Bible Commentaries
1 Corinthians 13

Verse 1

The One Thing Needful

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.— 1 Corinthians 13:1.

1. This chapter, although a digression, is yet a step in the treatment of the subject of spiritual gifts ( 1 Corinthians 12:1, 1 Corinthians 14:40), and forms in itself a complete and beautiful whole. After the promise that he will point out a still more surpassing way, there is, as it were, a moment of suspense; and then jam ardet Paulus et fertur in amorem (Bengel). Stanley imagines “how the Apostle’s amanuensis must have paused to look up in his master’s face at the sudden change in the style of his dictation, and seen his countenance lit up as it had been the face of an angel, as this vision of Divine perfection passed before him.” Writer after writer has expatiated upon its literary and rhythmical beauty, which places it among the finest passages in the sacred, or, indeed, in any writings. We may compare ch. 15, Romans 8:31-39, and—on a much lower plane—the torrent of invective in 2 Corinthians 11:19-29. This chapter is a Divine “prophecy,” which might have for its title that which distinguishes Psalms 45.—“A Song of Love” or “of Loves.” And it is noteworthy that these praises of love come, not from the Apostle of love, but from the Apostle of faith. It is not a fact that the Apostles are one-sided and prejudiced, each seeing only the gift which he specially esteems. Just as it is St. John who says, “This is the victory which over-cometh the world, even our faith,” so it is St. Paul who declares that greater than all gifts is love. 1 [Note: Robertson and Plummer, 1st Corinthians, 285.]

“The greatest, strongest, deepest thing Paul ever wrote.” 2 [Note: Harnack.]

I never read 1 Corinthians 13 without thinking of the description of the virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. St. Paul’s ethical teaching has quite an Hellenic ring. It is philosophical, as resting on a definite principle, namely, our new life in Christ; and it is logical, as classifying virtues and duties according to some intelligible principle. 1 [Note: E. L. Hicks, Studia, Biblica, iv. 9.]

For moral elevation, there is nothing in literature equal to this chapter. No Plato or Seneca ever uttered a sentiment of such transcendent beauty. Even in the Word of God I know of no parallel to the passage,—even in the Epistles of St. John, who wrote so much upon the subject, and learned his lesson on the Saviour’s heart. It is the highest encomium of the Queen of Graces that genius ever indited; and what more could man, however inspired of God, say in her praise? Yet here is no exaggeration, no distortion of the virtue commended, no depreciation of any other Christian quality or duty. All is just, exact, proportionate, because all is Divine. Love, in whatever aspect regarded—whether in its abstract principle, or in its relative importance, or in its enumerated attributes, or in its immeasurable duration, or in its asserted superiority to faith and hope—is manifestly worthy of its apostolic designation—“the more excellent way.” 2 [Note: J. Cross, Pauline Charity, 6.]

2. Let us examine the important word by which he designates this more excellent way. There is hardly a more difficult one to render exactly, in the whole compass of the New Testament. Our language has not a term which will exactly convey to an English reader the full idea. It is the word, indeed, by which at the same time God’s love to man, and that feeble return of ours which is called love to Him, are both expressed. Still, our word “love” would not by any means do its full work in this chapter. We have that word in so many restricted senses—the love of friendship, the love of wedded life, even the love of lower and less worthy objects—that there would perhaps be danger of our escaping from the largeness of regard here insisted on into some of those smaller channels and abiding places, and satisfying ourselves that we had attained that which is required of us. For instance, when it is said, “Love suffereth long, and is kind,” instead of forming in our minds the idea of some unusual indwelling grace which always and to all men suffereth long and is kind, we should be saying in our hearts, “O yes—we know that there is nothing one will not endure from an object deeply loved”; and so of similar expressions, thereby missing the whole force and blessedness of the description.

The A.V. has unfortunately departed here from the earlier rendering “love” of Tindale and Cranmer (which the Revised Version has restored) and has followed the Vulgate caritas. Thus the force of this eloquent panegyric on love is impaired, and the agreement between the various writers of the New Testament much obscured. The aim, no doubt, of the Vulgate translators was to avoid the sensuous associations which the Latin word amor suggested. But the English word charity has never risen to the height of the Apostle’s argument. At best it signifies only a kindly interest in and forbearance towards others. It is far from suggesting the ardent, active, energetic principle which the Apostle had in view. And though the English word “love” includes the affection which springs up between persons of different sexes, it is generally understood to denote only the higher and nobler forms of that affection, the lower being stigmatized under the name of “passion.” Thus it is a suitable equivalent for the Greek word here used.

The word “charity” is open to grave objections. For, in the mind of the common English reader, it absolutely identifies the quality here spoken of with that very practice of almsgiving with which it is in one verse of the chapter so forcibly contrasted. And it is partly owing to the fact of the word “charity” having been used here by our translators that the chapter itself falls so dead on the ear of the English public. The word, as already said, was adopted from the writers of the Latin Vulgate. Of our own English versions, it is found in Wyclif, and in the Rheims Roman Catholic translation, both of which were made from the Latin. All the versions of the Reformation—Tindale, Cranmer, and the Geneva Bible—had “love” throughout; but King James’s translators, to whom we owe our Authorized Version, unhappily returned to “charity,” so much more easily mistaken, and so characteristically doing the work of Rome, in being capable of representing a mere external act, instead of the largeness of Christian spirit here described. “This,” says Dean Alford, “is one out of not a few instances in which we owe our translators no thanks for having taken from us the life and spirit of our genuine Reformation Bibles, and having gone back to the ambiguous and less expressive language of the version by which Rome supports so many of her errors.”

The difference between the two terms is well exhibited in 1 John 4:8, where the Vulgate reads: “God is charity.” Even the A.V. would not accept this. In Luke 11:42, the Latin has: “Ye pass over judgement and the charity of God,” but in John 5:42: “Ye have not the love of God in yourselves.” These passages suggest that it was the intention of the Latin editors to distinguish between love as a principle and its manifestation. Yet in Romans 5:5, we have “the charity of God is diffused in our hearts.” Again, Romans 8:35, “What shall separate us from the charity of Christ?” It has also to be observed that the Latin caritas had not precisely the same meaning as has attached itself to our “charity.” With us it means beneficence, practical kindness, but in Latin it represents more the inward feeling. Hence Cicero speaks of “the charity which exists between children and parents.” The whole case shows how wisely the Revisers have applied their principle—not always observed—which required the same English word to represent one in the original.

Watts about the same time completed the group of the graces by adding his picture of “Charity.” This picture is in the manner of the old Italian masters, and might well have been painted by Correggio or Andrea del Sarto. Charity is a calm, modern Madonna, the homely, motherly love which is a constant revelation of His heart who comforts us as one whom his mother comforteth, robed in richly coloured vesture, and tenderly encircling three bright, chubby-faced children with her arms—an attempt to picture the “motherliness of God.” It is evident that the painter has a different and higher idea of charity than merely that of one who ministers to the poor, for in that case he would have represented the mother with a look of profound pity on her face, and the children with attenuated frames and gaunt, hungry countenances. The conception which he has of this virtue is that of St. Paul. Charity is more than the love that exists between man and woman. It has none of its excitement and passion. There is no selfishness or exclusiveness such as tinges even the most disinterested love between the sexes. It is more than benevolence, for it makes the rich as well as the poor the objects of its regard. It is not pity and a desire to help that it feels, but a longing for their true happiness, for their attainment of that which is highest and best and most lasting, for those who are well-off as well as for those who are unfortunate, irrespective of condition. It is this realized identity of interests resting on the invisible union of souls. You see on the countenance which the artist places before you the patience of love, never in a hurry, but always waiting to begin. A meek and quiet spirit of love looks out of those thoughtful, kindly eyes, suffering long, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things. She who seems so serene has learnt much of her wisdom by self-sacrifice, and much of her happy thoughts for the future from the trials and disappointments of the past. Humility reigns upon the brow, sealing her lips, so that she speaks not of, and tries to forget, the good she has done, and goes back from the world from her lovely act to the shade again, hiding even her love from itself. 1 [Note: H. Macmillan, G. F. Watts, 207.]

“I do not know when I first heard the thirteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians; but it was no abstract idea of charity, it was the living image of my mother that informed every verse of it. Even the clause ‘charity never faileth’ (though I knew what the Apostle meant by it) suggested to me rather that, in the worst extremity, she would never fail to afford comfort and help.” 2 [Note: Rainy’s daughter in The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 24.]

3. “What is love? St. Paul answers, by giving a great number of properties of it, all distinct and special. It is patient, it is kind, it has no envy, no self-importance, no ostentation, no indecorum, no selfishness, no irritability, no malevolence. Which of all these is it? For if it is all at once, surely it is a name for all virtues at once. And what makes this conclusion still more plausible is that St. Paul elsewhere actually calls love “the fulfilling of the law”: and our Saviour, in like manner, makes our whole duty consist in loving God and loving our neighbour. And St. James calls it “the royal law “: and St. John says, “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” Thus the chapter from which the text is taken seems but an exemplification in detail of what is declared in general terms by the inspired writers.

In one sense it is all virtues at once, and therefore St. Paul cannot describe it more definitely, more restrictedly than he does. In other words, it is the root of all holy dispositions, and grows and blossoms into them: they are its parts; and when it is described, they of necessity are mentioned. Love is the material (so to speak) out of which all graces are made, the quality of mind which is the fruit of regeneration, and in which the Spirit dwells; according to St. John’s words, “Every one that loveth is born of God; … he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

The chief point to remember is that here love is not regarded as a “gift” to be compared with other gifts, it is rather a spirit, or temper, in which all gifts are to be used or exercised. St. Paul constantly speaks of the Christian as a man or woman “in Christ,” or as one in whom Christ dwells. If love is a synonym for the spirit and motive of Christ, when we say that all these gifts have to be exercised and used with, or in, love, we mean that they have to be exercised “in Christ.” Just as to be “in Christ” infinitely moralizes the whole life, so to exercise a gift “in love” infinitely moralizes its use and exercise. 1 [Note: W. E. Chadwick, The Pastoral Teaching of St. Paul, 247.]

4. No distinction is drawn between love to God and love to man. Throughout the chapter it is the root-principle that is meant; love in its most perfect and complete sense. But it is specially in reference to its manifestations to men that it is praised, and most of the features selected as characteristic of it are just those in which the Corinthians had proved defective. And this deficiency is fatal. Christian love is that something without which everything else is nothing, and which would be all-sufficient, even were it alone. It is not merely an attribute of God, it is His very nature, and no other moral term is thus used of Him.

What is meant by love is not a preference for a certain number of special people, but a generic disposition. If you are going to test yourself by the words of Christ and His Apostles, you must ask yourself, not whether you love some person or persons who love you in return, but whether you so live amongst your fellowmen that those around you can see in you something of the comprehensive and inclusive love of God. “No man can love God except he evidence it in love to man.” 2 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 303.]

One of the last, slowly murmured sayings of Whittier, the poet, as he lay dying, was this: “Give—my love—to—the world.” And this is the world’s supreme need to-day; more than our eloquence, or our knowledge, or our wealth, or all else besides, it needs our love. True, even love may sometimes err; but the cure for love’s mistakes is just more love. We never blunder because we love; we often blunder because we do not love enough. God help us all, that like Whittier, we may live and die, giving our love to the world! 1 [Note: G. Jackson, Memoranda Paulina, 51.]

5. St. Paul’s first application of his great principle refers to the use of “tongues”—a gift of ecstatic, and probably highly emotional utterance, and evidently very highly prized by the Corinthians. St. Paul at once refuses to consider the gift apart from the personality through which it is exercised. If that personality is not motived by love the speaker has become a mere instrument of sound without moral (or spiritual) character.

Two applications at once suggest themselves: first, to what is termed popular preaching, however eloquent and clever, which does not proceed from a Christianized heart, which is not inspired by the love of souls, and whose object is not the salvation or edification of men; secondly, to the emotional singing of hymns whose words, if studied carefully apart from the music, are seen to be either heresy or nonsense, if they do not come perilously near to blasphemy. 2 [Note: W. E. Chadwick, The Pastoral Teaching of St. Paul, 248.]

I

Intellect or Character?

1. St. Paul has been alluding in the preceding chapter to sundry and various endowments, abilities, and qualifications by which certain individuals in the early Christian community were gifted and distinguished by Divine providence, for the purpose of the more speedy propagation of the Gospel, and of attracting, retaining, and edifying new candidates for that community. And one purpose of the Apostle in referring to these extraordinary gifts and faculties is to put the favoured possessors of them upon their guard, lest they should become puffed up and self-complacent in the consciousness of their distinctions, and employ them for their own exaltation, instead of for the furtherance of God’s honour in the welfare and progress of humanity.

Of the precise nature of these mysterious gifts, we know little more than that, having answered their temporary purpose, they exist no longer. But whatever they were, it is obvious that the best way of applying for our own edification the Apostle’s admonitions with respect to them will be to translate, as it were, those extraordinary gifts into their modern equivalents, which are variously distributed amongst us under the common name of “talents.” We have no miraculous gift of Tongues; but we have scholars whose laborious industry has mastered languages to such a degree as almost to repair the inconvenience of Babel and to reduce its confusion to order. We have no miraculous gift of Prophecy: but we have men of far-sighted sagacity to discern the signs of the times, of profound wisdom to prepare for the reception and interpretation of those phenomena, and possessed of an eloquence little short of miraculous in propounding their projects and recommending them for acceptance by a free people. And whatever might be the precise nature of what St. Paul terms “gifts of healing, gifts of help, gifts of government,” we can have no doubt that they each have their corresponding though ordinary and unmiraculous endowments in the present day, exhibited in the various evolutions of art, science, philosophy, political and religious administration; each of them, like the Pentecostal gifts, and like “every good and perfect gift,” proceeding from the Father of Lights; each of them liable to misuse by the vanity of man; each of them therefore necessitating a word of caution in the spirit of the Apostle. Such gifts there are corresponding to those of tongues, of knowledge, of prophecy, of discovery, of contrivance or administration; gifts working through all the range of commerce, politics, the camp, the court, the Church, or in the fields of literature and science. These are the gifts which, under the names of talent, force, and genius, men (and no wonder) are ready to bow down before and worship; these are the gifts before which we are least reluctant and ashamed to offer homage, sometimes approaching to extravagance—gifts that are dazzling to the beholder, and cannot therefore but be more or less dangerous to the possessor; gifts that must be used with watchfulness lest they should bear that possessor up into the region of superciliousness; lest they should set him above the plain tasks, the common duties, the homely sympathies, the social kindnesses, the meekness, the modesty, the concession, the considerateness, and the fair construction which we owe to one another.

In earlier days his standard had been almost purely intellectual, but in later life simplicity and charm and genuine goodness seemed to appeal to him most. He said, “The power of simple goodness is the greatest in the world.” 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 484.]

The idea was early and unmistakably impressed on our minds, that to be good was the main thing in life; that there was nothing else that could come into any comparison or competition with this; that in fact nothing else mattered greatly. We knew that this was what our parents desired for us above all else, though I do not think there was much direct speaking about it, beyond a little explanation of our Sunday lessons, or an occasional word when we were saying our prayers. 2 [Note: Early Letters of Marcus Dods, 18.]

Occasionally I preached a sermon at home over the red sofa cushions;—this performance being always called for by my mother’s dearest friends, as the great accomplishment of my childhood. The sermon was, I believe, some eleven words long;—very exemplary, it seems to me, in that respect—and I still think must have been the purest gospel, for I know it began with, “People, be good.” 3 [Note: Ruskin, Prœterita, i. 25.]

2. Since it is plainly because of its fruits that St. Paul magnifies the grace of love, we shall hardly be doing injustice to his argument by saying that, after all, the distinction he draws is between intellect and character, as things to be sought after for ourselves and reverenced in others. The text condenses it into an epigram, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as the blare of the trumpet or the clang of the cymbal.”

St. Paul knew nothing of the modern orchestra. He meant by his simile, presumably, only showy noise and display, loud enough to attract any attention however little cultivated. We may read into it yet other lessons, not less important; for the trumpet and the cymbal have their right and due place in the orchestra, and contribute their necessary share to the “concord of sweet sounds,” and to the intention of the great Master whose meaning they help to interpret. But by themselves what are they but “sound and fury, signifying nothing”? They are useless, and without beauty, unless they take a subordinate place, and unless they co-operate for something greater than themselves. 4 [Note: A. Ainger, The Gospel and Human Life, 33.]

3. It was within a comparatively small ring-fence of a struggling church, separated by hard and fast lines from the heathen and corrupt populace outside, that the problem had risen for solution, which St. Paul sets himself to solve. It was on purely religious questions—the diffusion of the knowledge of Christ by the ability and fervour of those already possessing it—that this question of Intellect versus Character had arisen. But as it is a question going down to the deeps of human personality, it never disappears, but is ever present, and ever pressing for our decision. It is a perennial danger, because a perennial temptation—that steady, never-changing temptation to value ability, talent, learning, accomplishment, even “cleverness,” the cheapest and most worthless of them all—to value these above goodness, and to ignore the certain truth that, where these things are not given by nature (as must be the case with the majority), they are not to be acquired by aping those who have them, by the mere mimicry of “gifts,” which everywhere abounds, the tinsel which obtains acceptance as the glorious gem of the mountain or the sea, the surface cleverness which we daily meet, the borrowed tricks of style and manner and talk, the assimilative skill, wherein is no reality, no root, because no heart.

An over-’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that. 1 [Note: Mr. Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss.]

One to whom he often spoke of the deepest things of life and of death will never forget his saying one day just after the attack of illness in December: “I have come to see that cleverness, success, attainment, count for little; that goodness, or, as F. (naming a dear friend) would say, ‘ character,’ is the important factor in life.” 2 [Note: Life and Letters of George John Romanes, 323.]

4. St. Paul did not malign or disparage gifts. Himself a man of rarest genius, is it likely he would stultify his own mission and function by disparaging the great gifts which, inspired and guided by love, were helping to mould the whole future of the world? “Covet earnestly the best gifts,” he said; every talent and faculty that God has bestowed on your mysterious individuality welcome and turn to the Master’s use.

True it is, and within the range both of illustrious historical precedent and of frequent personal observation and experience, that the best and most brilliant and distinguished gifts may be directed, harmonized, moderated, and controlled by the most frank and unaffected humility, and by the most tender and generous sentiments of humanity. But it will hardly be denied that while the highly gifted in literature and science are very frequently, and perhaps even in exact proportion to their eminence, men of modest stillness and humility, there is a very great temptation to the contrary. There is an instinct of self-glorification through these gifts which requires close looking after. There is a temptation to forget that the only legitimate dedication of such faculties, and the implied condition on which they are bestowed, must be such as shall promote the ulterior advantage of the whole community (as St. Paul shows in the preceding chapter representing us as all members of one body).

I remember one thing he said which made a great impression. Something led us to talk about genius and character. I was praising genius, and taking no notice of character as its great buttress. He turned and said quietly, and with some sadness, “I have seen more young men fail in early life from the absence of character than from the absence of genius.” 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Weslcott, ii. 33.]

In 1876 Leslie Stephen and his sister-in-law, Lady Ritchie (Miss Thackeray), were staying at a neighbouring farmhouse, and Ruskin saw a good deal of them. He liked Stephen, in spite of differences of opinion and temperament, and mentions talk with him as one of the agreeable things at Brantwood; but Stephen on his side “could not be at ease with Ruskin.” Between Lady Ritchie and Ruskin there was fuller sympathy, as is seen in her description of their meeting:—

“ Mrs. Severn sat in her place behind a silver urn, while the master of the house, with his back to the window, was dispensing such cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those who have been his guests will best realize,—fine wheaten bread and Scotch cakes in many a crisp circlet and crescent, and trout from the lake, and strawberries such as grow only on the Brantwood slopes. Were these cups of tea only, or cups of fancy, feeling, inspiration? And as we crunched and quaffed we listened to a certain strain not easily to be described, changing from its graver first notes to the sweetest and most charming of vibrations.… The text was that strawberries should be ripe and sweet, and we munched and marked it then and there; that there should be a standard of fitness applied to every detail of life, and this standard, with a certain gracious malice, wit, hospitality, and remorselessness, he began to apply to one thing and another, to one person and another, to dress, to food, to books.… Listening back to the echoes of a lifetime we can most of us still hear some strains very clear, very real and distinct, out of all the confusion of past noise and chatter; and the writer (nor is she alone in this) must ever count the music of Brantwood oratory among such strains. Music, oratory—I know not what to call that wondrous gift which subjugates all who come within its reach.”

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out. 1 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, ii. 291.]

5. That there may be gifts without love to use them aright—this is St. Paul’s warning, and this warning must be declared afresh in every age. If love is the one source of all that is best in human character, we need not wonder any more why St. Paul should be careful to compare or contrast it with faith and hope, and declare that it is the greatest. For indeed love is the atmosphere in which alone the light of faith and hope can burn. Love creates character, and character, in return, makes lovely and makes lovable. There is a witchery and a glamour which attend intellectual gifts in life, winning admiration and popularity, and even the semblance of affection. But when Death has come in to place the object of these at a distance from earth and time, it is to something far other than “cleverness” that Memory turns instinctively to brood over and cherish. Not the gifts, but the graces, then; not the cleverness, not the accomplishments or learning, not the wit and humour, but the touches of human sympathy and tenderness: the self-denial, the patience and forbearance, the nobility of aim, the steadfastness of purpose, the fact that the atmosphere of life and society was higher, nobler, purer, where such an one moved and spoke—just all those things which St. Paul found to have their source and spring in love.

