One of the sayings about God that have grown at the same time most trite
and most sacred, is that God is Love. This is a saying that deserves
careful examination. Love is a word very loosely used; there are people
who will say they love new potatoes; there are a multitude of loves
of different colours and values. There is the love of a mother for her
child, there is the love of brothers, there is the love of youth and
maiden, and the love of husband and wife, there is illicit love and the
love one bears one’s home or one’s country, there are dog-lovers and the
loves of the Olympians, and love which is a passion of jealousy. Love
is frequently a mere blend of appetite and preference; it may be
almost pure greed; it may have scarcely any devotion nor be a whit
self-forgetful nor generous. It is possible so to phrase things that the
furtive craving of a man for another man’s wife may be made out to be
a light from God. Yet about all the better sorts of love, the sorts of
love that people will call “true love,” there is something of that same
exaltation out of the narrow self that is the essential quality of the
knowledge of God.
Only while the exaltation of the love passion comes and goes, the
exaltation of religious passion comes to remain. Lovers are the windows
by which we may look out of the prison of self, but God is the open door
by which we freely go. And God never dies, nor disappoints, nor betrays.
The love of a woman and a man has usually, and particularly in its
earlier phases of excitement, far too much desire, far too much
possessiveness and exclusiveness, far too much distrust or forced trust,
and far too great a kindred with jealousy to be like the love of God.
The former is a dramatic relationship that drifts to a climax, and then
again seeks presently a climax, and that may be satiated or fatigued.
But the latter is far more like the love of comrades, or like the
love of a man and a woman who have loved and been through much trouble
together, who have hurt one another and forgiven, and come to a complete
and generous fellowship. There is a strange and beautiful love that men
tell of that will spring up on battlefields between sorely wounded men,
and often they are men who have fought together, so that they will do
almost incredibly brave and tender things for one another, though but
recently they have been trying to kill each other. There is often a pure
exaltation of feeling between those who stand side by side manfully in
any great stress. These are the forms of love that perhaps come nearest
to what we mean when we speak of the love of God.
That is man’s love of God, but there is also something else; there is
the love God bears for man in the individual believer. Now this is not
an indulgent, instinctive, and sacrificing love like the love of a woman
for her baby. It is the love of the captain for his men; God must love
his followers as a great captain loves his men, who are so foolish, so
helpless in themselves, so confiding, and yet whose faith alone makes
him possible. It is an austere love. The spirit of God will not hesitate
to send us to torment and bodily death. . . .
And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach
him. He has need of us as we of him. He desires us and desires to make
himself known to us. When at last the individual breaks through the
limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that moment, the smile
and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man. He has won us from his
enemy. We come staggering through into the golden light of his kingdom,
to fight for his kingdom henceforth, until at last we are altogether
taken up into his being.