A sister who is troubled on the matter of love, as we all are sometimes, writes: "What is love? If one man can not get along with another, how can he love him? The only way I can see is just to do him no harm and leave him alone, for you know deep down in your heart you do not love him. Though you can treat him right, yet it is not love. You can even help him in trouble, yet it is not love. And God says we must love one another. We can also not wish him any harm, and yet not love him."

      1. As to the first question, "What is love?" it is exceedingly hard to answer. Some one has said that nothing really worth defining can be defined. It is almost that way; and good it is so, lest we might memorize the definition and think we know what a thing is, when really we know nothing yet about it. Most of our definitions and stock phrases are, anyway, only big, empty terms [188] covering up our great ignorance. What is love? It is known by its actions more than any other way. The Lord Jesus left us in no doubt as to whether he loved us--it stands out all over his life; and people knew the thing when they saw it, even if they had no name for it. Love is that which makes one think of and care for others rather than for self; continually gives up self--gives up honor, pleasure, comfort, strength, even life, that another or others may be helped. Instead of (as does the world's ambition) making stepping-stones of other men, it makes itself a stepping-stone to others. It fires men with an ambition to be servants to one another, rather than lords. It prevents us from being resentful, and gives us the blessed faculty of overlooking and quite forgetting the wrongs that have been done to us in the past and are being done to us every day. It makes us humble; cures us of sensitiveness and touchiness; delivers us from self-conceit, from vindictiveness, from bitterness. In short, it eliminates self, that great curse and source of ills. It makes us like God, for God is love.

      2. You are right, my sister; to "do him no harm and leave him alone" is not loving your brother; nor even to "treat him right," nor "to help him in trouble," nor to refrain from wishing him harm. The first and last items are negative; but love is positive. It does not only do no harm; it studies to do good. It will leave the other man alone only when it sees that no good can be accomplished by going to him or talking to him, or by doing him good where he can see and know it, as is sometimes the case. But all the while it will be on the alert for that person's welfare, and seeking for a chance, not to force or drive him, but to win him back into the right way. To "treat him right," to "help him in trouble" may not at all fill the bill; for these things can be done as outward performances without true love behind them. A goody-goody [189] fellow can "treat you right" and "help you in trouble" in such a fashion as to irritate you to the last degree. Love is a thing of the heart, but it is not emotion. The chase after emotions is futile and vain. They are pendant, and will come of themselves in their own time and place. Do not try to force emotions. But love is a whole-hearted, whole-souled, sincere concern for another's welfare. And it is not concerned about its own honor, right, recognition, satisfaction. It does not study about self at all. It ignores, it sacrifices, it throws away self, and that naturally without a thought that it is doing anything grand or extraordinary. Yet when it thus loses its own life it really finds it.

      Is this too high a standard? Not a whit. It is the standard God set. It is not "human nature," I will grant; it is a characteristic of the divine. It is not from beneath, but from above. It is not of man, but "love is of God." It is the fruit of God's Spirit. It comes not out of ourselves, but out of Christ, the true Vine, that furnishes every grace to the branch that abides in it. It can be had by all Christians of Him who alone can give it. Wherefore "follow after love," determined to practice it from this very moment.

[TAG 188-190]