My opinion of Lord Althorp is extremely high. In fact, his character is the only stay of the Ministry. I doubt whether any person has ever lived in England who, with no eloquence, no brilliant talents, no profound information, with nothing in short but plain good sense and an excellent heart, possessed so much influence both in and out of Parliament. His temper is an absolute miracle. He has been worse used than any Minister ever was in debate; and he has never said one thing inconsistent, I do not say with gentlemanlike courtesy, but with real benevolence. Lord North, perhaps, was his equal in suavity and good-nature; but Lord North was not a man of strict principles. His administration was not only an administration hostile to liberty, but it was supported by vile and corrupt means,—by direct bribery, I fear, in many cases. Lord Althorp has the temper of Lord North with the principles of Romilly. If he had the oratorical powers of either of those men, he might do anything. But his understanding, though just, is slow, and his elocution painfully defective. It is, however, only justice to him to say that he has done more service to the Reform Bill even as a debater than all the other Ministers together, Stanley excepted. 1 [Note: Macaulay, Life and Letters, 175.]

II

The Discovery of Love

1. What is the origin of love? Turn to the Revised Version of the Epistles of John and you will find there these words: “We love because he first loved us.” “We love”—not, “We love him.” This is the way the old version has it, and it is wrong. “We love because he first loved us.” Look at that word “because.” There is the cause. “ Because he first loved us.” The effect follows that we love Him—we love all men. Our heart is slowly changed. Because He loved us, we love. Contemplate the love of Christ, and you will love Him. Stand before that, 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; you cannot command yourself to do it. And so look at the great sacrifice of Christ, as He laid down His life all through life, and at His death upon the Cross of Calvary; and you must love Him. Love begets love. It is a process of induction. You put a piece of iron in the mere presence of an electrified body, and that piece of iron for a time becomes electrified. It becomes a temporary magnet in the presence of a permanent magnet, and as long as you leave the two side by side, they are both magnets. Remain side by side with Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us, and you too will become a permanent magnet, a permanent attractive force; and like Him you will draw all men—be they white men or black men—unto you. That is the inevitable effect of love.

With all thy heart, with all thy soul and mind,

Thou must Him love and His behests embrace;

All other loves, with which the world doth blind

Weak fancies, and stir up affections base,

Thou must renounce and utterly displace,

And give thyself unto Him full and free,

That full and freely gave Himself to thee.

Then shalt thou feel thy spirit so possest,

And ravish t with devouring great desire

Of His dear Self, that shall thy feeble breast

Inflame with love, and set thee all on fire

With burning zeal, through every part entire,

That in no earthly thing thou shalt delight,

But in His sweet and amiable sight.

Thenceforth all world’s desire will in thee die,

And all earth’s glory, on which men do gaze,

Seem dirt and dross in thy pure-sighted eye,

Compar’d to that Celestial Beauty’s blaze,

Whose glorious beams all fleshly sense doth daze

With admiration of their passing light,

Blinding the eyes, and lumining the spright.

Then shall thy ravisht soul inspired be

With heavenly thoughts far above human skill,

And thy bright radiant eyes shall plainly see

Th’ Idea of His pure glory present still

Before thy face, that all thy spirits shall fill

With sweet enragement of celestial love,

Kindled through sight of those fair things above. 1 [Note: Spenser.]

With Professor Blackie the course of true love did not at first run smooth. But the Professor refused to believe that Mr. Wyld (her father) would persist in his displeasure. “You shall soon (he wrote to her) see your father, dearest, sitting as comfortably at my fireside as he does at his own. I believe that the only invincible power in the world is love; I shall ply your father with that and that only, and if I do not conquer—Christianity never conquered.” 1 [Note: John Stuart Blackie, i. 207.]

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 he called out to the people in the house, “God loves me! God loves me!” One word; one word! It changed that boy. The sense that God loved him had overpowered him, melted him down, and had begun the making of a new heart.

“Please, ‘ma,’ ” began Atim, “please no whip Mees Kittee. She say true word. Me black, me nigger. Me no white, me no prettee, but Jesus He no think about black face, and He lofe me all the same. He lofe me, me too glad. Mees Kittee speak true word, but me not sorree any more.”

The girl’s black eyes glistened with feeling, but she looked very happy, and she showed her ivory teeth.

“ Atim, my dear Atim!” said Mrs. Temple. “I’m glad along with you! What do other things matter after all if one is sure of that?”

“ Jesus, He make me white as snow me never see in me country. Me lofe Him! Me lofe Him!” She laughed aloud in her perfect pleasure. Truly she could afford to forgive and forget.

Kitty, stony-faced, had been a study during Atim’s plea for her. She had refused utterly to beg pardon, and stood as perverse a little mortal as one could see anywhere. Gradually, as Atim spoke, her expression became softer. Her warm heart was touched. The moment Atim stopped, she flung herself into the black girl’s arms.

“ I love you, Atim!” she cried. “I love your black face. I’m the wickedest sinner alive! If I loved Jesus the least little bit, I wouldn’t behave so.” She kissed the girl many times, and fondled her. Then Kitty turned to her mother. “Mother, mother, punish me! Make me do something I don’t like at all. I’ll do it just to show how sorry I am. I don’t want to be naughty, but it’s my nature! I feel awful bad, awful!” 2 [Note: J. F. Hogg, The Angel Opportunity, 131.]

2. As if on purpose to obviate all mysticism, St. Paul is careful to describe love by its practical results. A tree is known by its fruit; and as you might describe an oak tree to a child as the tree that is covered with acorns; or a vine as the tree from which the purple clusters are hanging, so St. Paul delineates love by the fruit it bears. By love, he seems to say, I mean that quality which “suffereth long and is kind,” puts up with a great deal, and, trying to find excuses for the misdemeanour of an adversary, is kind and gentle and forbearing. Love envieth not the good fortune, the reputation, the precedence of another, vaunteth not herself, is not puffed up; gives herself no airs of consequence, nor plumes herself upon even real superiorities, inasmuch as it is contrary to the very essence of love to be making those comparisons which alone could supply materials for self-conceit; doth not behave herself unseemly, nor in any manner incongruous with the correlative circumstances in which she is placed; or inconsistent with the rights, the feelings, or even, if it can be helped, the honest prejudices of those with whom she is placed. And she is the less likely to fall into this unseemliness because she seeketh not her own; is not incessantly on the watch to assert her own presence and to claim attention to her own prerogative; is not easily (or perhaps it may here mean “vehemently”) provoked; imputeth no evil where it can be avoided; rejoiceth not in iniquity—as so many do, who cannot hear a piece of discreditable news but they sit on thorns until they can find an opportunity to repeat it—but rejoiceth in everything that is consistent with truth, justice, and integrity. Beareth all things, or more probably here, concealeth all things concerning another person which, without injury to the claims of social laws, it would be kind and considerate to conceal; believeth all things favourable to such a person which there is any colourable reason to believe; even hopeth those which she finds it difficult to believe; and endureth all things which it may be an advantage to others that she should endure.

Henry Drummond has told us how in the heart of Africa, among the great lakes, he came across black men and women who remembered the only white man they ever saw before—David Livingstone; “and as you cross his footsteps in that dark continent, men’s faces light up as they speak of the kind doctor who passed there years ago. They could not understand him; but they felt the love that beat in his heart.”

In London, in 1872, one Sunday morning a minister said to me, “I want you to notice that family there in one of the front seats; and when we go home I want to tell you their story.” When we arrived home I asked him for the story, and he said, “All that family were won by a smile.” “Why,” said I, “how was that?” “Well,” said he, “as I was walking down a street one day I saw a child at a window; it smiled, and I smiled, and we nodded. So it was the second time; I nodded, she nodded. It was not long before there was another child, and I had got into a habit of looking and nodding; and pretty soon the group grew, and at last, as I went by, a lady was with them. I did not know what to do. I did not want to nod to her, but I knew the children expected it, and so I nodded to them all. And the mother saw I was a minister, because I carried a Bible every Sunday morning. So the children followed me the next Sunday and found I was a minister. And they thought I was the greatest preacher they knew, and their parents must hear me.” 1 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Faithful Saying, 44.]

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music. 2 [Note: George Eliot, Adam Bede.]

O Youth immortal—O undying love!

With these by winter fireside we’ll sit down,

Wearing our snows of honour like a crown;

And sing as in a grove,

Where the full nests ring out with happy cheer,

“Summer is here.”

Roll round, strange years; swift seasons, come and go;

Ye leave upon us only an outward sign;

Ye cannot touch the inward and divine,

While God alone does know;

There seal’d till summers, winters, all shall cease

In His deep peace.

Therefore uprouse ye winds and howl your will;

Beat, beat, ye sobbing rains on pane and door;

Enter, slow-footed age, and thou, obscure

Grand Angel—not of ill:

Healer of every wound, whene’er thou come,

Glad, we’ll go home. 3 [Note: Dinah M. Mulock.]

The One Thing Needful

Literature

Ainger (A.), The Gospel and Human Life, 30.

Ainger (A.), in Anglican Pulpit of To-day, 344.

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, vii. 104, 120, 133.

Bonar (H.), God’s Way of Holiness, 153.

Bradby (E. H.), Sermons at Haileybury, 324.

Brooke (S. A.), The Fight of Faith, 51.

Brookfield (W. H.), Sermons, 96.

Cross (J.), Pauline Charity, 22, 36, 50.

Daplyn (E.), One with the Eternal, 9.

Duncan (J.), In the Pulpit and at the Communion Table, 183.

Grant (C.), A School’s Life, 80.

Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 47.

Jones (H.), in A Lent in London, 134.

Kingsley (C.), Sermons for the Times, 256.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., ii. 167.

Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 222.

Moberly (R. C.), Christ our Life, 45.

Moody (D. L.), Faithful Sayings, 41.

Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, iv. 307, v. 327.

Nicoll (W. R.), Ten-Minute Sermons, 173.

Robarts (F. L.), Sunday Morning Talks, 125.

Salmon (G.), Sermons in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, 55.

Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 134.

Scott (M.), Harmony of Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, 66.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xiii. (1876) No. 992.

Wilson (J. M.), Sermons in Clifton College Chapel, i. 205.

Cambridge Review, ii. Supplement No. 39 (Bradby); vi. Supplement No. 142 (Ainger).

Christian World Pulpit, iii. 296 (Gasquoine), 406 (Bull); xvi. 20 (Statham); xxvii. 376 (Rogers); xxxv. 168 (Halsey); lxv. 97 (Henson); lxxix. 342 (Gordon).

Church of England Magazine, xiii. 281 (Hodgson); xix. 273 (Horsford); xxxix. 200 (Hoare).

Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., vii. 92 (Proctor).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., i. 155 (Newman); ii. 142 (Drummond); v. 115 (Newman); vii. 120 (Alford).

Preacher’s Magazine, ix. (1898) 251 (Slater).

Verse 12

The Partial and the Perfect

For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I have been known.— 1 Corinthians 13:12.

1. St. Paul has been speaking of gifts or endowments on which members of the Corinthian Church were priding themselves. There was a great deal of emotion in the new Christian societies of that day. Emotional impulses broke out in irregular exhortations, in utterances of praise, in expressions of conviction, in acts of healing; and these impulses, which sometimes led to disorderly competition, needed to be controlled. The first principle that St. Paul lays down with regard to them is that their proper object is to be of some use to the Christian society. They were given not for the profit or distinction of the individual, but for the benefit of the Church. Then he bids his readers see that all gifts, even those from which the Church might derive most advantage, were essentially inferior to love.

He goes on to describe, in words worthy of what he praises, the beauty and blessedness of love. The ultimate distinction that he ascribes to it is that it lasts; it does not fail, or undergo changes, it abides. Herein especially was it contrasted with prophesying and tongues and knowledge. Prophecies will be done away, tongues will cease, knowledge will be done away. St. Paul was no doubt referring here to the emotional gifts which were used and valued in the Churches of that age. But he lets us see that he regards these as representing all intellectual conceptions and utterances concerning spiritual things. “For we know in part, and we prophesy (or preach) in part: but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.” St. Paul would hardly have spoken thus if he had not himself been perplexed by the incompleteness and unsatisfying character of the accounts which we can give to ourselves and others of the ways of God. He was accustomed to take refuge in the thought that our conceptions and language are the expressions of partial knowledge, such as will be superseded in time by maturer and completer knowledge. And he had evidently found support in the two analogies which he proceeds to give.

(1) “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things.” Every grown-up person is familiar with this experience. We can remember fanciful conceptions of our childhood which now make us smile; things appeared to us in very different proportions from those in which we see them now. Our knowledge has grown, and the growth of it inevitably alters our apprehensions and judgments. It is not unreasonable to expect that what has already happened to us will happen to us again. May we not hope that in the future world, which we cannot now understand, but which will seem so different to us from the present, the contradictions and perplexities which baffle us now will in some way be made to disappear? There is a presumption that, even on this side of the grave, as the generations of Christians grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, they may outgrow doctrines and rules which were natural to earlier stages.

(2) The other analogy is that which forms our text. We are reminded of the difference between a person seen as reflected by an imperfect and confusing mirror and the same person seen face to face. Let us hold—the Apostle taught—that God is now seeing and knowing us; but let it not be assumed that we as yet see and know God—except most imperfectly.

2. The expression which St. Paul here uses is a very suggestive one. He has been speaking of the contrast in value between knowledge and love, showing that all our knowledge, of whatever sort it may be, is of little worth compared with love. Love is that which alone is truly precious in human life, and love endures; while all our ideas are destined to dissolve and pass away, like the changing shapes of the clouds from the heaven’s azure. Love is that constant blue above, and love above is eternal. Knowledge is partial, and therefore the utterance of the truth in prophecy or preaching must be partial. And just as the man puts off the thoughts of the child, so the man is ever putting off and changing even his manhood’s thoughts that have been as those of a spiritual childhood, for those that are to him new and better, even as he changes his raiment. This process must go on to the last hour of mental life and activity; and what we think the best thought must in time give place to a better; and the best that can be dreamed is still a dream and a shadow compared with the substance and the reality itself. “For,” says the Apostle (to render his words quite literally), “we are looking now through a mirror in (or upon) an enigma.”

3. Human knowledge is imperfect, fragmentary, partial. We can scarcely be said to “know”; we are only “learning to know” by slow and painful effort; our best attainment is one-sided, relative, incomplete. Our expression even of what we think we know is partial and imperfect. Not only do we “know in part,” but we “prophesy in part.” Even those whom God has called to be His spokesmen can but communicate their message in language which is inadequate to express the truth fully. And why? Because here and now, in this present life and with our limited faculties, we can only see “by means of a mirror.” All that we can discern is as it were but a reflection of the absolute archetypal realities, a blurred, confused, imperfect image of glory upon which as yet we cannot gaze. And even that reflection which we seem to see can only be described in language which is like a riddle, challenging us to guess its meaning and unravel its secret, but hinting, not defining, hard to interpret, liable to be misunderstood. In the face of eternal truths we are but children; thinking, feeling, speaking, with the limited capacities, the baffled eagerness, the constant and inevitable misunderstandings of children: yes, but like children too, with the hope and promise of growth, development, attainment hereafter.

For St. Paul’s now is balanced by a then. “When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.” Beyond this life of mediate and imperfect knowledge expressed in the language of riddles lies the promise of a life where knowledge will be immediate, distinct, consummated in the vision of God “face to face”; when partial knowledge will be exchanged for knowledge so full, so complete, so personal, that St. Paul dares to compare it with God’s present perfect insight into each human soul;—“then shall I know fully even as also I have been fully known.”

Meanwhile, in this our present state of limited and imperfect knowledge, amid all the uncertainties and perplexities of life, there is one sure clue, one indispensable guide to direct us—“love never faileth.”

The idea is one, but the Apostle gives it in two parallel statements, after the manner of Hebrew poetry. And each statement has its two sides—“now” and “then.” Thus—

I. Seeing.

1. Now we see in a mirror, darkly.

2. Then face to face.

II. Knowing.

1. Now I know in part.

2. Then shall I know even as also I have been known.

I

Seeing

It is often hard to get people to see. Their gaze is on the outward—the shows of sense and of time—on the seen; and therefore to the New Testament writers it is but blindness. To them he who does not see the unseen does not see at all. But, given the vision of faith, it will develop from faltering dim beginnings, and its horizon will become richer and more heavenly. It will rejoice in the mirror. It will not even resent the riddle. And why? Because it is conscious of moving onwards to the Face.

One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By-and-by, other stars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear-tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf.

At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star shines clearly: here a constellation is hidden by a branch: a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organism is required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed, and a real void: when to cease to look in one direction, and to work in another. Many men of broad brow and great intellect lived in the days of ancient Greece, but for lack of the accident of a lens, and of knowing the way to use a prism, they could but conjecture imperfectly. I am in exactly the position they were when I look beyond light. Outside my present knowledge I am exactly in their condition, I feel that there are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a leaf. 1 [Note: Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart, 188.]

The late Professor T. C. Edwards says that St. Paul got his metaphor of the mirror from Philo, who got it from Plato, and he mentions the striking passage in Plato’s Republic, where Socrates is illustrating the slow development of our faculties by the case of men who have been immured in a cavern and are suddenly dragged into the sunlight. Not a man at first can make out, in the unaccustomed glare, a single object as it is. “Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to perceive objects in that upper world. At first he will be most successful in distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the reflections of men and other things in water, and afterwards the realities; and after this he will raise his eyes to encounter the light of the moon and the stars, finding it less difficult to study the heavenly bodies and the heaven itself by night than the sun and the sun’s light by day.” Finally, he will see the sun as it is, not as it appears in water or on alien ground, and then he will conclude that the sun is the author of the seasons, the guardian of the visible world, and the cause of all he and his friends used to see. On some such lines the idealism of St. Paul runs respecting the soul and its spiritual vision as it ascends from the partial to the perfect, from the fleeting to the real. One may note, in passing, the joy of discovering a kinship between such minds as Plato, St. Paul, and Wordsworth, children of ages far distant, but each illumined by the immanent Reason, by the “Light which lighteth every man.” 2 [Note: R. M. Pope, The Poetry of the Upward Way, 152.]

i. Now

“Now we see in (by means of) a mirror, darkly.”

St. Paul’s meaning is explained in an illustration. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” With the humility of true wisdom and the sweetness of a large understanding, he reckons the attainments of this life as no more than childish acquisitions, when compared with that which we shall reach when we are home. Our powers are undeveloped, immature, juvenile, in this life; our spiritual insight is therefore defective, and our knowledge only preparatory or initial.

1. In (or by) a mirror.—When St. Paul lived and wrote, mirrors were not made of glass, as the Authorized Version of this passage erroneously suggests, but of some metal. The best, being made of silver, were costly, and it took a good deal of skill and labour to make the surface of the metal quite even. And however well made a mirror might be, it was always in danger of losing its clearness by exposure. St. Paul and his readers were not of the class that could indulge themselves in costly articles of luxury. A cheap and inferior mirror was better than nothing; but we can picture to ourselves what the mirrors used by the humbler classes were like, if we recall the reflections of ourselves which we have casually seen in tarnished and uneven surfaces of metal.

Let any one imagine himself to be before such a mirror, with a friend standing by him. He can see the friend’s face reflected as if he were looking through the mirror. But the face, so seen, will be distorted and dim, and if he desires to examine any feature accurately he will be baffled, so that the face will be in some respects an enigma or puzzle to him. What a contrast he will perceive, if he turns his head, and looks at the actual face of the friend at his side! Then he will see and know his friend, as his friend who was not using the mirror was seeing and knowing him.

Thus St. Paul’s similitude is to be explained. His words, literally rendered, are—“For we see now through a mirror in an enigma (or puzzle), but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know as fully as I was known.” He is comparing the blurred and confusing reflection of an object with the object as seen directly. And he uses this image to illustrate what he assumes to be puzzling in the ways of God as we can now apprehend them.

What we see at present is a sort of reflection of truth, not the very truth itself. A mirror may be very useful; but it can never give the accurate idea of the very figure, the very person, presented in it. If its copy of the person be ever so accurate, still it is not defective only, it is also misleading: the right side has become the left, and the left hand in the picture is awkwardly performing the functions of the right hand in the original: thus the effect produced is different, however carefully represented the details and the particulars. A mirror, too, can hold but one image at a time: if it be preoccupied by one figure, it is unavailable for another. And if, in addition to these essential defects of accuracy and limitations of capacity, there be also the slightest flaw in the glass or cloud upon the surface, there is an end at once of all beauty and of all truth in the representation, and what was before only defective becomes now a distortion and a caricature. And how much more expressive would be the figure in the Apostle’s days, when not glass but stone or metal was commonly used for the purpose spoken of; when the colouring therefore of every object must have been lost in the reflection, and nothing would remain but a meagre and blurred outline to carry to the eye the impression of face or figure or landscape!

2. Darkly.—That is, as the margin tells us, “in a riddle.” The original is identical with our English word “enigma.” What a mirror is to the eye a riddle is to the ear, only that the latter expresses more clearly the incompleteness of our knowledge, and the necessity that it should be thus partial. But just as a reflection implies a reality, so a riddle involves an answer. What we know of God comes to us wrapped in mystery; it comes as an answer to our needs, but in giving this answer it raises new questions for our solution—questions which St. Paul tells us by this very phrase we cannot hope now altogether to solve. We see God and Divine things amid the perplexities and contradictions of this imperfect state, part, surely, of the clouds and darkness which are round about Him; we behold Him through life’s great riddle, and though the dimness which it brings rises ever before us from this lower earth like a mist, those who look for Him see the far-off shining of His face, and know the maze is not without its clue, that His Hand, strong and tender, holds the thread of the Divine love, from which, while we hold it fast, neither life nor death, neither things present nor things to come, shall be able to separate us.

