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 he 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 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
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."
Lessons from the Angelus.
God often speaks to men's souls through music; He also speaks to
us through art. Millet's famous painting entitled "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 constitutes a complete life.