and crowned him with thorns, and crucified him on the cross. Could there be anything more natural than that our hearts should melt in love before his wonderful sacrifice for us? Indeed, does it not seem unnatural and ungrateful, almost beyond comparison, when we see a man or a woman turn away from the cross of Jesus Christ with a hard heart and a sneering or an indifferent look? Hard indeed must be the heart that feels the rising of no answering love to the unexampled love which Christ has shown for us.

I wish I knew how to make this love of Christ seem personal to every one of you here. There is a way of thinking about Christ's atonement as made for the whole world in such a way as to cause it to seem indefinite and vague, and without personal application to ourselves. But we are assured that Christ tasted death for every man. As Dr. George Pentecost says, God is a father, and tho he has a very large family, he loves each one of this great family with all his love. The blade of grass springing up on the lawn in May does not have just a little bit of the sunshine; it has all the light and heat and power there are in the sun. You may take a burning-glass, a double convex lens; it is nothing if you do not adjust it. You may put your hand out into the blazing sunlight of June, and it falls on you without great heat; but if you put the burning-glass between the sun and your hand, and draw it up or down until the

light is focused into a point the size of a pinhead, it will set you on fire. So the love of God, which is like universal sunshine, is easily appropriated by each one of us if we will approach God's love through the Divine Burning-glass. God's love is concentrated in Jesus Christ. The heavenly voice said to John the Baptist, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." All the saving power of God's love centers in Jesus Christ, and if you come to Christ in penitence and faith you have brought to bear on your heart the personal love of God, burning into your heart through all that Jesus is and all that he has done. Men who try to live in the love of God may and do often feel a great deal of pleasure in the providence of God over them, which comes in the way of the good things of the earth, which falls like the rain upon the just and the unjust; but no man ever gets the saving power in his heart until it comes burning through the cross on which Jesus Christ died for his sin.

I appeal to you in the name of his great love for you to surrender heart to him now.

your

XVIII.

LOVE'S EASY HARNESS.

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous. -1 John v. 3 (Revised Version).

THE highest credentials of love are to be found in obedience. The love that incarnates itself in service for the one beloved can never be doubted. It is idle to say that we love Christ unless we do the things that are pleasing to him. Paul says: "Tho I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, tho I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing." It is love that gives value to sacrifice. Love is sweeter than the perfume of a gift of flowers. Love weighs heavier than the gold bestowed upon the poor. Love is more nourishing to the soul than the bread fed to the hungry is to the body. Charity is only patronage until love touches it, and then it becomes divine sympathy.

The theme of our text, to which I wish specially to lead your thought, is the power which love has to take all the pain and suffering and hardness out of self-denial in our service for Christ. Many people when they are asked to be Christians shrink back because they feel it is a hard way. They

have looked altogether on the things that are to be given up, and have not beheld or obtained a proper conception of the beauty and blessing which glorify a Christian life. I am here this evening to make this assertion, that the Christian life is the transcendently happy life in this world; that genuine Christians are the happiest, most cheerful, and most hopeful people in the world. Life is sweeter to them than it is or can be to anybody else. While it is true that in order to be Christians we must deny ourselves anything that compromises us as the friends of Christ, and must share the fate of Jesus, standing by his banner, and going with him in adversity or prosperity, never wishing to be popular where he is unpopular, there is in the Christian's heart an inspiration of love that takes all the hardness out of such an experience and makes his life supremely joyous. In inviting you to be Christians I am not opening the door into a dark alley of midnight gloom, but into a beautiful garden where spiritual graces, such as hope and faith and love and gentleness and mercy and patience, fill the air with the perfume of heaven; a garden which stretches onward into a life that grows brighter and brighter unto the perfect day.

Love has a power to make commonplace things romantic and beautiful. A very wealthy merchant who lives in the suburbs of an Eastern city has about his stately mansion extensive grounds filled with rare and beautiful things. But one of the

interesting characteristics of his landscape gardening is that he has a great many of the old-fashioned country flowers and plants. When he began to improve his grounds, he said to his wife: "I want flowers; not the new-fangled things of to-day, but the flowers of long ago." And they set their heads together as well as their hearts to find all sorts of odd and old-fashioned things, long since out of date and almost forgotten save by a few people who, like himself, kept a liking for the trees and plants and shrubs that made beautiful their childhood's home. And so, after a while, the most conspicuous points on the grounds were filled with flowering almonds, or trumpet-creeper, or hollyhocks, that reminded them of childhood and youth and mother. Love crowned them with a beauty that other eyes could never see. So, when we surrender our hearts to Christ, in the presence of his great love for us, love covers the prayer-meeting, and the Bible-reading, and the self-sacrificing service with a beauty and a glory that the worldling can not see.

Once arouse the devotion of the heart, and there are no impossibilities in the way of sacrifice. In the time of the Civil War, a generation ago, a regiment of soldiers from Massachusetts marched proudly down Broadway, New York, and the crowd who looked on and cheered them seemed to recognize in face and figure their inheritance from an ancestry that never knew when they were defeated.