It is in relation to the highest truths that it is most important constantly to recognize the limitation of our knowledge and the imperfection of our expression of it. It is these truths of which it is most necessary to remember that we apprehend them only as “through a mirror,” express them only as “in a riddle”; learn only by slow degrees to recognize a little better what the image means, to understand a little more fully the depths of mystery wrapped in the words of the riddle. How many an error has sprung from the assumption that human language could be a full and adequate expression of Divine realities, in forgetfulness of St. Augustine’s warning, Verius cogitatur Deus quam dicitur, et verius est quam cogitatur; for “when we have said all that we can say concerning Him, we have said nothing worthily.” How many an assault upon the Christian faith has been based upon the assumption that infinite truths could be compressed into the moulds of human words! Yes, and how often the defenders of the Faith have exposed themselves to attack by letting it be thought that this was their belief, this the position which they were bound to maintain at all hazards.

Take for an example the nature of God. The very attributes of God are an enigma to us. What is infinity? What is omniscience? What is omnipresence? What is eternity? Each is a riddle. Take the character of God. Is it not all shadowed forth to us in the Scriptures, in the Old Testament at all events, in dark sayings? “It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart” ( Genesis 6:6). Take the mode of our redemption. We firmly believe in the truth of an atonement made for sin by the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. But is not every word in that statement an enigma? Who can explain, unless he would “darken counsel by words without knowledge” ( Job 38:2), the precise mode and principle of that work of Christ, which is yet a sinner’s one hope? Take the operation of the Holy Spirit. Who can tell us how the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of men? “Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” ( John 3:8). Take the process of the future judgment. Who will say that a thousand objections which he cannot answer might not be urged by human ingenuity against each part of that doctrine? We know it; but it is “in a riddle”; it is as a dark saying. Or take, once more, for an example, the whole conception of heaven, of the future life of the saved; and O, ten thousand times more, of the future life of the lost. The revelation is made to us, made on the authority of God, but made to us also in human words, and therefore also made “in an enigma.” 1 [Note: C. J. Vaughan.]

Evermore it remains true that we see darkly. It is necessary; it is part of our education; we do not require to know much just yet—a little here goes a long way. I do not need to know the metaphysical nature of God, or the state and occupations of the dead, or the destiny of the heathen, or how many shall be saved, or how long the world is to last under present arrangements, and when the great historic drama of our planet will enter upon another act, or what rising hierarchies of angels there are, and what they look like, and what they do, and how they subsist: all this is irrelevant to my condition. We see darkly, but we see enough. We feel that there must be reality behind these appearances, that behind the universe must be a Mind that made it; behind time must be eternity; behind the carnal kingdoms of this world, the kingdom of eternal love that shall one day replace them; behind man’s soul, with its hankerings and hungers and thirsts and clamours, a God who can satisfy them; behind all the sin of the world, a salvation from it. 2 [Note: J. S. Jones, Seeing Darkly, 22.]

ii. Then

“Then face to face.”

No doubt there is a verbal reference here to the words spoken of Moses: “If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold” ( Numbers 12:6-8). We have the same contrast here: “Now we see through a glass, in a dark speech … but then face to face.” We shall all have that sort of communication with God Himself, which, alone of all men, the mediator of the first dispensation was privileged to enjoy in his day.

Higher, higher,

Purified by suffering’s fire,

Rise, my soul, until thy flight

Pierce its way to heaven’s light.

Clearer, clearer,

Until, ever drawing nearer,

There shall burst upon thy sight,

Through the darkness of earth’s night,

All the eye of faith may see,

Set in God’s eternity. 1 [Note: William H. Birckhead.]

II

Knowing

In the language of St. Paul “knowledge” denotes the advanced or perfect knowledge, which is the ideal state of the true Christian. It appears only in his Latin Epistles (from Romans onwards), where the more contemplative aspects of the Gospel are brought into view, and its comprehensive and eternal relations more fully set forth. But the power of the preposition appears in the verb, no less than in the substantive. In this passage it is forced upon our notice. The partial knowledge is contrasted with the full knowledge which shall be attained hereafter. This distinction is missed in the Authorized Version here, though it is observed in 2 Corinthians 6:9, “as unknown, and yet well known.” 2 [Note: Lightfoot, A Fresh Revision, 69.]

i. Now

“Now I know in part.”

How much in the history of knowledge, as we read it with the comment of that most stern of critics, Time, seems to be but a record of misapplied ingenuity and dreary waste of energy. We mark one generation contemptuously discarding the studies and the methods of its predecessors and substituting its own, doomed in their turn to become antiquated and obsolete. Processes of thought which claimed to be capable of solving every contradiction are found wanting, and are abandoned for ever. Enthusiasms which boasted of their power to regenerate a dead age prove their insufficiency, and even turn themselves to worse corruption. Controversies which were treated as questions of life and death are pronounced to be barren logomachies or, at the best, of comparative insignificance, when, viewed from a distance, they assume their proper proportions.

In each successive age we see the tyranny of some dominant form of thought, or subject of study, or scheme of learning, claiming to be supreme and final, to have the right to suppress its rivals, and destined to last for ever. Wherein lay the error? Was it not that one age after another failed to take to itself St. Paul’s warning that all human knowledge is partial, relative, progressive? Each form of thought, each branch of study, served some useful end, but the mistake lay in the tendency to regard passing forms of thought as final, partial methods of study as universal; and its consequence was a timid and anxious clinging to the past when the inevitable hour of change arrived. The dialectic of the Schoolmen served to sharpen the reasoning faculties, but long ere it was displaced it had degenerated into the merest quibbling, and stunted rather than developed the growth of the intellectual powers. Yet its adherents were slow to confess that the “science of sciences” was no infallible instrument for the attainment of knowledge, and that the exercises of the schools were perilously liable to beget a habit of mind which valued victory in argument more highly than the elucidation of truth. 1 [Note: A. F. Kirkpatrick, Cambridge Review, xv. 85.]

Most of the hot debates which burn in the history of theology have been about things which were looked at in a mirror; and the fact that no one could see these things just as they were, was precisely what made them such excellent matter for debate. 2 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Afternoons in the College Chapel, 9.]

1. There are secrets hidden in every tiny flower and grain of sand, in every throbbing nerve and aching heart, which our keenest wisdom cannot discover. Every tear is a profound mystery, every sigh is a world of unimaginable things. No one can tell us why we laugh or why we cry. No one can read his brother’s mind or understand his own. He who has studied human nature most closely has but touched the surface of it. Those who can tell us most about man can only prove that he is fearfully and wonderfully made. Men who have been investigating for a lifetime the sins, sorrows, and diseases of the world find that these are still the everlasting riddle; and he whose faith has given him the clearest vision of God, knows that these are but “a portion of His ways, and the thunders of His power none can understand.” The highest philosophy still prattles and stammers and guesses like a child, and we all have to kneel down humbly declaring that our wisdom is but dim-eyed folly, and repeating these words of St. Paul: “Now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I have been known.”

The science of all sciences is the knowledge of God. To know Him, what He has done for man, what He is to man, what man is to Him,—nay, what He is in Himself, to know at once the tenderness of His love and the mystery of His Being—this is the highest exercise of man’s mind; this is the purest joy of man’s heart; this is the only one true aim of life; this alone can be called life; this is the life the pulses of which begin to beat within us in this world; this is the life which swells out into its full perfection in the world to come; for “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” 1 [Note: R. W. Randall, Life in the Catholic Church, 159.]

Speaking of God as being infinite in His nature and attributes, he said: “I cannot grasp this infinity: I am not able to comprehend God; I know but in part. If I knew Him I would cease to worship Him.” 2 [Note: D. Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 248.]

If I knew that I had fathomed all the love or all the wisdom of God, how faith and reverence and trust would fall away from a being that such powers as mine could grasp. 3 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Life, 80.]

2. If we can know in part what the holiest Mind has thought, how the purest Heart has loved, what the most gracious Wisdom has provided, “let us follow on to know.” If we must confess ourselves, at best, agnostics, let it be progressive agnosticism—“If we do not know to-day, we shall hope to know to-morrow.”

Is not all positiveness of necessity partiality? To say, “This is true, I know it,” and to leave no room for the limitations and qualifications that we cannot know, for all those outside influences of unseen truth which we must be working on and drawing from this fact that we have found,—is there not some folly here? Is not the true wisdom something like this?—I know so far as it goes this truth is sacredly and wholly true, but that very truth forbids me to believe that it has not developments and ramifications reaching far out into the universe of associated truth with which it is connected. Now I know, and I prize my knowledge as the gift of God and hold it sacred; but “I know in part,” I wait till that which is in part shall be done away. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Life, 111.]

(1) Let it be recognized that the highest knowledge we may here attain will not be clear of an agnostic haze. To comprehend infinitude and eternity our mind would have to be infinite and eternal; but we may apprehend where we cannot comprehend. We may voyage on a sea which we cannot compass. Whenever we follow on to know perfect Love, eternal Righteousness, absolute Will, we are compelled to take up Wesley’s strain—

God only knows the love of God.

But this is relatively true of all knowledge. Even the flower in the crannied wall has a last citadel of mystery which no effort of the human mind can capture.

We see “in part,” but we do see Him, though it be only in part; the more lovely the prospect, the nearer it must be to the truth. Again, we cannot fancy truth; we may fancy about truth when we are in the carnal mind, being led by the outward word, whether it be of a teacher whom we call the Church, or of an individual whom we call a theologian. In either case, what we see is what we fancy they see. We only see Truth when we are taught immediately by the Spirit of Truth. Let us take our revelation simply, as it is given us, and let us believe that the Lord spoke truly and is come to be the Guide and Teacher of the hearts of His children. His desire is that we should look up into His face and know Him as “Our Father.” 2 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 40.]

(2) That we only know now in part persuades us, constrains us to give all diligence towards fuller knowledge. In natural scenery, mountains appeal to us most and touch the strangest deeps of our nature, not when they stand out clear in sharp outline, but when their strength and curve are softened by a tender, almost transparent, haze. It is then that the call of the mountains is most eloquent, most effective. And to the earnest soul in quest of God, the richest moments are those when some increased knowledge has been gained, some fresh experience of truth has been treasured, with a feeling that more, far more, remains yet to be won. “We all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory.”

It is inscribed on the grave of T. H. Green, “He died learning.”

Isaac Newton had one theory of the universe, and John Hutchinson had another, but they both accepted the fact of the universe, about the detailed constructions and processes of which they differed so vigorously. One may believe that the earth stands still, another may believe that it performs certain revolutions; but they both believe in the earth itself, they both have confidence in its foundations, and they both draw their sustenance from the same generous bosom. So it must be to a very great extent with the first idea of God. We must receive the idea without discussion, without critical or metaphysical inquiry. We must begin with the idea that God is, and day by day grow in our knowledge concerning Him, and in our love towards Him. 1 [Note: J. Parker.]

(3) Our knowledge here as elsewhere must begin as a “venture of faith.” Faith is the pioneer of all knowledge. The first harvest of the field, the first voyage on the sea, was due to heroism of faith. Belief had to precede experience. Why then should any one demand faith’s dismissal when we come to the choicest knowledge of all? The great word of the Gospel—“Whosoever believeth”—is not a casual or official demand: it is rooted in the eternal order revealed to us. Columbus was not more learned than all his contemporaries: they stopped where experience stopped; he made the venture of faith. The whole story of human piety, of man’s apprehension of God, is a story of faith’s heroism. When we read that Enoch walked with God, it means that he ventured on a road that had to be travelled in order to be known. The moan of the agnostic in earnest was wrung from the heart of Job, when he cried—

“Oh that I knew where I might find him,

That I might come even to his seat!

Behold, I go forward, but he is not there;

And backward, but I cannot perceive him;

On the left hand, when he doth work, but I cannot behold him:

He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.”

What then? Experience refuses to go further, turns back, and would have him give up the quest. But faith stands beside him in the cloud and driving tempest, faces the blast with lighted face, cheers him to make the grand venture—

“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”

I think if thou couldst know,

O soul that will complain,

What lies concealed below

Our burden and our pain;

How just our anguish brings

Nearer those longed-for things

We seek for now in vain,—

I think thou wouldst rejoice, and not complain.

I think if thou couldst see,

With thy dim mortal sight,

How meanings, dark to thee,

Are shadows hiding light;

Truth’s efforts crossed and vexed

Life’s purpose all perplexed,—

If thou couldst see them right,

I think that they would seem all clear, and wise, and bright.

And yet thou canst not know,

And yet thou canst not see;

Wisdom and sight are slow

In poor humanity.

If thou couldst trust, poor soul,

In Him who rules the whole,

Thou wouldst find peace and rest:

Wisdom and right are well, but Trust is best. 1 [Note: Adelaide Anne Procter.]

ii. Then

“Even as also I have been known.”

If the Bible speaks of a disadvantageous “Now” it is always able to put over against it a bright and glorious “Then.” And these two must always be taken together. Look only at the “Now,” with its limitations and imperfections, forgetful of the “Then,” and your philosophy will be a chain of despair; but view earth revolving, as it surely does, in the light of a not far-distant heaven, and your thoughts will be gathered up into a song of hope. It was this that enabled St. Paul to write these words expressive of our present disadvantage without dissatisfaction or regret. “We see through a glass darkly, we know in part!” Those words tell all the intellectual struggle and pain through which a great mind passes before it accepts its defeat. They are the words of intellectual resignation in presence of those inscrutable problems before which lesser minds beat themselves in fruitless pain; grand words of one who has assayed the heights and depths of knowledge to prove them past finding out, and yet is calm. Not the words of an impatient thinker, or the petulance of a little mind not strong enough to wait, but the language of a great faith resting hopefully in God.

Porphyry, in his Principles of the Theory of Intelligibles, seems to me to have written a warning which might fitly stand at the beginning of this book—“By our intelligence we say many things of the principle which is higher than the intelligence. But these things are divined much better by an absence of thought than by thought. It is the same with this idea as with that of sleep, of which we speak up to a certain point in our waking state, but the knowledge and perception of which we can gain only by sleeping. Like is known only by like, and the condition of all knowledge is that the subject should become like to the object.” 1 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 6.]

I know the night is heavy with her stars,—

So much I know,—

I know the sun will lead the night away,

And lay his golden bars

Over the fields and mountains and great seas,

I know that he will usher in the day

With litanies

Of birds and young dawn-winds. So much I know,—

So little though.

I know that I am lost in a great waste,

A trackless world

Of stars and golden days, where shadows go

In mute and secret haste,

Paying no heed to supplicating cries

Of spirits lost and troubled,—this I know.

The regal skies

Utter no word, nor wind, nor changing sea,—

It frightens me.

Yet I believe that somewhere, soon or late,

A peace will fall

Upon the angry reaches of my mind;

A peace initiate

In some heroic hour when I behold

A friend’s long-quested triumph, or unbind

The tressèd gold

From a child’s laughing face. I still believe,—

So much believe.

Or, when the reapers leave the swathèd grain,

I’ll look beyond

The yellowing hazels in the twilight-tide,

Beyond the flowing plain,

And see blue mountains piled against a sky

Flung out in coloured ceremonial pride;

Then haply I

Shall be no longer troubled, but shall know,—

It may be Song of Solomon 1 [Note: J. Drinkwater, Poems of Men and Hours, 5.]

1. Then shall we see face to face; then shall I know even as I am known. Even as I am known. That is a good thing to rest upon, even in this stage—that, however little I know about you and about myself and about God, I am known to Him, every bit of me, and the way that I take, and the thoughts I think, and the fears which disturb me, and the doubts which worry and the sins which oppress. All is spread before Him in the searching light which scans and tries the uttermost secrets, and from which nothing can be hid. He knows me as well as He knows Himself. He knows every heart-beat, and every struggle, and every penitential sigh, and every passing shame and regret, and every striving after better things. He knows all the possibilities that are in me, the worst and the best, and all the helps, incentives, and pardons that they call for. And He never misreads, misunderstands, or misjudges. He is always fair, just, true, and pitiful. “And I shall know even as I am known.”

A myriad worlds encompass ours;

A myriad souls our souls enclose;

And each, its sins and woes and powers,

The Lord He sees, the Lord He knows,

And from the Infinite Knowledge flowers

The Infinite Pity’s fadeless rose.

Lighten our darkness, Lord, most wise;

All-seeing One, give us to see;

Our judgments are profanities,

Our ignorance is cruelty;

While Thou, knowing all, dost not despise

To pardon even such things as we. 1 [Note: Susan Coolidge.]

2. There are two things that may be said about this knowledge.

(1) It will be thorough.—It will be a knowledge through and through (for that is the meaning of the word). God is a heart-searching God. There is no secret so deeply buried in us but God sees it as in the light of day. Even such is the insight into His truth and character, into His word and works, into His ways and will, which is promised to those of us who shall be faithful unto death, in a world beyond the grave. It will be indeed a thorough knowledge.

(2) It mil be comprehensive.—God has not only a minute insight; He has also a large insight. He not only sees particulars; He sees each one of us as a whole. You know how impossible that is for any one of us with regard to another. We see particular faults and particular virtues, but we are not able, in very many instances, nor ought we, to speak decisively of the character as a whole, whether for good or evil. But God sees this also. God could judge each one of us at this moment. He could say, Notwithstanding this fault, that man is my servant; notwithstanding that good quality, this man I never knew. And it shall be thus with our knowledge hereafter. Not only shall we believe and understand this item and that item, separately, of God’s truth, but we shall see it all in its connection, in its combination, in its reconciling harmony, in its perfect unity. There will no longer be any spaces and gaps in our knowledge. There will be no longer crevasses and chasms, to be vaulted over on a staff of faith. “The crooked” will then have been “made straight,” and “the rough places plain” ( Isaiah 40:4); and “all flesh will see,” as in one view, “the salvation of God” ( Luke 3:6). Then will not only wisdom be, as she ever has been, “justified of her children” ( Matthew 11:19), but also the ways of God will be universally and finally justified to men.

Knowledge—who hath it? Nay, not thou,

Pale student, pondering thy futile lore!

A little space it shall be thine, as now

’Tis his whose funeral passes at thy door:

Last night a clown that scarcely knew to spell—

Now he knows all. O wondrous miracle! 1 [Note: Thomas B. Aldrich.]

III

What shall we See and Know?

1. God.—Human knowledge, then, imperfect as it must necessarily be, is consecrated by the thought that it has for its goal the vision of God, of whose Being and Doing all that we can see and learn here is the reflection, “broken lights” piercing earth’s mists from the central sun upon which no mortal man could gaze unveiled and live.

(1) The entrance on the next world must bring with it a knowledge of God such as is impossible in this life. In this life many men talk of God, and some men think much and deeply about Him. But here men do not attain to that sort of direct knowledge of God which the Bible calls “sight.” We do not see a human soul. The soul makes itself felt in conduct, in conversation, in the lines of the countenance; although these often enough mislead us. The soul speaks through the eye, which misleads us less often. That is to say, we know that the soul is there, and we detect something of its character and power and drift. We do not see it. In the same way we feel God present in nature, whether in its awe or in its beauty; and in human history, whether in its justice or in its weird mysteriousness; and in the life of a good man, or the circumstances of a generous or noble act. Most of all we feel Him near when conscience, His inward messenger, speaks plainly and decisively to us. Conscience, that invisible prophet, surely appeals to and implies a law, and a law implies a legislator. But we do not see Him. “No man hath seen God at any time”; even “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father,” is only said to have “declared him,” since in Him the Godhead was veiled from earthly sight by that mantle of Flesh and Blood which, together with a human soul, He assumed in time.

But after death there will be a change. It is said of our Lord’s glorified Manhood, united as it is for ever to the Person of the Eternal Son, that “every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him.” Even the lost will then understand much more of what God is to the universe and to themselves, although they are excluded from the direct vision of God.

(2) What will that first apprehension of God, under the new conditions of the other life, be? There are trustworthy accounts of men who have been utterly overcome at the first sight of a fellow-creature with whose name and work they had for long years associated great wisdom, or goodness, or ability; the first sight of the earthly Jerusalem has endowed more than one traveller with a perfectly new experience in the life of thought and feeling. What must not the first direct sight of God be, the Source of all beauty, of all wisdom, of all power, when the eye opens upon Him after death! “Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty” were words of warning as well as words of promise. What will it not be to see Him in those first few moments—God, the Eternal Love, God, the consuming Fire—as we shall see Him in the first five minutes after death!

An Indian officer, who in his time had seen a great deal of service, and had taken part in more than one of those decisive struggles by which the British authority was finally established in the East Indies, had returned to end his days in this country, and was talking with his friends about the most striking experiences of his professional career. They led him, by their sympathy and their questions, to travel in memory through a long series of years; and as he described skirmishes, battles, sieges, personal encounters, hair-breadth escapes, the outbreak of the mutiny and its suppression, reverses, victories—all the swift alternations of anxiety and hope which a man must know who is entrusted with command, and is before the enemy—their interest in his story, as was natural, became keener and more exacting. At last he paused with the observation, “I expect to see something much more remarkable than anything I have been describing.” As he was some seventy years of age, and was understood to have retired from active service, his listeners failed to catch his meaning. There was a pause; and then he said in an undertone, “I mean in the first five minutes after death.” 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

(3) Distinguish between those who say, “We know nothing,” and those who say with the Apostle, “We know in part.” When we are only speculating, God will seem to us very incomprehensible, very unknowable; His nature and mode of working do always baffle our understandings: “how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past tracing out!” But then we turn to the revelation of God which has been given us in our Lord Jesus Christ. As we study that, we shall hardly be inclined to complain of necessary ignorance; rather shall we be moved to exclaim with St. Paul that in Christ “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” The impressions concerning God and the Father which we received from the Lord Jesus grow into secure knowledge as they are verified by life and experience, and as we learn what the conditions of human progress and well-being are. How, we ask, can men live without faith and hope and love, and how can faith and hope and love be awakened and preserved without Divine righteousness and encouragement and goodness to which they may respond?

