of Galilee, scribes and Pharisees had managed, by their interpretation of the law, which was at once a law of religion and a law of righteousness, to bind heavy burdens upon men’s shoulders, and to reduce the simple moral code to a series of minute ritual observances. He was held to fulfil the law who could remember what to do ceremonially, and he was held to have disregarded the law, however faithfully, kindly, and nobly he might be living, who had forgotten or who never knew what the proper ritual was. Then came Jesus and swept it all away; and, humanly speaking, He died for doing it. His protest was entered in the name of religion against the burdensome ritual and minute useless observances with which men were troubled in His day.
The Pharisees were active and zealous. The Gospel was an active religion, and Pharisaism was an active religion; particular virtues were common to both. But the Gospel was an active religion founded upon love, and Pharisaism was an active religion founded upon egoism.
In our own day also a conscious obedience to particular laws of the Gospel determines the lives of large numbers among us; we pray, we worship, we learn the knowledge of Divine things, we give alms, we even fast, we follow the approved methods of repentance, we practise intercession, we bring all our daily interests,—our politics, our friendships, our households, to the feet of God in prayer; we could not be safe or happy for half a day of our lives without God being in all our thoughts; yet when our work for God is over, or even in the dread intervals of silence which stop the heart’s pulses in the stir of work, there comes to all of us this question, “Have I, after all, any true love for God? If God and I were alone in the world where would be my love for God? If there were no work to be done—that work which I love—should I love God at all?”
I put a loaded gun in the corner of a room, and tell my child not to touch it. There is a rule or maxim. Knowing nothing of the reason of my command, his plain duty as a child is implicit servile obedience to my order; his conscience should be grieved if, even to prevent its being broken by a fall, he is induced to touch it, because there is a harm in doing it which is to him mysterious and unknown. But suppose him older, and suppose him to understand by natural intelligence, that the reason of my prohibition was to prevent the possibility of its exploding, and suppose him to see a sheet of paper fall from the table on fire close to it, what would his duty be—to cleave to the maxim, or to cut himself adrift from it? Surely to snatch up the forbidden gun directly. His first duty, in point of time, is to obey the rule; his first in point of importance, is to break it. Indeed, this is the very essence, according to St. Paul, of the difference between the legal and the Gospel state. In the legal state we are under tutors, governors, and must not go beyond rules; for rules are disciplining us to understand the principles of themselves. But in the Gospel state we are redeemed from this bondage, serving in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. We discern principles, and are loyal to them; we use rules or dispense with them, as they save or destroy the principle for which they exist.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 358.]
Fulfilling the Law
Now this is what St. Paul means by “fulfilling the law.” He means that we should do to the very utmost everything required of us. It is incumbent upon us to give in every single one of the tale of bricks, or rather of the fine hewn stones, which God demands from us towards building up the edifice of duty. We must not, we dare not, break, or neglect, or overlook any part of any one of the commandments, for the reason that it is a little one, or that it is a trifle, that it cannot signify, that there is no use in being too particular. We are to remember the words of the Sermon on the Mount, where our Lord says that whosoever shall break one of the least of these commandments or shall teach men so, shall be reckoned the least in the Kingdom of heaven.
Men are apt to think that they cannot have too much of a good thing—too much piety, too much religious feeling, too much attendance at the public worship of God. They forget the truth which the old philosophy taught, that the life of man should be a harmony; not absorbed in any one thought, even of God, or in any one duty or affection, but growing up as a whole to the fulness of the perfect man. That is a maimed soul which loves goodness and has no love of truth, or which loves truth and has no love of goodness. The cultivation of one part of religion to the exclusion of another seems often to exact a terrible retribution both in individual characters and in churches. There is a Nemesis of believing all things, or indeed of any degree of intellectual dishonesty, which sometimes ends in despair of all truth.1 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.]
2. The fulfilling of the law, therefore, is keeping it in its fullest, its deepest, its most spiritual meaning. Every angry feeling, every wanton thought, every uncharitable and suspicious thought, every unfair advantage and dishonest trick, however it may be allowed to pass free by human laws, and however customary in men’s dealings with each other,—all these, and all manner of greediness after the things of this world, are breaches of one or other of the commandments. Nothing short of perfect kindness, perfect purity, perfect honesty, perfect truth, and perfect temperance will fulfil the law. Nothing short of perfect kindness, because every degree of unkindness is forbidden by the sixth commandment; nothing short of perfect purity, because all impurity is forbidden by the seventh; nothing short of perfect honesty, because every kind of dishonesty is forbidden by the eighth; nothing short of perfect truth, because all falsehood is condemned by the ninth; nothing short of perfect temperance, because all greediness and covetous desires are forbidden by the tenth commandment. Such are the vast claims which God’s law has upon us, when taken in its full extent.
