It is as broad as humanity. As all the stars lie in the firmament, so
all creatures rest in the heaven of His love. Mankind has many common
characteristics. We all suffer, we all sin, we all hunger, we all
aspire, hope, and die; and, blessed be God! we all occupy precisely the
same relation to the divine love which lies in Jesus Christ. There are
no step-children in God's great family, and none of them receives a more
grudging or a less ample share of His love and goodness than every
other. Far-stretching as the race, and curtaining it over as some great
tent may enclose on a festal day a whole tribe, the breadth of Christ's
love is the breadth of humanity.
And it is universal because it is divine. No human mind can be stretched
so as to comprehend the whole of the members of mankind, and no human
heart can be so emptied of self as to be capable of this absolute
universality and impartiality of affection. But the intellectual
difficulties which stand in the way of the width of our affections, and
the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and
forbiddingly in the way, have no power over that love of Christ's which
is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness
and clingingness of a human affection and lofty and universal and
passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness
and eternity of a divine heart.
And this broad love, broad as humanity, is not shallow because it is
broad. Our love is too often like the estuary of some great stream which
runs deep and mighty as long as it is held within narrow banks, but as
soon as it widens becomes slow and powerless and shallow. The intensity
of human affection varies inversely as its extension. A universal
philanthropy is a passionless sentiment. But Christ's love is deep
though it is wide, and suffers no diminution because it is shared
amongst a multitude. It is like the great feast that He Himself spread
for five thousand men, women, and children, all seated on the grass,
'and they did all eat and were filled.'
The whole love is the property of each recipient of it. He does not love
as we do, who give a part of our heart to this one and a part to that
one, and share the treasure of our affections amongst a multitude. All
this gift belongs to every one, just as all the sunshine comes to every
eye, and as every beholder sees the moon's path across the dark waters,
stretching from the place where He stands to the centre of light.
This broad love, universal as humanity, and deep as it is broad, is
universal because it is individual. You and I have to generalise, as we
say, when we try to extend our affections beyond the limits of
household and family and personal friends, and the generalising is a
sign of weakness and limitation. Nobody can love an abstraction, but
God's love and Christ's love do not proceed in that fashion. He
individualises, loving each and therefore loving all. It is because
every man has a space in His heart singly and separately and
conspicuously, that all men have a place there. So our task is to
individualise this broad, universal love, and to say, in the simplicity
of a glad faith, 'He loved me and gave Himself for me.' The breadth is
world-wide, and the whole breadth is condensed into, if I may so say, a
shaft of light which may find its way through the narrowest chink of a
single soul. There are two ways of arguing about the love of Christ,
both of them valid, and both of them needing to be employed by us. We
have a right to say, 'He loves all, therefore He loves me.' And we have
a right to say, 'He loves me, therefore He loves all.' For surely the
love that has stooped to me can never pass by any human soul.
What is the breadth of the love of Christ? It is broad as mankind, it is
narrow as myself.