2. Our fellows.—This chapter is the glorious hymn of love. The religious fervour, the intellectual conquests, the accumulated philosophy of succeeding centuries, have produced nothing nobler than this. You cannot “praise” this perfect utterance. You might as well “approve” the perpetual rainbow over the Fluela Fall or the after-glow in an Alpine sky. The Apostle exhausts the resources of inspired eloquence in exposition of love. And he looks for the maturing, the completion, the perfection of this Christian grace. When such full-blossomed love has come, we shall see with perfect clearness. In proportion as it comes, we shall see better. When love has her perfect work, we shall see so distinctly that the vision may be said to be “face to face.” Yes; that we have always understood. But what is it that we shall see? What but the object of our love—our fellow-man? Towards whom have you exercised love? Your brother-man, your neighbour, your friend, your rival, your foe. Then, as your love deepens, your vision of him will clear. As you think more charitably of him you will understand him better. When love towards him is perfected, you will see him face to face.

Doubtless the words “face to face” apply primarily to the vision of God in the perfected manhood. But, as the greater includes the lesser, this recognition of God involves the recognition of loved ones.

Pilgrims no longer, nor longer disguised from one another by the suspicions and concealments of this life, nor hidden from each other, as here the most closely linked hearts must be, by the necessary solitude and loneliness of every individual life, in which we must live so largely and, in all our tenderest sensibilities, so entirely alone. There hearts shall open to hearts spontaneously as the flowers to the sun, and there soul shall communicate itself to the soul it loves as naturally as the dews nourish the white lilies of the wood. The armour of light, so often blood-stained and torn, is unlaced; the shield and sword laid down at the King’s feet, and the soft clothing of peace put on.

“It is not easy, at the best, for two persons talking together to make the most of each other’s thoughts, there are so many of them.”

This was a remark made by the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table to the assembled guests. And the company looked as if they wanted an explanation. So the Autocrat went on.

“ When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is natural that among the six there should be more or less confusion and misapprehension.”

The people thought that the Autocrat had suddenly gone mad. The landlady turned pale. The old gentleman opposite thought the Autocrat might seize the carving-knife. But he proceeded to explain that at the fewest six personalities are distinctly to be recognized as taking part in the dialogue between John and Thomas. There is (1) the real John, known only to his Maker; (2) John’s ideal John, never the real one, and often very unlike him; (3) Thomas’s ideal John, never the real John, nor John’s John; but often very unlike either. In precisely the same way there are three Thomases. There is Thomas as he really is, as God sees him; Thomas as he thinks he is; and Thomas as John thinks he is. In all, there are six people. No wonder two disputants often get angry when there are six of them talking and listening at the same time!

There is a truth in the word that marriages are made in heaven. You may remember that Charles Kingsley had put on his grave, which was to be his wife’s, “We have loved, we love, we shall love.” Death does not, as most of us know, put an end to love. We love the dead because they are the living. Death separates, it is all that it can do; it cannot annihilate. Surely then, when death is destroyed the law of separation will be disannulled, and those who loved and love will meet again and enjoy one another’s love again. I say then, because we shall have full knowledge of our past life, because we preserve our individuality in the resurrection change, because in the other world we know and are known, because we are perfectly manifested by our spiritual bodies, and because by means of their powers we shall perfectly discern, because of the mutual attraction of love—love which was stronger than death, we shall, I feel confident, recognize one another in the life of the world to come. And it will be a full recognition; our hearts in perfect sympathy will beat one with another, answering love for love. 1 [Note: F. Watson, The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 240.]

3. Ourselves.—At our entrance on another world we shall know our old selves as never before. The past will lie spread out before us, and we shall take a comprehensive survey of it. Each man’s life will be displayed to him as a river, which he traces from its source in a distant mountain till it mingles with the distant ocean. The course of that river lies sometimes through dark forests which hide it from view, sometimes through sands or marshes in which it seems to lose itself. Here it forces a passage angrily between precipitous rocks, there it glides gently through meadows which it makes green and fertile. At one time it might seem to be turning backwards out of pure caprice; at another to be parting, like a gay spendthrift, with half its volume of waters; while later on it receives contributory streams that restore its strength; and so it passes on, till the ebb and flow of the tides upon its bank tells that the end is near. What will not the retrospect be when, after death, we survey, for the first time, as with a bird’s-eye view the whole long range—the strange vicissitudes, the loss and the gain, as we deem it, the failures and the triumphs of our earthly existence; when we measure it, as never before, in its completeness, now that it is at last over!

This, indeed, is the characteristic of the survey after death, that it will be complete.

There no shade can last,

In that deep dawn behind the tomb,

But clear from marge to marge shall bloom

The eternal landscape of the past.

In entering another world we shall know as never before what we have been in the past; but we shall know also what we are. Our present thoughts, feelings, mental habits, good and bad, are the effects of what we have done or left undone, of cherished impressions, of passions indulged or repressed, of pursuits vigorously embraced or willingly abandoned. And as our past mental and spiritual history has made us what we are, so we are at this very moment making ourselves what we shall be.

Richard le Gallienne delighted us some years ago by a brilliant essay on “Life in Inverted Commas.” He represented himself as watching from the top of an omnibus in Fleet Street the capture of a notorious plagiarist by detectives in the employ of the Incorporated Society of Authors, who led him away secured between strong inverted commas. This set him thinking. And he looked round at his companions in the ’bus. “There was the young dandy just let loose from his band-box, wearing exactly the same face, the same smile, the same neck-tie, holding his stick in exactly the same fashion, talking exactly the same words, with precisely the same accent, as his neighbour, another dandy, and as all the other dandies between the Bank and Hyde Park Corner. Looking at these examples of Nature’s love of repeating herself,” he goes on, “I said to myself: Somewhere in heaven stands a great stencil, and at each sweep of the cosmic brush a million dandies are born, each one alike as a box of collars. Indeed, I felt that this stencil process had been employed in the manufacture of every single person in the omnibus: two middle-aged matrons, each of whom seemed to think that having given birth to six children was an indisputable claim to originality; two elderly business men to correspond; a young miss, carrying music and wearing eyeglasses; and a clergyman discussing stocks with one of the business men; I alone in my corner being, of course, the one occupant for whom Nature had been at the expense of casting a special mould, and at the extravagance of breaking it!” To be sure “ I, myself,” am the original one. And each one of us is an “ I, myself!” 1 [Note: C. F. Aked.]

The Partial and the Perfect

Literature

Aked (C. F.), The Courage of the Coward, 225.

Albertson (C. C.), The Gospel according to Christ, 259.

Brooke (S. A.), The Gospel of Joy, 297.

Brooks (P.), Twenty Sermons, 280.

Clow (W. M.), The Secret of the Lord, 387.

Cooper (T. J.), Love’s Unveiling, 111.

Cross (J.), Pauline Charity, 207, 223.

Daplyn (E.), One with the Eternal, 51.

Davies (J. L1.), The Purpose of God, 80.

Dix (M.), Sermons Doctrinal and Practical, 190.

Edger (S.), Sermons at Auckland, N.Z., ii. 105.

Gibbon (J. M.), Evangelical Heterodoxy, 182.

Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 62.

Henson (H. H.), Christ and the Nation, 296.

Hicks (E.), The Life Hereafter, 1.

Howatt (J. R.), The Children’s Pew, 81.

Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 164.

Jackson (W. W.), in Oxford University Sermons, 144.

Jones (J. S.), Seeing Darkly, 3.

Leach (C.), Shall We know our Friends in Heaven? 81.

Lewis (E. W.), Some Views of Modem Theology, 50.

Lewis (H. E.), in The Old Faith and the New Theology, 241.

Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 367.

Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, i. 110.

Morrison (G. H.), Sunrise: Addresses from a City Pulpit, 12.

Paget (F.), The Spirit of Discipline, 111.

Pope (R. M.), The Poetry of the Upward Way, 137.

Randall (R. W.), Life in the Catholic Church, 155.

Roberts (R.), The Meaning of Christ, 39.

Sampson (E. F.), Christ Church Sermons, 11.

Sanday (W.), Oracles, 34.

Smith (D.), Man’s Need of God, 199.

Vaughan (C. J.), Epiphany, Lent and Easter, 87.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons in Christ Church, Brighton, i. 204.

Watson (F.), The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 233.

Cambridge Review, viii. Supplement No. 204 (Randall); xv. Supplement No. 366 (Kirkpatrick).

Christian World Pulpit, xv. 221 (Craig); xvii. 238 (Wonnacott); xxii. 184 (Johnson); xxxv. 232 (Westcott); xxxvii. 369 (Rogers); liv. 10 (Stalker); lxv. 104 (Wilmington Ingram); lxvii. 69 (Watt); lxx. 8 (Watson).

Verse 13

These Three

But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.— 1 Corinthians 13:13.

1. If St. Paul had left us nothing but this exquisite hymn in praise of heavenly love, he would have established his claim to be a great religious genius. Happily it loses nothing in the English Version. The scholars who translated the Bible for James I.’s government seldom failed to rise to a great occasion; and this chapter in the Authorized Version is one of the finest bits of prose poetry that have been written in our language. But the lyric rapture is St. Paul’s own. He was not, perhaps, a poet by nature; and a Rabbinical education was enough to dry up any but a very copious spring of poetic talent. But every now and then he is carried quite out of himself, and his words glow with a white heat of fervour and emotion. To read the thirteenth chapter after the twelfth, in which he discusses the relative merits of speaking with tongues and prophesying, is almost startling. “The more excellent way” once mentioned, the tide of pure inspiration flows swift and strong.

2. But even more remarkable than the sublime poetry of this chapter is the concluding verse: “Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” In this verse St. Paul has found an absolutely complete and satisfactory formula for the Christian character. Faith, hope, and love, with love in the place of honour—is not this Christianity in a nutshell? Within a few years after the Ascension, St. Paul has not only penetrated to the very heart of Christ’s teaching, but has given us the kernel of the whole Gospel in one of those illuminating phrases which are a necessity for every great movement. So at least the Church has always felt. The three emblematic figures of the “theological virtues,” as they were called, have been favourite themes of Christian art and Christian eloquence all over the world. What the cardinal virtues, Justice, Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance were to pagan antiquity; what Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were to the French Revolution; what the Rights of Man were to the founders of the American Republic; what the three stages in the spiritual ascent—Purification, Illumination, Union with God—have been to mystics of all ages and countries, that Faith, Hope, and Love have been and are to the Christian. The imitation of Christ means the life of Faith, the life of Hope, the life of Love.

Greek philosophy had proclaimed four cardinal virtues—justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude. Christian philosophy, following St. Paul, has taught during nineteen centuries that there are three specifically Christian graces—they are more than virtues—three primary and fundamental spiritual dispositions, which must dominate and permeate all true Christian character—Faith and Hope and Love.

This is one of the greatest of the great texts of the Bible. Let us take it in six parts—

Faith.

Hope.

Love.

These Three.

These Three Abide.

The Greatest of these Three.

FAITH

1. St. Paul has written as vigorously of faith, if not with as much seraphic eloquence, as he here writes of love. He penned the most intellectual and profound of all his Epistles—that to the Romans—to indicate the essential excellence, the justifying and soul-saving power of faith. We who have come to receive the truth which filled and fired the soul of the Apostle Paul have learned that by faith the just live. It is a rational and necessary spiritual ingredient of the truest manhood. We regard it as the channel through which God’s righteousness pours into the soul; as our gate of access into the kingdom of grace, standing like the Propylæa at Athens before the Acropolis, and giving entrance to the temple not only of love, but also of wisdom. St. Paul went so far as to say that any moral activity into which this quality did not enter was vitiated and unworthy. In one of his letters he describes faith as the light by which the soul walks: “A light that never was on sea or land,” but which glows in the mind of man. To his thinking this virtue was so needful and important that the whole doctrine which he proclaimed he called by this name. He speaks of “preaching the faith” which he once persecuted, meaning by it both the Christian doctrine and the Christian Church. Our warfare he calls “the fight of faith”; so that in his thirteen letters, from the First Epistle to the Thessalonians to the letters addressed to Philemon, St. Paul sounds forth a thousand notes from this golden string.

2. What is the antithesis of faith? Is it Reason? Do I believe some things because I am convinced by evidence that they are true, and other things because the Church tells me to believe them, or because it is a meritorious act to force myself to believe them? Is faith an act of submission to authority? Is there any truth in the answer of the child, who, according to the story, said, “Faith means believing what you know to be untrue”? Look out some of the places where faith is mentioned in the New Testament, and see whether it is ever opposed to Reason. You will find that it never is: it is opposed to sight. Faith is not the acceptance of certain historical propositions on insufficient evidence. It is trust in God and goodness.

It is the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest and highest hypothesis that we can conceive. It is the spirit of Athanasius when he stood “against the world”; of Luther when he said, “God help me, I can do no otherwise”; of Job when he said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him”; of the three children in the furnace when they said, “He will deliver us out of thy hand, O King. But if not, we will not serve thy gods.” It is the spirit which has given courage to all the martyrs to face death. Faith is the confidence that somehow or other the right must triumph, that God is stronger than Satan.

I resolved that at any rate I would act as if the Bible were true; that if it were not, at all events I should be no worse off than I was before; that I would believe in Christ, and take Him for my Master in whatever I did; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible was quite as difficult as to believe it; that there were mysteries either way; and that the best mystery was that which gave me Christ for a Master. And when I had done this I fell asleep directly. When I rose in the morning the cold and cough were gone; and though I was still unwell, I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never known before, at least to the same extent; and the next day I was quite well, and everything has seemed to go right with me ever since, all discouragement and difficulties vanishing even in the smallest things. 1 [Note: Letter from Ruskin to his father in E. T. Cook’s Life of Ruskin, i. 271.]

(1) Faith is trust in the saving power of Christ.—“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” would seem to be the simplest of all directions. Many, in Apostolic times, hesitated to believe, but none hesitated as to what belief was. A heathen or pagan never asks a missionary what is meant by faith. The very simplicity of the act prevents its definition. Like time and space, the more we think about faith, the less we understand it. It must be felt, not analysed. It cannot be analysed. Many a Christian life has been mournfully chequered by dark and cheerless seasons, from the habit of thinking about faith instead of the object of faith, about the acts of the mind instead of the truths of God, the manner of believing instead of the testimony to be believed. Faith leads the soul to act on what it credits. It includes not only the belief of what is true, and the desire of what is good, but the choice of what is right. We may believe many things which have no possible connection with our conduct. Many of the propositions of Scripture are not the proper objects of trust, though they are of belief. We believe on the ground of evidence, we trust on the ground of character. We believe a truth, we trust a person. I might believe and not trust, but I cannot trust and not believe. So the specific act of faith which unites to Christ terminates upon His person, an existing, living, loving personality. It is not a doctrine concerning Christ that saves me, but trust in the saving power of Christ. It is not a specific theory of faith, but the practical grasp of faith, that saves. Salvation is not the formation of a right creed in my understanding; it is the quickening of a spiritual life in my soul.

Faith is that strong buoyant confidence in God and in His love which gives energy and spirit to do right without doubt or despondency. Where God sees that, He sees the spring and fountain out of which all good springs: He sees, in short, the very life of Christ begun, and He reckons that to be righteousness; just as a small perennial fountain in Gloucestershire is the Thames, though it is as yet scarcely large enough to float a schoolboy’s boat; and just as you call a small seedling not bigger than a little almond peeping above the ground, an oak; for the word “justify” means not to be made righteous, but to reckon or account righteous. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 335.]

I am not sure that we are much the better for our attempted definitions of Faith. Baxter connects it with the doctrine of the mystical union; Lampe defines it as a willingness to be saved by Christ; Halyburton and Owen as a cordial acceptance of the offer; Sandeman as simple belief in simple testimony. Well, a man is sometimes very little the better for a definition, and all these perplex as well as enlighten. But “none perish that Him trust”—none perish that Him trust. 2 [Note: “Rabbi” Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 414.]

(2) Faith is also trust in God as a Father.—If there is a word more expressive of Christian character than any other, it is this one: trust—trust in God. It is the secret source of all peace and serenity. It will comfort and sustain when nothing else can. It gives the child of God the delightful assurance that all his trials are disguised blessings, the appointment of a Father’s wisdom, and the infliction of a Father’s love. And death itself becomes the security and enlargement of life, a training for that holy intimacy with Himself which is to constitute the blessedness of the heavenly world. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” The bringing of good out of evil is His grand prerogative. He permits the evil in order to produce the good. The Christian’s character is formed more from his trials than from his enjoyments. The picture would have no beauty or effect without shade.

Christ’s faith in His Father was as conspicuous as His faith in the mission He had to accomplish, of which He said on the cross, “It is finished!” His vindication He left entirely in His Father’s hands, when He yielded up His spirit, in a complete surrender of self, saying, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!” I am not forgetting that He was the everlasting Word, the only begotten of the Father, when I speak thus, but I wish to remind you that He really became man—having limited Himself, having “emptied” Himself, as St. Paul said, that He might become the true Brother of humanity, the Son of Man, sharing with us, in everything save sin, the necessity and the blessedness of faith. 1 [Note: A. Rowland, The Exchanged Crowns, 33.]

The faith of our time has had to pass through fiery furnaces of tribulation. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible Church. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible Book. It has surrendered, at the bidding of science, that latest voice of God—the Garden of Eden, and the world made in six days, and the dream of man’s primal innocence. It presumes no longer to penetrate dark mysteries. It cannot reconcile Foreknowledge and Free Will. It cannot reconcile the apparent cruelty of nature with the lovingness of God. It understands neither heaven nor hell. It has learnt to trust, humbly and without reserve, in Christ. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” That surely is the truest faith of all the ages, to have lived in an atmosphere of unbelief, to have faced and endured all the assaults of modern doubt, and still to trust “in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, by honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report, as dying, and behold we live, as chastened and not killed”—still, with deeper intensity than ever, to believe in God and Christ and Eternal Life.

I little see, I little know,

Yet can I fear no ill;

He who hath guided me till now

Will be my leader still.

No burden yet was on me laid

Of trouble or of care,

But He my trembling step hath stayed,

And given me strength to bear.

I came not hither of my will

Or wisdom of mine own:

That Higher Power upholds me still,

And still must bear me on.

I knew not of this wondrous earth,

Nor dreamed what blessings lay

Beyond the gates of human birth

To glad my future way.

And what beyond this life may be

As little I divine—

What love may wait to welcome me,

What fellowships be mine.

I know not what beyond may lie,

But look, in humble faith,

Into a larger life to die,

And find new birth in death.

He will not leave my soul forlorn;

I still must find Him true,

Whose mercies have been new each morn

And every evening new.

Upon His providence I lean,

As lean in faith I must:

The lesson of my life hath been

A heart of grateful trust.

And so my onward way I fare

With happy heart and calm,

And mingle with my daily care

The music of my Psalms 1 [Note: Frederick Lucian Hosmer.]

(3) It is enough to name one further aspect of faith: Faith is spiritual insight.—This is the way in which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews regards faith. He says it is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” These words impress upon our minds the thought that, corresponding to all the longings which possess the Christian soul, to all the desires and yearnings which spring up within the soul that is earnestly striving to attain to the Christlike and Divine—corresponding to all these are glorious realities; that the up-springing desires shall not be in vain; that the soul which remains steadfast in hope, which clings with brave perseverance to the hopeful yearnings which from time to time unfold themselves to consciousness within its inward recesses, begins by-and-by to feel by anticipation the very substance of what it has hoped for within its grasp, by-and-by attains to the power of seeing before it in mystic vision the glorious spiritual realities, the thoughts of which presented themselves at first only as dimly discerned but irrepressible desires. Faith then is spiritual insight. It has been called the eye of the soul. It is more than this; it is the soul seeing, the soul beholding, the things of heaven; the soul looking upon the things not seen by the bodily eye—looking upon the glories of the spiritual world, upon the wonders of that invisible world which is ever around us, ever underlying the natural world.

By the aid of that mental insight, which, because it is directed towards matters of a scientific import, has been called scientific imagination, men have been able to have within their minds a vivid representation of the marvellous vibratory movements of the mysterious ether, and their rapid transmission in one vast tide of light through the infinite space around us. By the aid of the same power of imagination, that other swiftly-acting vibratory motion which has only in recent times become obedient to man’s control, that vibratory motion which enables us with magic speed to send tidings even to countries separated from us by ocean abysses and by wide-spreading continents,—by the aid of the same imaginative power, the mind is able to discern the vibrations of the all-pervading ether with which we associate the term electricity. God who thus endows that part of our inner being which we call the mind with marvellous powers, also endows that which we speak of as the soul—of which the mind is indeed but a faculty—with corresponding powers. Within all souls longing after a fuller knowledge of Divine things God is ever breathing the breath of a diviner life; and as this sacred breath—this Holy Spirit—abides with us to animate us, our enkindled spiritual imaginations discern more and more of the mystic glories of heaven towards which the longings of our souls have been directed. This spiritual imagination which enables us to see as in a vision the substantial realities which the soul has been possessed with longings for; which enables the soul to have a vivid conviction that it has entered upon the life of reconciliation with God, which enables it to discern the transcendent glory of the future life of ever-advancing union with the Divine, which enables it to discern the underlying import of such words as Atonement and Sacrament, to recognize the oneness of the life of the redeemed on earth and in heaven with the great life of God, to behold the unity which binds things seen with things unseen, the correspondence which exists between things natural and things spiritual,—this spiritual imagination which has such potency within us, is the Divine gift of faith which is defined for us in the Epistle to the Hebrews in such suggestive words. 1 [Note: H. N. Grimley.]

Canst thou discern—beneath all outward seeming,

The hidden meaning, oft concealed from sight?

The secrets wherewith nature’s heart is teeming,

The deep soul-vision of a clearer light?

Say, dost thou understand the whisper’d token,

The promise breath’d from every leaf and flower?

