OW truly incomprehensible and beyond comparison is the love of God for man! Inscrutable as his ways, unsearchable as his judgments, deep as the exhaustless mines of his wisdom and knowledge, his love but partakes of the infinitude of his nature and the ineffable glory of his perfections. How, then, can we hope to fathom its depths, to estimate its value, or to realize its power! Were we to add together all the emotions of love in all human hearts; every feeling of affection; every sentiment of kindness; every form of attachment--parental, filial, fraternal, social, the love of the espoused, the love of lovers--all would fail to express, or even typify, the love of God. Of all these kind and [21] affectionate emotions, these fountains of earth's joys, without which this world would be a dreary waste, God is himself the author. For God is love in its abstract and unoriginated essence; and, since love can proceed from God alone, these are but the faint emanations, but the scattering rays of that divine love which first created and now redeems. And oh! how weak our noblest effort; how cold our warmest thought; how faint our most vivid conceptions, when contrasted with this love!

      Yet we are here assembled in presence of these sacred emblems to consider it in the most wonderful of all its manifestations. "In this was love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." Earth's highest evidence of love is, that a man should die for his friends. To heaven belongs the love that brought Christ to die for his enemies. Earth can supply no comparison by which it may be illustrated, and the human soul possesses no powers by which it may be fully appreciated. He forsook those realms of joy where the love of God forever reigns; he abandoned [22] the honors and wealth of heaven to assume our nature; to take the position of a servant; to become a pauper, an outcast, a houseless wanderer! He came to endure fatigue, and hunger, and temptation; to encounter contumely, ridicule, and scorn; to receive hatred for instruction, and ingratitude for kindness; to be "despised and rejected of men;" to be emphatically "a man of sorrows," and one who was familiar with grief; and finally, in all his innocence and unresisting gentleness, to be made to suffer the ignominious death of the cross--reviled even in his agonies, and not only by the cruel throng, but by the faltering tongues of dying robbers, co-partners in shame and suffering; denounced by the vilest of men; and (oh, insupportable anguish!) while thus cut off from life as unfit for earth, forsaken by the Deity as unfit for heaven! Yet he suffered not for himself; he was not "stricken or smitten of God," or "afflicted" for his own offenses. For surely it was our griefs he bore; it was our sorrows that he carried. He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities. It was the [23] chastisement of our peace that was upon him; it was by his stripes that we are healed!

      Such are the wonderful facts which we are called upon to contemplate as the exemplification of the love of God. And certainly it is in the life and death of Jesus that we can best consider that love, and make the nighest approach to its apprehension. As Immanuel, he has brought God near to us; as the express image of the Father, he has truly revealed Him; as God manifested in the flesh, he is love impersonated. In all his acts we observe the power of this divine love; we study it in all his words; we recognize it in all the social intercourse, in all the familiar incidents of his life, and in all the affecting associations and fearful agonies of his death.

      How proper that the Deity should desire this love to be reciprocated. Every emotion loves to reproduce itself, and to find a kindred sympathy in the bosom of another. It is thus extended, exalted, and perfected in those of corresponding susceptibilities, and attains its legitimate objects. It is from man, who is created in the image of God, that God himself desires reciprocal love! [24] And if poignant the sting of anguish experienced when earth's weak love is unrequited, what must be the keenness of the sense of ingratitude when the love of heaven is rejected with disdain! A love of whose intensity we can form no adequate conception. A love that pervades the universe; that includes all within its fond embrace, and longs to impart its own ineffable joys to all who will receive them! Oh! may not even the angelic nature here feel a sympathetic pang? May not the Son of God here shed bitter tears of anguish, as erst on Olivet?

      But, alas! how shall man return a love of which he can not even adequately conceive? It is high as heaven; it is vast as the universe! How can he attain to it? how can he compass it? Poor, indeed, must be his offering of a heart debased by the world and Satan, when all its purest and noblest feelings of undivided affection would bear no proportion to the love of God. But it is the nature of love never to be mercenary. It seeks not compensation, it requires not equal measure, it demands not more than can be given. A gentle word may requite a kind act; a smile of [25] affection, the most precious favor. Man may not love as God loves, who is infinite in love as in wisdom and in power; but he may love as man can love, who is so limited and feeble in all his capacities. And when he loves the Lord with all his heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, he renders the least return that may be offered, and the greatest that can be demanded.

      Nor is man left to form, by imagination, faint images of the Deity on whom his affections are to rest. Jesus is the living image of the invisible God, and his manifestation in the flesh renders possible that personality of attachment, that individualization of love so apposite and congenial to our nature. Nay, we are not even left alone with the sweet remembrances of the personal advent of the Lord Messiah, gleaned from sacred and ancient records; but as though to give scope and expression to this love, and quicken it by the active energies of life, he supplies a present, living, coequal, and consentient object, and bids us prove our regard for him by our love for one another. "A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another: as I have loved [26] you, that ye also love one another." "He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him." Transcendent thought, that man can become a temple for the Deity! That the glorious Being, of whom our unequal powers can form no adequate conception, and whose glory fills both earth and heaven, can yet find a dwelling place in the human heart! Inscrutable and sublime mystery, that "he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him!" "Yet hereby do we know that we dwell in him and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit." And oh! how joyful the reflection, that however weak our powers, however imperfect our efforts, the Divine Comforter can shed abroad the love of God in our hearts, enlarge our capacities, transform all our feeble nature, render us partakers of the divine fullness, and sharers in the everlasting joys and effulgent glory of the divine presence! [27]

[CITS 21-27]