clearly reflects the divine and eternal. It sets at naught all the categories of time and sense, and identifies us with the infinite and timeless. It is indifferent to environment. It does not rise and fall with the fortune of the beloved, as the quicksilver in the glass responds to the weather; it is delightfully unconscious of secular vicissitude. It is unaffected by distance: Mountains rise and oceans roll Duration does not weaken it. On receipt of his mother's portrait Cowper wrote: "It is fifty-two years since I saw her last, but I have never ceased to love her." Fifty-two centuries would not have chilled his affection. Death does not quench love. In Pompeii they showed me the bone of a human finger with the ring still upon it: fine symbol of the immortality of love and loyalty! Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, There is an ebullition sometimes misnamed love that quite lacks constancy and persistence: it is a fancy, flash, freak, fever; it is not love at all. But when we get the genuine passion we come as near to divinity as we ever can. As Victor Hugo puts it, "A brazier comes to be full of cinders, not so a star.” The apostle then declares that, as God's love to us But is rich and everlasting, surviving all variations of time and circumstance, we will respond to His love with one as much like His own as it is possible for the creature to give. Mutuality is of the essence of love. We have thinkers who recommend the substitution of nature for God. They assure us that when we properly know the universe we can regard it with awe and fear, with admiration and love. Nature is infinitely interesting, infinitely beautiful; there is food for contemplation which never runs short; it gives continually exquisite pleasure, and the arresting and absorbing spectacle, so fascinating by its variety, is at the same time overwhelming by its greatness and glory.* reciprocity is surely of the essence of love; and however we admire, love, and praise the creation, it cannot return our affection. We smile upon it, yet there is no answering flash; we extol it, but find no sympathetic response; appreciation passes into adoration, and still our worship is unrequited. We all see the folly of falling in love with a statue, notwithstanding its beauty; and nature is that statue. "They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they smell not; neither speak they through their throat." In nature-worship, as in all idol-worship, mutuality is not possible; to say that it is makes the pathetic faculty absurd: all thought and feeling, confidence and sacrifice, are on one side. But with God in Christ fellowship becomes a fact. He declares His * Seeley. love to the race most convincingly, and we love Him because He first loved us. He stretches forth His hand out of heaven, we clasp it; henceforth we are inseparable, no fortune or misfortune can unclench the grip. The love of the Eternal is one link of gold, our love to Him is another, and together they bind us to His throne for ever. Nothing shall dim our consciousness of the eternal love or shake our faith in it. Nothing in life shall. Much is hard to bear, impossible to understand; yet no affliction, anguish, persecution, famine, privation, peril, or the beheading sword shall confuse or stagger us. We may be massacred all through the day, and accounted mere sheep told off for the shambles; still we shall not deny the Great Shepherd. Nothing in death shall blind us to the truth of truths. The darkest spot on the earth is a grave, and of all the darkened glasses which mock us the tombstone is the most opaque. But this strangest and bitterest of enigmas shall breed in us no scepticism. Nothing in worlds unpierced by human thought shall drive us to despair. Yea, of this I am persuaded Neither Death, nor Life, nor Angels No, not the Celestial Hierarchy, Not "they that excel in strength❞— Nor the present world, nor the world to come; Nor the abyss of Hades, Nor aught else in God's creation, Shall avail to sever us from the love of God, The love incarnated in the Messiah, in Jesus, Our Lord-ours! * Nothing in the known or unknown, in the present or the future, nothing human or superhuman, nothing that will or can happen shall extinguish our faith and hope, or snap asunder the adamantine bond which binds God and us in a common love. Very sorrowful is the lament of Scherer: "Alas! no faith is so deeply rooted in the human soul that it is not shaken at last." He is mistaken; there is a faith so deeply rooted in the human soul that it survives all tragedies-the confidence of the man of God in the love of God. "Though He slay me, yet will I wait for Him." Here speaks the indestructible faith. "As when one ploweth and cleaveth the earth, our bones are scattered at the grave's mouth. For mine eyes are unto Thee, O God the Lord in Thee do I put my trust; leave not my soul destitute." Here, too, is the heroic accent of unquenchable trust and love. And once more in the intoxication of protestation in our text the kindled soul defies the world and the ages to shake its faith in the God of love. So to-day, amid clouds, scepticisms, and sorrows, ten thousand saints dare to put an absolute faith in God and in His ultimate purpose, and they know that they shall not be confounded. But observe the ground on which the apostle rests this absolute and loving confidence in the love of God: "Which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." St. Paul does not find the proof of God's love and the justification of * Arthur S. Way. ours in nature, history, or life. The love of God in creation is in eclipse, or at least in partial eclipse; and if we are to construe the divine character from the facts of nature, we must hesitate and fear. The light is not clear nor dark, and thinkers are sorely puzzled. To-day two great schools of scientists seriously differ in their interpretation of the world. One holds that nature knows only force, selfishness, and violence; whilst the other, recognizing the large play of egotism and violence in the evolution of things, discerns that sympathy and sacrifice are prominent facts of the physical universe: the first denies love, the second acknowledges it. The contention between the philosophers will go on interminably, for really they are occupied with the diverse aspects of a paradoxical world; the moral of their controversy being that love is not absent in the creation, but revealed only partially, faintly, fitfully. In many creatures the evidences of love are conspicuous, in others there seems a denial of it. The delightful element is unmistakable in doves, butterflies, nightingales, and a thousand more lovely things; it is painfully lacking in hawks, sharks, crocodiles, rattlesnakes, and microbes. In some seasons the Benign Will is in complete evidence; in others it is obscure. It appears clear enough in golden harvests, purple vintages, mellow orchards; it becomes hidden, however, when the labour of the olive fails and the fields yield no meat. In certain moods we discern the goodness of things; and then again a change of mood |