And dost thou hear the word ere it be spoken,

And apprehend love’s presence by its power?

Canst thou discover in the lives around thee,

How small events to mighty issues lead?

And does the storm’s voice nevermore astound thee,

Since every God-sent message thou canst read?

Then, Heaven-gifted thou, to whom is broken

Th’ eternal revelation, calm and clear—

As they to whom, long since the words were spoken,

“He that hath ears to hear”—yea, let him hear. 1 [Note: Una, In Life’s Garden, 93.]

HOPE

1. The question occurs to us sometimes, more or less consciously, why hope should be ranked so high, placed on a level with faith and love. We can understand why faith should be so singled out; it is the foundation of the whole structure of religion; it is the bond between the creature and his invisible Maker and God; it is the special title of his acceptance; it is the ground of his self-devotion and obedience, of his highest and noblest ventures. Still more can we understand it of love; for love brings us near, in the essential qualities of character, to Him whom we believe in and worship; love is the faint and distant likeness of Him who so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to save it; love must last and live and increase, under whatever conditions the regenerate nature exists, the same in substance, however differing in degree, in the humblest penitent on earth and in adoring saint or seraph in the eternal world. But hope is thought of, at first sight, as a self-regarding quality; something which throws forward its desires into the future, and dwells on what it imagines of happiness for itself. And hope, of all things, is delusive and treacherous; it tempts to security and self-deceit; it tempts us to dreams which cannot be realized, which divert us from the necessary and wholesome realities which do concern us: it is the mother of half the mistakes, half the fruitless wanderings, half the unhappiness of the world. How comes it that such a quality is placed on a level with faith and love? What need of encouragement to what men are only too ready to do of themselves?

So far from being always considered a virtue, Hope has been stigmatized as a dangerous deceiver or as a luxury not to be indulged in by the weak. “Hope,” says the Athenian in Thucydides, “the procuress of peril, cannot indeed destroy, though she may harm, those of her employers who have a reserve to fall back upon: but to those who risk their all upon the issue of her services—and a costly servant she assuredly is—she unmasks herself only in the moment of their ruin, when her victims have no resource left to defend themselves against her recognized treachery.” Poets in the same strain cry shame upon this delusive phantom, and protest that they are—

—tired of waiting for this chymick gold,

Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.

“Hope,” says Owen Feltham, “is the bladder a man will take wherewith to learn to swim; then he goes beyond return, and is lost.” And Lee,—

Hope is the fawning traitor of the mind,

Which, while it cozens with a coloured friendship,

Robs us of our best virtue,—resolution.

The twentieth century is as sad as Marcus Aurelius. Our music is sad. Our poetry—when we get any—is sad. Our drama, when it is serious, is half-morbid. Our greatest writers of fiction are pessimists, and deem a good ending, not only bad art, but false to fact. Our preachers—Heaven pardon them!—seem somehow to have lost fire and hope, and preach as though Christ were indeed in the ship, but asleep. Our philosophy has culminated in the insane ravings against God and man of Nietzsche, or, for the more reverent, in the pathetic Epicureanism of Omar—

One moment in Annihilation’s Waste,

One moment, of the Well of Life to taste,

The Stars are setting and the Caravan

Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—oh, make haste. 1 [Note: W. Hudson Shaw.]

2. But it is not really strange that St. Paul should raise hope to a Christian temper of the first order. St. Paul was a student of Scripture and of the history of his people and of religion in the world. And what is on the surface of the Bible is the way in which from first to last it is one unbroken, persistent call to hope—to look from the past and the present to the future. Its contents, we know, are manifold and various; the subjects which it treats are widely different, and it is different in different parts of it in its way of treating them; it is the record of enormous changes, of a great progressive advance in God’s dispensations and of man’s light and character, of the long and wonderful education of the Law and the Prophets; its story of uninterrupted tendency is strangely chequered in fact; bright and dark succeed one another with the most unexpected turns—lofty faith and the meanest disloyalty, great achievement and unexpected failure, lessons of the purest goodness and most heartfelt devotion with the falls and sins of saints, blessing and chastisement, the patience of God, and the incorrigible provocations of His people. In spite of all that is wonderful and glorious in it, it sounds like the most disastrous and unpromising of stories; and yet that is not its result. For amid the worst and most miserable conditions there is one element which is never allowed to disappear—the strength of a tenacious and unconquerable hope. Hope, never destroyed, however overthrown, never obscured even amid the storm and dust of ruin, is the prominent characteristic of the Old Testament. All leads back to hope, hope of the loftiest and most assured kind, even after the most fatal defeats, of changes which seem beyond remedy. The last word is always hope.

The whole Bible, from first to last, is one unbroken, persistent call to hope. Some of the most wonderful and soul-stirring words of revelation are those in which hope is spoken of. “The God of hope”—“We are saved by hope”—“Jesus Christ who is our hope”—“Christ in you, the hope of glory”—“Begotten again into a living hope”—these are expressions which only familiarity could deprive of their commanding power.

We call St. Paul the Apostle of Faith, and rightly. Equally the great teacher who, in a sudden moment of unique inspiration, recalling what Jesus was when He lived on earth, gave us the 13th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, was the Apostle of Love. But just as truly, perhaps even more emphatically, was St. Paul, above all things else, an Apostle of Hope. It is impossible to mistake it; he was himself the very embodiment of the Christian grace he taught. He never defined it, but his whole life illustrated what he meant. Save in his argumentative passages, it is his characteristic word always when exhorting, trying his hardest to help. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.” “Sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope.” “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not vain in the Lord.” That is the note which peals like a trumpet through all the Pauline Epistles. 1 [Note: W. Hudson Shaw.]

3. Even the common sense of mankind tells us that life would be but a poor shrunken thing without hope; and even the poet who reviles its “chymick gold,” marvels at the fascination which it still imparts to the future in spite of our monotonous and oft-repeated experience of the flat unprofitable past—

Strange cozenage! Who would live past days again?

Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain.

Surely the common sense of the world is right. While recognizing that hope may be an evil if it makes us careless or indolent, trustful to chance or to luck or to interpositions of Providence rather than to our own energies and skill, we cannot fail to see that hopelessness is a still greater evil, paralysing energy and neutralizing skill. No business in life, however purely intellectual, can dispense with hope as a stimulus to activity. That impulse which the immediate pressure of pleasure or pain gives to irrational animals, hope gives to human beings, who are endowed with the faculty or necessity of looking forward. Who could toil on through threescore years or more in hopelessness? “Work without hope,” says Coleridge, “draws nectar in a sieve”; and, indeed, what possibility is there that any human being, however richly endowed with genius, should ever produce the durable results that come from harmonious and continuous effort, or give birth to anything but the perishable expressions of a mere spasmodic outburst, if he had no durable hope of anything in heaven or earth?

Hope is the minister of strength. When I think of the virtue called Hope two pictures come to my mind. One is the work of a great living painter: it is a piece of symbolism, a gracious, frail, pathetic figure, the eyes blinded with a veil, the head bent and turned on one side with the intentness of a listener to catch the music sounded on the one unbroken chord of her lyre, on which all strings but this are gone. A touchingly beautiful conception; but this is human hope, not Divine. The other picture is the very familiar one which may have met your eye on many a church window—a figure not pathetic, weak, forlorn, but strong and brave as Fortitude; and in her hand not the lyre of broken strings, but the stout shaft and the iron grappling hooks of her mighty anchor; the anchor which entereth into that within the veil, the deeps of the world unseen, and from thence, whatever storm may swing their surface, holds the soul fast. 1 [Note: J. H. Skrine, The Heart’s Counsel, 118.]

To the quenchless hope in their souls all the strong heroes of the past, from Leonidas to King Alfred, from Alfred to Hildebrand, from Hildebrand to Cromwell and Lord Chatham and Washington and Mazzini, have owed their power. Without it, Religion, facing the stubborn mass of humanity’s sin, is paralysed. To the Christian the shield of faith is no whit more essential than the helmet of hope. Only to men of undying hope, able contagiously to kindle courageousness in their fellows, will the dead weight of the insensate evil of this universe ever yield. There will be no great Day of the Lord until such leaders arise.

Then sound again the golden horn with promise ever new,

The princely doe will ne’er be caught by those that slack pursue,—

Yes! sound again the horn of Hope, the golden horn!

Answer it, flutes and pipes, from valleys still and lorn;

Warders from your high towers, with trumps of silver scorn,

And harps in maidens’ bowers, with strings from deep hearts torn,

All answer to the horn of Hope, the golden horn!

4. Hope elevates and strengthens and inspires. This is why it is one of the great elements of the religious temper; this is why it ranks with faith and love. It is one of the great and necessary springs of full religious action. There may be a faith almost without hope; a faith which still believes, though it can see nothing; a faith which refuses to be comforted, which will not let the distant picture of better things rise before it, but yet trusts, even in the darkness, to God’s truth and goodness. It is the deep and awful faith of him who said, “Though he slay me yet will I trust in him”; of the cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the touching and childlike confidence of the prophet—“Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls; yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” But the human spirit can hardly stand long the strain of a hopeless faith; one or other of the elements will assert its supremacy. And hope is the energy and effort of faith; the strong self-awakening from the spells of discouragement and listlessness and despair.

What gives its moral value to hope, what makes it a virtue and a duty, is that in its higher forms it is a real act and striving of the will and the moral nature; and if any one thinks that this is an easy process he has yet much to learn of the secrets of his own heart. It is an act, often a difficult act, of choice and will, like the highest forms of courage. It is a refusal to be borne down and cowed and depressed by evil; a refusal, because it is not right, to indulge in the melancholy pleasure, no unreal one, of looking on the dark side of things. It is so that hope plays so great a part in the spiritual life; that it fights with such power on the side of God.

Millions of men are digging and toiling twelve hours each day; and God hath sent forth hope to emancipate them from drudgery. The man digging with his pick hath a far-away look as he toils. Hope is drawing pictures of a cottage with vines over the doorway, with some one standing at the gate, a sweet voice singing over the cradle. Hope makes this home his; it rests the labourer and saves him from despair. Multitudes working the stithy and deep mines sweeten their labour and exalt their toil by aspiring thoughts. Thinking of his little ones at home, the miner says: “My children shall not be as their father was; my drudgery is not for self, but for love’s sake; the sweat of my brow is oil in the lamp of love; I will light it to-night on the sacred altar of home.” Here is the secret of the rise and reign of the people. This explains all man’s progress in knowledge and culture. As the fruits and flowers rise rank upon rank in response to the advancing summer, so all that is most refined and exalted in man’s mind or heart bursts forth in new ideals, reforms, revolutions, in response to the revelation of that personal presence from whom all hope and aspiration incessantly proceed. 1 [Note: N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 285.]

5. What is the use, it is asked, of bidding us hope without giving us first some certain or probable reality to hope about? The faculty of hope is like the faculty of reason so far as this, that both must have some foundation of facts whereon to work. Give us a permanent and reasonable object of hope and we shall be only too glad to hope; but without such an object we must be content to be hopeless. We cannot allow ourselves to be fooled, even though the fooling may lead us along a path of happiness. Better the hopeless path of truth than the fool’s paradise of comfortable delusions.

(1) The whole universe, when illuminated by the light that streams upon it from the Cross of Christ, furnishes us with a durable object of hope in the Fatherhood of the Maker of the world, who, in the course of many ages, is conforming man to the Divine image. The hope of the ultimate perfection of all things, based upon the sense of the Divine Fatherhood, is the source of all healthy activity in men. In the strength of this hope we can look all evil in the face without blenching, and beneath the abyss of sin discern the vaster abyss of the Divine love.

(2) But what shall we say to those who tell us that about the future we may reason but have no right to hope? Our reply will be that we cannot reason about the future without taking into account the evidence that the world was made by a good and wise Being who has given us many faculties tending to happiness and righteousness, which faculties He cannot have intended to fust in us unused; and among the highest of these faculties stands hope. Furthermore we may point out that healthy natural hope, though it may work through illusions, does not delude. There is no deception in the Divine Providence which leads the human soul from the cradle to the grave under the guidance of unfulfilled hopes. Hope, like faith, may be literally, but it is not spiritually, deceptive: the spirits of heaven are not like the fiends—

That palter with us in a double sense,

That keep the word of promise to our ear

And break it to our hope.

Of the word of God’s promises we may assert the direct opposite. That word is never “kept to our ear” and never “broken to our hope.” Just as the faith or trust of the child in the father (who to him is as a God) is not a delusion but a truth enwrapped in illusion, so it is with the natural hopes of childhood and of every age; with the aspirations of a generous youth and the ambitions of a virtuous man. These neither “fool us when young” nor “beggar us when old”; but, on the contrary, each bright cloud of hope, breaking as the traveller is allured onward by it from one stage to another in his lifelong upward journey, reveals a brighter cloud within, to break in its turn and to disclose a still brighter interior splendour, till at last those heights are reached where all clouds shall vanish away, and the mind shall be prepared to receive the direct rays of the Sun of righteousness.

The characteristic of waning life is said to be disenchantment. Old men in general are inclined to check the zeal and damp the ardour of their younger followers. A shrewd observer of life has said that youth is an illusion, manhood a struggle, old age a regret. “How many young men,” says a great idealist, “have I not hailed at the commencement of their career, glowing with enthusiasm, and full of the poetry of great enterprises, whom I see to-day precocious old men, with the wrinkles of cold calculation on their brow; calling themselves free from illusion when they are only disheartened; and practical when they are only commonplace.” But believing men experience no disillusionment. The leaves of hope never wither on souls that are rooted in God. Joseph when dying looks forward with calm and perfect confidence, knowing that glorious things, and ever more glorious, must be, because God is. “What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of the Creator?” God lives though a hundred Josephs die. The two characteristics of the Hebrew mind were the upward and the forward look, the one directed to God in the present, the other to His coming in increasing power and grace in the future. Optimism was the distinction of the Hebrews. “In the absence of Hope and of an ideal of progress, we strike upon one great difference between the classical Greeks and the Hebrews.” Among the ancient races the Hebrew was like a watcher standing on a high mountain top, scanning the horizon and catching the first beams of coming day, while others were still hidden in darkness. The very heart-cry of the Hebrew race is heard in such words as these—

My soul looketh for the Lord

More than watchmen look for the morning;

Yea, more than watchmen for the morning. 1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 65.]

6. Our hope is for others and for ourselves.

(1) It is for ourselves here and now.—There must often be much to distress and alarm us in the course of things which interest us now—evils which seem without remedy, defeats which seem final, perplexities through which we cannot see our way, dark and gloomy clouds rising in menace over our familiar world. To hope seems to us then like deluding ourselves; we call it optimism, and instinctive dislike to pain, a determination not to see the cruel truth. And yet how often has it appeared in the upshot of things that if in the darkest times any had been bold enough to hope he would have been amply justified?

What must have been the feelings of Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries, when, just as Christianity seemed to have won its way into the Roman Empire, they saw the fierce northern barbarians break into it, and the heathen triumph over religion and civil order? Which would then have seemed the judgment of sober good sense—the despondency which saw only the frightful mischief, or the bold hope which saw in the barbarians the seed of a great Christendom? Yet, who would have been right and who wrong?

“It has come,” wrote the soberest and also the loftiest of Christian thinkers in the last century, “I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.” The ominous symptom has certainly not grown less ominous; but could even the calm and large mind of Bishop Butler have embraced the thought that with this, not diminished, perhaps aggravated, there might also come a steady growth of energy and fervour and deepening practical purpose in the Church and religious men, such as he had certainly not seen, and could not look for?

Hope about ourselves should be encouraged. It is no proof of devoutness to be always shedding penitential tears, or to be so sensible of our own weaknesses as to be despondent about our future. Victory is generally the guerdon of those who expect it, confident in the Tightness of their cause, and the help of omnipotence on the side of right. When King Ramirez, in the year 909, vowed to deliver Castile from the shameful tribute imposed by the Moors of one hundred virgins delivered annually, he collected his troops and openly defied their King Abdelraman.

The king called God to witness, that come there weal or woe,

Thenceforth no maiden tribute from out Castile should go,—

“ At least I will do battle on God our Saviour’s foe,

And die beneath my banner before I see it so.”

He fought with courage but without hope of victory, and after a furious conflict was defeated on the plain of Clavijo. But that night (the legend says), while he was sleeping, St. Jago appeared to him in vision, and promised him the victory. Next morning he called his officers about him, and told them his dream; inspired them also with hope of heavenly aid; and that day the enemy was overwhelmed by the Christian warriors, and ever since the war-cry of Spain has been “Santiago.” 1 [Note: A. Rowland.]

The worst of all the woes that trouble faithful hearts is despair of ever conquering our sins, of ever becoming what the Lord Christ would have us be. The modern man, Sir Oliver Lodge tells us, is not troubling much about his sins. I do not know about that. This I am sure of, that earnest Christians trouble about nothing so much. While we are young, while we are yet in the glad spring-time, the hope of victory is ever present. When we have entered upon the dull, dusty paths of middle age, there comes a horrible weariness of the conflict. Disappointment, disillusionment of ourselves, drag us down. Like the Celtic race, we are always setting forth to the war, always to return vanquished. Year by year our hearts grow harder and seem to ossify. The old sins we loathe are with us still; new sins that we never dreamt of assault us. Character seems not to advance, but to retrograde, and the enthusiastic impulses of youth have fled. What shall save us now, in the second critical period of life, but the grace of Christian hope, which is not temperament, is not human quality at all, but a blessed boon from God? By that gladdening spirit alone shall despair be quelled, demons exorcized, the old energy of youth recovered, the battle renewed. 1 [Note: W. Hudson Shaw.]

Nowhere, perhaps, is Hope in relation to one’s own future more beautifully illustrated than in the noontide scene in Pippa Passes. Phene, a Greek girl, has become the wife of Jules, a French sculptor. The union is the result of a cruel joke practised upon him by some students who owed him a grudge; and the sculptor finds, when it is too late, that the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her remorse at seeing what man she had deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her. And this is what she says—

You creature with the eyes!

If I could look for ever up to them,

As now you let me,—I believe, all sin,

All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,

Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth

Whence all that’s low comes, and there touch and stay

— Never to overtake the rest of me.

All that, unspotted, reaches up to you,

Drawn by those eyes! What rises is myself,

Not me the shame and suffering; but they sink,

Are left, I rise above them. Keep me so,

Above the world!

Both he and she are saved. 2 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 119.]

(2) It is for ourselves in the hereafter.—For it is simply the most literal fact that God has set before us, in another state of being, the most wonderful future, which is within the certain reach of every single one of us: as much, as certainly, within our reach, as anything that we know of, which we could obtain tomorrow. This is the plain, clear, certain promise, without which Christianity is a dream and a delusion. The life and destiny of each individual man runs up to this; this is what he was made for; for this he has been taught, and has received God’s grace, and has been tried, and has played his part in the years of time. It is the barest of commonplaces; and yet to any one who has tried to open his mind to its reality and certainty, it must have come with a strange and overpowering force—new on every fresh occasion, like nothing else in the world. For it is one thing to look forward to some great general event, the triumph of the saints of God, the final glory of the great company of the redeemed; one thing to look at all this from the outside, as a spectator by the power of imagination and thought. It is quite another, when it comes into your mind that you yourself in the far-off ages, you yourself, the very person now on earth, are intended to have your place—your certain and definite place—in all that triumph, in all that blessedness, in all that glory; and yet surely, to any one that will, this is the prospect; this, and nothing less.

Just come from heaven, how bright and fair

The soft locks of the baby’s hair,

As if the unshut gates still shed

The shining halo round his head!

Just entering heaven, what sacred snows

Upon the old man’s brow repose!

For there the opening gates have strown

The glory from the great white throne. 1 [Note: Harriet Prescott Spofford.]

(3) It is for others.—That ye may abound in hope, says St. Paul,—hope for ourselves, hope for our neighbour, hope for the world. Be the sin of our heart what it may, and seventy times seven the falls of the past, in Christ we know that sin shall have no more dominion over us. Be the sin of our neighbour what it may, love hopeth all things, and without love we are nothing. Be the sin of the world what it may, we know who came to take it away. His arm is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither is His ear heavy, that it cannot hear the great and bitter cry that cometh up from earth to heaven. We may give up hope when the Saviour of the world confesses Himself defeated, and all-ruling Love retires for ever baffled from the battlefield of human wickedness: but until then Christ calls us to set our hope on Him, and to bear witness of it to the world.

In the England of John Wesley, numbers of men were his peers in faith. Butler, Toplady, Romaine, John Newton, had as firm a grip on what faith can reach as he, and said words as noble for it. But Wesley had more hopefulness in his little finger than any other man of them had in his whole body. And so it was, that, wherever Wesley went, men caught the contagion of his great hope, and then ran tirelessly as long as they lived, kindling over all the world. Macaulay does well to say that no man can write a history of England in the last century, who shall fail to take into account Wesley’s vast influence in the common English life. 1 [Note: R. Collyer, The Life That Now Is, 68.]

It is to be regretted that Edna Lyall’s religious stories are being neglected. They are full, not only of artistic power, but likewise of rich Christian instruction. In one she describes one of her characters in this significant fashion: “Carlo had the rare and enviable gift of seeing people as they might have been under happier circumstances, and the still rarer gift of treating them as such.” The life of Christ was full of this enviable hopefulness. Read how He dealt with sinners, and you will rejoice to find that His compassion dwelt upon them in their sin. 2 [Note: J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 117.]