When Christ denounced the breaking of any of the commandments, He spoke on the very point that St. Paul is speaking of. His subject was “fulfilling the law.” “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you,”—I, the Eternal Word and Infallible Truth—“that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Or we might paraphrase it thus: “I am come to fulfil the law of Moses; I am come to show you the exceeding depth of God’s commandments; I am come to show you how much they require of every one, when they are taken in their full meaning. This is one object of My mission. If any man, then, fancies that I am come to bring a licence for sinning—if a person conceives he may continue in sin, because I have brought pardon and grace into the world—he takes a mistaken view of the object of My coming. My Father sent Me not to abolish holiness, or to diminish aught from its claims, but to place it on a firmer foundation, and to give it its true scope; so that it shall embrace, not only the outward actions of men, but their very thoughts and inmost wishes. I am not come to make the law void, but to fill it up.”
How Love Fulfils the Law
1. The love which is here spoken of, and which the writers of the New Testament set before us on every occasion when they teach about the inner principle of Christianity, is a reverent goodwill, not only from man to God, but from man to man. The very same word which describes love to God is used by New Testament teachers, by the great Apostle of the Gentiles, and by John the Divine, to describe the relations which should exist between man and man. The same quality of reverent affection which is due from man to God is due from man to man.
It is not easy for men to comprehend the full meaning of this term “love.” We identify it with amiability and mildness and sentimentality. We confuse it with the petty standards of love that are partial, weak, and blind: that limit their favours to one or two; that are no more than a flush in the blood or a thrill along the nerves. Love as St. Paul means it, love as it was newly and divinely characterized by the Saviour, is a broader and more comprehensive thing than any of these,—rises higher, runs deeper, sweeps around larger interests, includes nobler ideals. It is a feeling which pervades all conduct, governs all motives, sustains every duty, extends to all souls. It is the kindliness which prompts to courtesy, the sensitive fairness which insists on perfect equity, the sympathy which reaches after the lost, the mercy which softens the doom of crime. And it is the strength and the courage which dare to undertake severities which are destined to end in blessings; to be a little hard in order to be very tender; and to go forth with the scourge against offenders, and draw the sword of retribution against the oppressor and his hard-hearted crew. And, over and above all these peculiarities, love rises above this earth and the humanity it supports, and exalts the soul to heaven’s gates; reaches out for God, and loses itself in the Being whence its holy impulse was derived. That is what Christianity means by love.
Oh, there are moments in man’s mortal years,
When for an instant that which long has lain
Beyond our reach, is on a sudden found
In things of smallest compass, and we hold
The unbounded shut in one small minute’s space,
And worlds within the hollow of our hand,—
A world of music in one word of love,
A world of love in one quick wordless look,
A world of thought in one translucent phrase,
A world of memory in one mournful chord,
A world of sorrow in one little song.
Such moments are man’s holiest,—the full-orbed
And finite form of Love’s infinity.1 [Note: Henry Bernard Carpenter, Liber Amoris.]
2. “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” St. Paul seems to limit the action of love here to doing no ill. That is simply because the commandments are mostly negative; and that they are is a sad token of the lovelessness natural to us all. But do we love ourselves only negatively, or are we satisfied with doing ourselves no harm? That stringent pattern of love to others prescribes not only degree, but manner. It teaches that true love to men is not weak indulgence, but must sometimes chastise, and thwart, and always must seek their good, and not merely their gratification. Whoever will honestly seek to apply that negative precept of working no ill to others, will find it positive enough. We harm men when we fail to help them. If we can do them a kindness, and do it not, we do them ill. Non-activity for good is activity for evil.
Some years ago we were reading day by day of a murder that had been committed in the swamps of Niagara, and such was the solidarity of the human race that that isolated deed was discussed right round the globe. We saw it all enacted, like some stage drama, before our very eyes. We saw this man, an Oxford graduate, a man of good family, a man reared in honourable traditions, leading his victim on and on to some lonely spot in that dismal swamp, and then the pistol shot rings, and without remorse he turns away, leaving his victim—who has eaten with him, jested with him, trusted in him—to die miserably and unpitied. We tried this man for murder, but that red blossom of murder was only the outward sign of something else. Go deeper to the root, and you will see that he wants to steal, and he covets, and he lies before he wants to murder. These were the active causes of the crime; this was the black sap that fed the tree upon which this hideous blossom of murder at last sprang into life. Reduce all these things to a sentence, and you have said everything when you have said, “This man did not love.” If he had loved his friend he would not have lied to him; if he had loved him he would not have coveted his money; still less could he have pushed him out of life for the sake of paltry gain, which—such is the irony of crime—he never even handled. For that unhappy youth love would literally have been the “fulfilling of the law.”1 [Note: W. J. Dawson.]
