He did,
that we shall come to love them all honestly and purely. When we are
delivered from the monstrous oppression and tyranny of self, we have
hearts capable of a Christlike and Christ-giving love to all men, and
only they who have cleansed their hearts by union with Him, and by
receiving into them the purging influence of His own Spirit, will be
able to love without hypocrisy.

II. Let love abhor what is evil, and cleave to what is good.

If we carefully consider this apparently irrelevant interruption in
the sequence of the apostolic exhortations, we shall, I think, see at
once that the irrelevance is only apparent, and that the healthy
vehemence against evil and resolute clinging to good is as essential
to the noblest forms of Christian love as is the sincerity enjoined
in the previous clause. To detest the one and hold fast by the other
are essential to the purity and depth of our love. Evil is to be
loathed, and good to be clung to in our own moral conduct, and
wherever we see them. These two precepts are not mere tautology, but
the second of them is the ground of the first. The force of our
recoil from the bad will be measured by the firmness of our grasp
of the good; and yet, though inseparably connected, the one is apt to
be easier to obey than is the other. There are types of Christian men
to whom it is more natural to abhor the evil than to cleave to the
good; and there are types of character of which the converse is true.
We often see men very earnest and entirely sincere in their
detestation of meanness and wickedness, but very tepid in their
appreciation of goodness. To hate is, unfortunately, more congenial
with ordinary characters than to love; and it is more facile to look
down on badness than to look up at goodness.

But it needs ever to be insisted upon, and never more than in this
day of spurious charity and unprincipled toleration, that a healthy
hatred of moral evil and of sin, wherever found and however garbed,
ought to be the continual accompaniment of all vigorous and manly
cleaving to that which is good. Unless we shudderingly recoil from
contact with the bad in our own lives, and refuse to christen it with
deceptive euphemisms when we meet it in social and civil life, we
shall but feebly grasp, and slackly hold, that which is good. Such
energy of moral recoil from evil is perfectly consistent with honest
love, for it is things, not men, that we are to hate; and it is
needful as the compl