Dr. Westcott has told us—what those who are acquainted with the poet’s works will recognize as a statement of fact—that Browning “has dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms of action and passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes, and he has brought back for us, from this universal survey, a conviction of hope.” As a single specimen of this, we may refer to the scene described in the brief poem bearing the title, “Apparent Failure.” It is a picture of the Morgue in Paris, into which the poet entered to gaze upon the ghastly spectacles that there presented themselves—the bodies of men who hated life, or whose ideals were shattered, or whose hearts were broken. And, after plucking up courage to look fearlessly upon them all, trying to conceive what such a sight represented, how each victim came to meet with his terrible fate, he sums up his reflections thus—

My own hope is, a sun will pierce

The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;

That, after Last, returns the First,

Though a wide compass round be fetched;

That what began best, can‘t end worst,

Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst. 3 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 121.]

LOVE

1. Now consider the greatest of the three—charity or Christian love. It is no use studying Greek or Latin to find out what Christian love is. The dictionaries to consult here are our own hearts in relation to our nearest and dearest, the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and St. John’s pregnant phrase, “God is love.” Christian love is the feeling begotten in our hearts towards God and towards our fellow-men by the penetration into our hearts of the sense of the love of God to us when He gave His Son to die for us. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins … we love, because he first loved us.” That is at once the natural and the supernatural history of Christian love.

Nothing suggests better what Christian love is than Giotto’s drawing of “Charity” in Padua. It is a corrective to all that misconception of love which left room for such a phrase as “cold as charity.” This is how Ruskin describes the drawing: “Usually Charity is nursing children or giving money. Giotto thinks there is little charity in nursing children: bears and wolves do that for their little ones; and less still in giving money. His Charity stands trampling upon bags of gold—has no use for them. She gives only corn and flowers (with her right hand); and God’s angel (to whom she looks) gives her, not even these—but a Heart.” 1 [Note: R. J. Drummond, Faith’s Certainties, 240.]

The great religions of the world are distinguishable from each other by some supreme characteristic. Thus, the genius of Hinduism is mysticism, that of Buddhism is asceticism, that of Parseeism is dualism, that of Mohammedanism is fanaticism, that of Confucianism is secularism,—and that of our own faith is altruism, or love. No other inference than this is possible from the teachings of the New Testament. There God is represented as sending His Son to the earth because He loved, and He in this way “commends” His love; and then St. John, seeking to sum up His nature in a single word, exclaims: “God is love!” 2 [Note: G. C. Lorimer, The Modern Crisis in Religion, 233.]

2. Note three things in the very conception of love.

(1) It is a personal relation.—The word may, indeed, be used loosely of our mere liking for inanimate or impersonal objects; it may be degraded to express an animal passion. But all such uses of the word are either abuses of its meaning or are figurative. As the modern poet of chivalry has exquisitely expressed it: “True love’s the gift which God has given to man alone beneath the heaven;” it is “the tie, which heart to heart, and mind to mind, in body and in soul can bind.” The discriminating genius of the Greek language has marked the absolute difference of this love from the lower forms of passion by assigning special words to each; and there are some who have regretted that no similar distinction has been maintained in our own language. But, we may perhaps be permitted to think, there is another point of view from which the absence of any such verbal distinction may appear prompted by a true instinct in a Christian nation. It was necessary for a Greek to recognize sensual passion as one form of human relationship. But the Christian best expresses the lofty ideal which is ever before his eyes, and best exemplifies that charity which thinketh no evil and which believeth all things, by refusing to contemplate men and women as united by any lower tie than that of love, or by refusing to contemplate our lower nature except in the light shed upon it by the higher.

(2) Love is the highest relation which one personal being can assume towards another.—It seems necessary to insist upon this characteristic in it, because its true nature is often obscured by its association with mere abstractions. It is not with humanity but with human beings that love is concerned; and such mere intellectual abstractions are useful only so far as they assist us in placing ourselves in that individual relation to individuals in which love finds its existence and its sphere of action. That which the Apostle has in view in his glowing description of this virtue is not a vague emotion of the heart, but the self-sacrifice, the devotion, the patience which are evoked in one soul by the presence of another.

The degree in which this gracious virtue of love can be evoked in our nature must depend upon the personal relations in which we are placed. The relation, perhaps, may be sometimes and in some measure an ideal one; but the vision of a person must be brought before the soul, if its highest faculties are to be aroused and its noblest emotions drawn forth. We all know, and it is the privilege of a generous youth to feel with peculiar vividness, what an ennobling effect is produced upon our nature by love, in the true sense of the word, thus aroused towards a kindred soul; while we also know and feel how intimately and essentially this influence is dependent on the personal character of the relation. It was the favourite theme of our greatest poets in the most splendid period of our literature, and perhaps of our national life; and in Spenser’s lofty verse the vision of love and beauty, and the vision of heavenly love and beauty, are so closely associated that they seem to merge into one another. But poets of less spiritual flight, and more concerned with the ordinary passions of human nature, have similarly depicted their heroes as rising to their noblest heights under the inspiration of this generous passion. When St. Paul discerns in the true relation of husband and wife a picture of the relation of Christ to His Church, he justifies and sanctifies these transcripts from nature, and welds together in essential union the most human and the most Divine aspect of love. Where, indeed, even in the light of the Gospel, shall be found more touching illustrations of some of the excellencies which the Apostle ascribes to charity, than in the personal affections of a gracious family life? The love which suffers long and is kind, which envies not, which seeks not her own, which is not easily provoked, which thinks no evil, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things,—is not this the love of mothers and of wives, the devotion of true sons and husbands? What an astonishing power there is in such love and such devotion to suppress the selfishness in a man or a woman, and to arouse all the faculties of our nature in the service of the person to whom we are devoted! 1 [Note: Dean Wace.]

(3) It needs a perfect Person to satisfy its desires.—For the question arises, whether all these stirrings of heart towards men like ourselves, all these quickenings of the moral and spiritual pulse can be more than the first awakenings of the human soul towards its true destiny—that of communion and union with a perfect Person. With respect to all these emotions, even the truest and most beautiful, when viewed independently of higher relations, in how lamentable a degree is illusion blended with them! Those illusions are often the mockery, the cruel and unworthy mockery, of maturer years; and they are not less often the bitter disappointments of tender and faithful hearts. But suppose a love open to human nature which should be subject to no such illusion; imagine a Person revealed to men and women on whom they could lavish the inexhaustible stores of their affection, their admiration, their devotion, and be sure that all, and more than all, would fall short of what was due, and be a feeble response to the infinite reality: and what might not then be expected to be the influence produced upon our nature? We have the answer in this chapter, which was, in fact, the response elicited from the soul of St. Paul by the vision of the Lord Jesus Christ, by the love of the Saviour for him and his responsive love for the Saviour.

Perfection, or at least blessedness, in some form or other, has been proved by experience to be the ineradicable desire of the soul of man. That desire may, indeed, be dulled for a time, or chilled by despair. But such an acquiescence in imperfection brings with it, like the disappointed philosophy of the ancient world, a decay of energy, an abandonment of hope, in every sphere of life, and relaxes the spring of all noble thoughts and emotions. “Be ye perfect” is a command which is implied in all others, and is one of their main animating motives; and, in offering the means for this perfection, the Gospel possesses one of its deepest claims upon our spirits. 1 [Note: Dean Wace.]

Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all,

Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold,

Rend each man’s temple veil and bid it fall,

That we may know that Thou hast been of old;

Gather us in.

Gather us in: we worship only Thee;

In varied names we stretch a common hand

In diverse forms a common soul we see;

In many ships we seek one spirit-land;

Gather us in.

Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow light;

Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven

Thou art the fulness of our partial sight,

We are not perfect till we find the seven;

Gather us in.

3. To whom, then, is our love directed?

(1) It is love to God in Christ.—The immediate and supreme object of love is the ever-blessed God. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” This is the first commandment. And with God as the centre of the heart, all the faculties and all the powers have unbounded scope for their operation.

I spoke to H—about the worship of the Virgin, and he thought one reason for its prevalence is, that it puts before men the more affectionate side of truth; and he deplored the want of a more large appeal to the affections in Protestantism, saying that we worship Christ, but none of us love Him. I was silent, but the result of a scrutiny into my own mind was that, with an exception, I scarcely love any one, or anything else, and that not because of any reference to His love for me, which somehow or other never enters into my mind, but solely in consequence of what He is and was, according, at least, to my conception of Him and His mind and heart. I do not know that this consciousness pleased me, because it presented itself rather as a deficiency than as a power—a lack of human sympathy, the existence of a continually increasing number of repellent poles in my constitution, which isolate me from my species, and make my antipathies more marked than my sympathies. Whereas St. John’s conception of genuine love for Him was that of an affection trained in love for beings who exhibit the same Humanity which was in Him, in weaker images, in the various relationships of life. “If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” Through the visible as a school we rise up to the appreciation of the invisible. Now my nature forces me to reverse the order, or rather to skip the first steps, for I certainly have some sympathy—dreamy, perhaps useless—with the invisible—invisible personality, justice, right; but there they end, and almost never go on, or go back, to the visible and human. Those lines you have often quoted, of Burns—

I saw thee eye the general weal

With boundless love—

express a feeling which I can only imagine, not realize, except by a sort of analogy which is dreamy. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 341.]

The very blessed in Paradise, beholding the infinite Beauty of God, would faint and fail from longing to love Him more if His most Holy Will did not fill them with His own sweet Rest. But they love His sovereign Will so entirely that theirs is wholly merged in it, and they rest content in His Content, willing to submit to the limit Love puts to love. Were it not so, their love would be alike delicious and poignant—delicious in the possession of so great a gift, poignant in the intensity of desire for more. Thus God in His Wisdom sends perpetual shafts into the hearts of those who love Him, to teach them that they do not love Him nearly so much as He deserves to be loved. And be sure that the man who does not crave to love God more does not as yet love Him well enough. There is no “enough”; and he who would stop short in what he has attained, has attained but little, be sure. 1 [Note: St. Francis de Sales.]

(2) It is love to man.—We cannot love God without loving man. The love of God is the love of man expanded and purified. To love man is to love God. The testimony of St. John, the disciple of love, is decisive on this point. His love to God was unearthly, pure, spiritual; his religion had melted into love, and here is his account: “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” According to him, it is through the visible that we appreciate the invisible, through the love of our brother that we grow into the love of God. At the same time, true love for man must flow primarily from love to God. The love of God is the root, the love of man the fruit; the love of God is the fountain, the love of man is the stream in which it flows. Both are parts of one whole, links of one chain, threads of one cord which binds us to God, descending from Him to us, and lifting us up to His very being, which is love. 2 [Note: J. Davies.]

I read the other day of a girl, a convert from heathenism in the Sandwich Islands, where Father Damien lived. She had a class of little children, and she wished to know which of them continued heathen and which had accepted Christianity. In her simplicity, uncontaminated by conventionalities and traditions which mislead us, she said to each child in her class, “Do you love your enemies?” If the child answered, “Yes,” the unsophisticated teacher said, “Then you are a Christian; stand here.” If the child answered, “No,” she said, with equal decision, “Then you are a heathen; stand on the other side.” Thus did the girl in the Sandwich Islands divide the sheep from the goats; and thus will her Saviour divide them on the last day. 3 [Note: H. P. Hughes, The Philanthropy of God, 40.]

The Teacher earnestly desired to return to his post. I pled with him to remain at the Mission House till we felt more assured, but he replied,—“Missi, when I see them thirsting for my blood, I just see myself when the Missionary first came to my island. I desired to murder him, as they now desire to kill me. Had he stayed away for such danger, I would have remained Heathen; but he came, and continued coming to teach us, till, by the grace of God, I was changed to what I am. Now the same God that changed me to this can change these poor Tannese to love and serve Him. I cannot stay away from them; but I will sleep at the Mission House, and do all I can by day to bring them to Jesus.” 1 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 195.]

Have we got this love? Have we got it as a city, as a Church, and as individuals? Have we got it as a city? I suppose that many would answer that by an eulogium upon the charity of London. We should have flowing articles upon the generosity with which we support our hospitals and our asylums and our refuges. But I have during this last week come across certain facts which I feel it my duty to place before you this afternoon. As the Bishop of East London, it is, I think, natural that, considering for a thousand years the head of every hospital in Europe was Bishop of the place, the Bishop of East London should take a great interest in East London hospitals. I took first the London Hospital, that lifeboat, as it were, which goes up and down the sea of suffering humanity in East London, to cure it and to save it. I thought that the charity of London would, at any rate, be sufficient to support a great institution like the London Hospital. What do I find? I find that the love of London has allowed a deficit of £30,000 in the last two years; that so cramped are they that they have to build, and yet have no money to build with; and that to carry on their work efficiently at all they want £10,000 a year more. I pass to the Victoria Park Consumptive Hospital, and I pass with the memory of having seen at least fifty of my East-end friends die of consumption before my eyes in the last nine years. I go to the Consumptive Hospital, and what do I find? Out of 162 beds only 60 can be used for lack of funds. One hundred and two patients are passed as suitable, and yet of those 102 none can be taken in. Four women, passed a few weeks ago, have all died before their time to go in came. Those 102 beds are left vacant because the love of London is not sufficient for the purpose. I go to the Children’s Hospital. One would have thought that the charity of a great city would look after its children. But what do I find at the North-Eastern Hospital for children? I find the Hospital crammed with children, and another wing an urgent necessity, and yet the only £2000 which has been given was not given by some one who hates creeds and who goes in for the service of man without creeds, but was obtained from a distinctly Church charity as the first contribution to the new wing. I say, then, that as a city we have not risen yet to the true standard of love. Have we as a Church? 1 [Note: Bishop Winnington Ingram, Banners of the Christian Faith, 43.]

“O happy souls, O radiant souls, what songs are ye outpouring?

What passionate, pure prayers are these from earth to heaven soaring?

What mystic gifts of love and grace are these your words imploring

From God, for your neighbour and your enemy?”

Our souls are all afire with love—with love our hearts are glowing,

The mystic peace that Jesus gives our joyous strains are showing;

For lo! our love can not be hid—our brimming love out-flowing

To God, and our neighbour and our enemy.

“But what of those who sought your harm—who joyed at your mistaking,

What place have they in this your chant—in these your prayers, partaking?

Are your pure souls—your tender hearts—with love and longing breaking

For God, and your neighbour and your enemy?”

Our souls are filled with heavenly peace—our hearts with love untiring,

And Jesus with His radiant love our feeble love is firing,

Till nought we crave but love for all, in this our joyous choiring

From God, for our neighbour and our enemy. 2 [Note: Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 54.]

(3) It is love to the brethren.—The love of the brethren is often referred to as distinguished from love; the one having reference to moral character, the other to the race in general. “Be kindly affectioned one to another.” “Be ye all of one mind, … love as brethren.”

Gibbon has discussed the reason of the wonderful expansion of Christianity at the outset of its career, and he has alleged five causes: the zeal of the primitive Christians, their doctrine of immortality, the miraculous powers of the Apostolic Church, her pure morality, and the union and discipline of the Christian republic. And these, no doubt, were efficient causes, but Gibbon has overlooked the strongest of all. The reason why Christianity spread over the world and won the nations, was that the Christians understood the blessed secret of love as the Lord had taught it. It is said by Tertullian that in those early days the heathen would often exclaim: “See how they love one another!” All this changed, and during the days of bitter controversy over the doctrine of the Person of Christ, when the Christians were wrangling and excommunicating and persecuting one another, it was said by a Latin historian that their hatred of each other exceeded the fury of savage beasts against mankind. It was then that Christianity lost its power, and if we would recover the ancient power, we must rediscover and practise the ancient secret. 1 [Note: D. Smith.]

In Samoa, Stevenson had left his small hut and removed into a large house. There had not yet been time for Love to line it. Stevenson felt sad and weary, and had forgotten to bespeak his nightly coffee and cigars. Whilst he was thinking, the door quietly opened and the native boy entered carrying the tray with that on it for which he longed. Stevenson said in the native tongue, “Great is your forethought.” The boy corrected him and said, “Great is the love.” 2 [Note: A. R. Simpson, These Three, 47.]

The writer remembers a curious expression used by a Mohammedan who had become a Christian and then relapsed, “Un ki muhabbat dekhke, bhul gaya; un ki dushmani dekhke, yad aya,” “Their (the Christians’) love made me forget my religion; their hostility made me remember it.” 3 [Note: C. Field, The Charm of India, xi.]

4. But God in Christ is the source as well as the object of love. Where are we to look for the inspiration that breathed into the idea of “love” that intense spirituality—that perfect purity and almost infinite longing and desire, which demanded almost a new word to meet a new conception, as much in advance of all that the heathen world knew as the Gospel of St. John transcends all the Greek philosophies? The answer to this question is to be found, at least in the first instance, in the words of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as reported to us in that very Gospel—the spiritual Gospel, as it has been well called—of the beloved Apostle; to the effect that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

So kindly was His love to us,

(We had not heard of love before),

That all our life grew glorious

When He had halted at our door.

So meekly did He love us men,

Though blind we were with shameful sin,

He touched our eyes with tears, and then

Led God’s tall angels flaming in.

He dwelt with us a little space,

As mothers do in childhood’s years,

And still we can discern His face

Wherever Joy or Love appears.

He made our virtues all His own,

And lent them grace we could not give,

And now our world seems His alone,

And while we live He seems to live.

He took our sorrows and our pain,

And hid their torture in His breast,

Till we received them back again,

To find on each His grief impressed.

He clasped our children in His arms,

And showed us where their beauty shone,

He took from us our grey alarms,

And put Death’s icy armour on.

So gentle were His ways with us,

That crippled souls had ceased to sigh,

On them He laid His hands, and thus

They gloried at His passing by.

Without reproof or word of blame,

As mothers do in childhood’s years,

He kissed our lips in spite of shame,

And stayed the passage of our tears.

So tender was His love to us,

(We had not learned to love before),

That we grew like to Him, and thus

Men sought His grace in us once more. 1 [Note: Coningsby William Dawson.]

When the Jubilee Singers first visited our shores in 1873, an old believer used to repeat constantly the refrain of one of their songs, “Free grace and dying love.” The love of Christ constrained her. “Rabbi” Duncan rose up from the Professor’s chair, and walked up and down the platform as he discoursed on the Crucifixion with his students. “Ay, ay, d’ye know what it was—dying on the cross, forsaken by His Father—d’ye know what it was? What? What? It was damnation—and damnation taken lovingly.” The love of Christ constrained him. 2 [Note: A. R. Simpson, These Three, 45.]

It was for me that Jesus died, for me and a world of men

Just as sinful, and just as slow to give back His love again;

And He didn‘t wait till I came to Him, but He loved me at my worst;

He needn‘t ever have died for me if I could have loved Him first. 3 [Note: Dora Greenwell.]

THESE THREE

We have looked at Faith, Hope, and Love separately. Now let us see them acting and re-acting the one on the other.

“Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three.” In thus speaking of these cardinal virtues of the Christian character, it is evident that St. Paul means to distinguish them from one another. He speaks of them as “these three,” and thereby represents them to us as three several virtues, each holding its own place, and serving its own purpose, to which it is peculiarly adapted, and in which the others are incapable of superseding it. Each one of that blessed triad of Christian graces has its own proper province in the spiritual life allotted to it. And each has important functions to discharge, which none but itself is capable of executing. Faith can be no substitute for love in the way of fulfilling the great duties of practical religion. And as little can love be any substitute for faith in the way of appropriating the merits of the Saviour, and thereby securing our justification in the sight of God. What St. Paul has elsewhere said of the several offices in the Christian Church is equally applicable to the leading graces of the Christian character—that all of them are useful and needful in their respective spheres, like the various organs and members of the human body; and that no one among them can set aside another any more than the hand can dispense with the services of the foot, or the eye undertake to perform the functions of the ear.

But while in this statement faith, hope, and love are thus represented as numerically distinct, they are notwithstanding very intimately associated, as having the closest mutual affinity and dependence. All three must abide together, in order to the perfection of each other, as well as of the whole character into which they enter. God has joined them; and man must not attempt to sever them. Faith must animate the mind with hope, and “work by love,” in order to show its genuineness as that living and operative faith of which alone the Scriptures have approved. Hope, if it do not rest on the good foundation which faith has laid for it, is altogether visionary and unwarranted; and if it do not elevate the soul unto the unfeigned love of God and man, it is spurious or hypocritical. And love, if it be not originated by faith and sustained by hope, is merely an instinctive impulse of nature, accidental in its attachments, and limited to the sphere of visible things, and thus differing most essentially from that evangelical love of which it is written, that “the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.”

1. Faith and Hope.—Faith and hope are twin sisters, and hardly to be known apart; both as beautiful as they can be, and alike beautiful, and very often indeed mistaken each for the other. Yet this need never be; because between them there is this clear difference, that while hope expects, faith inspects; while hope is like Mary, looking up -ward, faith is like Martha, looking at -ward; while the light in the eyes of hope is high, the light in the eyes of faith is strong; while hope trembles in expectation, faith is quiet in possession. Hope leaps out toward what will be: faith holds on to what is; hope idealizes, faith realizes; faith sees, hope foresees.

The trouble with some men is, that, while they hold on to the faith, they have lost hold of the hope of their religion. And so they inspect but they do not expect; they believe in what has come, but not in what is coming. So they expire after they have ceased to inspire; they die, but they do not make many live. You get a grand lesson on this matter, as you go from the mouth to the springs of the Rhine. Passing through the fog and mist of Holland, as through a stagnant, grassy sea, you stretch upward, league after league; and, as you go, the country gradually changes. The air grows clearer, the prospect finer; everything that can stir the soul begins to reach down toward you, and touch you with its glory. But the higher you go, the harder is your going; only the deepening beauty never fails you. So at last you come into Switzerland, where the blue heavens bend over you with their infinite, tender light; and the mountains stand about you, in their white robes, glorious as the gates of heaven, with green valleys nestling between, which, but for sorrow and sin, are beautiful as Paradise. And all about you is a vaster vision, and within you an intenser inspiration than can ever be felt on the foggy flats below. It is the difference between faith alone, and faith and hope together. 1 [Note: R. Collyer, The Life that Now Is, 64.]

