Our Lord has been speaking in a former verse about the keeping of His
commandments. Now He gathers them all up into one. 'This is my
commandment, that ye love one another' All duties to our fellows, and
all duties to our brethren, are summed up in, or resolved into, this
one germinal, encyclopaediacal, all-comprehensive simplification of
duty, into the one word 'love.'
Where the heart is right the conduct will be right. Love will soften
the tones, will instinctively teach what we ought to be and do; will
take the bitterness out of opposition and diversity, will make even
rebuke, when needful, only a form of expressing itself. If the heart be
right all else will be right; and if there be a deficiency of love
nothing will be right. You cannot help anybody except on condition of
having an honest, beneficent, and benevolent regard towards him. You
cannot do any man in the world any good unless there is a shoot of love
in your heart towards him. You may pitch him benefits, and you will
neither get nor deserve thanks for them; you may try to teach him, and
your words will be hopeless and profitless. The one thing that is
required to bind Christian men together is this common affection. That
being there, everything will come. It is the germ out of which all is
developed. As we read in that great chapter to the Corinthians--the
lyric praise of Charity,--all kinds of blessing and sweetness and
gladness come out of this, It is the central force which, being
present, secures that all shall be right, which, being absent, ensures
that all shall be wrong.
And is it not beautiful to see how Jesus Christ, leaving the little
flock of His followers in the world, gave them no other instruction for
their mutual relationship? He did not instruct them about institutions
and organisations, about orders of the ministry and sacraments, or
Church polity and the like. He knew that all these would come. His one
commandment was, 'Love one another,' and that will make you wise. Love
one another, and you will shape yourselves into the right forms. He
knew that they needed no exhortations such as ecclesiastics would have
put in the foreground. It was not worth while to talk to them about
organisations and officers. These would come to them at the right time
and in the right way. The 'one thing needful' was that they should be
knit together as true participators of His life. Love was sufficient as
their law and as their guide.