THE DEFENCE
Now I have a closing sentence or two to add
about Paul's reason for singling out love as the supreme possession. It is a
very remarkable reason. In a single word it is this: it lasts. "Love,"
urges Paul, "never faileth." Then he begins again one of his marvellous lists
of the great things of the day, and exposes them one by one. He runs over the
things that men thought were going to last, and shows that they are all
fleeting, temporary, passing away.
"Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail" It
was the mother's ambition for her boy in those days that he should become a
prophet. For hundreds of years God had never spoken by means of any prophet,
and at that time the prophet was greater than the king. Men waited wistfully
for another messenger to come, and hung upon his lips when he appeared as upon
the very voice of God. Paul says, "Whether there be prophecies, they shall
fail" This Book is full of prophecies. One by one they have "failed"; that is,
having been fulfilled their work is finished; they have nothing more to do now
in the world except to feed a devout man's faith.
Then Paul talks about tongues. That was another
thing that was greatly coveted. "Whether there be tongues, they shall cease."
As we all know, many, many centuries have passed since tongues have been known
in this world. They have ceased. Take it in any sense you like. Take it, for
illustration merely, as languages in general--a sense which was not in Paul's
mind at all, and which though it cannot give us the specific lesson will point
the general truth. Consider the words in which these chapters were
written--Greek. It has gone. Take the Latin--the other great tongue of those
days. It ceased long ago. Look at the Indian language. It is ceasing. The
language of Wales, of Ireland, of the Scottish Highlands is dying before our
eyes. The most popular book in the English tongue at the present time, except
the Bible, is one of Dickens's works, his Pickwick Papers. It is largely
written in the language of London streetlife; and experts assure us that in
fifty years it will be unintelligible to the average English reader.
Then Paul goes farther, and with even greater
boldness adds, "Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." The wisdom
of the ancients, where is it? It is wholly gone. A schoolboy to-day knows more
than Sir Isaac Newton knew. His knowledge has vanished away. You put
yesterday's newspaper in the fire. Its knowledge has vanished away. You buy the
old editions of the great encyclopaedias for a few pence. Their knowledge has
vanished away. Look how the coach has been superseded by the use of steam. Look
how electricity has superseded that, and swept a hundred almost new inventions
into oblivion. One of the greatest living authorities, Sir William Thomson,
said the other day, "The steam-engine is passing away." "Whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away." At every workshop you will see, in the back
yard, a heap of old iron, a few wheels, a few levers, a few cranks, broken and
eaten with rust. Twenty years ago that was the pride of the city Men flocked in
from the country to see the great invention; now it is superseded, its day is
done. And all the boasted science and philosophy of this day will soon be old.
But yesterday, in the University of Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the
faculty was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of chloroform. The other day his
successor and nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the librarian of the
University to go to the library and pick out the books on his subject that were
no longer needed. And his reply to the librarian was this: "Take every
text-book that is more than ten years old, and put it down in the cellar."Sir
James Simpson was a great authority only a few years ago: men came from all
parts of the earth to consult him; and almost the whole teaching of that time
is consigned by the science of to-day to oblivion. And in every branch of
science it is the same. "Now we know in part. We see through a glass
darkly."
Can you tell me anything that is going to last?
Many things Paul did not condescend to name. He did not mention money, fortune,
fame; but he picked out the great things of his time, the things the best men
thought had something in them, and brushed them peremptorily aside. Paul had no
charge against these things in themselves. All he said about them was that they
would not last They were great things, but not supreme things. There were
things beyond them. What we are stretches past what we do, beyond what we
possess. Many things that men denounce as sins are not sins; but they are
temporary. And that is a favourite argument of the New Testament. John says of
the world, not that it is wrong, but simply that it "passeth away." There is a
great deal in the world that is delightful and beautiful; there is a great deal
in it that is great and engrossing; but it will not last. All that is in the
world, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, are
but for a little while. Love not the world therefore. Nothing that it contains
is worth the life and consecration of an immortal soul. The immortal soul must
give itself to something that is immortal. And the only immortal things are
these: "Now abideth faith, hope, love, but the greatest of these is love."
Some think the time may come when two of these
three things will also pass away --faith into sight, hope into fruition. Paul
does not say so. We know but little now about the conditions of the life that
is to come. But what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal God,
is Love. Covet therefore that everlasting gift, that one thing which it is
certain is going to stand, that one coinage which will be current in the
Universe when all the other coinages of all the nations of the world shall be
useless and unhonoured. You will give yourselves to many things, give
yourselves first to Love. Hold things in their proportion. Hold things in
their proportion. Let at least the first great object of our lives be to
achieve the character defended in these words, the character,--and it is the
character of Christ--which is built around Love.