By faith Jacob, when a-dying, leaves his children a legacy of hope in God. He looks upward in faith and forward in expectancy. His religion makes him sanguine and prophetic. “Behold,” he said, “I die: but God shall be with you” ( Genesis 48:21). The words are suggestive of infinite possibilities. The One remains while the many change and pass. When man dies, God lives on, and faith in the real presence of a living God is the spring of eternal hope. Faith is the power by which men grasp the future, the unseen, the Divine, by which they maintain their expectant look, by which they remain optimists in spite of all the evil of the world. Dying saints are enabled to bequeath messages of comfort to after ages, because they are sure that the God who has so greatly blessed themselves has greater blessings in store for their posterity. True religion bids them expect a brighter day to dawn and a happier society to come into being. Jacob, dying in Goshen, the proverbial land of plenty, sees something still better than Goshen. His conviction of the goodness of God kindles an ardent and unquenchable hope of the amelioration of the state of his people. The vision of God is always accompanied by the vision of a better and happier world. 2 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 150.]

In the career of Columbus faith and hope supported each other. So sings the American poet, Maurice Francis Egan—

Who doubts has met defeat ere blows can fall;

Who doubts must die with no palm in his hand:

Who doubts shall never be of that high band

Which clearly answer—Present! to Death’s call:

For Faith is life, and, though a funeral pall

Veil our fair Hope, and on our promised land

A mist malignant hang, if Faith but stand

Among our ruins, we shall conquer all.

O faithful soul, that knew no doubting low;

O Faith incarnate, lit by Hope’s strong flame,

And led by Faith’s own cross to dare all ill

And find our world!—but more than this we owe

To thy true heart; thy pure and glorious name

Is one clear trumpet call to Faith and Will.

2. Faith and Love.—Faith is energetic love. Divinely implanted love, spiritually inspired self-surrender increases every faculty of knowledge, deepens every impression made by truth, opens the eye which indifference or passion had blinded, purifies the gaze which prejudice or evil bias had corrupted and obscured, and so makes the trembling faith which can only cry, “I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” grow, burn, gleam with holy enthusiasm, until it cries, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded.”

I have been writing lately on the subject of Keble’s lines (Hymn for Sunday next before Advent). I have little doubt that the Church of Borne has paid far more attention than we have to that which forms the subject of this hymn—the treatment of penitence. She has more power to soothe, because she dwells chiefly on that which is the most glorious element in the nature of God—Love. Whereas Protestantism fixes attention more on that which is the strongest principle in the bosom of man—Faith. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 244.]

I ask not for Thy love, O Lord: the days

Can never come when anguish shall atone.

Enough for me were but Thy pity shown,

To me as to the stricken sheep that strays,

With ceaseless cry for unforgotten ways—

O lead me back to pastures I have known,

Or find me in the wilderness alone,

And slay me, as the hand of mercy slays.

I ask not for Thy love; nor e’en so much,

As for a hope on Thy dear breast to lie;

But be Thou still my shepherd—still with such

Compassion as may melt to such a cry;

That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch,

And dimly see Thy face ere yet I die. 1 [Note: George John Romanes, Life and Letters, 267.]

In 1836 James Field, of Cork, called for the third time on an unsaved woman to whom he had been introduced. She cried out to him, “Oh, sir, I do not love God!” He replied, “What have you to do with loving God? How can you love until you apprehend His love to you? and this you cannot do until you believe. It is folly to think of loving God before you obtain pardon.” Tears gushed from her eyes, and she said she had never understood it before. As the two prayed, God set her soul at liberty, and then she found she could love God, because He first loved her. It was the gift of pardon that filled her heart with the love of gratitude. 2 [Note: J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 68.]

3. Hope and Love.—Who has not experienced what he and others call Christian hope, but which on close analysis is found to be little better than a faint and feeble desire after better things, and a desponding cry of the soul for what is just a grade better than blank despair? This is not the hope that saves. Contrast it with the full evidence of things hoped for, which is imparted by living faith. Let desire be large, and expectation strong; let hope embrace all Divine promises, and it becomes a vast capacity for blessedness, and often bursts out in solitary places and on dark nights into songs of rejoicing. Then is revealed what the Apostles call “patience,” born of quiet waiting, with a smile upon its face, reflecting all the lustre of the Divine manifestation. Tribulation and sorrow are but the crucible in which this precious quality and energy of soul is refined. “This hope maketh not ashamed,” and can never be disappointed, because it is a veritable foretaste of its own object—it is the earnest and foretaste of the purchased possession. What leads the soul from hope to hope, from the faint uplifting of the wearied weeping eye to the “hope full of immortality”? St. Paul gives us the answer: “Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us.”

Do you not think that the ordinary standpoint of so-called Christian teaching is undergoing a destruction, and that the devil’s travesty is waning? Terrorism is no real factor in Christianity. Surely Christianity is the response which follows the recognition of Love and its beneficent purpose of Universal beatitude. In that atmosphere the heart beats freely and fully, for it breathes the Hope which Love begets. We ought to breathe the Hope before we attempt to deal with the distresses of life; then should we be armed with the Sympathy that is powerful, and not merely with the sympathy that is the recognition of a common woe. 1 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 150.]

Yesterday, after reading Romance of Rose, thought much of the destruction of all my higher power of sentiment by late sorrow; and considered how far it might be possible to make love, though hopeless, still a guide and strength. 2 [Note: Ruskin in E. T. Cook’s Life of Ruskin, ii. 267.]

Is any grieved or tired? Yea, by God’s will:

Surely God’s Will alone is good and best:

O weary man, in weariness take rest,

O hungry man, by hunger feast thy fill.

Discern thy good beneath a mask of ill,

Or build of loneliness thy secret nest:

At noon take heart, being mindful of the west;

At night wake hope, for dawn advances still.

At night wake hope. Poor soul, in such sore need

Of wakening and of girding up anew,

Hast thou that hope which fainting doth pursue?

No saint but hath pursued and hath been faint;

Bid love wake hope, for both thy steps shall speed,

Still faint yet still pursuing, O thou saint. 3 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 164.]

4. Faith, Hope, Love.—When St. Paul takes three words, and couples them with a verb in the singular, he is not making a slip of the pen, or committing a grammatical blunder which a child could correct. But there is a great truth in that piece of apparent grammatical irregularity; for the faith, the hope, and the love, for which he can afford only a singular verb, are thereby declared to be in their depth and essence one thing, and it, the triple star, abides, and continues to shine; the three primitive colours are unified in the white beam of light. Do not correct the grammar, and spoil the sense, but discern what he means when he says, “Now abided faith, hope, love.” For this is what he means, that the two latter come out of the former, and that without it they are naught, and that it without them is dead.

(1) Faith is the rightful attitude of self and our neighbour to God: Hope is the recognition and welcome of God’s purpose for self, and our neighbour: Love binds God, self, and our neighbour in the perfect bond of the Divinely purposed harmony.

You have seen that famous picture of the French artist Millet, “The Angelus.” You remember the scene which it depicts—a very homely and, at the first glance, prosaic scene: a potato-field and two figures, a man and a woman, surrounded by the implements of their toil. It is a dull, bleak landscape, and away across the level tract you see a village with the church-spire rising above the lowly roofs. It is evening, and the bell has rung out its call to prayer. Its silvery chime has reached the ears of the two labourers, and after the devout manner of their country they have hearkened to its call. They have dropped their tools, and they are standing erect, with bowed heads and folded hands, in the attitude of prayer. I once heard an interpretation of this picture from my old teacher, the late Professor Henry Drummond. There, he said, are the three elements of a complete life—Work, God, and Love. The field, the spade, the basket, and the barrow—there is Work; the bowed heads and the folded hands—there is Religion; the two, a man and a woman, whatever be their relationship—there is Love. And this is precisely the idea of the saying of St. Paul in our text. 1 [Note: D. Smith, Man’s Need of God, 16.]

So Faith shall build the boundary wall,

And Hope shall plant the secret bower,

That both may show magnifical

With gem and flower.

While over all a dome must spread,

And Love shall be that dome above;

And deep foundations must be laid,

And these are Love.

(2) Though separated in the representation, faith, hope, and love are really inseparable companions, closely united, not only to every Christian, but also to each other. What, indeed, is faith without hope and love? A cold conviction of the intellect, but without life-awakening power in the heart, or mature fruit in the life. Without hope, faith would never behold heaven; but even if it could enter therein, heaven would lack its highest bliss. What is hope without faith and love? At most, an idle dream from which we soon shall sadly wake; a fragrant blossom in the garden, fading before it has brought forth fruit. And, lastly, what is love without hope or faith? The welling forth, perhaps, of natural feeling, but in no degree a spiritual principle of life. If love believes not, it must die; and if it hopes not in the same measure as it loves, it is then the source of unparalleled suffering. Thus, whichever of these three sisters we would separate from the others, in so doing we have subscribed her death-warrant; nay, even if two of them remain together, the brightness of their beauty is dimmed whenever the third has disappeared.

That the whole substance of religion was faith, hope, and love; by the practice of which we became united to the will of God; that all beside is indifferent, and to be used only as a means, that we may arrive at our end, and be swallowed up therein, by faith and love.

That all things are possible to him who believes, that they are less difficult to him who hopes, that they are easier to him who loves, and still more easy to him who perseveres in the practice of these three virtues. 1 [Note: Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 23.]

I remember reading about an English barrister, of refined mind but speculative tendencies, who had reached such a depth of Pyrrhonism, alike in philosophy and religion, that he had lost all faith in positive truth. His Christian wife grieved over him all the more that she perceived about him symptoms of incipient consumption. One day, however, as he lay on the sofa, she saw him gazing upwards, as if on some object, with an expression of soft delight and almost rapture. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Do you know, I have begun to conceive hope.” “Hope of what?” “I don’t know, but somehow I have hope.” Ah! the haze was dissolving, phantoms were crystallizing into concrete realities and the transporting “hope” of finding solid footing on the rock of positive truth. Right speedily came that faith which overcometh the world—a childlike reception of the Gospel of Christ—terminating, and at no distant period, in a tranquil departure to the region of unclouded light. 2 [Note: D. Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 78.]

John Knox, in his History of the Reformation, has preserved a beautiful comparison of faith, hope, and charity by Patrick Hamilton, the Scottish martyr. Says Hamilton: “Faith cometh of the Word of God, Hope cometh of Faith, and Charity springeth of them both. Faith believes the Word, Hope trusteth after that which is promised by the Word, and Charity doeth good unto her neighbour, through the love which she hath to God, and gladness that is within herself. Faith looketh to God and His word; Hope looketh unto His gift and reward; Charity looketh unto her neighbour’s profit. Faith receiveth God; Hope receiveth His reward; Charity looketh to her neighbour with a glad heart, and that without any respect of reward. Faith pertaineth to God only, Hope to His reward, and Charity to her neighbour.”

Let love weep—

It cometh, that day of the Lord divine;

And the morning star will surely shine

On the long death-night of sleep.

Let faith fear,—

The unending light comes on apace;

The path leads homeward from this place;

Through the twilight home must appear.

Let hope despair,—

Let death and the grave shout victory,—

That flush of the morning yet shall be,

Which shall wake the slumberers there!

THESE THREE ABIDE

1. Amidst all that changes and is destined to pass away, three things there are, St. Paul tells us, that abide. Just as in a world of shadows and uncertainties we have learned to postulate as fundamental certainties three incontestable realities, God, self, and our neighbour; so amid the variety of external and transient manifestations of the religious life there remain unchangeably three activities or functions of the soul, which are perpetually concerned with these fundamental certainties. Much of the detail of religion is an accommodation to present necessities and will pass away when it has served its temporary purpose; but behind and beneath lie three essential and eternal principles of spiritual life—Faith, Hope, and Love.

2. The popular interpretation reads “now” as temporal instead of logical—identifying it with the “now” of 1 Corinthians 13:12, though the Greek words differ—as though the Apostle meant that for the present faith and hope “abide” with love, but love alone “abides” for ever. But St. Paul puts the three on the same footing in respect of enduringness—“ these three” in comparison with the other three of 1 Corinthians 13:8—pointedly adding faith and hope to share and support the “abiding” of love; love is greater among these, not more lasting.

It is curious that this meaning has been so generally missed by readers of the passage. Learned readers, as well as unlearned, have failed to observe it. You may frequently see it assumed, in hymns and other religious literature, that faith and hope, instead of being associated with love in this quality of permanence, as St. Paul declares them to be, are contrasted with it, in that they are transitory, whilst love is eternal. “Faith will vanish into sight; Hope be emptied in delight; Love in heaven will shine more bright.” Such language is plausible enough to be generally accepted. But it is at variance with St. Paul’s view. The passage we are considering is not one of doubtful meaning; no competent interpreter could question that St. Paul’s purpose is to say that faith, hope, love, all three abide; and that by “abide” he means that they have not the changing and transitory character which belongs to other things of which he has been speaking. It is true that he is asserting the supreme glory of love; it is greater, he says, than faith and hope. But these two sister graces share with it the significant distinction that they all abide.

3. The chief point, then, to be noticed in this statement, is the permanence it ascribes to those graces of which it speaks. It represents “faith, hope, and love, these three,” as all alike abiding. Formerly the Apostle had said this of love in particular, declaring in the 8th verse that “love never faileth.” But now, in repeating the statement, he extends it to the other two, ascribing to them also the same durability that he had previously noticed as an attribute of love. No doubt it was the design of the Apostle to point out in this respect the very striking contrast between these three essential graces, by which at all times the Christian character must be distinguished, and those extraordinary gifts bestowed on the early Christian Church, which, however remarkable and useful while they endured, were only intended to continue for a season.

If, loving well the creatures that are like yourself, you feel that you would love still more dearly creatures better than yourself—were they revealed to you;—if striving with all your might to mend what is evil, near you and around, you would fain look for a day when some Judge of all the Earth shall wholly do right, and the little hills rejoice on every side; if, parting with the companions that have given you all the best joy you had on Earth, you desire ever to meet their eyes again and clasp their hands,—where eyes shall no more be dim, nor hands fail;—if, preparing yourselves to lie down beneath the grass in silence and loneliness, seeing no more beauty, and feeling no more gladness—you would care for the promise to you of a time when you should see God’s light again, and know the things you have longed to know, and walk in the peace of everlasting Love— then, the Hope of these things to you is religion, the Substance of them in your life is Faith. And in the power of them, it is promised us, that the kingdoms of this world shall yet become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. 1 [Note: Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (Works, xxxiii. 174).]

4. When we have looked backward and seen these three graces to be thus identical and unchanging in stages of human growth which are in mental conditions so far separated from each other, we shall have confidence in them as we look forward even beyond the grave. Are we to part with faith hereafter? Only if we give to the name Faith some narrow interpretation. Not, surely, if it is filial trust in the Father. It cannot be part of the reward of the future state that the children of God should cease to be filial, or to cherish that confiding trust in the Fatherly wisdom and goodness which was perfectly exhibited in the perfect Son of God. No; if childlike faith has continued from yesterday until to-day, we may know it to be of a nature to continue and abide for ever. But must not hope, as they say, be swallowed up in fruition? Not, it would seem, until the whole work of the Divine creation and government be brought to a standstill. Such an end is beyond the reach of our faculties to imagine. But the death of a Christian will not leave him without objects of hope. After each of us dies there will be plenty of evil still to be purged out of God’s world; there will be endless evolutions of the Divine purpose for the revealing of the Divine glory. Those that have gone before us, we may well believe, instead of having ceased to hope, are now hoping more earnestly, more continuously, more joyfully, more calmly, than we are. Of the continuance of love in the life to come one need say nothing, as it has not been possible to fall into the mistake of supposing that love could be stopped by death unless all conscious existence be believed to be stopped by it also.

We are very much accustomed to speak of faith as destined in the future world to give place to vision, and of hope as destined, in like manner, to end in full fruition. This view is taken in the last verses of our 49th Paraphrase, of which the chapter before us is the groundwork. And by frequently using that beautiful Paraphrase, we have probably been led, without much consideration, to assume that love alone shall exist in heaven, while faith and hope shall be altogether superseded. But is there any solid Scriptural ground for such an assumption? There is nothing in the text itself to warrant it. Nor am I aware of any other passage that has ever been formally brought forward to confirm it. No faith in heaven! What, then, are we to make of those texts which speak of the glorified saints as “eating of the hidden manna,” partaking of “the fruit of the tree of life,”—following the Lamb of God whithersoever He may lead them—and as guided by Him—to “living fountains of waters.” Surely these expressions are as significant as words can be of a life of unceasing faith in the Redeemer. It is quite true that many of those things which are now objects of faith, shall hereafter be objects of sight. But it would be a very rash and sweeping conclusion thence to infer that in a future world there shall be no room and no occasion for faith at all. Unless, indeed, we are to be made absolutely omniscient at the very first moment of our entrance into the heavenly mansions, there must still remain a field, though not indeed the same field as that which we now have, for the exercise of faith. And then, in so far as faith can be held to consist in confidence towards God or dependence on the Saviour, we may surely venture to say that instead of ceasing in the world to come, it will be more fully developed and more perfectly maintained. With respect to hope, again, it is not to be questioned that many of those things to which it is for the present directed shall in our future state be actually possessed, so that they cannot then be hoped for any longer. But does it follow that, after this life is ended, the Christian will have absolutely nothing whatever to hope for? Will it be nothing for the departed spirits of the faithful to anticipate the resurrection of their bodies, and to look forward to the triumphant issues of the coming judgment? And even when these glorious events have been consummated, will there not still remain the animating prospect of continually augmenting knowledge, unceasingly advancing happiness, and progressively increasing spiritual excellence to all eternity? We must either suppose that all that heaven has to give is to be enjoyed at once by the spirits of the redeemed when first they are translated thither, and that there is no progress of any kind to be afterwards made by them from glory to glory; or else we must allow that there is still something in reserve for them, besides what they at first attain, as a fit and proper object of Hope. 1 [Note: T. J. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross, 349.]

5. Faith, hope, and love, these three represent the spiritual or Christian life, called also the eternal life, in the soul of man. It is this that has in its history and essential nature the witness of permanence. St. Paul found comfort in the evident progress from the more imperfect to the less imperfect which is to be traced in a part of our human nature. But he also derived comfort, and the more indispensable comfort, from contemplating the signs and working in man of the perfect and eternal Divine nature. And in order to realize that this which seemed to him best in man was really unchanging, he must have looked at it as he did at the changing forms of mental conception, in the stage of human childhood. In the child—he implies, if he does not fully affirm—he found the spiritual affections at least as admirable as in the man. These things, faith and hope and love, he perceived, manifest themselves with heavenly beauty in the young; they are also the signs of God’s truest presence in the instructed and experienced man, and they will stand the shock of death, and remain with us, in virtue of their imperishable and eternal nature, in the dimly imagined world that lies on the other side of the grave.

So with our youths. We once taught them to make Latin verses, and called them educated; now we teach them to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a bat, and call them educated. Can they plough, can they sow, can they plant at the right time, or build with a steady hand? Is it the effort of their lives to be chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in word and deed? Indeed it is, with some, nay, with many, and the strength of England is in them, and the hope; but we have to turn their courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy; and their intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things; and their knighthood from the errantry of adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly power. And then, indeed, shall abide, for them and for us, an incorruptible felicity, and an infallible religion; shall abide for us Faith, no more to be assailed by temptation, no more to be defended by wrath and by fear;—shall abide with us Hope, no more to be quenched by the years that overwhelm, or made ashamed by the shadows that betray:—shall abide for us, and with us, the greatest of these; the abiding will, the abiding name of our Father. For the greatest of these is Charity. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (Works, xviii. 186).]

i. Faith Abides

1. There is a common saying, which ninety out of a hundred people think comes out of the Bible, that “faith is lost in sight.” There is no such teaching in Scripture. True, in one aspect, faith is the antithesis of sight. St. Paul does say, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” But that antithesis refers only to part of faith’s significance. In so far as it is the opposite of sight, of course it will cease to be in operation when we shall know even as we are known, and see Him as He is. But the essence of faith is not the absence of the person trusted, but the emotion of trust which goes out to the person, present or absent. And in its deepest meaning of absolute dependence and happy confidence, faith abides through all the glories and the lustres of the heavens, as it burns amidst the dimnesses and the darknesses of earth. For ever and ever will dependence on God in Christ be the life of the glorified, as it was the life of the militant, Church. No millenniums of possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty and perfectness and enrichment with the wealth of God, will bring us one inch nearer to casting off the state of filial dependence which is, and ever will be, the condition of our receiving them all. Faith “abides.”

2. But how can faith, which is the evidence of things not seen, remain in the very presence of the realities themselves? There we shall see face to face. So it is clear that faith cannot be altogether the same as here. But in every essential point, it will be the same. For what is the ground of faith? What leads me to act on God’s word, though I have never seen God, have never heard His voice? Is it not that I trust God, that I am content to leave myself in His hands, that I have confidence in His doing all things well? Is not this the essence of faith in ordinary life? Is it not that we trust one another, and have confidence in men doing their duty, and so we leave important matters to be transacted for us by others, having faith in them, as we express it? And in this its ordinary sense, will not faith remain in our new and higher state of being? Will not entire and unwavering trust in God form a component of the character of the saints in glory—a confidence compared to which the most perfect assurance ever attained here below is but doubt, an entire resting for the present and for the future on His wisdom and His love, of the perfect value of which we know nothing here?

Caesar Malan’s death-bed seemed to those who witnessed it the most surprising of all his achievements. Said the doctor to me one day on leaving him, “I have just beheld what I have often heard of, but what I never saw before. Now I have seen it, as I see this stick I carry in my hand.” “And what have you seen?” I asked. “ Faith, faith,” he answered; “not the faith of a theologian, but of a Christian! I have seen it with my eyes”. 1 [Note: The Life, Labour, and Writings of Caesar Malan, 459.]

