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Which is the first commandment of all?… Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.… Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’
Mar_12:28-31
I. The command, though old, is still new: new by new proportion and emphasis, and by disentanglement from much else that was temporary and partial. It is fit for use in a condition of things over which is writ large that it is new: a new covenant, which makes all things new, for a new Jerusalem, in which every citizen is to be a new man.
II. The double commandment is final; there is neither spiritual nor moral progress beyond it. The first half gathers up in simple but colossal form all those spiritual instincts which we see to be so true a part of experience: it focusses them in a single faith. That faith is simple enough for every child of man; yet it puts no restraint on man’s questioning thought other than this, if restraint it be, that the incapacity of his own finite faculty to conceive an Absolute otherwise than by negation of all attributes, shall not forbid him to recognise in ultimate Being the source of those things of Life, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Love, which are to him the greatest realities of experience.
III. But it contains within it room and impulse for all that the purer, larger, deeper power of man can do to gain deeper, larger, and purer thoughts of God: and for all the illimitable developments that philanthropy, fellowship, and the spiritualising of social moulds and motives can do to work out into organised form the principles of brotherly and neighbourly love founded on, coupled with, explained by, the common relation of all alike to a God Who claims Love, teaches Love, and is Love.
IV. The twofold duty.—Meanwhile for us here in the two great commandments is the high and twofold duty, resting on deep and twofold truth.
(a) First, let us exercise ourselves unto godliness: let us count that life as dull and mutilated which does not at least strive for some communion, spirit with Spirit, with Him Who through Jesus has taught us that He may be loved.
(b) And then let us remember that alike for those who soar, and for those who can hardly lift up their eyes, there is room, thanks be to Him, for all that we can muster, and He can grant, of the twofold love which He enjoins, in the task so far, so awfully far, from accomplishment, of making the common human life more worthy both of God and man. That is the task to which the voices call in our day with singular insistence.
—
Bishop E. S. Talbot.