3. Love fulfils the commandments. We may take the commandments one by one, and apply this test to them, and we shall see at once that they would not have been needed if only men had loved one another. Do we need to be told not to murder any one we love, not to defraud him, not to covet his possessions, not to dishonour his home? Why, we not only cannot do it, we simply cannot conceive the thought of doing it. If we have love, we cannot help keeping the law. If we have love, we cannot help being moral. It may seem but a scanty equipment to produce perfection, and so the seven notes of music may seem to be a scanty equipment to produce the heaven-born melodies of a Handel or a Beethoven. But see how they use them,—of what infinite and glorious combinations are they capable! How the highest and deepest emotions of our nature find liberation and a language as we thrill to the majestic strains which purify and exalt us, which give us visions of truth, of self, of heaven, of God, and of the joy of God, which no speech could utter and no articulate array of words could express. Yet there are but seven notes of music in it all, something a child might learn in an hour, but which a Handel or a Beethoven cannot exhaust in a lifetime. So it is with this supreme quality of love! It is capable of all but infinite combinations and interpretations; it utters the grand music of heroism and the soft lute-music of courtesy; it is patriotism, it is altruism, it is martyrdom; it stoops to the smallest things of life and it governs the greatest; it controls the temper and it regulates the reason; it extirpates the worst qualities and it develops and refines the best; it reforms and transforms the whole man into the image of God, for there is no height of character to which love cannot lift a man, and there is no height of character possible without it. Love is character. “Love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Love is so comprehensive a grace that it includeth all the rest; and so is in effect the fulfilling of the whole law. There is a thread of love which runneth through all the particular duties and offices of Christian life, and stringeth them like so many rich pearls into one single chain.1 [Note: Bishop Sanderson.]
4. Love is the fulfilling of the law for three reasons:—
(1) It removes the bias of self-love that is in our nature.—That there is such a bias in our nature is plain. Else why should we all be such unfair judges in our own case, and, comparatively speaking, such fair judges in matters we are not concerned with? Any man of common sense can see the rights of a case, where the question is between neighbour and neighbour. Not one in ten, or in fifty, or in a hundred, can see the right of the case, when the question is between his neighbour and himself. Where self is concerned, the weight of self-love is sure to slip into one of the scales; and so they become uneven. Nor is this to be remedied, except by putting into the opposite scale that love to our neighbour which Christ commands us to cherish.
Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul;
Love is the only angel who can bid the gates unroll;
And when he comes to call thee, arise and follow fast;
His way may lie through darkness, but it leads to light at last.1 [Note: Henry van Dyke.]
(2) It gives us sympathy, and is the only effective principle of duty.—This love is far more amenable to reason than the passion which goes by the same name. “We may set ourselves,” as George Eliot has put it,—we may studiously set ourselves “to learn something of the poetry and pathos lying in the experience of all human souls—poetry and pathos that look out through dull grey eyes, and that speak in a voice of quite ordinary tones.” We may know something of this if we will only think. And such knowledge will inevitably give birth to sympathy.
If ever you see in your neighbour the downcast, suffering, timid look, that unmistakable air which marks so often the first apprenticeship to hardness, the beginning of the death of finer feelings, does it strike you to show kindness, to administer comfort or ensure protection? Does it not sometimes rather happen that you help to break the bruised reed, that you show contempt or indifference when you should show loving-kindness, or that you even join in mocking or cruelty when you ought to have put your heel upon it? “Do as you would be done by” is only a low form of practical maxim, but even this is very often higher than our practice. Does it never happen that you get your pleasure out of annoyance to another? Does it never happen that you allow this to be done by some one near you? Does a stranger coming amongst us young, inexperienced, or it may be with some peculiarity, never find his life made miserable by some cruel, or hard, or low-toned neighbour?2 [Note: Bishop Percival, Some Helps for School Life, 175.]
Do thy day’s work, my dear,
Though fast and dark the clouds are drifting near,
Though time has little left for hope and very much for fear.
Do thy day’s work, though now
The hand must falter and the head must bow,
And far above the failing foot shows the bold mountain brow.
Yet there is left for us,
Who on the valley’s verge stand trembling thus,
A light that lies far in the west—soft, faint, but luminous.
We can give kindly speech
And ready, helping hand to all and each,
And patience to the young around by smiling silence teach.
We can give gentle thought,
And charity, by life’s long lesson taught,
And wisdom, from old faults lived down, by toil and failure wrought.