3. It would be a most serious mistake to think that there ever was a time in the history of our creation in the past, that there is any part of the infinite creation now, that there ever will be a time in the history of any conceivable creation of the future, in regard to which it has been, is, or shall be true that the spiritual life of creatures made in the image of God is not lived by faith in God. For what is the life of faith but the living, not independently and with self-reliance, but by the receiving of the life of God? And how can it accord with the relation between the Creator and the creature, that there should ever be any other spiritual life than this?

I singularly moved

To love the lovely that are not beloved,

Of all the Seasons, most

Love Winter, and to trace

The sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face.

It is not death, but plenitude of peace;

And the dim cloud that does the world enfold

Hath less the characters of dark and cold

Than warmth and light asleep;

And correspondent breathing seems to keep

With the infant harvest, breathing soft below

Its eider coverlet of snow.

Nor is in field or garden anything

But, duly looked into, contains serene

The substance of things hoped for, in the Spring,

And evidence of Summer not yet seen. 1 [Note: Coventry Patmore.]

ii. Hope Abides

1. Hope shares the prerogative and dignity of love, to stand on the wreck of worlds and gaze on the eternal Face which sinners may not see and live. The works of God shall pass away. The law of decay is not more plainly written on our mortal bodies than on the mightiest star that walks the frozen verge of heaven. Even spiritual gifts shall perish, unless faith and hope and love throw over them the asbestos robe of immortality. If prophecies there be, they shall be needed no more; if tongues there be, they shall cease; if knowledge there be, it shall be needed no more: but hope along with faith and love abideth evermore. There is room and work for hope even in the world where we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. If heaven is not poorer than earth, there must be unmeasured room for hope in revelations far beyond all that sinners can ask or think—revelations rising through the years of eternity, but always revelations of our Heavenly Father’s love in Christ.

2. It is no more a Scriptural idea that hope is “lost in fruition” than it is that faith is lost in sight. Rather that future presents itself to us as the continual communication of an inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable spirits. In that continual communication there is continual progress. Wherever there is progress there must be hope. And thus the fair form which has so often danced before us elusive, and has led us into bogs and miry places and then faded away, will move before us through all the long avenues of an endless progress, and will ever and anon come back to tell us of the unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, and to woo us farther into the depths of heaven and the fulness of God. Hope “abides.”

3. What is hope? The expectation of things to come—good things; brighter, better, fuller life. And the surer the expectation, the truer the hope. In the first dawn of the world’s history, was not this hope an inspiration? Indeed it is the very perversion of hope that we see exemplified so strikingly in the desire to be wise, to be as gods ( Genesis 3:5-6). And in our world to-day, is it not the glorious heritage of the sons of God, anticipated by hope, that makes the present not only bearable but instinct with strength, and fraught with victory? And can we conceive of any other world, or of any other state of life, where hope is not? where the goal is already reached, and only the dull monotony of existence is left? Nay, hope shines on the forehead of every happy world, as of our poor, sinful, struggling world. And in the immortal future shall hope cease? Nay, for that would be our doom. But rather, “for ever and ever”—or “unto the ages of the ages,” as implying the opening up of an ever-growing history—there shall be the joyous expectation of fuller, richer, and more glorious life.

We can imagine only one condition from which hope is for ever shut out; but one place over the portal of which is inscribed, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” But in heaven, where the spirit shall be refined and quickened and exalted to the utmost, shall the keenest of all its pleasures, the life of all its delights, the spur of all its exertions, be absent? Hope disappointed indeed there shall be none, for hope shall be based on certainty; the eye of the soul shall rest, not on the flitting visions of earthly bliss, but on the calm realities of perfect knowledge. Hope deferred there shall be none; no more sickness of heart at long waiting; for the state of trial will be over, the perfect work of patience will be accomplished, and the hand which here is often stretched out till it wearies and stiffens and cannot grasp the object which it has reached, will there have but to open and be filled. But hope in all its blessedness, in all its fulness of joy, shall abide for ever. 1 [Note: 1 H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, i. 130.]

Bury Hope out of sight,

No book for it and no bell;

It never could bear the light

Even while growing and well:

Think if now it could bear

The light on its face of care

And grey scattered hair.

No grave for Hope in the earth,

But deep in that silent soul

Which rang no bell for its birth

And rings no funeral toll.

Cover its once bright head;

Nor odours nor tears be shed:

It lived once, it is dead.

Brief was the day of its power,

The day of its grace how brief

As the fading of a flower,

As the falling of a leaf,

So brief its day and its hour;

No bud more and no bower

Or hint of a flower.

Shall many wail it? not so:

Shall one bewail it? not one:

Thus it hath been from long ago,

Thus it shall be beneath the sun.

O fleet sun, make haste to flee;

O rivers, fill up the sea;

O Death, set the dying free.

The sun nor loiters nor speeds,

The rivers run as they ran,

Thro’ clouds or thro’ windy reeds

All run as when all began.

Only Death turns at our cries:—

Lo the Hope we buried with sighs

Alive in Death’s eyes! 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 137.]

iii. Love Abides

1. Love is the eternal form of the human relation to God. It, too, like the mercy which it clasps, “endureth for ever.” It is greater than its linked sisters, because, whilst faith and hope belong only to a creature, and are dependent and expectant of some good to come to themselves, and correspond to something which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from faith and hope not only corresponds to, but resembles, that from which it comes and by which it lives. The fire kindled is cognate with the fire that kindles; and the love that is in man is like the love that is in God. It is the climax of his nature; it is the fulfilling of all duty; it is the crown and jewelled clasp of all perfection. And so “abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

Round among the quiet graves,

When the sun was low,

Love went grieving,—Love who saves;

Did the sleepers know?

At his touch the flowers awoke,

At his tender call

Birds into sweet singing broke,

And it did befall

From the blooming, bursting sod

All Love’s dead arose,

And went flying up to God

By a way Love knows. 1 [Note: Louise Chandler Moulton.]

2. The first thing about love is that it is Godlike, the second follows from the first, and that is, it is indestructible—

They sin who tell us love can die.

With life all other passions fly,

All others are but vanity.

In Heaven ambition cannot dwell,

Nor avarice in the vaults of Hell.

Of earth, these passions of the earth,

They perish where they have their birth,

But love is indestructible:

Its holy flame for ever burneth.

From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth,

Full oft on earth, a troubled guest,

At times deceived, at times oppressed,

In Heaven it finds its perfect rest.

It soweth here in toil and care,

But the harvest-time of love is there.

When the last day is ended,

And the nights are through

When the last sun is buried

In its grave of blue;

When the stars are snuffed like candles,

And the seas no longer fret;

When the winds unlearn their cunning,

And the storms forget;

When the last lip is palsied

And the last prayer said—

Love shall reign immortal

While the worlds lie dead!

THE GREATEST OF THESE THREE

St. Paul, when he assigns the pre-eminence to love, has no intention of depreciating the value, still less of dispensing with the necessity, of those other graces to which he prefers it. For it is remarkable that he who in this passage extols love in a strain which none of the other writers of the New Testament has ever reached is the same who has also dwelt more largely and more forcibly than all the others on the inestimable preciousness of faith and hope,—attaching, indeed, to these two principles, and more particularly to faith, a measure of importance which men have objected to as, in their judgment, altogether inordinate and unwarranted.

Yet the first thing that strikes us is, that the whole civilized world has come round—at any rate, in theory—to the teaching of St. Paul. To an educated Roman of the time of St. Paul it would have seemed the most ridiculous assertion possible that the greatest of all virtues was love. To die with a smile on his face, to wrap himself up in the toga of his reserve, to be self-contained and absolutely self-controlled, that was his ideal, and a grand one, too, up to a certain point; but the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, for instance, towards Christianity, shows us that the educated Roman of the day would have heard with something like contempt that “the greatest of these is love.” And yet to-day take up any magazine—the most anti-Church magazine that you can find—and look to see what is its teaching about social matters. What is it that the popular magazine puts before us as the greatest thing of all? Away with creeds! Away with dogmas! But what is important? The service of man; doing good to one’s fellows! The verdict of the popular magazine of to-day is, that cleverness may be a great thing, and learning a great thing, but a greater than these is love. Or pick up a philosophical treatise on ethics, and, in a more cumbrous style, you will find the same thing said. What comes out as the ultimate basis of conduct in such books? Is it not Altruism? But Altruism after all is but a cumbrous name for love, and was taught to the world by Jesus Christ; and therefore the verdict of the ethical treatise is the verdict of St. Paul, that “the greatest of these is love.” Or, again, take practical life. Who is the villain that is hissed off the stage not only of the theatre but of real life? Is it the dishonest man? Is it the drunkard? No! It is the hard-hearted man; it is the man with no sympathy; it is the man with no kindness. Let a man be kind-hearted and generous, and there is nothing that he is not forgiven to-day. You will find his victims waiting round the corner to give him another chance. He may break every statute in the Statute Book, but if he is kind and affectionate everything is forgiven him. The popular verdict of the day is that sobriety is a great thing and honesty is a great thing, but a greater than these is love.

There are people who believe they could have improved this thirteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. I have found one man who, if he had been acting as amanuensis, and St. Paul had said, “And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, and the greatest of these is love “—he would have held up his hands and said, “No, Paul, that is a mistake; put compact organization of the visible church for the word love, and you will have it right.” There are multitudes of people in the churches who believe that the outer form of the organization of the church has more to do with religion conquering the world than love. I have known a man who, if he had been there, would have insisted that the word beauty should be substituted for the word love. There are other men who would have substituted the word music, so that it would read: “And now abideth faith, hope, music, these three; but the greatest of these is music.” There is another class of men who would have said, “Paul, you should substitute conscience for the word charity, so that it shall read: And now abideth faith, hope, conscience, these three; and the greatest of these is conscience.” I suppose there are not fewer than twenty-five people here this morning who would have seconded the suggestion. There are others who would have substituted for this word love the word zeal: “And now abideth faith, hope, zeal, these three; but the greatest of these is zeal.” There are many who, if they had been there, would have substituted for the word love the phrase sound doctrine: “Now abideth faith, hope, sound doctrine, these three; but the greatest of these is sound doctrine.” 1 [Note: J. R. Thompson, Burden Bearing, 152.]

Why is Love the greatest? There are many reasons.

1. Love is likest God.—Faith and hope, from their nature, are recipients, while it is of the nature of love to be communicative, and thus to be possessed of that higher blessedness which the Lord Jesus ascribes to giving before receiving. Faith and hope, too, are necessarily expressive, in all who exercise them, of imperfection and dependence, and as such can be attributed only to subordinate creatures. We cannot ascribe to God anything that resembles them. He who knows all things, and can do all things of Himself, has no room for relying on the testimony or aid of others. And He who is infinitely blessed in the possession of a Divine fulness cannot be said to hope, or to lack anything that could be hoped for. But love, on the contrary, is the attribute of superior natures. It is held by the highest creatures in common with their Creator. It belongs to the character of Him in whom all fulness dwells. Indeed it is His pre-eminent and crowning attribute; and the more we attain of it, so much the more do we approach Him in His Divine excellence, so much the more are we fitted to share in His unutterable blessedness. “Beloved,” saith an Apostle, “let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God; God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

Faith and hope belong to finite beings only, while love is not thus limited. It is an attribute of the Divine: nay, it is the very name of God. “God is not faith,” says the commentator Bengel in his epigrammatic way, “and God is not hope, but God is love.”

(1) It follows that love interprets God.—The quickest, the truest, the fullest interpretation of God comes through love. How do you know a man? Do you know a man when you describe him by saying he is so many feet high, weighs so many pounds, his hair is of such a colour, his eyes are of such a hue, he is engaged in such a business, he lives in such a house? Is that a description of the man? Is that the way you interpret and analyse a man? We begin to know a man when we find out the master passion of his nature, and we never know anything about him until we understand that. You may know ever so much about a man externally, you may know ever so much about him intellectually, but until you know what quickens it all, and colours it all, and directs it all, until you have followed the subtle windings of his soul, and know in what dispositions and purposes the man has his hidden life, you will never know him.

(2) And it makes us like God.—For to all the extent we possess and cherish it, we are like God, and partakers of a Divine nature. The possessor of it is not merely a passive recipient of good, a shrivelled, sordid abject, turning all his thoughts and desires inward on his own littleness; he becomes, like his Maker, a pattern, a source of good; a centre of diffusive benevolence; a fountain whose streams irrigate the earth; a sun whose light and heat dissipate the rigours of night and winter, and dispense the blessings of day and summer.

2. Love is greatest because it is the end of redemption.—Love, we are told, is the end of the commandment. It is so, whether by “the commandment” we understand the Law or the Gospel. As for the Moral Law, what is its sum or substance but love to God and love to man? And as for the Gospel, what is its grand design but to rescue men from a state of enmity against God and against one another, to restore them, not only to the Divine favour, but to the Divine image, of which Love is certainly the characteristic and prevailing feature; and by writing upon their hearts that great law of Love, in which all the Divine statutes are summarily comprehended, to bring them into cordial submission to the will of God, and to win from them a cheerful and thorough obedience to His commandments? This is unquestionably the ultimate design of the Gospel. Finding men “without hope” and “without God in the world,” living in enmity, distraction, and alienation, it aims at raising them from their sin and selfishness to the love of God and of the brethren. As necessary means for the accomplishment of this purpose, faith and hope are of inestimable importance, bringing as they do the Gospel to bear upon us, with all its sanctifying and love-inspiring influences. But still, as being mainly means, they are subordinate to the end or final result to which they are conducive; just as the scaffolding, though necessary, is less valuable than the finished building that is erected by the use of it, or as the sowing of the seed, however indispensable, is of less consideration in itself than the reaping of the precious and abundant grain. Faith is the leaf, hope is the blossom, but love is the fruit of the tree of righteousness; and here, too, the leaf and the blossom are for the sake of the fruit. Only we must think of these, not as giving place to each other in time, but as flourishing together on the same eternal stem. Faith may rely on the mercies and promises of God, and hope may anticipate their full and final enjoyment; but love is that actual consummation of blessedness, begun on earth and to be perfected in heaven, to which these other excellent graces are subsidiary, and from their subservience to which they derive their chief importance.

True religion is a radical thing, that is, it goes to the root of matters. Paul tells us that great and needful for a complete life as faith and hope may be, it is Love—supreme, absolute Love, which is the one essential. Love is the only religion; there is no true religion which is loveless. You may have everything else—orthodoxy, intelligence, faith, whatever you like, but if you have not got love you are as a lantern without light, and as a man without a soul. 1 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 302.]

(1) It is therefore most beautiful.—God has revealed His benevolence in the beautiful, and the beautiful is the image of His benevolence. Real affection always tries to express itself similarly. In Divine Worship we bring the tribute of our music, or our flowers,—even one poor flower may mean much—and seek to make everything attractive in the sanctuary. So in our human relations, love tries to make everything beautiful. It adorns the home, adds a touch of colour here and there, the presence of some garden trophies. When a wife professes it for a husband, or a mother for her child, and is willing to leave everything untidy, gloomy, neglected, or when a father is harsh and glum and never thinks of helping, something is radically wrong. In impoverished homes we see the difference—in one the pathetic endeavour to make all charming, in the other, the disposition to leave everything unclean and hideous.

I once read of a school where there was a very plain girl. Somewhat cruelly her companions would remind her of her lack of attractions. The school-teacher saw the depressing effect on her of this treatment. One day she handed her a coarse lump covered with black earth, and said: “This is like yourself; only plant it.” The schoolgirl took it home and obeyed, not understanding. Out of it grew a Japanese lily. Then she perceived. And in the progress of time love in her soul imparted a heavenly charm to her character and to her face as well. 1 [Note: G. C. Lorimer, The Modern Crisis in Religion, 249.]

“As to other points,” said John Milton, “what God may have determined for me I know not, but this I know—that if He ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man, He has instilled it into mine. Ceres, in the fable, pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness of inquiry than I, day and night, the idea of perfection. 2 [Note: N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 261.]

(2) It is most peaceful.—There is a majesty of Divine serenity in love. We always associate a holy calm with God. When it is said that a thousand years with Him are as one day, we immediately think of Him as moving reposefully. Our Saviour in all the strain of His tempted and tempestuous life invited the world to come to Him for rest. Wherever there is hate there must be agitation, uncertainty, and possible anarchy. Peace comes when we are at peace with the God of peace, and with our fellow-beings.

Columba renounced the warlike frenzy of his youth and became a leader in the creative arts of peace and the preacher of supernatural hopes. He made Iona a centre of light and loveliness. And when he came to die his end was full of holy quietness. He sent this message to his spiritual children: “Let peace and charity, a charity mutual and sincere, reign always among you.” St. Cuthbert also was gentle and composed. During his wanderings when his followers were sad, he would say: “Never did man hunger who served God faithfully;” and beholding the eagle above, he would add: “by it even food can come.” When a snow-storm in Fife hedged him in, one said to him: “The snow closes the road along the shore to us;” another added: “The storm bars our way over the sea.” St. Cuthbert answered: “There is still the way of heaven that lies open.” 1 [Note: G. C. Lorimer.]

3. Love is greatest in influence.—Love is described in the context as “seeking not her own.” Equally boundless with the others in its views, it looks constantly abroad, without any regard to self, opens the heart and hand to all whom it can benefit, and makes it its sole aim and never-ceasing vocation to promote the glory of God and the welfare of all mankind. Unlike the two kindred graces here compared with it, it leads the Christian to regard himself not as an isolated being, whose chief concern is to secure his own spiritual interests, but as a member of that great family of which God is the Father and all men are brethren, and in which the members ought ever to be linked together by the sacred bonds of amity and peace.

Love is more than pity. Pity stands in the porch, its eyes watching the poor wayfarer who comes wearied and footsore, ragged and perishing. And pity bids the servant search if there is any scrap of meat and any cast-off clothing that can be spared. But look again, pity stands and watches more intently; the face is changed; the tears gather; the man is stirred; he runs. In spite of rags and wretchedness, he falls upon the wanderer’s neck. He kisses him and presses him to his heart. The wondering servant comes forth with a crust or two of bread, and an old coat. No indeed, that might do for pity, but this is love. “Bring forth the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring hither the fatted calf and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” That is love. Pity saw the wants, and would give what it could spare; but love saw the son, and could not give enough.

Love found upon the battle’s edge

A coward fleeing from the strife;

And sent him forth his heart in pledge,

Valiant thro’ life.

Love touched dumb lips that could not pray,

And lo, they uttered prayer and song;

Love hath so subtle sweet a way,

Love is so strong.

It is because love is the first fact of all facts in the Gospel of Christ that the Gospel is fitted to be a universal Gospel. All men have hearts, and love is the same thing to every heart. An idea is not the same thing to every mind, but love is the same thing to every heart. A loving smile on the face of a Christian woman in China does not require to be translated into Chinese in order to be understood by a Chinaman. A child can perfectly interpret the sweetness in its mother’s face long before it can translate into thoughts of its own the words she utters. If thought is the soul’s prose, love is its music, and we know that music will steal easily into many a spot to which words stiffly articulated would be coldly refused admittance.

(1) It secures obedience.—“If ye love me, keep my commandments.” In this exhortation, love to Christ is the mighty energy that produces holy obedience. The loving eye is quick to discern the will, the wish of the beloved. The heart which truly loves cannot break one of the least of these commandments. Even if the commandment seem arbitrary, it is enough that He who is supremely loved has said, “This do in remembrance of me.” That is enough. Such motive is sufficient. It is simple, clear, and explicit. The obedience which is the witness, the pledge, the consequence of love, and is neither formal nor perfunctory, but the outcome of a self-sacrificing affection, is alone well-pleasing.

(2) It is the source of knowledge.—“He that loveth not, knoweth not God.” This is true of other objects of both love and knowledge, as certainly as it is true of the love and knowledge of the Lord God. We do not know any thing, any person, any science, until we love it. The “dry light” needed for scientific pursuit is the eye unbleared by prejudice, unfilled with tears of foolish and inappropriate emotion, not an eye which does not flash with love. It is sometimes said that “love is blind.” Cupid has been imaged with shaded eyes. No greater mistake can be made. Love has microscopic eyes to see both the faults and excellences of the beloved objects. What a world this would be if mothers could see in all children the Divine attractions and worth which they do see in their first-born; and if lovers could see in all persons the wonderful lovableness they easily discern in one another! It is only the lover of truths, of persons, of countries, of great causes and principles, who really and veritably knows them.

“Love seeks not to limit its devotion but to find opportunities of expressing it. Would you know God? I say to you, discover what true love means. Get your heart so full of it that it will send you forth in God’s Spirit seeking to save the lost, yearning to redeem the erring and sinful, binding up the broken-hearted, drying streaming eyes, and comforting them that mourn; get such a love as that into your soul, and you need look no further for an image of God. Moreover, not only is it true that every one that loveth knoweth God, but it is equally true that you will know God just to the extent that you really love and no more.” 1 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 304.]

4. Love is the greatest because it embraces and harmonizes the rest.—It is love that gives faith and hope their very life. How can we truly trust where we love not? In that case faith is but a selfish grasping after one’s own good. But, inspired by love, it is the grateful acceptance of the love of God, as in itself the best gift, and the pledge of all good gifts besides. Hope likewise, without love, is but the selfish anticipation of one’s own joy. But, as inspired by love, it is the glad expectancy that God will work all things according to His good pleasure.

But Love an everlasting crown receiveth;

For She is Hope, and Fortitude, and Faith,

Who all things hopeth, beareth, and believeth. 2 [Note: Ruskin.]

These Three

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