's
unspeakable gift. Wherever we look we behold that Love. Loving
compassion rested upon the multitudes; with Love He compassed the
poor, the sinful, the oppressed, the heartsick and the outcast. Love
carried the weak and failing men, who had believed on him, His
disciples. A blessed word it is, which stands in the beginning of
the thirteenth chapter in the Gospel of John. "Having loved His own
which were in the world, He loved them unto the end." His Love for
His own was expressed by serving them. He pleased not Himself but
had come to minister. He then girded Himself and began to wash the
disciples' feet. What humiliation! Yet it was the fruit of Love. All
He did was born of Love. His was on earth a constant, a never-tiring,
an enduring Love. All the selfishness of His disciples could
not quench that Love. Nothing could quench His Love for His own.
Nothing will ever quench it. Peter denied Him. "And the Lord turned
and looked upon Peter" (Luke xxii:61). Was it a look of reproach?
Was it a frown of displeasure which Peter saw in that beloved face?
Far from it. Love in its divine perfection shone out of the eyes of
the Son of God. And after His resurrection that Love was still the
same. There was no reproach connected with the restoration of Peter
to service. In the greatest tenderness and Love He committed to His
disciple, who had so shamefully denied Him, the lambs and sheep so
dear to His own loving heart.

Again we say, that Love passeth knowledge. How could man's
imagination and invention ever have produced such a loving Person as
our Lord, revealing the perfection of divine Love!

But there is greater Love than the Love which we behold in His
blessed Life on earth. The greater Love is manifested when He laid
down His life. He came into the world to die, to be the propitiation
for our sins. He came to take our place on the cross. He came to
drink the cup of wrath in our stead and suffer the awful penalty of
our sins.

"For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for
the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet
peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. _But God
commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us_."

God in Love gave thus His Son, and He gave Himself in Love. From
shame to shame, from suffering to suffering, from pain to pain and
agony to agony that Love went on to plunge into the deepest sorrow,
to reach at