Sermons for the Christian Seasons.

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

LOVE, THE KEEPING OF THE COMMANDMENTS.

ST. MATT. xxii. 40. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Ir we were asked what portion of our nature were the most amiable and blameless, we should probably agree in saying, our affections. We should point to the love with which a mother loves her child, and which a child returns to a mother; or to the tried attachment kept up for years between two friends; or to the devotedness of a true love between man and woman, ripened into the constant affection which often. makes married life so full of blessing. And we might justly say, that here we see the fairest side of human nature; that man cannot be utterly lost to all good, while these feelings of the heart. remain. We might feel that, notwithstanding: our fall, and our inheritance of sin and woe,

some relics of our original state, and of paradise itself, yet linger upon earth in the affections of home, and the confidence and sympathy of faithful love.

But, on the other hand, consider what relation these human affections bear to the God from Whom they flow; how far our Creator is the object and guide of all these warmer feelings of our nature, and you will be struck with the melancholy conviction, that they have greatly departed from their true end. What then we look upon as the fairest portions of our being have shared the same alienation from God which has befallen all other portions of it. The most amiable and attached families, the kindest friends, may have in them no sign or motion of a higher love, no apparent consciousness of God's presence, or of His claims upon the heart.

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There is a common way of speaking that tends to blind men's eyes against this truth. It is hardly necessary to do more than point out the immense influence which popular expressions have on the mind, even when they are opposed to holy Scripture itself. Now the high regard with which many speak of kind and affectionate persons, as having good hearts, is calculated in a fatal manner to deceive, Our Lord said, that

there is "none good but God;" but if we apply this term, as we surely may in a modified sense, to a creature, yet it would be utterly false to call any heart good, if its affections be altogether alienated from God. Warmth and kindness there may be, but if there is no beating of the heart towards the very Author of one's being, if all this warmth and kindness, which He inspired for higher ends, are spent in entire forgetfulness of Him, how can the idea of goodness be applied to such a heart? Are not this very amiableness and these kindly qualities the greatest condemnation of their possessor? for the greater the capacity for the love of God, the greater the sin in abusing so high a gift. There is indeed no deeper or surer mark of the fall; than the alienation of the heart from God. This is Satan's last and most fatal work. The poison of sin has entered into the very sanctuary of our being. The centre of the most sacred feelings, which form the blessing and joy of home, where all that is best and purest of human kind is nurtured, is itself struck with the taint of sin, and is turned away from God. The blight has spread everywhere. The very core of the tree is corrupt. Sin has entered in, and possessed and laid waste the holiest place of the human soul:

It has blackened the fountain-head of our life. "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint."

There are two respects in which the human affections, however warm and kindly, may be altogether sinful. Firstly, this is the case when the affection fixes itself on some object more than upon God. The object may be innocent; it may be God's own gracious gift to us: the sin is not in loving the object, but in loving it too much; in unduly exalting it into the place of God. "This is the first and great commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." These words do not mean that we are to love none other, but that we are to love With the highest love of which our nature is capable; with such warmth, and earnestness, and joy of intercourse, as our nature owns; so are we to love God. The love of father, mother, wife, child, brother, sister, friend, are not opposed to the love of God, but they have a lower claim on us than the love of God. When the love of such near objects of affection interferes with that higher love, they are to be put aside; when it seeks to occupy a larger space, when we are conscious that stronger feelings beat to

none more.

wards a fellow-creature than towards our Creator and our Redeemer, that we would do more for any other than for Him who made and redeemed both us and them, we are then fallen; we are then making a human idol, and bowing down toward it; we have dethroned God from His rightful place within the heart, and substituted a fellow-creature in His room; we are guilty of spiritual idolatry; we have resisted the very first claim that God makes upon us : "My son, give me thine heart." It is not to the exclusion of all other loves that God requires us to love Himself, but all other loves are to be held subordinate to the love of Him; for He explained His own commandment when He said, "He that loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me."

Secondly, human affections may be sinful from their selfishness. When our Lord speaks of love towards our neighbour, He uses one brief word that involves a momentous truth as to the character of that love: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Love and kindness are in themselves the mere impulses of our nature; they exist in man as instincts in a brute. There is no virtue in them of themselves. They are SERM, 67. NEW SERIES. 3 Y 2

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