seek and to save that which was lost,' had ever entered the mind either of Jewish rabbi, or of Greek philosopher, until Christ came to reveal it in his own person to us. 'God so loved the world.' Think of the numberless souls even in this sinful world that have, only through Jesus Christ, lived in the light of this all-pervading divine love ; have made it their own, by self-sacrifice and high resolve; have gone out, in the name of Christ and his redeeming love, into all the world, not for any personal benefit or advantage, but solely (as St. Paul said, Rom. v. 5), 'because the love of God is shed abroad. in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, which is given to us.' Then think of the results, in missions, schools, charities, hospitals; think of this love as a silent but ever-present influence between man and man, 'sweetening the breath of society' (as Chalmers well said); think of the love of God, from age to age, and often, alas! in Our own,

despite (as it were) having widened the horizon of liberty and extinguished the fires of persecution in all the most advanced and Christian nations; and we may surely admit to ourselves that the love of God in Christ Jesus has actually been a redeeming power, demonstrably present throughout all these centuries, although only too often marred, and deformed, and even all but lost in history, owing to our human weakness, and error, and sin. Yes; and what is perhaps more than all this, for each one of us-'God so loved the world,' that by our coming to know him as our Father, through Christ Jesus, we have a new way of access into the holiest in our individual prayer to him, crying, Abba, Father. 'We love him, because he first loved us.' For here we have the very human passion for which the Latin translators of the fourth century could hardly find a decent or presentable word, actually lifted into the

heavenly places, and become (like mercy, which is the fruit of it) the attribute of God himself.' Nay, more than the attribute; for so deeply was the impression of this divine love rooted in the mind of the apostle John, that in his first epistle general, and when the living converse with his Master had long ceased, he could revert to the idea in a yet more developed form. 'God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him' (1 John iv. 16).

3. Love, therefore, from the Christian point of view, is not only an attribute, but is of the very essences of the divinity. And thus it becomes not only the ground of redemption, as in the words spoken to Nicodemus, but of every possible approach which we, frail creatures of a day, though bearing 'the image of God,' can make towards the source of our being, and of all being. And thus a very human feeling, often a frail and deceitful, even sinful passion in us, shared by us, too, with the

brute creation, is lifted up on high, and placed among the things that ' abide.' Love, to the apostle John, is the golden key that opens all mysteries. Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and he that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. . . Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another' (1 John iv. 7, 8, 11). So that the very ground of our 'charity' towards men, in the sense we read in the epistle to the Corinthians (but with the same word, agapé, in both cases), is that very love of God, which in Jesus Christ was made manifest to all men, for the salvation of a world which neither knew God, nor loved him. Herein is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins' (1 John iv. 10).

It can surely not be needful, in an audience like this, to point out more in detail how

of

our Lord Jesus Christ was not only the supreme teacher of this love of God to man, but also one who lived constantly in the very atmosphere and light of it. The great parable of the prodigal son, of the lost sheep, the imperishable words in which he revealed the fatherhood God to us; the innumerable cross-lights which he threw upon our duty to our neighbour, as arising from this; the duty, for instance, of being kind and loving even to our enemies, even to the unthankful and the evil, as God makes his sun to shine alike upon the evil and the good; all these are only parts of the revelation that came to us in the very person of Christ dwelling on this earth; in his life and in his death; in his many works of beneficence; in his everabounding sympathy with the weak, the poor, the erring, the afflicted; in his patience under the contradiction of sinners'; in the very last words which came from his lips on the cruel