All that is in the world, the l.u.s.t of the eye, the l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.s 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.

G.o.d, the Eternal G.o.d, 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 unhonored. You will give yourself to many things, give yourself 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 he character of Christ--which is built round Love.

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you ever notice how continually John a.s.sociates love and faith with eternal life? I was not told when I was a boy that "G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 a life. Never offer a man 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 forever is to live forever. Hence, eternal life is inextricably bound up with love. We want to live forever for the same reason that we want to live to-morrow. Why do we want to live to-morrow? Is it because there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to see to-morrow, 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, he has no contact with life, no reason to live. He dies by his own hand.

Eternal life also is to know G.o.d, and G.o.d is love. This is Christ's own definition. Ponder it. "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true G.o.d, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent."

Love must be eternal. It is what G.o.d is. On the last a.n.a.lysis, 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. It 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 G.o.d. For G.o.d 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 fulfill 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 he beautiful things G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 Judgement 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 compa.s.sion 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."

Thank G.o.d the Christianity of today is coming nearer the world's need. Live to help that on. Thank G.o.d men know better, by a hair's breadth, what religion is, what G.o.d 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 G.o.d."

Lessons from the Angelus.

G.o.d often speaks to men's souls through music; He also speaks to us through art. Millet's famous painting ent.i.tled "The Angelus"

is an illuminated text, upon which I am going to say a few words to you to-night.

There are three things in this picture--a potato field, a country lad and a country girl standing in the middle of it, and on the far horizon the spire of a village church. That is all there is to it--no great scenery and no picturesque people. In Roman Catholic countries at the evening hour the church bell rings out to remind the people to pray. Some go into the church, while those that are in the fields bow their heads for a few moments in silent prayer.

That picture contains the three great elements which go to make up a perfectly rounded Christian life. It is not enough to have the "root of the matter" in us, but that we must be whole and entire, lacking nothing. The Angelus may bring to us suggestions as to what const.i.tutes a complete life.

I.

The first element in a symmetrical life is WORK.

Three-fourths of our time is probably spent in work. Of course the meaning of it is that our work should be just as religious as our worship, and unless we can work for the glory of G.o.d three-fourths of life remains unsanctified.

The proof that work is religious is that most of Christ's life was spent in work. During a large part of the first thirty years of His life He worked with the hammer and the plane, making ploughs and yokes and household furniture. Christ's public ministry occupied only about two and a half years of His earthly life; the great bulk of His time was simply spent in doing common everyday tasks, and ever since then work has had a new meaning.

When Christ came into the world He was revealed to three deputations who went to meet and worship Him. First came the shepherds, or working cla.s.s; second, the wise men, or student cla.s.s; and third, the two old people in the temple, Simeon and Anna; that is to say, Christ is revealed to men at their work, He is revealed to men at their books, and He is revealed to men at their worship. It was the old people who found Christ at their worship, and as we grow older we will spend more time exclusively in worship than we are able to do now. In the mean time we must combine our worship with our work, and we may expect to find Christ at our books and in our common task.

Why should G.o.d have provided that so many hours of every day should be occupied with work? It is because

Work makes men.

A university is not merely a place for making scholars, it is a place for making Christians. A farm is not a place for growing corn, it is a place for growing character, and a man has no character except that which is developed by his life and thought.

G.o.d's Spirit does the building through the acts which a man performs from day to day. A student who cons out every word in his Latin and Greek instead of consulting a translation finds that honesty is translated into his character. If he works out his mathematical problems thoroughly, he not only becomes a mathematician, but becomes a thorough man. It is by constant and conscientious attention to daily duties that thoroughness and conscientiousness and honorableness are imbedded in our beings. Character is

The music of the soul,

and is developed by exercise. Active use of the power entrusted to us is one of the chief means which G.o.d employs for producing the Christian graces. Hence the religion of a student demands that he be true to his work, and that he let his Christianity be shown to his fellow students and to his professors by the integrity and the conscientiousness of his academic life. A man who is not faithful in that which is least will not be faithful in that which is great.

I have known men who struggled unsuccessfully for years to pa.s.s their examinations who, when they became Christians, found a new motive for work and thus were able to succeed where previously they had failed. A man's Christianity comes out as much in his work as in his worship.

Our work is not only to be done thoroughly, but it is to be done honestly. A man is not only to be honorable in his academic relations, but he must be honest with himself and in his att.i.tude toward the truth. Students are not ent.i.tled to dodge difficulties, they must go down to the foundation principles. Perhaps the truths which are dear to us go down deeper even than we think, and we will get more out of them if we dig down for the nuggets than we will if we only pick up those that are on the surface. Other theories may perhaps be found to have false bases; if so, we ought to know it. It is well to take our surroundings in every direction to see if there is deep water; if there are shoals we ought to find out where they are. Therefore, when we come to difficulties, let us not jump lightly over them, but let us be honest as seekers after truth.

It may not be necessary for people in general to sift the doctrines of Christianity for themselves, but a student is a man whose business it is to think, to exercise the intellect which G.o.d has given him in finding out the truth. Faith is never opposed to reason, thought it is sometimes supposed by Bible teachers that it is; but you will find it is not. Faith is opposed to sight, but not to reason, thought it is not limited to reason. In employing his intellect in the search for truth a student is drawing nearer to the Christ who said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." We talk a great deal about Christ as the way and Christ as the life, but there is a side of Christ especially for the student: "I am the truth,"

and every student ought to be a truth-lover and a truth-seeker for Christ's sake.

II.

Another element in life, which of course is first in importance, is G.o.d.

The Angelus is perhaps the most religious picture painted this century. You cannot look at it and see that young man standing in the field with his hat off and the girl opposite him with her hands clasped and her head bowed on her breast, without feeling a sense of G.o.d.

Do we carry about with us the thought of G.o.d wherever we go? If not, we have missed the greatest part of life. Do we have a conviction of G.o.d's abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more needed in this generation than a larger and more Scriptural idea of G.o.d. A great American writer has told us that when he was a boy the conception of G.o.d which he got from books and sermons was that of a wise and very strict lawyer. I remember well the awful conception of G.o.d which I had when a boy. I was given an ill.u.s.trated edition of Watts' hymns, in which G.o.d was represented as a great piercing eye in the midst of a great black thunder cloud. The idea which that picture gave to my young imagination was that of G.o.d as a great detective, playing the spy upon my actions, as the hymn says:

"Writing now the story of what little children do."

That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me years to obliterate. We think of G.o.d as "up there," or as one who made the world six thousand years ago and then retired. We must learn that He is not confined either to time or s.p.a.ce. G.o.d is not to be thought of as merely back there in time, or up there in s.p.a.ce. If not, where is He? "The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth." The Kingdom of G.o.d is within you, and G.o.d Himself is among men. When are we to exchange the terrible, far-away, absentee G.o.d of our childhood for the everywhere present G.o.d of the Bible? Too many of the old Christian writers seem to have conceived of G.o.d as not much more than the greatest man--a kind of divine emperor.

He is infinitely more; He is a spirit, as Jesus said to the woman at the well, and in Him we live and move and have our being. Let us think of G.o.d as Immanuel--G.o.d with us--an ever-present, omnipresent, eternal One. Long, long ago, G.o.d made matter, then He made the flowers and trees and animals, then He made man. Did He stop? Is G.o.d dead? If He lives and acts what is He doing? He is

Making men better.