I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever
notice how continually John associates love and faith with eternal life? I was
not told when I was a boy that "God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should have everlasting life."
What I was told, I remember, was, that God so loved the world that, if I
trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called peace, or I was to have rest, or I
was to have joy, or I was to have safety. But I had to find out for myself that
whosoever trusteth in Him--that is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is only the
avenue to Love--hath everlasting life The Gospel offers a man life.
Never offer men a thimbleful of Gospel. Do not offer them merely joy, or merely
peace, or merely rest, or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give men
a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love, and therefore
abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in enterprise for the
alleviation and redemption of the world. Then only can the Gospel take hold of
the whole of a man, body, soul, and spirit, and give to each part of his nature
its exercise and reward. Many of the current Gospels are addressed only to a
part of man's nature. They offer peace, not life; faith, not Love;
justification, not regeneration. And men slip back again from such religion
because it has never really held them. Their nature was not all in it. It
offered no deeper and gladder life-current than the life that was lived before.
Surely it stands to reason that only a fuller love can compete with the love of
the world.
To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to
love for ever is to live for ever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up
with love We want to live for ever for the same reason that we want to live
tomorrow. Why do you want to live tomorrow? It is because there is some one who
loves you, and whom you want to see tomorrow, and be with, and love back. There
is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved. It
is when a man has no one to love him that he commits suicide. So long as he has
friends, those who love him and whom he loves, he will live; because to live is
to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go
and he has no contact with life, no reason to live. The "energy of life" has
failed. Eternal life also is to know God, and God is love. This is Christ's own
definition. Ponder it. "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the
only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Love must be eternal. It
is what God is. On the last analysis, then, love is life. Love never faileth,
and life never faileth, so long as there is love. That is the philosophy of
what Paul is showing us; the reason why in the nature of things Love should be
the supreme thing--because it is going to last; because in the nature of things
it is an Eternal Life. That Life is a thing that we are living now, not that we
get when we die; that we shall have a poor chance of getting when we die unless
we are living now. No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live
and grow old alone, unloving, and unloved. To be lost is to live in an
unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to love; and
he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God. For God is love.
Now I have all but finished. How many of you will
join me in reading this chapter once a week for the next three months? A man
did that once and it changed his whole life. Will you do it? It is for the
greatest thing in the world. You might begin by reading it every day,
especially the verses which describe the perfect character. "Love suffereth
long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself." Get these
ingredients into your life. Then everything that you do is eternal. It is worth
doing. It is worth giving time to. No man can become a saint in his sleep; and
to fulfil the condition required demands a certain amount of prayer and
meditation and time, just as improvement in any direction, bodily or mental,
requires preparation and care. Address yourselves to that one thing; at any
cost have this transcendent character exchanged for yours. You will find as you
look back upon your life that the moments that stand out, the moments when you
have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of
love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures
of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to
do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak
about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. I have seen
almost all the beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed almost every
pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look back I see standing out
above all the life that has gone four or five short experiences when the love
of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine,
and these seem to be the things which alone of all one's life abide. Everything
else in all our lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the
acts of love which no man knows about, or can ever know about--they never
fail.
In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is
depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the
sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but
"How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion, is not
religiousness, but Love. I say the final test of religion at that great Day is
not religiousness, but Love; not what I have done, not what I have believed,
not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of
life. Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By
what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not
be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of
Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It
means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing
in all our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized with
the spell of His compassion for the world. It means that--
"I lived for
myself, I thought for myself,
For myself, and none beside--
Just as if Jesus had never lived,
As if He had never died."
It is the Son of Man before whom the
nations of the world shall be gathered. It is in the presence of
Humanity that we shall be charged. And the spectacle itself, the mere
sight of it, will silently judge each one. Those will be there whom we have met
and helped: or there, the unpitied multitude whom we neglected or despised. No
other Witness need be summoned. No other charge than lovelessness shall be
preferred. Be not deceived. The words which all of us shall one Day hear, sound
not of theology but of life, not of churches and saints but of the hungry and
the poor, not of creeds and doctrines but of shelter and clothing, not of
Bibles and prayer-books but of cups of cold water in the name of Christ. Thank
God the Christianity of to-day is coming nearer the world's need. Live to help
that on. Thank God men know better, by a hairsbreadth, what religion is, what
God is, who Christ is, where Christ is. Who is Christ? He who fed the hungry,
clothed the naked, visited the sick. And where is Christ? Where?--whoso shall
receive a little child in My name receiveth Me. And who are Christ's? Every one
that loveth is born of God.