We can give love, unmarred
By selfish snatch of happiness, unjarred
By the keen aims of power or joy that make youth cold and hard.
And, if gay hearts reject
The gifts we hold, would fain fare on unchecked
On the bright roads that scarcely yield all that young eyes expect,
Why, do thy day’s work still.
The calm, deep founts of love are slow to chill;
And heaven may yet the harvest yield, the work-worn hands to fill.
(3) It springs from love to God.—There is no true love of man unconnected with the love of God, nor any which does not originate there. The feeling which takes the name of benevolence is too fickle in its nature, too narrow in its range, too easily checked and extinguished, to fulfil, in any due degree, the duties with which God charges us towards each other. To do this we must love each other for His sake after His pattern, and by extending to them the love we bear to Himself. Then it becomes Christian charity, and is equal to every precept. “Love worketh no ill” to our neighbour; it “thinketh” none. It “suffereth long and is kind.” In no case “doth it behave itself unseemly.” It furnishes unto all good works. It is a principle broad enough for the whole range of our duty; and to be improving in every grace of the Gospel, we need only to be growing perfect in love.
He who loves his neighbour also fulfils the commandments written in the first table of the law. Because he is God’s child and therefore must needs have loved God first, and have thus conformed himself to the obligations of the whole law, he loves his neighbour with a pure heart and true charity. He can, in point of fact, keep the commandments which concern his neighbour only through love of God. For, as the law of Moses was powerless to produce in the heart of the Jew that true love for his fellow-men, without which the law itself could not be fulfilled, which is the effect only of grace, so only those who are filled with the love of God, and possess the grace which grows from this love, can really possess that true love to man which is the fulfilment of the law.
When thy heart, love filled, grows graver,
And eternal bliss looks nearer,
Ask thy heart, nor show it favour,
Is the gift or giver dearer?
Love, love on; love higher, deeper;
Let love’s ocean close above her;
Only, love thou more love’s keeper,
More, the love-creating lover.
5. Love not only fulfils the precepts of the law, it also completes and perfects the law itself. No law can provide for all cases that may come before us in the course of life. Every law can only lay down general principles and rules, and at the utmost can only name some cases in particular. Much less can a lawgiver prescribe exactly the application of his law to the individual case; for the application must necessarily differ with the difference between men, their actions, and the accompanying circumstances. Love alone can take account of all the cases that occur in human life, of all men and their actions, all their surrounding circumstances and peculiarities, and provide completely and suitably for all. In this sense love is not only the fulfilling, but also the fulness (plenitudo), i.e. the completion and perfection of the law. Where love rules wholly and perfectly, there the precepts of the law become superfluous, and the rule of love takes the place of law; where love withdraws and becomes cold, there the machinery of the law must come in, and the more love removes herself, so much the more must the legal machinery rule until it sinks to the slavery of simple government by police.
A mightier church shall come, whose covenant word
Shall be the deeds of love. Not Credo then,—
Amo shall be the password through its gates.
Man shall not ask his brother any more,
“Believest thou?” but “Lovest thou?” and all
Shall answer at God’s altar, “Lord, I love.”
For Hope may anchor, Faith may steer, but Love,
Great Love alone, is captain of the soul.1 [Note: Henry Bernard Carpenter, Liber Amoris.]
Literature
Body (G.), The Life of Love, 10.
Bonar (H.), God’s Way of Holiness, 104.
Campbell (R. J.), City Temple Sermons, 108, 122.
Dawson (W. J.), The Church of To-morrow, 229.
Fuller (M.), The Lord’s Day, 355.
Gibbons (J. C.), Discourses and Sermons, 89.
Hall (C. R.), Advent to Whitsun-Day, 1.
Hall (W. A. N.), “Do Out the Duty,” 50.
Hancock (T.), The Pulpit and the Press, 67.
Hare (A. W.), Alton Sermons, 538.
Hathaway (E. P.), The Ten Commandments and Lord’s Prayer, 79, 81.
Horne (W.), Religious Life and Thought, 111.
Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, ii. 121.
Lee (R.), Sermons, 215, 228.
M‘Cosh (J.), Gospel Sermons, 199.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Romans, 304.
Mellor (E.), In the Footsteps of Heroes, 1.
Momerie (A. W.), The Origin of Evil and Other Sermons, 160.
Percival (J.), Some Helps for School Life, 165.
Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 79.
Streatfeild (G. S.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 23.
Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 131 (Beecher); xxv. 129 (Furse); xl. 152 (Dawson); lxix. 203 (Hutton); lxx. 372 (Muir).
Church Pulpit Year Book, v. (1908), 162.
Churchman’s Pulpit, i. (Pt. 47), 284 (Atkin).