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